Smithsonian articles from April 2008

Smithsonian archives from April 2008

Into the void: unraveling an astronomical mystery ... and a presidency.(FROM THE EDITOR)(Martin Luther King, Jr. on Lyndon Baines Johnson's presidency)
April 1, 2008... BLACK HOLES are intrinsically interesting," says Robert Irion, "because they're just so strange and exotic and seem like something out of science fiction." But they're quite real. "There's no longer a debate that they exist. What people may...

It is amazing that our government provided this service that saved hundreds of thousands of treasures stolen by the Nazis ("Monumental Mission").(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2008... READERS RESPOND TO THE FEBRUARY ISSUE It is amazing that our government provided this service that saved hundreds of thousands of treasures stolen by the Nazis ("Monumental Mission"). These soldiers did a wonderful job with limited...

Rescuing stolen art.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2008... LYNN H. NICHOLAS wrote the definitive work on this subject. Her brilliant 1994 book, The Rape of Europa, was published after ten years of groundbreaking research, during which Nicholas interviewed most of the surviving "monuments men," as these...

Tagged.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2008... CURATOR FRANK GOODYEAR III, of the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, says the exhibit featuring museum-commissioned graffiti is "not glorifying the illegal activity" (Around the Mall, "Aerosol Art"). So what is it doing? Graffiti--the...

Radioactive history.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2008... I WAS PART OF a Combat Engineer Battalion, the 231st, Baker Company, which witnessed some of the early nuclear test explosions discussed in the Points of Interest item "Atomic Legacy" While bunkers were present in various field fortification...

Monkey business.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2008... AFTER READING about Marc van Roosmalen ("Trials of a Primatologist"), I have to agree with those who say that his problems are of his own making. I was disheartened that your excellent publication devoted 12 pages to his plight. Clearly he...

Correction.(Correction notice)
April 1, 2008... A photograph on page 20 accompanying a Points of Interest item about Arches National Park in Utah actually shows another Utah site, Canyonlands National Park. We regret the error.--Ed.

Egged on.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(nematode worms)(Brief article)
April 1, 2008... Look again -- the arrow isn't pointing to a berry. It's a parasitic worm's way of getting around. Scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama discovered the tiny nematode worm, whose eggs swell an ant's abdomen and turn...

Tell tail.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(Anna's hummingbirds)(Brief article)
April 1, 2008... A male Anna's hummingbird courts females by flying up 100 feet, diving at 50 miles per hour and emitting a loud squeak. But where does the sound come from? Not its throat, say University of California at Berkeley researchers. High-speed video...

Time to breed.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(dinosaur maturity)(Brief article)
April 1, 2008... If dinosaurs developed like birds, their closest living relatives, they would not have reached sexual maturity until full-grown. But a University of California at Berkeley study suggests the animals were precocious. Fossils of young allosaurus...

Follow the leader.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(chimpanzees)(Brief article)
April 1, 2008... Chimpanzees eat mostly fruit, but now and then a group hunts down a monkey What makes them attack? Leadership, according to a nine-year study of 14 adult male chimps in Uganda. Two of the males were most likely to hunt. Other chimps seldom went...

Observed.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(chameleons)(Brief article)
April 1, 2008... NAME: Southern African dwarf chameleons (Bradypodion spp.) EVERYBODY KNOWS: Chameleons change color. BUT WHO KNEW? They do it not just to hide, but to be seen. HOW DO YOU KNOW? Researchers from Australia and South Africa compared...

Comrades and arms: when Fidel Castro asked for a show of hands in support of his new policies, an American journalist captured the response.(INDELIBLE IMAGES)(Andrew St. George)
April 1, 2008... IN MID-JANUARY 1959, Fidel Castro and his comrades in revolution had been in power less than a month. Criticized in the international press for threatening summary justice and execution for many members of the government of ousted dictator...

April anniversaries: momentous or merely memorable.(THIS MONTH IN HISTORY)
April 1, 2008... 40 YEARS AGO FALLEN HERO Civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., 39, is assassinated on the balcony of his Memphis motel on the evening of April 4, 1968, while preparing for a march in support of the city's striking sanitation workers....

Urbane renewal: the best-selling author of the Emperor's Children discovers the grown-up pleasures of her adolescent playground.(MY KIND OF TOWN)
April 1, 2008... BEFORE EVER I HAD set foot in Boston, it lived in my imagination as a natural home. It was the place in the United States where, long before my birth, my parents had been happiest, when my French father was a graduate student at Harvard and my...

Abe's getaway.(NOTABLE AMERICAN DESTINATIONS AND HAPPENINGS)(Abraham Lincoln's summer home)(Brief article)
April 1, 2008... WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Despite the convenient option to live where he worked, during his presidency Abraham Lincoln commuted 45 minutes most summer days by horseback or carriage to a cottage three miles from the White House. Now, after a...

Boom time.(NOTABLE AMERICAN DESTINATIONS AND HAPPENINGS)(prairie chickens)(Brief article)
April 1, 2008... EAGLE LAKE, TEXAS -- As the sun rises over the tallgrass prairie, one of the last wild Attwater's prairie chickens performs an unusual mating dance, called booming because of the low "woo woo" sounds the male emits. His neck and tail feathers...

Encore.(NOTABLE AMERICAN DESTINATIONS AND HAPPENINGS)(The Neville Brothers at the Jazz & Heritage Festival)(Brief article)
April 1, 2008... NEW ORLEANS -- The Neville Brothers were the closing act for their hometown jazz festival for 21 years. But "Katrina messed up life for everybody," says Aaron Neville, who now lives near Nashville. "I couldn't go back, too many memories." This...

Interview Patricia Zaradic, conservation ecologist, Pennsylvania: the trouble with "videophilia".(Interview)
April 1, 2008... NATURE JUST ISN'T as entertaining as it used to be, according to new research by Patricia Zaradic, an Environmental Leadership Program fellow in Bryn Mawr, and Oliver Pergams of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Their studies of Americans'...

Hello? Hello?(FROM THE CASTLE)(Giant Magellan Telescope to study extrasolar planets)
April 1, 2008... IN ALL LIKELIHOOD, we are not alone. Astronomers are quite certain there is no intelligent life elsewhere in our solar system, but given recent discoveries of nearly 300 "extrasolar" planets, there's an excellent chance life exists elsewhere in...

Buried treasure; A clarion call from the new African American History museum: what's in your attic?(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)
April 1, 2008... SUPERFICIALLY, IT WAS A HAT: worn, discolored, mundane. It once belonged to a Pullman Company sleeping-car porter, an African-American man--the headpiece to a pristine white uniform. Patricia Heaston got it from a friend, whose father was a...

Making history.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Brief article)
April 1, 2008... WHERE ANIMALS ROAM Like paparazzi snapping covert pictures of celebrities, a series of hidden cameras will soon be capturing images of red foxes, long-tailed weasels and white-tailed deer along the Appalachian Trail--the footpath that stretches...

Spirals of history: hand-carved elephant tusks tell the story of life in the Congolese colonies of the late 1800s.(THE OBJECT AT HAND)(National Museum of African Art)
April 1, 2008... IN 1882, ROBERT VISSER, a German merchant who had been offered an opportunity to manage cacao and coffee plantations, traveled to central Africa's Loango Coast (in present-day Congo Republic). From then until his departure 22 years later,...

Q & A.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Interview)(Brief article)
April 1, 2008... Native American performance artist JAMES LUNA is known for pushing boundaries in his installations, where he engages audiences by making himself part of a tableau. His latest piece is at the Smithsonian's Gustav Heye Center in New York City...

Jukebox.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Brief article)
April 1, 2008... YOUNG TALENT Poet Langston Hughes was "discovered" in 1925 while working as a busboy in a Washington, D.C. restaurant. He slipped some of his poems next to poet Vachel Lindsay's dinner plate and, with Lindsay's enthusiastic backing, went on to...

What's up.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Brief article)
April 1, 2008... BUST A MOVE Dancer Chita Rivera still performs in her 70s (Chita in Silhouette, 2005). "The Dancer Within," a traveling exhibit of 48 photos by Rose Eichenbaum, is at the Ypsilanti District Library in Michigan, April 5 through June 1. ...

Homing in on black holes: to gain insight into the most mysterious objects in the universe, astronomers shine a light at the chaotic core of our own Milky Way.(W. M. Keck Observatory)
April 1, 2008... FROM THE SUMMIT of Mauna Kea, nearly 14,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean, the Milky Way tilts luminously across the night sky, an edge-on view of our galaxy. Parts of the great disk are obscured by dust, and beyond one of those dusty blots,...

Inside Cape Town: tourists are flocking to the city's stunning mountains, glittering seacoast and top-rated vineyards, but a former resident explains how the legacy of apartheid lingers.
April 1, 2008... From the deck of a 40-foot sloop plying the chilly waters of Table Bay, Paul Mare gazes back at the illuminated skyline of Cape Town. It is early evening, at the close of a clear day in December. Mare and his crew, racing in the Royal Cape...

The unmaking of the president: Lyndon Johnson believed that his withdrawal from the 1968 presidential campaign would free him to solidify his legacy--but four days later, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated ...(40 YEARS AGO)
April 1, 2008... At the beginning of 1968, no one could have predicted the reception that would greet President Lyndon Baines Johnson as he entered St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan on the afternoon of Thursday, April 4. Here was a man so dogged by...

Larger than life: whether denouncing France's art establishment, shocking 19th-century sensibilities or challenging Napoleon III, Gustave Courbet never held back.(Biography)
April 1, 2008... Painter, provocateur, risk taker and revolutionary, Gustave Courbet might well have said, "I offend, therefore I am." Arguably modern art's original enfant terrible, he had a lust for controversy that makes the careers of more recent...

To catch a thief: how a Civil War buff's chance discovery led to a sting, a raid and a victory against traffickers in stolen historical documents.
April 1, 2008... In the fall of 2006, a history devotee named Dean Thomas was surprised by something he saw on eBay, the online auction house. Someone was offering 144-year-old letters sent by munitions companies to Philadelphia's Frankford Arsenal, a major...

The sodfather: major-league teams from coast to coast are turning to third-generation groundskeeper Roger Bossard to give them a winning edge.
April 1, 2008... Harry Caray is smiling. Gazing down through outsized specs as a sign on a bar's rooftop high above Sheffield Avenue, the late, legendary baseball broadcaster looks as if he's seeing history in the making. Which he is. For on this cold and sunny...

"Those aren't rumors": two decades ago an anonymous telephone call sank Gary Hart's presidential campaign--and rewrote the rules of political reporting.(PRESENCE OF MIND)
April 1, 2008... WHEN TOM FIEDLER'S phone rang the evening of April 27, 1987, he thought it might be another crank call, the kind political reporters get all the time. But Fiedler, a veteran campaign chronicler for the Miami Herald, couldn't ignore the caller's...

Mind games: you say tomato, I say otamot.(THE LAST PAGE)
April 1, 2008... I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU, but when I see a STARBUCKS sign, I don't think coffee. I think, "SKCUB RATS." A sign above a supermarket called GELSON'S prompts: "SNOS LEG." Maybe I then pause to wonder what skcub rats are, or what it feels like (or...