Smithsonian articles from February 2007

Smithsonian archives from February 2007

Author Paul Theroux should pause before he concludes animals cannot be cheerful ("Living with Geese").(Letter to the editor)
February 1, 2007... READERS RESPOND TO THE DECEMBER ISSUE Author Paul Theroux should pause before he concludes animals cannot be cheerful ("Living with Geese"). There are happy dogs and mean ones, just as there are happy and mean people. It's not a simple...

Fowl language.(Letter to the editor)
February 1, 2007... AS THE EDITOR OF the just-released Letters of E. B. White, Revised Edition and as his granddaughter, let me reassure Mr. Theroux that White observed geese by night, as well as by day. I was the occasional recipient of a nighttime tour of the...

Former marines.(Letter to the editor)
February 1, 2007... AS A FORMER jarhead with the First Marine Division, the photo on page 92 ("Waging Peace in the Philippines") caught my eye. I am puzzled by an Army sergeant wearing the patch of the First Marine Division. Can you clarify this for me? BOB...

Correction.(Correction notice)
February 1, 2007... A timeline on page 86 misstated the reason that Philippines president Corazon Aquino left office in 1992. She did not run for reelection.

Roads to ruin.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(forest fragmentation)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... When pastures and roads carve up a forest, even trees that aren't chopped down suffer. That's one finding from the world's longest (22 years) and largest (32,000 trees) study of forest fragmentation, conducted in the Amazon by the Smithsonian...

Mammals catch birds in flight.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(volaticotherium antiquus in Mongolia)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Mammals have been flying as long as birds, according to research on a newfound fossil. A flying squirrel-like glider called Volaticotherium antiquus (ancient gliding beast, illustrated above) from Inner Mongolia lived 125 million years...

Street music.(Leiden University)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... More evidence that life in the big city can change a creature's tune: researchers from Leiden University in the Netherlands analyzed the songs of great tits, birds related to chickadees, in ten European cities, including London, Berlin and...

Keeping cool.(Princeton University on marine iguanas )(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Why did scientists chase dozens of marine iguanas on the Galapagos Islands? To learn why island animals with no predators tend to be so calm. After subjecting the three-foot-long reptiles to 15 minutes each of "experimental harassment," the...

Observed.(Redouan Bshary of the University of Neuchatel, Gymnothorax javanicus)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... NAME: Gymnothorax javanicus, the giant moray eel, and Plectropomus pessuliferus, a grouper FORMERLY SEEN AS: Crevice lurker and bottom dweller, respectively NOW SEEN AS: Huntin' buddies. A new study has found that they seek prey...

Fallen giant: "a whole lifetime was over," legendary quarterback Y. A. Tittle recalls.(Column)
February 1, 2007... THE GREEK POET Pindar had wonderful things to say about heroes but less about defeat. So a couple of millennia later, Dianne Tittle de Laet, herself a poet as well as a classical scholar, was left to make sense of this image of her father, the...

Interview Maria Zuber, Planetary Scientist, Mit, Cambridge, Massachusetts: on the surprise evidence of flowing water on Mars.(Interview)
February 1, 2007... THE MARS GLOBAL SURVEYOR JUST WENT DARK AFTER CIRCLING MARS FOR TEN YEARS. WHAT WERE ITS MOST IMPORTANT FINDINGS? We made the first viable model of the internal structure of Mars--including that the core of Mars is probably still fluid. Another...

Sea Island strata: at a former Georgia plantation, archaeologists delve into both the workaday and spiritual lives of slaves.(Dan Elliott )
February 1, 2007... ON THE NORTHERN END of Ossabaw Island, three former slave cabins sit in a perfect row--remains of a plantation that predates the Revolutionary War. Dan Elliott stands next to the cabins one morning, near palm trees silhouetted against the gray...

February anniversaries: momentous or merely memorable.(Laura Ingalls)(Mary Stuart)(Edwin Land)
February 1, 2007... 140 YEARS AGO LITTLE HOUSE LAURA Laura Ingalls is born on February 7, 1867, near Pepin, Wisconsin. Her stories of the pioneer West of her childhood and marriage to Almanzo Wilder--beginning, in 1932, with Little House in the Big...

Cache value.(Christine Mullen Kreamer)
February 1, 2007... Early one morning this past February, Christine Mullen Kreamer, a curator at the National Museum of African Art (NMAfA), got an excited call from shipping and receiving. The first boxes from the Walt Disney Company's donation of 525 African...

Yo! Sly gives gear, K.O.'s museum brass.(Sylvester Stallone )(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Without giving away the ending of the latest Rocky movie, it's safe to say the old boxer is history: actor-writer-director Sylvester Stallone has donated several franchise items to the Smithsonian Institution. Rocky Balboa's black homburg hat,...

Out of Africa: this month a special collection--representing most of Africa's major artistic traditions--goes spectacularly on view.
February 1, 2007... TWO EXQUISITE PIECES OF ART--an ivory female figure and a copper-alloy mask, both from the African Kingdom of Benin in Nigeria--provided the spark for a lifelong love and pursuit of African art for real estate developer Paul Tishman and his...

Pas de deux: Joseph Cornell turned his obsession with a prima ballerina into art.(Biography)
February 1, 2007... PICTURE A MAN living in a small house on Utopia Parkway in Flushing, Queens, just across the East River (and worlds away) from Manhattan. He is in his late 30s and lives with his mother and an invalid brother. On a given evening in the winter...

Q & A.(Robert Jarvik)(Interview)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... Artificial heart inventor ROBERT JARVIK has donated his latest model, a Jarvik 2000, to the Museum of American History. He spoke with the magazine's Chai Woodham. WHAT IS THE JARVIK 2000? It's a miniature rotary blood pump that we call an...

Great cat diplomacy.(National Zoo)(Brief article)
February 1, 2007... How does a lionkeeper make introductions? "Very carefully," says Jeanne Minor of the National Zoo, which recently acquired three young lions (including sisters Shera and Nababiep, below) from a wildlife preserve in South Africa. Because the...

What's up.
February 1, 2007... STRIKE UP THE BAND For more than 150 years, Washington, D.C. public-school bands have turned the usual oompah fare on its head (Woodson High marchers in 1979). Uniforms, photos, recordings and more artifacts recall all that jazz at the...

The pardon: President Gerald R. Ford's priority was to unite a divided nation. The decision that defined his term proved how difficult that would be.(Excerpt)
February 1, 2007... President Richard M. Nixon's resignation created the Ford administration--and left Ford with the excruciating dilemma of whether to intervene in Nixon's legal fate in the Watergate scandal. In the book 31 Days, published this past April, author...

The vanishing: little noticed by the outside world, perhaps the most dramatic decline of a wild animal in history has been taking place in India and Pakistan. Large vultures, vitally necessary and once numbering in the tens of millions, now face extinction. But why?
February 1, 2007... THERE IS a moment during the capturing of baby vultures when the human nose can be considered an asset. In the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve of central India, this moment comes for us atop a 100-foot-high cliff etched with natural ledges and carved...

Faces of war: amid the horrors of World War I, a corps of artists brought hope to soldiers disfigured in the trenches.
February 1, 2007... WOUNDED TOMMIES facetiously called it "The Tin Noses Shop." Located within the 3rd London General Hospital, its proper name was the "Masks for Facial Disfigurement Department"; either way, it represented one of the many acts of desperate...

Ahead in the clouds: Susan Solomon helped patch the ozone hole. Now, as a leader of a major United Nations report--out this month--she's going after global warming.(PROFILE)
February 1, 2007... THIS MONTH, when the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization release their first major report on global climate change in six years, two things are likely to happen. Some people will dismiss it. And Susan Solomon will grow...

Incurably romantic: for much of the 20th century, Britain's Pre-Raphaelite painters were dismissed as overly sentimental. A new exhibition shows why they're back in favor.
February 1, 2007... THE SULTRY FIGURE combs her golden hair and gazes at a mirror; her dressing gown has slipped off one shoulder. In a sonnet inscribed on the painting's elaborate gold frame, the artist, a London poet and painter named Dante Gabriel Rossetti,...

Famous once again: Longfellow reaches his bicentennial; here's why his poems became perennial.(TRIBUTE)(Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)
February 1, 2007... EVEN IN HIS later years, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow did not mind birthdays. He inspired others to celebrate right along with him. His 70th, for example, took on the air of a national holiday, with parades, speeches and lots of his poetry "My...