Smithsonian articles from March 2009

Smithsonian archives from March 2009

Paying attention: ten sites and one overlooked hero.(Editorial)
March 1, 2009... SENIOR EDITOR MARK STRAUSS took on our special 20-page, staff-written cover report--"10 Must-See Endangered Cultural Treasures" (p. 30)--with characteristic brio. "It's important to call attention to those treasures that people may not be aware...

Corrections.(Correction notice)
March 1, 2009... The caption on page 36 of the article "Samarra Rises" wrongly identified Lt. Col. J. P.McGee as Captain Kurtzman. In a reference on "The Last Page" to the birth name of singer Shania Twain, we omitted one of the "1's" in Eilleen. We regret...

Vision Thing.(WILD THINGS)(spookfish )(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... The rarely seen spookfish dwells in dark ocean depths, where bioluminescent flashes from other creatures can be the only light. When scientists this past year caught a live spookfish for the first time in the South Pacific, they found its two...

Species hot spot.(WILD THINGS)(Greater Mekong region in Southeast Asia)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Between 1997 and 2007, more than 1,000 species previously unknown to science were discovered in Southeast Asia's Greater Mekong region, according to a report by the World Wildlife Fund. That's about two new species a week. The Greater Mekong has...

Mosquito love duet.(WILD THINGS)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... When two mosquitoes of the opposite sex approach each other, according to new research at Cornell University, they synchronize their wing beats and harmonize the buzzing, producing a high-frequency love duet. The researchers theorize that the...

Yes, this big lizard is pink.(WILD THINGS)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... A new study from the University of Rome Tor Vergata shows that a rare strawberrytinted land iguana in the Galapagos Islands is genetically distinct from other iguanas there, having diverged from them more than five million years ago as the...

Observed.(WILD THINGS)(Moa)
March 1, 2009... NAME: Moa, flightless birds (order Dinornithiformes) from New Zealand that went extinct hundreds of years ago. HIGH LIFE: Some species (left: a giant moa) stood taller than nine feet and were believed to have feasted primarily on trees and...

Monument valley girl: Cindy Sherman's self-portrait plays with our notions of an archetypal west.(INDELIBLE IMAGES)(Into the Sunset: Photography's Image of the American West)
March 1, 2009... THE ENDURING image of the American West is one of endless plains and unpopulated vistas. In a 1904 photograph by Edward Curtis, the monumental cliffs of Canyon de Chelly in northern Arizona dwarf the Navajo horsemen riding by Then there's the...

This month in history: March anniversaries momentous or merely memorable.
March 1, 2009... 120 YEARS AGO TOWERING ACHIEVEMENT "There's an attraction in things colossal," responds Gustave Eiffel to detractors who say his Paris tower--completed March 31, 1889, for the Universal Exhibition--is "useless and monstrous." At 1,023...

Devil's half acre: the excavation of a notorious jail recalls Richmond, Virginia's leading role in the slave trade.(DIGS)
March 1, 2009... ARCHAEOLOGISTS KNEW that Robert Lumpkin's slave jail stood in one of the lowest arts of Richmond, Virginia--a sunken spot known as Shockoe Bottom. From the 1830s to the Civil War, when Richmond was the largest American slave-trading hub outside...

Science, yes!(FROM THE CASTLE)
March 1, 2009... IT WAS AN EXCITING DAY When Brarack Obama named physicist Steven Chu (history's first Nobel laureate scientist cabinet nominee) as Secretary of Energy and chose two science advisers with previous ties to the Smith-sonian. John Holdren, a...

Bone cops: Smithsonian researchers solve a colonial cold case.
March 1, 2009... THE BOY DOES NOT HAVE A NAME, but he is not unknown. Smithsonian scientists reconstructed his story from a skeleton, found in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, buried underneath a layer of fireplace ash, bottle and ceramic fragments, and animal...

Sing like a Pirate.(JUKEBOX)(Pirate Queen Granuaile)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... SING LIKE A PIRATE Born in 1530, the Pirate Queen Granuaile was raised in an Ireland where English law was usurping Gaelic sovereignty. She refused to submit to authority and raided merchant ships bound for Galway Bay. According to legend, she...

Under the Radar: The Five-Pound RQ-14A Takes High-Tech Reconnaissance to New Heights
March 1, 2009... EARLY ON WARM SUMMER EVENINGS in the small New Jersey town where I grew up, my father would take me to the ball field behind Benjamin Franklin Elementary School. The buzzing in the air was produced not by my home state's hummingbird-size...

Q&A.(Ori Gersht)(Interview)(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... Israeli-born artist ORI GERSHT created traditional still-life arrangements--and then literally blew them up, capturing it all on video. His film Pomegranate is at the Hirshhorn's Black Box theater. Gersht spoke with Joseph Caputo. WHAT MAKES...

Making history.(Brief article)
March 1, 2009... WHAT'S IN A NAME? Brian Schmidt has a pet peeve about species named after their discoverers. "I don't find them descriptive of the specimen," says the research ornithologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. So when a...

What's up.(Around the Mall)(Brief article)(Calendar)
March 1, 2009... TO AFRICA Giraffes don't travel well, so 18th-century European naturalists had to sketch the statuesque African mammal (above: from 1804). The Smithsonian Libraries presents 40 drawings in "Art of African Exploration" on view at the Natural...

10 must-see endangered cultural treasures: some of the world's most precious historic and artistic sites can be visited today--but might be gone tomorrow.
March 1, 2009... It took the Taliban only days to destroy 1,500 years of history. The Buddhas of Bamiyan--two statues standing 120 and 175 feet high and hewn from the sandstone cliffs of central Afghanistan--had survived the wrath of Genghis Khan in the 13th...

Bingham's list: as Jews in France tried to flee the Nazi occupation, an American diplomat named Harry Bingham defied his own government to speed them to safety.(Biography)
March 1, 2009... AN INTERNATIONALLY KNOWN GERMAN NOVELIST, Lion Feuchtwanger had been a harsh critic of Adolf Hitler since the 1920s. One of his novels, The Oppermanns, was a thinly veiled expose of Nazi brutality. He called the Fuhrer's Mein Kampf a...

Out of Rembrandt's shadow: renowned in his day, Jan Lievens was later eclipsed by his friend and rival. A new exhibition establishes his reputation as an old master.
March 1, 2009... Telescopes trained on the night sky, astronomers observe the phenomenon of the binary star, which appears to the naked eye to be a single star but consists in fact of two, orbiting a common center of gravity. Sometimes, one star in the pair can...

Getting past the Troubles: a decade after Protestants and Catholics agreed on a peace treaty in Northern Ireland, both sides are adjusting to a hopeful new reality.(Can It Change? We believe!)
March 1, 2009... The crime that still haunts Don Browne took place on a cold, damp evening in February 1985 outside a housing development in a working-class neighborhood of Derry, Northern Ireland. That night, Browne says, he handed over a cache of weapons to...

Happy as clams: in the Pacific Northwest, fishermen and others are cashing in on the growing yen for a funny--looking mollusk turned worldwide delicacy.(geoduck)
March 1, 2009... Craig Parker popped his head above his head above the surf, peeled off his dive mask and clambered aboard the Ichiban. We were anchored 50 yards offshore from a fir-lined peninsula that juts into Puget Sound. Sixty feet below, where Parker had...

Steeped in story: the lyrical novelist says the city is more than her hometown, it's her life.(MY KIND OF TOWN CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA)(Viewpoint essay)
March 1, 2009... ONE SPRING AFTERNOON I was sitting at my office desk when I heard the sounds of a ruckus outside. And I do welcome a ruckus. My office is on the ground floor of the Confederate Home, where widows lived after the Civil War and old ladies still...

Which way out? The author discovers the surprising satisfactions of a home funeral.(PRESENCE OF MIND)(home after-death care)(Viewpoint essay)
March 1, 2009... TWO FUNERALS, two days apart, two grandfathers of my two sons. When my father and father-in-law died in the space of 17 days in late 2007, there wasn't a lot of time to ruminate on the meaning of it all. My wife, Sarah, and I were pretty busy...

Let a thousand bobbleheads bloom: how China's "Great Helmsman" became the King of Kitsch.(THE LAST PAGE)(Mao Zedong)(Viewpoint essay)
March 1, 2009... ALMOST 60 YEARS have passed since Mao Zedong founded the People's Republic of China in October I949, promising an economic system that would muzzle capitalism's running dogs. I think most of us can agree that the Great Helmsman screwed things up...