Skip to main content

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine and get a FREE tote.

Cool Finds

Cool Finds

The Turing Test of Computer Intelligence Is Too Easy

To better test our computer programs’ intelligence, we should to ask them for stories and drawings

Cool Finds

Making Dead People’s Pulses Beat Again

A new device can transform 150-year-old printed representations of heart beats into actual sound

The view out of the Soyuz window.

Cool Finds

If You Looked Out the Window While Returning From Space, Here’s What You’d See

The bright glow of friction in Earth’s atmosphere

A sonar view looking down on part of the 345 foot-long SS City of Rio de Janeiro

Cool Finds

Found: The Wreckage of the SS City of Rio de Janeiro, the “Bay Area’s Titanic”

The maritime disaster was the worst in Bay Area history

Cool Finds

The Library for Magicians Is Taking Appointments

The Conjuring Arts Research Center in New York City houses some of the world’s rarest books on the art of deception

Ice from a glacier

Cool Finds

Backpackers Walk Across a Completely Clear Frozen Lake

A cool video raises the question: Why is most ice cloudy?

None

Cool Finds

TGI Fridays Has Dispatched Mistletoe-Carrying Drones in Restaurants

There’s already been one collision between drone and human

Cool Finds

These Adorable Robot Toys Teach Kids How to Code

The two bots using a basic visual language, and they are just one way to introduce children to computer programming

Cool Finds

Dreams Are Slow-Motion

Lucid dreamers are offering insight into the sleeping mind

None

Cool Finds

Norwegian Nobel Winners Release Their Inner Avant-Garde Musicians

Nobel laureates in Physiology or Medicine repurposed a Norse folk tune for a science lecture

Cool Finds

The Science of the Red Sea’s Parting

It is physically and scientifically possible for a body of water to part

An illustration of the marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert on February 10, 1840.

Cool Finds

Queen Victoria Dreamed Up the White Wedding Dress in 1840

For most people, wearing a white wedding dress wasn’t really a thing until the 1950s

Cool Finds

It’s Possible to See Exoplanets Without Schmancy Equipment

A cheap DSLR and some light computer processing can unveil far off exoplanets

A steel engraving of Walt Whitman in his 30s from the first edition of Leaves of Grass, published in 1855.

Cool Finds

Found in “Penny Papers” from the 1800s, A Lost Walt Whitman Poem

A professor at the University of Nebraska stumbled upon an ode to Whitman’s contemporary William Cullen Bryant

A hippopotamus named Linda takes her calf Reginald for a swim in a pool at Whipsnade Zoo. England, 1954.

Cool Finds

Let Wildlife Recordings From the 1930s Take You Back to Nature

Hear African wildlife from the 1930s with the British Library’s nature sound archives

A historical altered photo showing a mushroom cloud over the United Nations and New York City waterfront

Cool Finds

Tour the Great Wide World of Mushroom Cloud Imagery

Nuclear testing yielded far more, and more diverse, images of mushroom clouds than those that are commonly shown

Cool Finds

The Largest Manmade Block Ever Was Just Discovered in Lebanon

The block was never used, likely because it was too big to transport

Cool Finds

MIT Is Giving Its Students Bitcoin

Researchers interested in studying how people use Bitcoin are handing out $100 worth of the currency to whoever wants it

Cool Finds

Hollywood Asked for Freeway Noise Barriers First

It only makes sense that the problem of road noise cropped up in Los Angeles

Cool Finds

The White House Is Going Digital With Its Holiday Decorations

Robot dogs, an interactive holiday card and crowd-sourced light shows are a few of the new additions

Page 172 of 282