Smithsonian staff gathered on Thursday, June 1 outside the National Museum of African American History and Culture to show their support and listen to Director […]

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A Projection Art Installation from the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art, “IlluminAsia Festival of Asian Art and Cultures” during the reopening celebration held in Oct. […]

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 Blues singer and pianist Marcia Ball performs “Louella” at the 2008 Smithsonian Folklife Festival.      

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“Parallax Gap” transforms the Renwick Gallery’s Bettie Rubenstein Grand Salon into a visual puzzle. This immersive, site-specific installation explores examples of interplay between craft and […]

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On February 12, 2018, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery unveiled its commissioned portraits of former President Barack Obama and Mrs. Michelle Obama by artists Kehinde […]

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If you see a web site that states "Press <> to watch the video" and then prompts you to allow browser notifications, do not click on the allow button. These sites are just trying to trick you into subscribing to their browser notifications so that they can send notification spam directly to your desktop.

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The Encyclopedia of Life is an unprecedented global effort to document all 1.8 million named species of animals, plants and other forms of life on Earth. For the first time in the history of the planet, scientists, students, and citizens will have multi-media access to all known living species, even those that have just been discovered. The Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University, Marine Biological Laboratory, Smithsonian Institution, and Biodiversity Heritage Library joined together to initiate the project, bringing together species and software experts from across the world. Lean more at www.eol.org

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These opportunistic plants quickly fill-in the gap taking advantage of the increased light coming through the tree canopy and the fresh soil at the fallen tree’s turned-up roots.

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The small-whorled pogonia is a plain, endangered orchid that inhabits the hollows of Virginia, and survives only in collaboration with a particular type of fungus […]

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It is one of the rarest shrubs in the southeastern United States but for scientists trying to save it, the critically endangered Michaux’s sumac (Rhus michauxii) is not cooperating.

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The Smithsonian Environmental Research Center has created NEMESIS--National Estuarine and Marine Exotic Species Information System--an online public database that provides key information about the non-native marine species throughout the United States.

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Small-Whorled Pogonia: Endangered Orchid on the Edge. The small-whorled pogonia (Isotria medeoloides) is endangered 16 of the 20 states where it still appears, earning it the title "rarest orchid east of the Mississippi."

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Mexico is the fourth largest honey producer and fifth largest honey exporter in the world. A Smithsonian researcher and colleagues helped rural farmers in Mexico […]

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What plant species has just been discovered but is almost gone? Bidens meyeri–a just discovered flowering plant from the small South Pacific island of Rapa, […]

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A newly discovered Hawaiian tree recently had the distinction of being added to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Critically […]

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Finding a mouse in your morning coffee might give you an unwelcome jolt, but there’s a strong connection between small mammals, birds and the plantations […]

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Life and the Earth have always evolved together. When it opens on June 8, 2019, the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils — Deep Time […]

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This article aims to encourage practitioners, young and seasoned, by enhancing their structure-determination toolboxes with a selection of tips and tricks on recognizing and handling aspects of data collection, structure modelling and refinement, and the interpretation of results.

This work presents a technique for extracting the detailed shape of peaks with extended, overlapping tails in an X-ray powder diffraction pattern. The application discussed here concerns crystallite size broadening, though the technique can be applied to spectra of any origin and without regard to how the profiles are to be subsequently analyzed. Historically, the extraction of profile shapes has been difficult due to the complexity of determining the background under the peak, resulting in an offset of the low-frequency components of the Fourier transform of the peak known as the `hook' problem. The use of a carefully considered statistical weighting function in a non-linear least-squares fit, followed by summing the residuals from such a fit with the fit itself, allows one to extract the full shape of an isolated peak, without contributions from either the background or adjacent peaks. The extracted shape, consisting of the fit function recombined with the residuals, is not dependent on any specific shape model. The application of this to analysis of microstructure is performed independently of global parametric models, which would reduce the number of refined parameters; therefore the technique requires high-quality data to produce results of interest. The effectiveness of the technique is demonstrated by extraction of Fourier transforms of peaks from two sets of size-broadened materials with two differing pieces of equipment.

The development of antiviral strategies requires a clear understanding of the principles that control the protein arrangements in viral shells. Considered here are those capsids that violate the paradigmatic Caspar and Klug (CK) model, and it is shown that the important structural features of such anomalous shells from the Picobirnaviridae, Flaviviridae and Leviviridae families can be revealed by models in the form of spherical icosahedral packings of equivalent rhombic structural units (SUs). These SUs are composed of protein dimers forming the investigated capsids which, as shown here, are based on the rhombic triacontahedron (RT) geometry. How to modify the original CK approach in order to make it compatible with the considered rhombic tessellations of a sphere is also discussed. Analogies between capsids self-assembled from dimers and trimers are demonstrated. This analysis reveals the principles controlling the localization of receptor proteins (which recognize the host cell) on the capsid surface.

The unit-cell reduction described by Selling and used by Delone (whose early publications were under the spelling Delaunay) is explained in a simple form. The transformations needed to implement the reduction are listed. The simplicity of this reduction contrasts with the complexity of Niggli reduction.

In small-molecule single-crystal structure determination, we now have at our disposal an inspiring range of fantastic diffractometers with better, brighter sources, and faster, more sensitive detectors. Faster and more powerful computers provide integrated tools and software with impressive graphical user interfaces. Yet these tools can lead to the temptation not to check the work thoroughly and one can too easily overlook tell-tale signs that something might be amiss in a structure determination; validation with checkCIF is not always revealing. This article aims to encourage practitioners, young and seasoned, by enhancing their structure-determination toolboxes with a selection tips and tricks on recognizing and handling aspects that one should constantly be aware of. Topics include a pitfall when setting up data collections, the usefulness of reciprocal lattice layer images, processing twinned data, tips for disorder modelling and the use of restraints, ensuring hydrogen atoms are added to a model correctly, validation beyond checkCIF, and the derivation and interpretation of the final results.