Smithsonian articles from June 2005

Smithsonian archives from June 2005

Hazy days in our parks: the air in many national wilderness wonderlands is getting worse. As officials debate controversial new rules to curb pollution, scientists find the sources are surprisingly far-flung.
June 1, 2005... Big bend national park's superintendent, John King, calls the 801,163-acre reserve on the West Texas border with Mexico a "destination park," meaning for most folks there's little other reason to venture into the area at all. Reaching it takes...

Animal magnetism: Gregory Colbert's haunting photographs, exhibited publicly for the first time in the United States, hint at an extraordinary bond between us and our fellow creatures.(Ashes and Snow)
June 1, 2005... The most arresting aspect of Gregory Colbert's photographs, in his show "Ashes and Snow," is their air of dreamlike calm. That serenity pervades the sepia-toned pictures, though the people in them--children mostly--pose with enormous elephants,...

Telling moments: sometimes it's the little things one remembers.
June 1, 2005... Athleen McGuigan, who is a senior editor at Newsweek, first met the photographer Gregory Colbert last fall at his Manhattan apartment. She had gone to see the remarkable photographs, some of which appear in this issue ("Animal Magnetism," p....

Seeing a ghost: a woodpecker feared extinct reappears in Arkansas.(ivory-billed woodpecker)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... As we were putting the finishing touches on this issue of Smithsonian, scientists announced they had seen an almost mythical creature long thought extinct--an ivory-billed woodpecker. A team led by Cornell University ornithologists tracked a...

The year of Albert Einstein: his dizzying discoveries in 1905 would forever change our understanding of the universe. Amid all the centennial hoopla, the trick is to separate the man from the math.
June 1, 2005... Over four months, March through June 1905, Albert Einstein produced four papers that revolutionized science. One explained how to measure the size of molecules in a liquid, a second posited how to determine their movement, and a third described...

Chief lobbyist: he made little headway with President Grant, but Red Cloud won over the 19th century's greatest photographers.(INDELIBLE IMAGES)
June 1, 2005... Red cloud started down the path of becoming the most photographed American Indian of the 19th century one spring morning in 1872, a few blocks from the White House. Before meeting with President Ulysses S. Grant, the Lakota chief agreed to sit...

Killers in paradise: the tropics are home to the world's most venomous creatures--jellyfish with 4 brains, 24 eyes and stingers that can kill you in a minute flat.(Opal Reef)
June 1, 2005... The sky is an immense bowl of blue and the boiling-hot sun speckles the flat green waters gold as our boat edges out of Port Douglas, Australia, just north of the tropical resort town of Cairns. On board, tourists from around the world are...

Just looking.(brown mallard duck)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... JUST DUCKY In April, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, often passed over in favor of its more popular neighbor, the White House, became a tourist hot spot. "There's a steady stream from morning till evening," said Treasury spokesman Robert...

King Tut: an exhibition featuring the first CT scans of the boy king's mummy tells us more about Tutankhamun than ever before.(THE PHARAOH RETURNS!)
June 1, 2005... Seated on a cushion at the Pharaoh Tutankhamun's feet, Ankhesenamun hands her young husband an arrow to shoot at ducks in a papyrus thicket. Delicately engraved on a gilt shrine, it's a scene (above) of touching intimacy, a window into the...

Lucky man: a stroke of astonishing good fortune that even the author's skeptical father might embrace.(THE LAST PAGE)
June 1, 2005... My irish-born father was quick with a story, unselfish with his tears and never bashful about singing an answer to the musical question "Who Threw the Overalls in Mistress Murphy's Chowder?" But by one signature measure, the Celtic stereotype...

Out of bounds.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2005... The korubo of the Amazon ("Out of Time") are ignorant, isolated, and, yes, fierce, but when Sydney Possuelo says "I prefer them to be violent," he betrays his arrogance. When he says Don Quixote is his hero because he tried to "transform the...

A new dark ages?(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2005... After reading "Evolution on Trial," about the Scopes trial, I find myself wondering if we are returning to a new Dark Ages, where all of nature must conform to the Bible. It is appalling that every year many of our young people pass through the...

Corrections.(LETTERS)(Correction Notice)
June 1, 2005... Corrections: A caption on page 95 misidentified the man on the left. He is Rod Beattie, portraying First Sgt. James Butler. In "Hope Sleuth Cracks Case?" the names of Stephen and Nancy Attaway, project participants, were misspelled.

A fork in the river: after deliberating for nine days, the captains choose the tortuous Southwest branch of the Missouri toward the Great Falls.(LEWIS AND CLARK : 200 YEARS AGO THIS MONTH)
June 1, 2005... By june 1, 1805, the two expedition leaders, relying on information gathered from the Hidatsa Indians, estimated that the corps should be nearing the Great Falls in present-day Montana. Instead, they encountered an unexpected fork in the river,...

A bear-handed grab: how a stranded cub became the living symbol for one of America's best-known advertising campaigns.(AROUND THE MALL: SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)
June 1, 2005... G. W. Chapman plucked America's most famous bear from a forest fire near Capitan, New Mexico. It was May 1950, and Chapman was a 20-year-old U.S. Forest Service rookie fighting the biggest blaze he'd ever seen. Dry winds whipped a firestorm...

$7.30.(frankincense, Oman)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... A POUND IS THE GOING RATE FOR HIGH-QUALITY FRANKINCENSE IN OMAN, A LEADING PRODUCER OF THE AROMATIC GUM RESIN AND A PARTICIPANT IN THIS SUMMER'S SMITHSONIAN FOLKLIFE FESTIVAL. OMAN, A NATION OF 2.3 MILLION ON THE ARABIAN PENINSULA, IS THE FIRST...

Dig this: Chef Alice Waters has a recipe for getting kids to eat their veggies.(AROUND THE MALL: SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Interview)
June 1, 2005... When the influential chef and natural foods advocate Alice Waters shows up on the National Mall this summer, she'll tend to artichokes, tomatoes and mesclun (greens and herbs). No, the founder of the legendary Berkeley, California, restaurant...

Hurry in.(AROUND THE MALL: SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Folklife Festival)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... The 39th annual Smithsonian folklife festival spotlights the history of the U.S. Forest Service, trends in American cuisine, the crafts and culture of Oman, and Latino music traditions (right, Los Camperos de Valles, from the Huasteca region of...

This month in history: June anniversaries--momentous or merely memorable.
June 1, 2005... 110 YEARS AGO: HORSELESS Illinois inventor Charles Duryea patents a gas-driven "road-vehicle"--the first American car to be commercially produced--in June 1895. He and his brother Frank will make 13 "Duryeas," capable of 20 mph speeds,...

Glyph Dweller: archaeologist Alanah Woody's infectious enthusiasm for Nevada's rock art knows no bounds.(PEOPLE FILE)
June 1, 2005... Alanah Woody doesn't wear a fedora or crack a bullwhip, but her fans will tell you that the 5-foot-3 archaeologist is to the rock art of Nevada what Indiana Jones is to the Holy Grail. Like her fictional counterpart, she has had gigs in...

Your branch or mine? Fireflies' come-hither signals are being decoded by penlight-wielding biologists, who've found treachery, also, in the summer-night flashes.(PHENOMENA & CURIOSITIES)
June 1, 2005... Ara Lewis is impersonating a firefly. She stands in waist-deep grass and brush, the hood of her jacket pulled tight around her ears to ward off mosquitoes, and clicks her penlight into the darkness. Frogs chirp. A dog barks. Lewis clicks again....

Boar war: a marauding hog bites the dust in a border dispute between the United States and Britain that fails to turn ugly.
June 1, 2005... In a classroom on San Juan Island, Washington, across the Haro Strait from Victoria, Canada, a man in uniform was showing 26 fifth graders how to load a rifle. "It looks old, but it's a weapon of modern warfare, mass-produced in a factory in...

Rhyme or cut bait: when these fisher poets gather, nobody brags about the verse that got away.(POINTS OF INTEREST)
June 1, 2005... The last weekend in February is a slow time for Pacific Northwest and Alaska fishermen. The crab season is winding down, and the salmon aren't running yet. But in Astoria, Oregon, a historic fishing town on the Columbia River, there's real...

Cross purposes: Mexican immigrants are defying expectations in this country--and changing the landscape back home.
June 1, 2005... On a windy Sunday morning, I get off a subway train in Queens, New York, to join throngs of Mexican families headed into the mowed, shady groves of Flushing Meadows Park. Many are wrapped in Mexico's red, white and green national flag; others...

Reversing the clock: taking care of the nation's treasures requires art, history and even molecular science.(Smithsonian Center for Materials Research and Education)
June 1, 2005... Treasures from the past need preserving. Too many families who have put their old photographs in a cardboard box in the attic or folded their antique linens and left them in the basement know the heartbreak of seeing how the passage of time...

Where are they now? Elizabeth Platz: first female Lutheran Minister.(June 1970: THE YEAR WE WERE BORN: A LOOK BACK AT THE WORLD IN SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE'S FIRST YEAR)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... After the Lutheran Church in America changed its bylaws to allow the ordination of women on June 29, 1970, Elizabeth Platz decided to pursue the opportunity then available to her. "I was not interested in ordination in terms of women's rights,"...

On June 21, Edson Arantes do Nascimento, better known as Pele, or the "King of Football," scored one goal and two assists to lead Brazil to a 4-1 victory over Italy in the World Cup, making Brazil the first team to win the tournament three times.(June 1970: THE YEAR WE WERE BORN: A LOOK BACK AT THE WORLD IN SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE'S FIRST YEAR)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... On June 21, Edson Arantes do Nascimento, better known as Pele, or the "King of Football," scored one goal and two assists to lead Brazil to a 4-1 victory over Italy in the World Cup, making Brazil the first team to win the tournament three...

Charles Manson, 35, and three of his cult-like "family" members (Susan Atkins, 21, Leslie Van Houten, 20, and Patricia Krenwinkel, 22) begin trial in Los Angeles June 16 for the murder of actress Sharon Tate and six others.(IN THE NEWS)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... Charles Manson, 35, and three of his cult-like "family" members (Susan Atkins, 21, Leslie Van Houten, 20, and Patricia Krenwinkel, 22) begin trial in Los Angeles June 16 for the murder of actress Sharon Tate and six others. Denied parole from a...

Dr. H. Gobind Khorana and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin at Madison complete the first synthesis of a gene June 2.(IN THE NEWS)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... Dr. H. Gobind Khorana and his colleagues at the University of Wisconsin at Madison complete the first synthesis of a gene June 2. The accomplishment prompts Dr. George Kistiakowsky, science adviser to President Dwight Eisenhower, to fret that...

1970 price index.(THE LIST)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... Gasoline $.36/gallon Median Income $8,734/year Median Rent $108/month Median Home $17,000 Bacon $.97/pound Eggs $.51/dozen Bread $.24/loaf Vitamin D Milk $1.14/gallon First-Class Postage Stamp $.06 ...

Comings & goings.(in the month of June)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... BORN: Chris O'Donnell, Actor, June 26 BORN: Phil Mickelson, Golfer, June 16 DIED: Sukarno, Indonesian President, 69, June 21 DIED: E. M. Forster, British Novelist, 91, June 7 "Were I in your position, you know, I might well be...

"Were I in your position, you know, I might well be a member of your group.".
June 1, 2005... --Vice President Agnew, to a group of professors who had urged him to tone down his criticism of young people, in the June 5 New York Times