Smithsonian articles from March 2004

Smithsonian archives from March 2004

Kenyon's Ageles quest: a San Francisco scientist's genetic research renews the ancient hope for a way to slow aging.
March 1, 2004... the poster taped to the door of Cynthia Kenyon's office at the University of California at San Francisco seems so ordinary that you would hardly suspect it advertises a revolution in human affairs. It announces a talk she was about to give on...

In their footsteps: retracing the route of captured American and Filipino soldiers on the Bataan Peninsula in World War II, the author grapples with their sacrifice.
March 1, 2004... on a sun-scoured, early summer morning in Mariveles, a seaport town at the tip of the Philippines' Bataan Peninsula where jungled mountains kneel to the sea, the temperature quickly rises above 100 degrees. The tide is low; the few fishing...

Landmark: Rockefeller Center symbolizes the heart of Manhattan.(Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center)(Book Review)
March 1, 2004... Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center Daniel Okrent Viking, $29.95 in all likelihood many decades from now, the day will come when New York will no longer be the most powerful city in the world. At that time, the citizens of this...

Self-Portrait with Turtles.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
March 1, 2004... Self-Portrait with Turtles David M. Carroll Houghton Mifflin, $22 on a june afternoon in Connecticut in 1950, when David Carroll was 8 years old, he tramped into the woods near his house. Intrigued by a curious rustling from a patch of...

Visions of China: with donated cameras, residents of remote villages document endangered ways of life, one snapshot at a time.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... Since 2001, the Arlington, Virginia-based Nature Conservancy has equipped more than 220 people in 61 remote villages in China with inexpensive, point-and-shoot cameras and encouraged them to capture their lives on film: their chores and...

Doris Duke's Islamic art retreat: the Honolulu hideaway built by "the richest girl in the world" is now a museum showcasing her unique collection of Islamic art.(Biography)
March 1, 2004... in 1938, American tobacco heiress Doris Duke embarked on one of her periodic shopping trips to Europe and Asia. Then 25, "the richest girl in the world"--as newspapers had dubbed her when she was a child--was eagerly acquiring antiques and...

Duel! Defenders of honor or shoot-on-sight vigilantes? Even in 19th-century America, it was hard to tell.
March 1, 2004... the story, as parson weems tells it, is that in 1754 a strapping young militia officer named George Washington argued with a smaller man, one William Payne, who made up for the disparity in size by knocking Washington down with a stick. It was...

War, honor and ... cats: after such knowledge, what forgiveness?(Editor's Note)(Editorial)
March 1, 2004... for "in their footsteps" (p. 80) Donovan Webster retraced the torturous 65-mile forced march in the Philippines by captured American and Filipino soldiers in 1942. With every step he took, his admiration for the G.I.s grew. "I was there at...

Private eye: noted for her sensitive photojournalism in postwar magazines, Esther Bubley is back in vogue.(Indelible Images)(Biography)
March 1, 2004... esther bubley was among the best-known photographers of her time, and for three decades blazed trails, especially for women, with her work for the government, corporations and magazines such as Life, Look and Ladies' Home Journal. Though she...

No chive left behind: not since the launch of Sputnik has U.S. education seemed so ripe for reform.(The Last Page)
March 1, 2004... "what's this?" the grocery cashier asked me, holding a tan melon at eye level. "I don't know how much to charge you, because I don't know what to call this." "That," I answered, trying to hide my surprise, "is called a cantaloupe." ...

Blessing counted.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... my husband has been laid off from his job, and I was feeling unhappy that he's still unemployed. Then I read "Coming to America." Thank you for reminding me that one of my biggest blessings is to have been born in this country, and instead of...

Inuit ways.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... i was astounded to read in "Top Dogs" that the French Arctic explorer Jean Malaurie thought the Inuit's relationship to their dogs was "as close as a marriage." Since the article also states that the Inuit have neither the "inclination nor the...

Vieques revisited.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... we were surprised that "Vieques on the Verge" failed to mention the extensive studies on potential health risks on Vieques conducted by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) at the request of an island resident. ATSDR,...

Fair trade?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... david devoss' "Divided Loyalties," about British Tories who fled to Canada during the American Revolution, mentions the gilded coat of arms now hanging in Trinity Church in Saint John, New Brunswick, that originally graced the Council Chamber...

Ear of the beholder.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... i grew up in Puerto Rico, where the coqui frog ("Sleepless in Hawaii") is a sort of national symbol, a native beloved as the source of one of the island's most ubiquitous sounds, and I had to laugh at the tiny frog being presented as some sort...

Promoting Clark.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... "looking for a few Good Men" correctly states that William Clark remained a lieutenant despite President Jefferson's promise that he would be made a captain. As co-chair of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Congressional Caucus and as a former...

Also courageous.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2004... i have always thought there was another anonymous hero ("Profile in Courage") involved when the unknown protester faced down a Chinese tank column in Tiananmen Square. The tank driver who hesitated, then chose not to crush his confronter,...

Osage oranges take a bough: the first shipment of botanical specimens sent to President Jefferson contained the seeds of thousands of miles of fences.(Lewis And Clark)
March 1, 2004... In his 1803 directive outlining his goals for the expedition, President Thomas Jefferson instructed Meriwether Lewis to record "the soil & face of the country, it's growth & vegetable productions, especially those not of the U.S. [and] the...

Monkey in the middle: blamed for destroying one of North Africa's most important forests, Morocco's Barbary macaques struggle to survive.
March 1, 2004... High in the atlas mountains of morocco an important ecological drama is playing out, with the future of North Africa's largest intact forest and the welfare of many Moroccans at stake. Like nearly all eco-dramas, this one has an embattled,...

Who is the artist? A team of artists turned up at the Hirshhorn Museum to carry out Sol LeWitt's vision of a wall mural. Is he the artist or are they?(Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond)
March 1, 2004... when tomas ramberg, 30, and Megan Dyer, 34, arrived from New York City at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., they spread out paint-spattered tarps and set up scaffolding and ladders. Before long the museum's Lerner Gallery was littered...

Found and lost.(From The Attic)(Iraq's Shanidar cave )(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... FOUND AND LOST Smithsonian archaeologist Ralph Solecki says he felt a twinge of excitement when he first laid eyes on northern Iraq's Shanidar cave in 1951 and saw its huge 82-foot-wide opening. There, starting in 1953, Solecki would recover...

Bull's-eye: a Smithsonian geologist helped NASA set its sites on Mars.(Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond)
March 1, 2004... on saturday, January 24, NASA's Mars Exploration Rover "Opportunity" hit the Red Planet's thin atmosphere at some 12,000 miles per hour, and deployed rocket thruster brakes and a parachute. Cocooned by air bags, Opportunity bounced a couple...

73.(Who's Counting?)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2004... MANNEQUINS (INCLUDING THREE HORSES, TWO DOGS, ONE CAT AND A RAT) POPULATE THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY'S TRANSPORTATION EXHIBITION, "AMERICA ON THE MOVE." CRAFTING THE MODELS TOOK MORE THAN A YEAR AS THE FIGURES WERE METICULOUSLY...

This month in history: March anniversaries--momentous or merely memorable.(Calendar)
March 1, 2004... 50 YEARS AGO IN LIVING COLOR In March 1954, RCA rolls out the CT-100, the first mass-produced color television in America. All electronic, the set costs $1,000, and receives black-and-white as well as color broadcasts. A good thing--only...

Magic wand: clarinetist Artie Shaw's recordings recall the nostalgic power of the big-band sound.(The Object At Hand)(Biography)
March 1, 2004... psychologists tell us that our sense of smell conjures up some of our deepest emotional memories. Take a deep whiff of baby powder and you might be transported about as far back as you can go. (You're hungry, you're cranky... better loosen...

A man, a plan, a canal: Panama rises: the Central American nation, now celebrating its centennial, has come into its own since the United States ceded control of its vital waterway.
March 1, 2004... the freighter Falstaff, nine days out of San Francisco and bearing a cargo of Korean automobiles, slid slowly into a chamber of the Miraflores Locks near the Pacific end of the Panama Canal. Like her Shakespearean namesake, the Falstaff is...

Zoo story: independent and determined, biologist and former circus performer Sharon Matola takes pride in "the Best Little Zoo in the World".(People File)(Biography)
March 1, 2004... wearing one of her signature hand-tailored jumpsuits, Sharon Matola vaults the Belize Zoo's "Do Not Enter" back gate with the elan of Xena, Warrior Princess. We are headed to Matola's office, a well-hidden cottage set on stilts amid the zoo's...

Signal discovery? A Los Angeles scientist says living cells may make distinct sounds, which might someday help doctors "hear" diseases.(Phenomena & Curiosities)(Biography)
March 1, 2004... kids, lawn mowers, planes, trains, automobiles--just about everything makes noise. And if two California scientists are right, so, too, do living cells. In recent experiments using the frontier science of nanotechnology, the researchers have...

Return of a giant: a fully restored Vulcan--Birmingham, Alabama's 100-year-old statue--resumes its rightful place in town.(Points of Interest)
March 1, 2004... it sounds like the plot of a three-hankie biopic: a ruggedly handsome fellow comes out of nowhere, becomes the top draw at a world's fair, then goes to pieces and is reduced to working as a carnival huckster. In a stunning comeback, he stars in...

World view: Panama offers an ideal vantage point for scientists to see the big picture of life on earth.(From the Secretary)
March 1, 2004... in just two acres of a tropical forest, there can be as many species of trees as in all of the continental United States. In fact, the forests and coral reefs of the tropics are the world's most biologically diverse ecosystems. And because much...