Smithsonian articles from August 2006

Smithsonian archives from August 2006

Heck of a story: a poignant homecoming launches a harrowing quest.(FROM THE EDITOR)
August 1, 2006... ROBERT POOLE'S PIECE ("Lost Over Laos," p. 38) is about the attempt by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) to recover the remains of U.S. Air Force captain Michael J. "Bat" Masterson, who disappeared over Southeast Asia in his A-I...

James Carroll's decoding of Mary Magdalene has all the elements of a good yarn.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
August 1, 2006... READERS RESPOND TO THE JUNE ISSUE James Carroll's decoding of Mary Magdalene has all the elements of a good yarn: a mysterious, sexually charged figure; a reinvented legend defined and promulgated by a powerful pope; frustrated celibates...

Mary Magdalene agonistes.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
August 1, 2006... JAMES CARROLL starts off well by separating the three Marys of the New Testament from the three unnamed women, but then, skating off on erotic thin ice, he epitomizes the "whole history of Western civilization" as one of "discrediting sexuality...

Paying no mind.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
August 1, 2006... HERE IS THE IRONY: long after Andrew Wyeth's critics are gone and forgotten, his paintings will continue speaking to people for generations to come ("Wyeth's World"). It's a blessing that he doesn't listen to his detractors. ROBERT...

Saving Asian elephants.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
August 1, 2006... I DID NOT SAY that the importation of Asian elephants needs to stop ("Trunk Shows," "Around the Mall," July). What I said was that elephant "death rates are higher than the birth rates, and we have to change that in order to stop importing...

Fruits of their labor.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(figs found in abandoned village of Gilgal 1 in Israel)(Brief article)
August 1, 2006... A handful of 11,400-year-old dried figs have whetted the appetites of anthropologists. The figs, found in the abandoned village of Gilgal 1 in the Lower Jordan Valley in Israel, appear to be the first domesticated plants (above left, one of the...

Ancient bouquet.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)( Amborella trichopoda )(Brief article)
August 1, 2006... A shrub from the South Pacific island of New Caledonia is the sole survivor of the oldest line of flowering plants. Now William Friedman of the University of Colorado reports that Amborella trichopoda makes egg cells in a way similar to that of...

An etude for egg laying.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(Brief article)
August 1, 2006... Some male canaries sing better than others. Now ornithologists at the Max Planck Institutes in Germany have found that female canaries that hear recordings of mating songs with complicated sequences of buzzes and trills--which scientists call...

On its last legs.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(Brief article)
August 1, 2006... Whales and dolphins are descended from four-legged creatures (one ancestor, left, was Pakicetus) that lost their hind limbs 34 million years ago. How? A new study focuses on a gene dubbed sonic hedgehog (after a video game) that guides limb...

Observed.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(American beaver)(Brief article)
August 1, 2006... NAME: Castor canadensis, or American beaver. RESIDENCE: Village of the clammed. RELATIONSHIPS WITH THE NEIGHBORS: Better than you'd expect. THEY GO WITH THE FLOW? No, they create the flow. Researchers studying two beaver dams near...

Morning in America: space shuttle-watchers took their places in the sun, not yet awakened to the true risks of exploring the heavens.(INDELIBLE IMAGES)
August 1, 2006... EVEN AFTER Vietnam, Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis, the gasoline shortages and the berserk inflation eating away at their pensions, the people you see here in a Florida campground still have their faith. This is 1983, and they're up at...

A writer's beginnings: the well-known novelist calls growing up where she did "one of the great pieces of luck in my life".(MY KIND OF TOWN)
August 1, 2006... IN 1857 AN EAGER PARTY of town site speculators from St. Anthony, now a neighborhood of Minneapolis, set out for the place they believed the Northern Pacific Railway would cross the Red River, about 125 miles away. The party's first mistake was...

August anniversaries: momentous or merely memorable.(THIS MONTH IN HISTORY)
August 1, 2006... 25 YEARS AGO BOOTING UP It isn't the first personal computer, but after the IBM PC is unveiled in August 1981, it quickly attains benchmark status. IBM outsources the operating system--to a small outfit called Microsoft--but Big Blue's...

Working men.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(braceros: participants in US's first large-scale guest worker program)
August 1, 2006... Nicolas Saldana does not look like a man who cries easily. Broad-shouldered and with hands the size of baseball mitts, the 70-year-old has been selling houses in Santa Ana, California, for the past 40 years. But when Saldana attended a meeting...

Q & A: the largest retrospective of William Wegman's quirky art--photographs, paintings and videos--opens July 1 at the Reynolds Center for American Art and portraiture. He spoke with Jennifer Drapkin about photographing his Weimaraners, including Man Ray and Fay Ray.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Interview)(Brief article)
August 1, 2006... YOU ONCE SAID YOU FELT AS IF YOU WERE "NAILED TO THE DOG CROSS." WHAT DID YOU MEAN? In the early 1970s, in the beginning, I didn't even differentiate between working with the dog and not working with the dog. And then, after a while, I would...

Banner renovation: the National Museum of American History will undergo a dramatic makeover.(FROM THE SECRETARY)
August 1, 2006... IN AUGUST 1814, after defeating American defenses in Washington and burning the White House, British forces set their sights on Baltimore. Not only was it a major port and the third largest city in the upstart republic, but Baltimore privateers...

Stale mail: the nation's first hot-air balloon postal deliveries barely got off the ground.(THE OBJECT AT HAND)
August 1, 2006... IF YOU HAPPENED to be a child in the New York City of 1859, awaiting a birthday letter from, say, Aunt Isabel in Lafayette, Indiana--containing, perhaps, a shiny silver dollar--you were going to be disappointed. The mail that your aunt had...

Xtreme Birding.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(World Series of Birding: bird-watching's premier competitive event)
August 1, 2006... HUMAN FIGURES stand still and silent beside a hilltop pasture, silhouetted against the pre-dawn light. They cup their ears as the morning's first birds start to sing. "Vesper sparrow," whispers one of the four. "Got it," say the others....

Who's counting?(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Brief article)
August 1, 2006... 14 gas pumps reside at the American History Museum. Talk about a relic! The 1932 Wayne model (right) dispensed a gallon of Red Crown for 18 cents.

What's up.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Brief article)
August 1, 2006... ONCE UPON A TIME The good old days? Photos, paintings (an 1872 Winslow Homer) and more, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum until September 17, look at childhood in 19th-century America. THANKS, MICKEY Of the 525 items from 75...

Lost over Laos: scientists and soldiers combine forensics and archaeology to search for pilot Bat Masterson, one of 88,000 Americans missing in action from recent wars.
August 1, 2006... Night closed over Laos, where clouds were piling up over the rugged mountain jungle. An American pilot, on a mission to disrupt enemy traffic bound for North Vietnam, was flying into trouble. The artificial horizon on his A-I Skyraider, a...

Snap judgments: the winners (and some runners-up) of Smithsonian's annual photo contest take a bow.
August 1, 2006... IT'S BEEN SAID that good photography involves a collision of the new and the known: a fresh take on an ancient ritual, say, or an intimate portrait of a stranger. Our grand prize winner--an image of a sumptuous statue shaded by umbrellas--is a...

Saving New Orleans: in a new book, Patriotic Fire, the author of Forrest Gump paints an uncommonly vivid picture of an overlooked chapter in American history--and its unlikely hero.
August 1, 2006... BY AUTUMN 1814, the United States of America, barely 30 years old, was on the verge of dissolving. The treasury was empty, most public buildings in Washington, including the Capitol, the White House (then known as the President's House) and the...

Crescent city twilight: a photographer takes a pinhole view of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, which struck a year ago this month.(Brief article)
August 1, 2006... MUCH OF NEW ORLEANS is bouncing back, its jazzy insouciance alive and well in some quarters, but a year after the most destructive natural disaster in U.S. history, the city also remains unsettled. About half of its population of 469,000 has...

David Hockney and friends: though the artist doesn't think of himself as a painter of portraits, a new exhibition makes the case that they are key to his work.
August 1, 2006... BIG PREDICTIONS can take time to come true. When David Hockney, a working-class Yorkshire lad, left his Brad-ford school at 16 to go to art school, his English teacher and form master assessed him in these terms: "He has undoubted ability in...

Uphill battle: as the climate warms in the cloud forests of the Andes, plants and animals must climb to higher, cooler elevations or die.(THE ENVIRONMENT)
August 1, 2006... On the crest of the eastern Andes, about an eight-hour drive on a dirt road from Cuzco, Peru, is an expansive vista of one of the most diverse forests on earth. Storm clouds boil up in the pink evening sky, and fog advances over the foothills....

Corn plastic to the rescue? Wal-Mart and others are going green with "biodegradable" packaging made from corn. But is this really the answer to America's throwaway culture?(THE ENVIRONMENT)(resin known as polylactic acid (PLA))
August 1, 2006... THIRTY MINUTES north of Omaha, outside Blair, Nebraska, the aroma of steaming corn--damp and sweet--falls upon my car like a heavy curtain. The farmland rolls on, and the source of the smell remains a mystery until an enormous, steam-belching,...

Cowboys and realtors: the mythical West lives on--even as the wealthy, the leisured and the retired buy into Big Sky Country. An essay.(THE ENVIRONMENT)
August 1, 2006... GRIZZLIES in northwest Montana are being shot and possibly poisoned at an unprecedented pace since the bears were listed more than three decades ago as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The carcass count--22d killed in the past two...

Trial by fire: vital records were missing--and would have stayed missing were it not for a dead lawyer's vanity.(PRESENCE OF MIND)(Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, 1911)
August 1, 2006... ON MARCH 25, 1911, a pleasant springtime afternoon, a fire broke out in a garment factory near Washington Square in New York City's Greenwich Village. Within minutes, the entire eighth floor of the ten-story tower was full of flames. Onlookers,...

Weight of the world: the battle of the bulge goes global.(THE LAST PAGE)
August 1, 2006... LIKE SEVERAL MILLION PEOPLE on this planet, I weigh 15 pounds more than I'd like. But my 15 pounds appeared overnight, after an airplane ride from my home in India to Boston. As a child in Chennai, I was considered worryingly thin. My...