Skip to main content

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine and get a FREE tote.

Cool Finds

South Texas is among the most inhospitable places to cross the border—and is now the most popular.

Cool Finds

New Database Helps Families ID People Who Died Crossing the Border

I Have a Name/Yo Tengo Nombre offers a devastating glimpse of those who are gone—and a glimmer of hope to those who want to find them

A jar of the world's pinkest pink paint pigment.

Cool Finds

This Artist Is the Only Person Banned From Using the World’s Pinkest Pink

It’s a brightly colored revenge for restricting the world’s blackest black

Not the largest wave ever recorded

Cool Finds

Sixty-Two-Foot Wave Sets New Record

A sensor in the North Atlantic detected a set of waves averaging over six stories tall, setting a new record for a buoy-measured wave

Glad tidings! There's a new Christmas song in town.

Researchers Found a Long-Lost Christmas Song

“Crown Winter With Green” has some serious archival cred—and a sad story to tell

New Research

Fossil Footprints Show Movements of Our Early Ancestors

The trace fossils found in Tanzania spurred a debate about how early hominids lived

The Russian Front of World War II as of 1942.

Cool Finds

The CIA Is Celebrating Its Cartography Division’s 75th Anniversary by Sharing Declassified Maps

Decades of once-secret maps are now freely available online

This colorful pattern is actually the cells inside a zebrafish embryo.

Cool Finds

Prize-Winning Videos Capture Mesmerizing, Microscopic World

Everything looks cooler when it’s viewed through the lens of a microscope

Men smoke pipes and drink on the London streets. Booth's police notebooks reveal the everyday habits of Londoners.

Cool Finds

Explore the Seedy Reality of a London Long Gone

Charles Booth explored the poorest parts of England’s capital—and changed the way social scientists think about the world

A panoramic map of the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, MO.

Cool Finds

The Library of Congress Is Putting Its Map Collection on the Map

A new partnership with the Digital Public Library of America will put three major LOC map collections online

Artist's rendering of KITE

Cool Finds

Japan Testing “Space Tether” to Knock Junk Out of Orbit

The KITE experiment will use a half-mile long cable to guide some of the 500,000 chunks of space junk out of orbit

It isn't pretty, but it made history.

Cool Finds

Someone Paid $46,000 for a Bunch of Mold

Its discovery was an accident, but this scientific sample changed the course of medicine forever

Cool Finds

The Ancient Origins of Apple Cider

The classic fall drink has a boozy history going back thousands of years

Cosmic dust particle collected from an urban gutter

Cool Finds

Scientists Discover Cosmic Dust in the Grime of City Gutters

Usually only found in remote locations, a dedicated amateur scientist combed through pounds of urban debris to recover these space specks

The Beckery monastery as it would have looked in the fifith century

Cool Finds

Oldest Community of Monks in U.K. Discovered

The find was thanks to a community training dig

Bathochordaeus charon

Cool Finds

Scientists Finally Spot Giant, Slimy Sea Blob First Found Over a Century Ago

Discovered in 1899, the creature recently popped up in Monterey Bay

A visualization of Eyal Gever's #Laugh art project

Future of Space Exploration

This Artist Wants to Send a Sculpture of Your Laughs Into Space

#Laugh is on orbit to become the first art piece created in space

Today, America's founding documents reside in the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom in the National Archives.

Cool Finds

What Happened to America’s Most Precious Documents After Pearl Harbor?

Librarians and archivists made sure the nation’s records didn’t become casualties of World War II

Queen Nefertari's knees

New Research

Researchers Identify Queen Nefertari’s Mummified Knees

Found in 1904, new research confirms the mummified fragments in a Turin museum likely belong to ancient Egypt’s beautiful and revered queen

The mansion at Bletchley Park.

Cool Finds

Alan Turing’s World War II Headquarters Will Once Again House Codebreakers

Bletchley Park is being revived as a cybersecurity training center

Abraham Ortelius created the world's first modern atlas, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, or "Theater of the World," in 1570. Shakespeare, who famously wrote that "all the world's a stage," was doubtless influenced by the maps that flourished during his lifetime.

Cool Finds

How Maps Shaped Shakespeare

An exhibition in Boston delves into historical maps to show how the Bard saw the wider world

Page 111 of 284