Smithsonian articles from January 2007

Smithsonian archives from January 2007

Travelin' man: nailing stories from Timbuktu to the Basque Country.(Josh Hammer)(Interview)
January 1, 2007... JOSH HAMMER has written for SMITHSONIAN about the dying of the Dead Sea, the disruption of Iraq's Marsh Arabs and the preservation of ancient manuscripts in Timbuktu. In this issue the former Newsweek correspondent, who was based in Capetown,...

To the best of my knowledge, only the Mayflower compact ("Pilgrims' Progress") united religious leaders, military men, merchants and servants.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2007... READERS RESPOND TO THE NOVEMBER ISSUE To the best of my knowledge, only the Mayflower compact ("Pilgrims' Progress") united religious leaders, military men, merchants and servants. Pilgrim father William Brewster's name stood alongside the...

Bonding with bonobos.(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2007... THE PRIMATOLOGIST Robert Yerkes was my father, and I was 11 years old when (in August of 1923) he acquired Chim, a primate who years later would be identified as a bonobo ("The Smart and Swinging Bonobo"). He came to our family's summer place,...

Mighty memories.(Letter to the editor)
January 1, 2007... "R.I.P., MIGHTY O," about the aircraft carrier Oriskany turned into an artificial reef, brought back memories of the making of The Bridges at Toko-Ri. I was aboard the Oriskany's sister ship, USS Kearsarge, during the filming when the Oriskany...

Time after time: William Christenberry embraces the impermanent.(INDELIBLE IMAGES)(Interview)
January 1, 2007... FOR YEARS, WILLIAM CHRISTENBERRY saw the Bar-B-Q Inn only with its windows shuttered. When he finally came upon it with its doors open and went inside, he found a bartender who was affable but somewhat bemused that the skinny, clean-cut...

That's deep.(subsurface organisms)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... Where to look for new forms of life? Scientists who descended almost two miles into a South African gold mine--besting previous searches for subsurface organisms by a mile and a half--discovered bacteria that survive on energy from uranium....

Origin of species (cont.).(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... Plants may seem to lead simple lives, but their genes can be a blooming confusion. Consider a sunflower that lives in the desert (above). A Kansas State University study found that its genes bear an unusual abundance of transposons--"jumping"...

Full body lotion.(frogs preserving their natural moisture)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... Amphibians lose water through their thin skin, so most prefer to stay wet. But the South American monkey frog (below) and some other tree frogs can endure sunlight and dry air for long periods. They secrete a waxy substance from specialized...

Observed.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(Xiphophorus birchmanni, swordtail fish)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... NAME: Xiphophorus birchmanni, aka the northern swordtail fish, native to Central America and an aquarium mainstay MALE PREFERS: to court by raising his sail-like dorsal fin as high as it can possibly go FEMALE PREFERS: a male with a...

Conservation's big picture.(world map on threatened species)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... The first detailed world maps of threatened birds, mammals and amphibians (above, colors indicate the number of species under threat) show that the creatures are in trouble in different places. The work, published in Nature, underscores that...

Bleeve it, hon: the tentative city the sportswriter grew up in has regained a bit of swagger.
January 1, 2007... IF YOU WILL FORGIVE ME, a word about myself first. I came from Baltimore, and I came from money. The Defords owned a big leather company My father was born in a house so large that when the family sold it, no private owner would buy such a...

Paleozoic Vermont: what's the world's oldest communal ocean reef doing in the Green Mountain State?
January 1, 2007... NELSON FISK, who was Vermont's lieutenant governor from 1896 to 1898, was also the owner of a quarry on Isle La Motte, in Lake Champlain. His business card read: "Isle La Motte Grey and Black Marble Quarries." He was overselling. The rock was...

January anniversaries: momentous or merely memorable.(THIS MONTH IN HISTORY)
January 1, 2007... 75 YEARS AGO AROUND THEY GO Berkeley physics professor Ernest Lawrence files a patent application January 26,1932, for the cyclotron, a machine that accelerates nuclear particles to high velocities by using a magnetic field to send them...

Pictures of youth.(National Museum of Natural Historys' photogrpah exhibition)
January 1, 2007... A boy in an oversize Dallas Cowboys T-shirt smiles, one arm slung over a donkey's neck. Amid a crowd of children, a girl grasps a long wooden pestle and grinds shea nuts into shea butter. In the shade of a tree, a man naps outside on a woven...

Let the collecting begin.(National Museum of African American History and Culture)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... The National Museum of African American History and Culture isn't scheduled to open, on the Mall, until 2015. But the new museum has just acquired its first piece--a 115-year-old pew from Quinn Chapel, site of Chicago's oldest African-American...

Treasures trove: America's most singular sensations are at the National Air and Space Museum.(iconic items on display form National Museum of American History)
January 1, 2007... FOR THE ONLY TIME in history, the top hat Abraham Lincoln wore the night he was assassinated is within a few feet of Kermit the Frog, and just down the hall from SpaceShipOne. That's because Lincoln's hat, Kermit and more than 150 other...

Gathering rosebuds: did a Native American actress inspire one of Hollywood's most celebrated symbols?
January 1, 2007... "ROSEBUD...." That final, mystifying word, uttered by dying newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane as portrayed by Orson Welles in the film Citizen Kane, transformed a childhood sled, conjured from memory, into an icon of American culture. No...

Q & A.(Brad Bird )(Interview)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... BRAD BIRD wrote and directed the Incredibles. Now Edna "E" mode, the film's scene-stealing costumer, is at the cooper-Hewitt's national design triennial. Bird spoke with Amy Crawford. WHY WAS EDNA MODE SO POPULAR? People feel they know...

Who's counting?(Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... 470 glass panes had been installed, as we went to press, in the Norman Foster-designed roof over the vast courtyard at the Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture. And there were 394 more to install before the courtyard opens in late...

What's up.(art museums)(Brief article)
January 1, 2007... HIGH-CONCEPT Forty photos taken by satellites (a U.S. Geological Survey image of Russia's Lena River delta from 438 miles up) reveal the often surprising structure of earthly features. At the Air and Space Museum until January 7, then traveling...

Peace at last? Home to glittering beaches, robust wines, piquant foods and Bilbao's sparkling new Guggenheim Museum, the Basque Country of northern Spain has been riven by separatist violence for decades. Though political tensions linger, terrorists agreed to a cease-fire this past March. Will it mean.
January 1, 2007... THE FIRST BLAST reverberated through the old quarter of San Sebastian at one o'clock in the afternoon. It rattled the windows of the ornate buildings around the 18th-century Santa Maria del Coro church and sent a flock of pigeons into the sky....

End of the road? Development threatens to block the ancient migration of a herd of pronghorn antelopes in western Wyoming. Without new protections, conservationists say, the speedy animals are running out of time.
January 1, 2007... The chase began just after dawn. In a curious predator-prey role reversal, the pronghorn antelope pursued a coyote across a knoll. The doe could have run down her quarry in seconds, but she was not trying to catch the coyote, only shoo it away....

Arresting faces: a new book argues the case for the mug shot as art.(Least Wanted: A Century of American Mugshots)(Book review)
January 1, 2007... THE FACES ARE "RIGHT OUT OF CENTRAL CASTING," says Mark Michaelson. For a decade, the graphic designer collected old mug shots--he got them from a retired cop in Scranton, Pennsylvania, from a file cabinet bought at a Georgia auction and...

Extreme polo: there are no holds barred at the annual grudge match in northwest Pakistan's "land of mirth and murder".
January 1, 2007... BY MIDMORNING'S LIGHT, a military helicopter descends on the Shandur Pass, a 12,300-foot-high valley hemmed in by mountains whose jagged peaks soar another 8,000 feet above us. This part of Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province is usually...

House proud: high design in a factory-made home? Michelle Kaufmann believes she holds the key.
January 1, 2007... LIKE THE ROBOT MAID and the flying car, the perfect prefab house seems like one of those futuristic promises that never quite come true. You know the house: a light and airy, clean and green 3 BR, 2 BA constructed of renewable, energy-efficient...

Americans in Paris: in the late 19th century, the City of Light beckoned Whistler, Sargent, Cassatt and other young artists. As a new exhibition makes clear, what they experienced would transform American art.
January 1, 2007... HER SKIN POWDERED lavender-white and her ears provocatively rouged, Virginie Avegno Gautreau, a Louisiana native who married a prosperous French banker, titillated Parisian society. People talked as much of her reputed love affairs as of her...

The shadow knows: why a leading expert on the history of timekeeping set out to create a sundial unlike anything the world has ever seen.(William Andrewes of Harvard University)
January 1, 2007... THE FIRST TIME I MET WILLIAM ANDREWES, several years ago, he was wearing an inexpensive wristwatch with the cartoon figures Tintin and Snowy running across the dial. Since Andrewes then served as curator of Harvard University's Collection of...

Doctor feelgood: stricken by "vile melancholy," the 18th-century critic and raconteur Samuel Johnson pioneered a modern therapy.
January 1, 2007... MEL GIBSON DID IT. Brooke Shields too. So did Uma Thurman, Ben Stiller and Carrie Fisher. They and dozens of other celebrities have all come forward, in books or on TV, to discuss their struggles with alcoholism, or drug addiction, or...