Smithsonian articles from June 2006

Smithsonian archives from June 2006

Ruins and secrets: probing the Grand Canyon's mysterious prehistory.(FROM THE EDITOR)(Editorial)
June 1, 2006... YOU MAY NOTICE some reorganization and some new design elements in this issue. It's not a redesign; we like our classic look. But Brian Noyes, our art director, has freshened up the magazine typographically to make it easier to read and, we...

Steve Bloom's beautiful and incredible cover picture of a female lemur with baby should win a prize.(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2006... READERS RESPOND TO THE APRIL ISSUE Steve Bloom's beautiful and incredible cover picture of a female lemur with baby should win a prize. Fred Astaire would be jealous of that step. It reminds me of your great meerkat photograph from 20...

Upbeat primates.(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2006... ON A DAILY BASIS, I read heart-breaking articles about gorillas, monkeys, orangutans and other apes being slaughtered and even eaten towards the precipice of extinction. So it was profoundly heart-warming to learn ("For the Love of Lemurs")...

Gibson girl remembered.(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2006... IMAGINE MY SURPRISE upon seeing your story about the painting expeditions of a family friend, Caroline Mytinger ("A Gibson Girl in New Guinea"). Although I was only 11 years old at the time, I clearly remember her arrival at our Tacoma,...

Grave secrets.(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2006... THROUGHOUT Adam Goodheart's article about the remains of John Paul Jones ("Home Is the Sailor"), I wondered why not just do DNA analysis. Then it dawned on me: it would be sacrilegious to do so. This is John Paul Jones. He's not some Native...

Duty called.(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2006... "GRACE UNDER FIRE," about the heroic actions of mint superintendent Frank Leach and his compatriots during the fire following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, was inspiring. It is a great example of extraordinary things done by ordinary...

Slackers, take note.(niversity of Washington's Sean O'Donnell on usage of Polybia paper wasps )(Brief article)
June 1, 2006... Polybia paper wasps in Costa Rica bite nestmates to goad them into foraging for food, water or building material, says the University of Washington's Sean O'Donnell, who studied the insects (left, a paint-daubed wasp bites another). Why do...

Fleeing Vesuvius.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(Brief article)
June 1, 2006... Sure, Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79 and entombed Pompeii. Now a University of Buffalo scientist and colleagues have uncovered evidence the volcano erupted even more violently some 2,000 years earlier. Thousands of human footprints excavated...

Observed.(research on Sula nebouxii)(Brief article)
June 1, 2006... NAME: Sula nebouxii, or blue-footed booby OLD IMAGE: Getting mugged for food by the frigate bird, a co-resident of the Galapagos Islands NEW IMAGE: Fathering chicks at Hugh Hefneresque ages THIS HAPPENED HOW? Booby males, which...

Heads up.(Erketu ellisoni research)(Brief article)
June 1, 2006... A newly discovered sauropod species called Erketu ellisoni (above, an artist's sketch) was not the biggest or the longest dinosaur. But the herbivore's nearly 2-foot-long vertebrae, among the fossil remains dug up in Mongolia's Gobi Desert,...

Itching to communicate.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(Brief article)
June 1, 2006... To direct someone's attention, point. Until now, zoologists had observed such "referential gestures" only in apes that interact with people. But a new study shows that wild chimpanzees in Uganda's Kibale National Park (above) signal what parts...

Coal miner's daughter: "I'm 15. I'm getting married. My mother doesn't want me to get married." But that's just the beginning of the story.(INDELIBLE IMAGES)
June 1, 2006... AFTER BLASTING her way through the hoot owl shift, harvesting West Virginia coal from midnight to 8 a.m., Betty Toler headed to a friend's house for the fitting of Toler's youngest daughter's wedding dress. Jenny, the bride-to-be, asked...

The sound of hoofs: in a breathtaking spectacle, wildebeest by the millions are on the move this month in the Serengeti.(PHENOMENA & CURIOSITIES)
June 1, 2006... EACH JUNE on Tanzania's Serengeti plains, animals resume a journey they've been making for millions of years. It's the drying of the grasses that triggers them and the scent of rain in the north that beckons them. Then, as if a herdsman had...

Neil Shubin, paleontologist, university of Chicago: the "missing link?" at least a step in a new direction.(Interview)
June 1, 2006... IS TIKTAALIK, THE FOSSIL YOU FOUND, TECHNICALLY A FISH? You might recognize it as a fish--it has fin webbing and scales on its back. WHAT MAKES YOU THINK IT'S RELATED TO THE FIRST VERTEBRATE ANIMALS TO WALK ON LAND? It has a head that's...

The great dying.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(mass extinction two hundred fifty million years ago)
June 1, 2006... Two hundred fifty million years ago, life on earth nearly stopped. In less than 160 thousand years--a geologic snap of the fingers--a mass extinction wiped out 95 percent of life in the oceans and 70 percent of life on land, ending the Permian...

Pride of place: a new national museum will tell the story of centuries of African-American struggle and achievement.(FROM THE SECRETARY)( National Museum of African American History and Culture )
June 1, 2006... PROUDER than ever of her grandfather, who was a railroad porter in the 1920s, a woman from St. Louis recently wrote to the Smithsonian of her excitement about the site selected in January for the National Museum of African American History and...

Fine art ascends to hog heaven.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Don Smolinski's Harley Davidson dealership in Hughesville, Maryland buys 116-year-old painting from the Smithsonian American Art Museum)(Brief article)
June 1, 2006... If you think motorcycles and fine art mix about as well as motor oil and watercolors, cruise over to Don Smolinski's Harley Davidson dealership in Hughesville, Maryland. Since April, the showroom of glittering hogs has also displayed The March...

Dead end: fans of a battery-powered, emissions-free sedan mourn its passing.(THE OBJECT AT HAND)(General Motors EV1)
June 1, 2006... THE RELATIVELY BRIEF HISTORY of the automobile echoes with romantic stories of lost causes, undeserved failures, great ideas unheeded, righteous hopes dashed, prophets before their time and heroes overwhelmed. Innovative also-rans litter the...

Q & A: the fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, who designed the costumes for the Broadway revival of Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera, has created blue denim aprons for conservators at the American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, due to reopen in July.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Interview)(Brief article)
June 1, 2006... WAS IT HARDER TO DESIGN CLOTHING ITEMS FOR THE SMITHSONIAN THAN, SAY, A RHINESTONE DOG COLLAR FOR TARGET? Some things are harder to design than others. The idea I had for the conservators was aprons instead of lab coats. Lab coats can be so...

Who's counting?(Museum of Natural History (New York, New York),University of Nebraska )(Brief article)
June 1, 2006... 330,000 scarab beetles from the Museum of Natural History are on loan to the University of Nebraska. The family of 35,000 species includes, yes, the June bug.

What's up.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Brief article)
June 1, 2006... INVESTIGATING ORCHIDS Not only are orchids studied at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Maryland (right, Brassavola nodosa), they thrive on the 3,000-acre grounds, which, for the first time, are open to the public Monday through...

This month in history: June anniversaries momentous or merely memorable.
June 1, 2006... 25 YEARS AGO: OUTBREAK The first report of a new disease, later called AIDS, is published June 5, 1981. Five young men in Los Angeles are infected with a lethal pneumonia; their case histories suggest a "cellular-immune dysfunction" and a...

Below the rim: humans have roamed the Grand Canyon for more than 8,000 years. But the chasm is only slowly yielding clues to the ancient peoples who lived.
June 1, 2006... It was early May, but a raw breeze was blowing as we tracked bootprints through an inch of new-fallen snow. Shortly after dawn, we had parked on the Desert View Drive and set off through the ponderosa forest toward the Grand Canyon, leaving...

Learning from Tai Shan: the giant panda born at Washington, D.C.'s National Zoo has charmed animal lovers. Now he's teaching scientists more than they had expected.
June 1, 2006... In a cramped, dimly lit room, three women stare at a bank of blinking video monitors. Each of the six screens shows, from a slightly different angle, a black-and-white ball of fluff--Tai Shan, the giant panda cub born last summer at...

Wyeth's world: after seven decades, critics still differ over Andrew Wyeth's stature as an artist. A new exhibition stirs the debate.(Andrew Wyeth)
June 1, 2006... IN THE SUMMER OF 1948 a young artist named Andrew Wyeth began a painting of a severely crippled woman, Christina Olson, painfully pulling herself up a seemingly endless sloping hillside with her arms. For months Wyeth worked on nothing but the...

Berlin: beyond the wall; Nearly 17 years after the wall came down, Berliners are still trying to escape its shadow.
June 1, 2006... THE BERLIN MORNING was gray and drizzly, October 3, 2005, and the thin crowds milling outside the Brandenburg Gate were in no mood to celebrate the 15th annual Day of German Unity. Recent news suggested why: unemployment and the budget deficit...

Time and again: in 1984, Peter Feldstein set out to photograph every last person in Oxford, Iowa. Two decades later, he's doing it again, creating a unique portrait of heartland America.
June 1, 2006... ONE SWELTERING summer day in 1984 my friend Peter Feldstein walked up and down the streets of Oxford, Iowa, posting fliers announcing he would take anyone's picture, free. At the time, 676 people lived in Oxford, and he wanted to make a...

From the writing of the New Testament to the filming of The Da Vinci Code, her image has been repeatedly conscripted, contorted and contradicted. But through it all, one question has gone largely unanswered: who was Mary Magdalene?
June 1, 2006... THE WHOLE HISTORY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION is epitomized in the cult of Mary Magdalene. For many centuries the most obsessively revered of saints, this woman became the embodiment of Christian devotion, which was defined as repentance. Yet she...

Land of the wee: where else can you decorate the bordello and exercise godlike powers?(THE LAST PAGE)(dollhouse miniatures )
June 1, 2006... I'VE BEEN researching old-time brothels, and it turns out that they were lovely places. They had nannies to take care of the babies that are a side effect of that particular business, and barbershops with showers where the clients could freshen...