During a press conference Friday, July 22 at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, NASA announced that Gale Crater will be the landing site for the Mars Science Laboratory. Scheduled to launch in late 2011 and arrive at Mars in August 2012, the Mars Science Laboratory is a rover that will assess the planet’s “habitability”—if it ever was, or is today, an environment able to support microbial life.

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The humble salamander may provide evidence to support a controversial claim that North and South America were joined together much earlier than previously thought. The […]

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Scientists from the Smithsonian and the University of Rhode Island have found unsuspected linkages between the oxidation state of iron in volcanic rocks and variations […]

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Many traits unique to humans were long thought to have originated in the genus Homo between 2.4 and 1.8 million years ago in Africa. A […]

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Oysters are keystone organisms in estuaries around the world, influencing water quality, constructing habitat and providing food for humans and wildlife. Yet their populations in […]

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The last time Earth experienced both ice sheets and carbon dioxide levels within the range predicted for this century was a period of major sea […]

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To the Hopewell Culture, ancient Native Americans who sought out the exotic from near and far, metal was a rare and precious resource. Copper, found […]

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On Monday, Aug. 21, beginning shortly after 9 a.m. Pacific Time, the sky will darken across North America as the moon’s orbit carries it between […]

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The Jamaican golden swallow was last seen in 1982. From 1994 to 2012, Smithsonian ornithologist Gary Graves combed the island of Jamaica to document several […]

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Appendices B4 and B5 of Cayron [Acta Cryst. (2019), A75, 411–437] contain equations involving the point group and the metric tensor in which the equality symbol should be substituted by the inclusion symbol.

Under the anomalous transmission condition in the Bragg mode, X-ray interference fringes were observed between two beams with different hyperbolic trajectories in a very weakly bent plane-parallel perfect crystal with negative strain gradient. The origin of the fringes was analysed based on the dynamical theory of diffraction for a distorted crystal. In the reflected beam from the entrance surface, the interference fringes were observed between once- and twice-reflected beams from the back surface. In the transmitted beam from the back surface, the interference fringes were observed between the direct beam and once-reflected beam from the entrance surface. In the emitted beam from the lateral surface, the interference fringes were observed between the beams after different numbers of reflections in the crystal. The multiply reflected beams were formed by a combined result of long propagation length along the beam direction with large divergence of the refracted beams when the strain gradient was negative. The period of these interference fringes was sensitive to very weak strain, of the order of 10−7.

A novel approach for finding and evaluating structural models of small metallic nanoparticles is presented. Rather than fitting a single model with many degrees of freedom, libraries of clusters from multiple structural motifs are built algorithmically and individually refined against experimental pair distribution functions. Each cluster fit is highly constrained. The approach, called cluster-mining, returns all candidate structure models that are consistent with the data as measured by a goodness of fit. It is highly automated, easy to use, and yields models that are more physically realistic and result in better agreement to the data than models based on cubic close-packed crystallographic cores, often reported in the literature for metallic nanoparticles.

Crystal structure identification of thin organic films entails a number of technical and methodological challenges. In particular, if molecular crystals are epitaxially grown on single-crystalline substrates a complex scenario of multiple preferred orientations of the adsorbate, several symmetry-related in-plane alignments and the occurrence of unknown polymorphs is frequently observed. In theory, the parameters of the reduced unit cell and its orientation can simply be obtained from the matrix of three linearly independent reciprocal-space vectors. However, if the sample exhibits unit cells in various orientations and/or with different lattice parameters, it is necessary to assign all experimentally obtained reflections to their associated individual origin. In the present work, an effective algorithm is described to accomplish this task in order to determine the unit-cell parameters of complex systems comprising different orientations and polymorphs. This method is applied to a polycrystalline thin film of the conjugated organic material 6,13-pentacene­quinone (PQ) epitaxially grown on an Ag(111) surface. All reciprocal vectors can be allocated to unit cells of the same lattice constants but grown in various orientations [sixfold rotational symmetry for the contact planes (102) and (102)]. The as-determined unit cell is identical to that reported in a previous study determined for a fibre-textured PQ film. Preliminary results further indicate that the algorithm is especially effective in analysing epitaxially grown crystallites not only for various orientations, but also if different polymorphs are present in the film.

A new approach is presented to obtain candidate structures from atomic pair distribution function (PDF) data in a highly automated way. It fetches, from web-based structural databases, all the structures meeting the experimenter's search criteria and performs structure refinements on them without human intervention. It supports both X-ray and neutron PDFs. Tests on various material systems show the effectiveness and robustness of the algorithm in finding the correct atomic crystal structure. It works on crystalline and nanocrystalline materials including complex oxide nanoparticles and nanowires, low-symmetry and locally distorted structures, and complicated doped and magnetic materials. This approach could greatly reduce the traditional structure searching work and enable the possibility of high-throughput real-time auto-analysis PDF experiments in the future.

When animal care staff at the Smithsonian's National Zoo need to know when to breed their pandas or when to expect a cub they turn to the Endocrine (Hormones) Research Lab at the Zoo's Front Royal, Va. facility.

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Dr. Thomas R. Watters of the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum talks about his research in astronomy, particularly our moon. More about space science at http://www.nasm.si.edu

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Dr. Mary Hagedorn, a marine biologist at the Smithsonian Institution, talks about her research to understand and conserve our oceans' corals.

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Smithsonian Tropical Research Center Botanist Stefan Schnitzer talks about his work studying lianas (woody vines) in the jungles of Panama. These hardy vines compete with trees for water and nutrients and also act as highways for jungle animals moving through the forest canopy.

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What determines the variety of trees in a tropical forest? Is it the seed size? Perhaps seed-hungry animals? And what happens to forests that are being drastically changed by humans? Smithsonian Tropical Research Center Botanist, Helene Muller Landau, talks about her attempt to find answers to these questions.

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Invasive plant species are threatening native species across the globe. Learn how scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Center in Panama are trying to fight one species of grass in Panama that is wreaking havoc on the country's tropical biodiversity.

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When birds and planes collide: Carla Dove, a forensic ornithologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, talks about the work of the Smithsonian's Feather Identification Lab and its role in improving aviation safety.

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Tom Crouch, Senior curator in the National Air and Space Museum's Aeronautics Division, discusses Thaddeus Lowe and the birth of American aerial reconnaissance during the Civil War. This presentation was recorded on May 11, 2011 on the National Mall.

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It takes a Tlingit artist up to 2,000 hours, or 83 days, to weave just one ceremonial robe. Not surprisingly, this art form is practiced by a dedicated few including Tlingit artists Teri Rofkar and Shelly Laws of Alaska. In their presentation for the Smithsonian Spotlight series hosted by the Arctic Studies Center at the Anchorage Museum, Rofkar and Laws discuss the methods and cultural significance of robes, spruce root baskets and more.
For more information, go to http://www.mnh.si.edu/arctic/html/alaska.htm

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The Smithsonian Science Education Center (formerly NSRC) was formed by the Smithsonian Institution and the National Academies in 1985 with the mission to improve the learning and teaching of science in school districts in the United States and throughout the world.

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This scientific visualization is much more than a dizzying dance of whirling worlds. It shows 2,299 planets found by NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft.

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One of Italy’s greatest treasures, Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex on the Flight of Birds, will be exhibited at the National Air and Space Museum from […]

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Joseph Henry was one of America’s preeminent 19th-century scientists, a pioneer in the investigation of electromagnetism and other fields of study, and the first Secretary […]

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See our ancient ancestors come to life through paleoartist John Gurche’s realistic human likenesses for the Smithsonian’s Hall of Human Origins. “The human story is […]

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Yellowstone National Park is one of the world’s most protected ecosystems. But that’s still not enough to keep its grizzly bears completely safe. Click here […]

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Gwen Ifill sat down with Lonnie Bunch, the director of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, which is due to open this […]

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Aukeran is a professional dance troupe from Basque country founded in 1997 by Edu Muruamendiaraz. The beautiful and graceful professional dancers have backgrounds in both […]

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The Moon and its surface provide insight into the early history of the solar system in this video from the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space […]

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Known around the world for personal and culturally inspired choreography, Dana Tai Soon Burgess has been named the Smithsonian’s first choreographer-in-residence at the National Portrait […]

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On the morning of Monday, Jan. 30, 2017 a 25-pound female bobcat cat was discovered missing from its exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in […]

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Known around the world for personal and culturally inspired choreography, Dana Tai Soon Burgess has been named the Smithsonian’s first choreographer-in-residence at the National Portrait […]

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The Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art is the first institution to acquire the deeply personal and visually mesmerizing video projections “Invocation: The Severance of […]

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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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  Frances Glessner Lee created dollhouses with dead dolls. Her creations are now on exhibit at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

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