Smithsonian articles from June 2007

Smithsonian archives from June 2007

Making connections: looking for sunrises and guiding lights.(FROM THE EDITOR)(Editorial)
June 1, 2007... YOU MIGHT SAY that 18-year-old Joelle Linhoff, our photo contest grand prize winner, was born to the camera: her mother teaches photography at Minneapolis Southwest High School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and her father owns a photo lab in that...

"Barbaro's Legacy" helped me understand the many steps taken to save this beautiful champion racehorse.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2007... READERS RESPOND TO THE APRIL ISSUE "Barbaro's Legacy" helped me understand the many steps taken to save this beautiful champion racehorse. I'm pleased that Barbaro's owners tried so hard to save him, and have so graciously donated funds...

Fallen champion.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2007... BARBARO WAS obviously a force of nature with not only his great physical abilities but also a spirited personality that seemed to shine through the drugs, pain and stress. When he died, I felt sympathy for the veterinarian and his staff,...

Rediscovering Alexandria.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2007... MY HEART SANK as I read "Raising Alexandria." The author, Andrew Lawler, almost skips over the city's Christian period, moving from the Ptolemies to Islam--seven centuries!--in a blink. He briefly returns to Christian Alexandria as he discusses...

Corrections.(Correction notice)
June 1, 2007... "Open Sesame" misstated the name of the architect of the House of the Temple in Washington, D.C. He was John Russell Pope. In "Raising Alexandria," the date Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire was misrepresented....

Outfoxed by climate change.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... Animals don't always cope with shrinking habitat, say researchers from Stockholm University and other institutions. They compared DNA from modern foxes in Scandinavia and Siberia with DNA extracted from the teeth and bones of ten arctic foxes...

How sharks help scallops.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... Great sharks--blacktips, great whites and other species longer than six feet--have been hunted almost to extinction in places. So skates, rays and small sharks are thriving, causing shortages of some of their (and our) favorite foods: oysters...

Bamboo hunting.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... Scientists have discovered a new species of bamboo--in the southern Appalachian Mountains. There are 1,400 known species of the woody grass worldwide, but Arundinaria appalachiana is one of only three native to North America. "It's so exciting...

A dinosaur's own digs.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... Paleontologists have excavated the first known dinosaur burrow. The 95-million-year-old tunnel, in southwestern Montana, held one adult and two juveniles from a new genus and species: Oryctodromeus cubicularis. The animal apparently had a...

Observed.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... NAME: Chiroxiphia lanceolata, or the lance-tailed manakin PROVOCATIVE BEHAVIOR: Males court cooperatively--an alpha male uses an unrelated beta male to attract a female, much as a human male might use a buddy as a "wingman" in a bar. Except...

Endless summers: for almost 50 years, surfing legend LeRoy Grannis has been shooting the curl.(INDELIBLE IMAGES)
June 1, 2007... THERE IS AN old surfer taunt: You should have been here yesterday. LeRoy Grannis was there in the 1930s and '40s, when a few hundred young men in California and Hawaii with heavy redwood boards represented surfing's Camelot. Portrait...

June anniversaries: momentous or merely memorable.(THIS MONTH IN HISTORY)
June 1, 2007... 40 YEARS AGO SIX FATEFUL DAYS Tensions brewing since Israel became a state in 1948 erupt June 5,1967, when it and Egypt go to war, each claiming the other invaded. Syria, Jordan and several other Arab states quickly join Egypt. After six...

Fields of dreams: to help revive his North Dakota hometown, a former high-school principal created giant sculptures to grace a stretch of prairie highway.(POINTS OF INTEREST)(Gary Greff)
June 1, 2007... GARY GREFF WAS DRIVING across western North Dakota when he came upon a human figure fashioned out of metal and a round hay bale. As he watched a family stop to take a picture of the figure, he saw his future. Having recently left his job as a...

Interview May Berenbaum, entomologist, Urbana, Illinois: on the role of cellphones, pesticides and alien abductions in the honeybee crisis.(Interview)
June 1, 2007... Honeybee populations in more than 20 states have mysteriously crashed. May Berenbaum, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studies "colony collapse disorder" and its consequences. THERE WAS A MAJOR DECLINE IN BEE POPULATIONS...

Hot stuff: new study finds chili peppers spiced American food 6,000 years ago.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)
June 1, 2007... Digging in Venezuela and Peru for evidence of how human beings used plants thousands of years ago, Linda Perry kept finding traces of a distinctive starch--disk-shaped under the microscope, much like a red blood cell--in the crevices of ancient...

Biologist at the helm: meet Cristian Samper, acting Secretary.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)
June 1, 2007... THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION has a new leader, at least for now. Cristian Samper, director of the National Museum of Natural History, was named acting Secretary in March, replacing Lawrence M. Small, who resigned amid criticism over his...

Wishful thinking: at the Hirshhorn, Yoko Ono invites people to imagine peace.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... The Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden recently welcomed its first work of art by Yoko Ono-a tree. This past April, the artist and widow of John Lennon presented the museum with a white Japanese flowering dogwood, inviting...

Flights of fancy: Leslie Payne's flying machines soared, if only in his imagination.(THE OBJECT AT HAND)
June 1, 2007... BY THE AUTUMN OF 1918, the war to end all wars was itself coming to an end in Europe. Far away in rural Virginia, Leslie J. Payne, an 11-year-old boy from Northumberland County, went to an air show, gazing in awe as biplanes looped and rolled...

Q & A.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Interview)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... The foremost Piedmont-style blues guitarist, JOHN CEPHAS, of Bowling Green, Virginia, will play in this year's Folklife Festival, June 27 to July 1. He spoke with the magazine's David Zax. WHEN DID YOU FIRST PICK UP A GUITAR? When I was...

Gone fishing: off the Panama coast, researchers net a slew of new species.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... It might look like a cartoon character, but the inch-long yellow snail Tylodina fungina (below) is one of dozens of little-known or even undocumented species that Smithsonian scientists recently collected off the Pacific coast of Panama. They...

What's up.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... SCRIBES Korean calligraphers have long used porcelain water droppers (right, a piscine model) to moisten blocks of solid ink. The Natural History Museum's new Korea Gallery, exhibiting artifacts from the museum's anthropology collections,...

Reconstructing Petra: two thousand years ago, it was the capital of a powerful trading empire. Now archaeologists are piecing together a more complete picture of Jordan's compelling rock city.
June 1, 2007... "Donkey, horse or camel?" The question from my Bedouin guide reminds me of a rental car agent asking, "Economy, full-size or SUV?" I choose economy, and we canter on our donkeys through the steep valleys that surround Petra, in Jordan, as the...

Prize pictures: our photo contest attracted thousands of photographers from 86 nations. And the winners are ...
June 1, 2007... YES, CERTAIN THEMES recur, such as the joys of the open road: lonely undulating two-laners, neon-basked diners and weathered barns, even an ant's-eye view of Death Valley blacktop. And there are cowboys galore, including, in Times Square, a...

Jewel of the Tetons: they were the prime movers behind the great Wyoming park. This summer, the Rockefellers are donating a final 1,106 acres, a spectacular parcel to be open to the public for the first time in 75 years.(Teton Mountains, Wyoming)
June 1, 2007... Who doesn't love the tart taste of forbidden fruit? Hiking through a pine forest high in Wyoming's Teton Mountains, I felt as if I'd been issued a pass to a secret world. This particular slice of the West, a scenic parcel of lakeside...

Into the fold: physicist Robert Lang has taken the ancient art of origami to new dimensions.
June 1, 2007... AMONG THE MULTILEGGED CREATURES in Robert Lang's airy studio in Alamo, California, are a shimmering-blue long-horned beetle, a slinky, dun-colored centipede, a praying mantis with front legs held aloft, a plump cicada, a scorpion and a black...

Scripture alfresco: in northeastern Romania, 450-year-old paintings on the exterior of monasteries and churches--now open again for worship--tell vivid tales of saints and prophets, heaven and hell.
June 1, 2007... FROM THE TIME Romania's Stephen the Great took power in 1457 until his death in 1504, he fought 36 battles against the mighty Ottoman Empire, winning all but two. And the warrior king was as religious as he was ferocious. He built churches...

The Ethiopia campaign: after fighting neglected diseases in Africa for a quarter century, former president Jimmy Carter takes on one of the continent's biggest killers--malaria.
June 1, 2007... His once-sandy hair had gone all white; his shoulders were a bit more stooped; his freckled face was lined with new creases. But Jimmy Carter's 82 years had diminished neither his trademark smile, which could still disarm skeptics at 20 paces,...

Risks and riddles: the Soviet Union was a puzzle. Al Qaeda is a mystery. Why we need to know the difference.(PRESENCE OF MIND)
June 1, 2007... HERE'S A REASON millions of people try to solve crossword puzzles each day. Amid the well-ordered combat between a puzzler's mind and the blank boxes waiting to be filled, there is satisfaction along with frustration. Even when you can't find...

The American Home Front: 1941-1942.(Book review)
June 1, 2007... THE AMERICAN HOME FRONT: 1941-1942 BY ALISTAIR COOKE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS. $24.00 EVER SO RARELY, a long-lost treasure comes to light, unearthed in an attic, at a bric-a-brac sale, in the false drawer of an ancient piece of...