Smithsonian articles from July 2006

Smithsonian archives from July 2006

Let there be light: from dark and cavernous to room for everybody.(FROM THE EDITOR)
July 1, 2006... WHEN HE LIVED IN WASHINGTON, D.C. in the late 1990s, Adam Goodheart often visited the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery in the Patent Office Building, which has just undergone a massive renovation. "I remember...

This "shrine of democracy" ("Mount Rushmore") honors men who sought the eradication of America's first peoples.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2006... READRES RESPOND TO THE MAY ISSUE This "shrine of democracy" ("Mount Rushmore") honors men who sought the eradication of America's first peoples. Let us not forget that Theodore Roosevelt, one of the four presidents immortalized, once said,...

Biblical geography.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2006... OSTENSIBLY AN ACCOUNT of the debate between archaeological literalists and minimalists about the historical accuracy of the Hebrew Bible, Jennifer Wallace's "Shifting Ground in the Holy Land" is instead an exercise in thinly disguised...

Booming China.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2006... AS A FREQUENT business traveler to China, I find that the description of Shenyang ("A Tale of Two Chinas") as economically depressed is inaccurate. Shenyang is a booming city, center of an ambitious expansion plan that covers Liaoning Province,...

Revolutionary.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2006... IT WAS EVOCATIVE to be in Frombork Cathedral last November when archaeologists announced that the grave of Nicolaus Copernicus had been found ("Copernicus Unearthed"). I told the congregation that Copernicus was the first to show that a...

Last hurrah: everyone wanted to see the Babe the day they retired his number; photographer Nat Fein saw the story.(INDELIBLE IMAGES)
July 1, 2006... NAT FEIN was not a sports photographer. His usual assignments for the New York Herald-Tribune sent him around the big city for pictures of dogs and children and whatever oddities struck his eye--human-interest stuff. He was proud that these...

Whom can you trust?(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(side-blotched lizards)(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... How does an animal inclined to-ward altruism, which often results in a loss of mating opportunities, pass that trait along? A new study shows how one species solves the problem--by recognizing the selfless trait in others and coming to the...

Take a deep breath.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(blackback crab )(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... After aquatic crabs molt, they fill up with water to stabilize their new, flimsy, oversized shells. But how do land-dwellers such as the blackback crab (below) fill out a new shell? University of North Carolina scientists say they suck in...

Monkey talk.(University of St. Andrews have gathered the first evidence that monkeys can string words)(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... Scientists from the University of St. Andrews have gathered the first evidence that monkeys can string words together. Tree-dwelling putty-nosed monkeys (right) in Nigeria combine "pyow," warning of a possible threat below, and "hack," about a...

Ouch!(Researchers in Germany that sea anemone tentacles accelerate)(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... Researchers in Germany have documented that the stingers covering sea anemone tentacles (a starlet sea anemone, left) accelerate from zero to 80 miles per hour in 700 nanoseconds, a million times faster than a race car. That's one of the...

Observed.(Thyrohyrax observations)(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... NAME: Thyrohyrax, ancient predecessor of hyraxes, rabbit-size mammals found from the Middle East to southern Africa. SEXUAL IDENTITY: Reassigned. It was believed that the species' long, banana-curved lower jaws belonged to females. But...

A city called heaven: America's best-known oral historian tells his own story; Hog butcher for the world, tool maker, stacker of wheat, player with railroads and the nation's freight handler; stormy, husky, brawling, city of the big shoulders ...(MY KIND OF TOWN)
July 1, 2006... CARL SANDBURG, the white-haired old Swede with the wild cowlick, drawled out that brag in 1914. Today, he is regarded in more soft-spoken quarters as an old gaffer, out of fashion, more attuned to the street corner than the class in American...

Joe Robinson: vacation advocate, Santa Monica, Calif; His prescription for overworked Americans: chill.(Interview)
July 1, 2006... Americans take fewer days off than the Japanese, Chinese, British and all continental Europeans. Journalist Joe Robinson, founder of the group Work to Live, which advocates more generous vacations and a U.S. minimum paid leave law, is trying to...

July anniversaries: momentous or merely memorable.(THIS MONTH IN HISTORY)
July 1, 2006... 30 YEARS AGO: RED PLANET, YES; GREEN MEN, NO After an 11-month journey, Viking/lands on Mars on July 20, 1976, and transmits the first color image from the planet's surface. For six years the lander and its sister, Viking II, analyze soil...

Trunk shows.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(elephants protection)
July 1, 2006... The world's largest land animals can pose a big challenge for zoos. In light of research showing that elephants are social, intelligent creatures that need companionship and space to roam, the American Zoo and Aquarium Association mandated this...

The art of flattery.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Randall Rosenthal exhibitions)(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... Randall Rosenthal was once a darling of the New York City art scene. In 1974, his one-man show of surrealist paintings attracted Andy Warhol and charmed Salvador Dali, who wrote in the gallery guestbook, "BRAVO." So what did Rosenthal do when...

Patent pending: after a glorious renovation, the old Patent Office Building opens its doors anew.(National Portrait Gallery (London, England))(Editorial)
July 1, 2006... AWESOME AS Washington's Independence Day fireworks are, this year they'll have been upstaged a bit by a historic event three days earlier. On July 1, after being closed for more than six years and a $283 million renovation, the magnificent old...

Camelot: in the mid-1800s, "ships of the desert" reported for duty in the Southwest.(THE OBJECT AT HAND)
July 1, 2006... THE CAMEL'S NAME was Said. His destiny was to travel from the deserts of the Middle East to the American Southwest, where he would participate in a short-lived, 19th-century military experiment that came to be known as the U.S. Army Camel...

Q & A: the Muppets are 50. The American History Museum will exhibit Jim Henson's first puppets and such classics as Kermit the Frog. Cheryl Henson, Henson's daughter and a Muppet designer, spoke with Smithsonian's Jennifer Drapkin.(Interview)(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... DO YOU REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME YOU FELL IN LOVE WITH A PUPPET? It was Robin, Kermit's nephew in "The Frog Prince." I was 10 years old, and my dad had been Kermit for quite some time. Robin was such a tiny frog, and the idea of a child-size...

Who's counting?(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Brief article)
July 1, 2006... 115 rockets, from an 1870s gunpowder-fueled whaling harpoon to a handy weather probe to a 363-foot Saturn V, are in the National Air and Space Museum's collection.

What's up.
July 1, 2006... TRIPPY FLOORS Step into the groove of a "Zobop" floor, made out of psychedelic vinyl tape by the Scottish artist, DJ and musician Jim Lambie. The Hirshhorn Museum's lobby will resonate with visitors until October 2. IN LIVING CULTURE ...

Back to the future: one of Washington's most exuberant monuments--the old Patent Office Building--gets the renovation it deserves.(GRAND REOPENING)
July 1, 2006... On a recent afternoon in early spring, the old Patent Office Building in Washington, D.C. hosted a most distinguished reunion of American luminaries. Pocahontas leaned casually against one wall, resplendent in her lace collar and broad-brimmed...

Speaking of art: two museums return home and invite visitors to engage in "conversations".(GRAND REOPENING)
July 1, 2006... Most art museums seek to dazzle like Ali Baba's cave, but the Smith-sonian American Art Museum (SAAM) and the National Portrait Gallery (NPG), which jointly reopen in the old Patent Office Building on July 1 after a six-year, $283 million...

Building an arc: despite poachers, insurgents and political upheaval, India and Nepal's bold approach to saving wildlife in the Terai Arc just may succeed.
July 1, 2006... IT WAS NEARLY DUSK when A.J.T. Johnsingh set off at his usual forced-march pace down a dusty path hugging the eastern bank of the Ganges River in Rajaji National Park. Johnsingh, one of India's foremost conservation biologists, was looking for...

A mystery fit for a Pharaoh: the first tomb to be discovered in the Valley of the Kings since King Tut's is raising new questions for archaeologists about ancient Egypt's burial practices.
July 1, 2006... IT IS BARELY 7:30 A.M. in the Valley of the Kings, and tourists are already milling just beyond the yellow police tape like passersby at a traffic accident. I step over the tape and show my pass to a guard, who motions for me to climb down a...

Finding a home in the cosmos: in a new book written with his wife, Nancy Abrams, cosmologist Joel Primack argues that the universe, far from being a meaningless void, was meant for us. Sort of by Jerry Adler.(PROFILE)
July 1, 2006... FOR THE PAST 400 YEARS, says cosmologist Joel Primack, the measure of intellectual sophistication about the universe was acceptance of our own planet's insignificance within it. The Earth, ousted by Copernicus from the center of the heavenly...

Wild in the Yukon: a Danish photographer goes farther than the extra mile to document wildlife in one of North America's most remote, pristine areas, now coveted by mining and oil companies.(Jannik Schou)
July 1, 2006... ORIGINATING JUST OUTSIDE the Arctic Circle in Canada's Yukon Territory, the Snake River winds through the northern reaches of the great boreal forest, a green girdle stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific that is the breeding ground for 43...

Berried treasure: why is horticulturalist Harry Jan Swartz so determined to grow an exotic strawberry beloved by Jane Austen?
July 1, 2006... THERE'S SOMETHING CURIOUS going on at the pick-your-own strawberry farm amid the bland expanse of tract homes and strip malls southwest of Miami. In row after row on the ten-acre property, the plants appear uniform, but in a far corner set off...

Pamplona no bull; Forget Hemingway's bovine madness: this charming medieval town hosts the most misunderstood public party in the world--the festival of San Fermin.
July 1, 2006... THE FIESTA of San Fermin in Pamplona, which mixes a saint who may not have existed, an audacious American writer attracted to danger, and six wild bulls charging down the main street, may be the most famous and most misunderstood public party...

Altered states: there's a fine line between vision and revision. But it can be crossed.(THE LAST PAGE)
July 1, 2006... JUDAS ISCARIOT, long reviled as history's quintessential betrayer, was actually the best friend of Jesus and turned him over to authorities only because Jesus asked him to, according to the Gospel of Judas, a long-lost document revealed...