Today the Smithsonian Institution announced Eva J. Pell, Senior Vice President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School at Pennsylvania State University, will be the new Under Secretary for Science at the Institution.

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Testing caterpillars’ taste buds is no simple task. Just like your local salad bar, plants in the wild come in different shapes, textures and flavors. Herbivores rely on each of these cues to tell them what to eat. Deciphering this code is Lind’s task. He’s examining 40 different plant species – half invasive, half native.

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The Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies is hosting “Climate Change,” a three-day, free, education online conference Tuesday, Sept. 29 through Thursday, Oct. 1. This […]

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The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum has opened a new Public Observatory that contains a 16-inch, 3,000-pound Boller and Chivens telescope, on loan from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Through this powerful telescope, museum visitors can now observe the sun (with a special filter), the moon and the brighter stars and planets, such as Venus, Jupiter and Saturn, during daylight hours. Funding for the project was provided by the National Science Foundation.

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A major new exhibition hall dedicated to the discovery and understanding of human origins will open next year at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History: The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins

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The way that massive stars form remains mysterious, in part, because massive stars are rare and tend to spend their youth shrouded by dust and gas and hidden from view.

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There are several hypotheses about how amphibian chytrid has spread around the world, but the trade in amphibians for food, bait, pets and laboratory animals has been identified as the most likely mode of spread

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Recently, researchers from Boston University and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama have been taking a closer look at the vibrations that red-eyed treefrog embryos use as cues to trigger early hatching. They discovered that treefrog embryos can evaluate different features of vibrations.

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In their laboratory, scientists from the University of Cambridge, the University of Southampton and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, observed as a number of adult locusts walked along a horizontal ladder. After covering the right or left eye of an insect, the scientists observed a significant increase in the error rate of rungs missed by the front leg on the side of the covered eye.

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Birds do it. Bees do it. And in a laboratory in northern California, scientists using bumblebees recently figured out the best way to measure it--vertical lift!

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The results show mergers of two dense stellar remnants are the likely cause of many of the supernovae that have been used to measure the accelerated expansion of the universe.

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The study found that infants whose mothers had higher levels of available milk energy soon after their birth, coped more effectively (moved around more, explored more, ate and drank) and showed greater confidence (were more playful, exploratory, curious and active) with this novel situation.

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Finding this stellar relic wasn’t easy. It is 60,000 times dimmer than the faintest star visible to the unaided eye. The team also had to distinguish it from many surrounding stars that aren’t so old. Just like an archaeological dig, the hunt succeeded through a combination of patience and clever use of technology.

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Eleven bats remain in the National Zoo’s colony. The initial challenge the team faced was how to feed the animals. Virginia big-eared bats, which are a subspecies of the Townsend’s big-eared bat (Corynorhinuss townsendii), eat while flying.

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The Stephen L. Wood collection brings the collection of bark beetles held in the Natural History Museum’s Department of Entomology to an impressive 180,000 specimens, making it one of the most extensive collections in world.

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The research and patience has paid off. The sisters, Nababiep and Shera, have spent short periods of time with the male, Luke, individually and simultaneously. This happened only after they each had spent more than a year sniffing Luke through a mesh door (called a “howdy door”).

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"Just like mirrors in a changing room show you a clothing outfit from all sides, interstellar dust clouds act like mirrors to show us different sides of the supernova," Rest explains.

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The rescue pods will be part of the project’s Amphibian Rescue Center at Summit Municipal Park, which will also include a lab with a quarantine facility.

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The Caddo people of Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma have maintained many of their traditional ways and actively work to preserve their unique tribal cultural today. One example is the pottery of Jeri Redcorn.

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New world megafauna such as mammoths, bison and camelids that were alive at the end of the Pleistocene epoch (some 13,000 years ago) would have produced massive amounts of methane-rich flatulence and belching, thanks to the cellulose-digesting microbes in their guts.

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This innovative facility will be at the front line of Earth defense by searching for "killer" asteroids and comets. It will map large portions of the sky nightly, making it an efficient sleuth for not just asteroids but also supernovae and other variable objects.

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The new study suggests that echolocation calls also serve a social function--bats listen to the ultrasonic calls of other bats to identify roost mates, bats of the same species, members of the opposite sex and intruders to their territory.

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The Smithsonian’s National Zoo recently acquired Japanese giant salamanders given to the Zoo by the City of Hiroshima Asa Zoological Park. This donation will be the foundation of a new long-term breeding program in the United States and may play an important role in saving amphibians around the globe.

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Discoveries of three new from species in Panama lead to hope that project researchers can save these animals from a deadly fungus killing frogs worldwide and the fear that many species will go extinct before scientists even know they exist.

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The Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) PS1 telescope has discovered an asteroid about 150 feet in diameter that will come within 4 million miles of Earth in mid-October.

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Researchers at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute conducted three different kinds of genetics tests and all yielded the same result—the Galapagos seabirds have been genetically different from the magnificent frigatebirds elsewhere for more than half a million years.

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The Kepler spacecraft was launched in March of 2009 to study extrasolar planets. One of its major goals is the detection of terrestrial planets in habitable zones.

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Scientists and local dive operators first noticed coral bleaching in the waters surrounding Isla Colon, in Panama’s Bocas del Toro province in July. Smithsonian staff scientist Nancy Knowlton and colleagues documented an extensive bleaching event in late September.

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The Smithsonian’s National Zoo recently welcomed two litters of lion cubs over a three-week period – bringing the total number of cubs to seven during the summer of 2010.

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This circa 1910 Yup'ik mask from Good News Bay, Alaska--made of driftwood, baleen, feathers, paint and cotton twine--is part of "Infinity of Nations: Art and History in the Collections of the National Museum of the American Indian," an exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian, opening Saturday, Oct. 23.

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Should global warming cause sea levels to rise as predicted in coming decades, thousands of archaeological sites in coastal areas around the world will be lost to erosion. With no hope of saving all of these sites, three archaeologists—Leslie Reeder of Southern Methodist University, Jon Erlandson of the University of Oregon and Torben Rick from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History—have issued a call to action for scientists to assess the sites most at risk around the world.

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The science-based study will evaluate elephant welfare along a quality continuum, assessing the impact of zoo management practices by looking at the elephants’ responses to differences in practices among zoos.

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The most puzzling characteristic of deep-sea dragonfishes (stromiids) is found where their backbone (or vertebral column) approaches the back of their skull. In the anterior region of the backbone, these […]

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NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has unveiled a previously unseen structure centered in the Milky Way--a finding likened in terms of scale to the discovery of a new continent on Earth. The feature, which spans 50,000 light-years, may be the remnant of an eruption from a supersized black hole at the center of our galaxy.

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Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have found evidence of the youngest black hole known to exist in our cosmic neighborhood. The 30-year-old object is a remnant of SN 1979C, a supernova in the galaxy M100 approximately 50 million light years from Earth.

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Known as one of the greatest racehorses of his day and sire to more winning horses than any other American thoroughbred before or since, this Smithsonian loan returned the legendary Lexington's remains to the town of his birthplace some 160 years after he was born.

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The team discovered that there are about 20 times more red dwarfs in elliptical galaxies than in the Milky Way, said Charlie Conroy of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

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The Scarlet Knight, as the glider is called, made nautical history as the first submersible glider to successfully cross the Atlantic Ocean.

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A research team from The Smithsonian Environmental Research Center and Virginia's Old Dominion University will be awarded $110,999 to develop a tool to help seagrass restorers predict which places will be the best for planting seagrasses, the Virginia Sea Grant has announced.

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For two weeks the team recorded and documented the community’s elders, families and llamas along a pilgrimage of remembrance in Pisaq, Peru.

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Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute community ecologist Sunshine Van Bael primarily examines the relationship between leaf cutter ants–the world’s first farmers–and the fungi that they cultivate.

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"Physics for the 21st Century," a free, on-line course developed at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics about current research in physics is now available.

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Office of Public Affairs videographers Johnny Gibbons and Brian Ireley recently headed down to the Punta Culebra Nature Center on the edge of Panama City […]

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Water is a critical molecule for human life, and, because it is abundant in space, it also plays an important role in the life of […]

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The male’s fluke design helps it overcome the drag caused by their long tusks, the scientists determined. The female’s fluke design gives them increased speed for diving while foraging.

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A. sediba was discovered in 2008 in the Malapa Cave at the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site located outside Johannesburg.

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Last week, the Kepler team and CfA astronomers announced the discovery of a system of six transiting planets around one Sun-like star. The previous record holder for the number of transiting planets was three.

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The awarded film features STRI marine biologist Héctor M. Guzman diving with a group of five whale sharks while traveling in the Tropical Eastern Pacific. In the video, Guzmán tags a radiotransmitter to one of the sharks in order to follow its voyages.

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They found that the molars of fruit-eating species had sharp outer edges that likely allow them to pierce tough fruit skin and pulp... By contrast, the molars of insect-eating species were less complex, possibly because of their smoother shearing surfaces.

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Using modern genetic analysis, combined with traditional morphology, scientists from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and the Ocean Science Foundation have discovered seven […]

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