Smithsonian articles from April 2006

Smithsonian archives from April 2006

Giving back: nothing routine about these assignments.(EDITOR'S NOTE)
April 1, 2006... JOURNALIST AND NOVELIST Michael Castleman, who wrote our story about the San Francisco Mint (p. 56), traces his interest in it to his days as a coin-collecting kid growing up outside New York City. "The San Francisco Mint was the nation's...

Fred and Ginger: two robots, neither as graceful as its namesake but no less accomplished, are among advances keeping scientists on the cutting edge.(From the SECRETARY)
April 1, 2006... "HIGH TECH" and "in a museum" aren't usually found in the same sentence. But just as our exhibitions increasingly incorporate 21st-century display screens, Smithsonian researchers are using cutting-edge technologies. On the west side of the...

Genetic misconceptions.(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2006... Readers respond to the February issue: "Medical Sleuth," about Dr. D. Holmes Morton's work with genetic diseases among Amish and Mennonite people in Pennsylvania, prompted many readers to ask why such communities do not avail themselves of...

Bahamian blenny.(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2006... I SHARE GORDON CHAPLIN'S concern about the degradation of Bahamian reef systems ("A Return to the Reefs"). In fact, in 1956, while working on my PhD dissertation, I visited James E. Bohlke at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia when...

Lesson learned?(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2006... DAVID VON DREHLE ("A Lesson in Hate") hauls out the cliche "Why do they hate us?" and says jihad theorist Sayyid Qutb and his disciples were "insane." This is hardly helpful in broadening our understanding of the crisis. The real answer can be...

Attack of the killer eagle.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(cause of death of Taung child)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... What killed the Taung child, the celebrated human ancestor who lived two million years ago? A prehistoric eagle, according to a new analysis of the child's skull, the first hominid fossil ever discovered in Africa, in 1924. Claw and beak marks...

Cave dwellers.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(new species)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... A study of 30 caves in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks in California has yielded 27 new species, including an eyeless pseudoscorpion (above) and a daddy longlegs with jaws as big as its body. "This just confirms how little we know about...

Here comes the sun.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(songbirds)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... Yes, birds greet the day with a cacophony of song. But different voices join the "dawn chorus" at different times. How come? According to a study in an Ecuadorean forest by Karl Berg of the University of California at Berkeley, birds that perch...

Safety in small numbers.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(tropical forest biodiversity)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... In tropical forests, rare trees tend to live longest, perhaps because fungi and viruses have evolved to attack common tree species, sparing odd ones (like Dipertyx panamensis, left). The research, led by Smithsonian's Tropical Research...

Observed.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(cotton-top tamarin)(common marmoset)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... NAMES: Cotton-top tamarin (below) and common marmoset. POST-MATING RITUAL: Males gain weight while their mates are pregnant. WHAT'S THEIR EXCUSE? Child care, possibly. ARE YOU KIDDING? No. A recent University of Wisconsin at...

Stars and strife: a clash of cultures at Boston city hall in 1976 symbolized the city's years-long confrontation with the busing of schoolchildren.(INDELIBLE IMAGES)
April 1, 2006... THE INCIDENT on Boston's City Hall Plaza took no more than 15 seconds, Ted Landsmark recalls. He was set upon and punched; someone swung an American flag at him; his attackers fled; he glanced down at his suit. "I realized I was covered with...

Refined palette: scholars say this 19th-century artifact could have belonged to the celebrated American painter.(THE OBJECT AT HAND)(James McNeill Whistler)(Biography)
April 1, 2006... THOSE OF US who love to look at paintings for the sheer pleasure of it tend naturally to think a lot about the end result and very little about the means to that end. We forget that a work of art is work. Yet anyone who has ever visited a...

God save the ... ravens.(JUST LOOKING)(Tower of London flock)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... Ravens have roamed the courtyards of England's Tower of London for centuries. But the six who constitute the tower's current flock have now--like Anne Boleyn and Sir Walter Raleigh--been imprisoned within its walls. Concerned that the birds...

Home is the sailor ... One hundred years ago this month, John Paul Jones was welcomed home with great fanfare at the U.S. Naval Academy. But was the body really his?(POINTS OF INTEREST)
April 1, 2006... IN A SOFTLY LIT CRYPT beneath the chapel of the U.S. Naval Academy, a massive sarcophagus of veined marble rests on the backs of four bronze dolphins. At a respectful distance from the tomb, two midshipmen with gleaming swords stand vigil over...

To some, sunglasses are a fashion accessory ... But when driving, these sunglasses may save your life!(Urgent: Special Summer Driving Notice)
April 1, 2006... Drivers Alert: Driving can expose you to more dangerous glare than any sunny summer day at the beach can... do you know how to protect yourself? An amazing breakthrough in optic technology by NASA resulting in Eagle Eyes[R] can be your...

A struggle to stay afloat: in the chilling reality of a warming Arctic, Alaskan villagers are fighting a battle to save their community and way of life.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)
April 1, 2006... SHISHMAREF, an Eskimo village on an island off northwestern Alaska, is falling into the ocean. Giant storm surges have so battered the place--once well protected by sea ice--that villagers voted in 2002 to leave their ancestral home for the...

All jazzed up.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Miles Davis)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... Miles Davis, the legendary trumpeter and composer, wore it for a career-capping performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland in 1991, a few months before he died of a stroke at age 65. The boldly colored Versace suit has geometric...

Exposed: how Sugimoto's mind-bending photography began with a sexual awakening at the movies.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Hiroshi Sugimoto)(Interview)
April 1, 2006... Hiroshi Sugimoto's enigmatic black-and-white photographs tease, whether they focus on the imperceptible line between ocean and sky on a misty day or a seemingly alive stuffed polar bear in a museum diorama. The largest retrospective of...

Hurry in.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)
April 1, 2006... A little teapot short and stout with--an albatross on its handle? Joe and Georgia Pozycinski's bird-topped bronze homage to Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is among the wares at the Smithsonian Craft Show, April 20 to 23, at the...

This month in history: April anniversaries--momentous or merely memorable.
April 1, 2006... 45 YEARS AGO: THE BAY OF PIGS FIASCO April 17, 1961: With President Kennedy's approval, Cuban exiles land on Cuba's coast to overthrow Fidel Castro. The British media predict a "major disaster for the U.S." if the invasion fails. It does....

Grace under fire: as San Francisco burned, 100 years ago this month, a hardy band of men worked feverishly to save the city's mint--and with it the U.S. economy.
April 1, 2006... LIKE A DOG SHAKING A RAG DOLL, the most destructive earthquake in American history shook San Francisco at 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906. It ruptured gas lines and ignited dozens of fires, many of which soon merged into the disaster's single...

Young and restless: Saudi Arabia's baby boomers, born after the 1973 oil embargo, are redefining the kingdom's relationship with the modern world.
April 1, 2006... SCENTED SMOKE FROM DOZENS of water pipes mingled with Lebanese pop music at Al-Nakheel, a seaside restaurant in the Red Sea port of Jeddah. Saudi men in white robes and women in black abayas, their head scarves falling to their shoulders,...

A Gibson girl in New Guinea: two Seattle women have retraced the intrepid travels of model and portrait artist Caroline Mytinger, who journeyed to the South Sea islands in the 1920s to capture "vanishing primitives" on canvas.(Biography)
April 1, 2006... IN THE 1920S, New Guinea and the Solomon Islands were among the world's last wild places. Largely unmapped and inhabited by headhunters and cannibals, the jungle isles of the Coral Sea captured the popular imagination as exemplars of the...

Odyssey's end? The search for ancient Ithaca: a British researcher believes he has at last pinpointed the island to which Homer's wanderer returned.(Robert Bittlestone)
April 1, 2006... ROBERT BITTLESTONE is standing above the village of Petrikata, looking over redtile roofs down upon a narrow isthmus that connects the two parts of the island of Cephalonia, off Greece's western coast. In the valley below, farmers in overalls...

Students of the game: when the Aztec and Maya played it 500 to 1,000 years ago, the losers sometimes lost their heads--literally. Today scholars are visiting remote Mexican villages to study the oldest sport in the Americas, ulama, now on the verge of extinction.
April 1, 2006... "!DEJAMELO!" Jesus "Chuy" Paez shouts. "Leave it for me!" The nine-pound black rubber ball arcs high in the late-afternoon Mexican sky. Paez's teammates scatter, fanning out diagonally to defend their end zone. With a running leap, Paez throws...

Evildoer: the Beowulf monster is a thousand years old. But his bad old tricks continue to resonate in the modern world.(PRESENCE OF MIND)(Grendel)
April 1, 2006... WHAT A GIANT Grendel must be. For supper he scoops up sleeping warriors 30 at a crack. Imagine the width of his jaws. Yet Beowulf the Avenger brings him down in single combat. Stripped of armor, Beowulf rips the monster's arm off at the...

My cold war hang-up: how I learned to stop worrying and make peace with my nuclear phone.(THE LAST PAGE)
April 1, 2006... I FOUND AN OLD ROTARY TELEPHONE in a junk shop. Firetruck red. High gloss. "Ten bucks," said Fred, the shop owner. The newspaper spread out before him, amid more junk, was open to the harness-racing results. I handed him a one dollar...