Timelapse video of Flight operations aboard the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower brought to you by the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

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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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 This video explains how the Marine and Estuarine Ecology Lab and Fish and Invertebrate Ecology Lab at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, […]

The post Chesapeake juvenile oyster study appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Aymar Ccopacatty (Aymara), NMAI Artist Leadership Program (ALP) participant, tells his personal story of the environmental impact on Puno, Peru, of all-too-commonly discarded commercial plastic […]

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At the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, curator of arachnids and myriapods Hannah Wood has examined and analyzed hundreds of pelican spiders both in the field […]

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  Find your passion,” says veteran Astronaut Peggy Whitson. The Iowa native holds the record for time in space by an American. Learn all about […]

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 Inspired by Steampunk design, Richard Wilks talks about his larger than life 3-point mobile contraption. Through the merging of transportation and art, he created […]

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In Armenia, the completion of a carpet and cutting it from its loom is a significant rite of passion for young female weavers.

The post Smithsonian Folklife Festival: Armenian carpet-cutting ceremony appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Curator Taína Caragol gives you a tour of a portrait of the late sculptor Luis Jiménez by Gaspar Enríquez at our National Portrait Gallery

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Dried specimens of nearly 800 flowering plants were acquired by the Botany Department of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History from the National Botanical Research Institute in Windhoek, Namibia, Africa. The collection includes nearly 160 specimens from the Compositae, or sunflower family.

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Smithsonian scientists and colleagues, however, have recently found evidence that gymnosperm plants shared an intricate pollination relationship with scorpionfly insects 62 million years before flowering plants appear in fossil records.

The post Prehistoric pollination: Scorpionfly mouthparts fit tubular channels of gymnosperm cones appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Flowers are usually associated with butterflies, but not the Dutchman’s Pipe (Aristolochia grandiflora). This deciduous vine, native to Brazil, has large flowers that emit an odor of decaying flesh, which attracts flies and beetles.

The post Video: Smithsonian horticulturalist Janet Draper discusses the pollination of the pelican flower appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

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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Current plans to protect the Chesapeake Bay include planting trees along hundreds of miles of streams that empty into the Bay. This study provides realistic limits for how much these buffers might further reduce nitrate pollution, and it helps identify where buffer restoration can offer the greatest additional nitrate removal.

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How do you recreate the ocean in a box? National Zoo Keeper Mike Henley talks about how he cares for the aquatic invertebrates in the Zoo's collection and how the National Zoo is also working to preserve them in their native habitats.

The post Coral “whisperer” Mike Henley of the National Zoo explains how he cares for the Zoo’s living coral appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

For the first time researchers from the Smithsonian, South Dakota State University and the University of Nebraska described the immature stages of the switchgrass moth, first collected in Denver in 1910.

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The Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md., and the Alaska Sea Grant Program of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, were recently identified as the […]

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Now the Global Plants Initiativeis catapulting biodiversity research to a new level by sharing these historic plant collections in a massive online database of high-resolution scans.

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The scientists staked out dozens of the gingers night and day while the plants flowered, but no long-proboscid pollinator ever appeared. Climate change, they surmised, was responsible for the loss of this highly specialized and now, perhaps forever unknown insect.

The post With specialist pollinator absent, Himalayan gingers must adapt appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Smithsonian plant physiologist Bert Drake has studied one wetland's response to climate change for more than two decades. He gives a tour of the field experiment and explains some of the findings.

The post On the Chesapeake Bay, Smithsonian plant physiologist Bert Drake has been studying one wetland’s response to climate change for more than two decades. appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

W. Atlee Burpee & Company Seed Co., 1898 The seed trade catalogs document the history of the seed and agricultural business in the United States; […]

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Bird species in rainforest fragments in Brazil that were isolated by deforestation first disappeared and then reappeared during the next quarter-century.

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Recent botanical exploration efforts in the rugged Marquesas Islands (French Polynesia) have increased the known flora of the archipelago by an impressive 20 percent. Field research and collecting in conjunction with the Vascular Flora of the Marquesas Islands and Flore de la Polynesie française projects have yielded 62 new species of ferns and flowering plants bringing the total native species to 360, of which 18 are newly described and illustrated in a special issue of PhytoKeys.

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Nutmeg-loving toucans wearing GPS transmitters recently helped a team of scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama address an age-old problem in plant ecology: accurately estimating seed dispersal.

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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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People living along the coast of Peru were eating popcorn 2,000 years earlier than previously reported and before ceramic pottery was used there, according to a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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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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Non-native plant species pose a significant threat to the natural ecosystems of the United States. Many of these invasive plants are escapees from gardens and […]

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Soon after a dirt road through the forests of Lambir Hills National Park in Borneo was improved in 1987, local markets selling the meat of […]

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The North Pole isn’t the only place on Earth affected by slight increases in temperature. Until recently, scientific thinking used to posit that tropical forests, […]

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Tucked into the wooded landscape and rolling hills of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md., is a new forest. Six months ago, a […]

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A joint research initiative carried out by scientists from the Smithsonian Institution, Saint Louis University and the Universidad de Los Andes in Venezuela, has resulted in […]

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As mangrove trees lose ground to deforestation and urban sprawl, one development seems to be giving them a boost: climate change. Fewer winter cold snaps […]

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For centuries untold numbers of this tiny arachnid (cousin to spiders and ticks) have ended up in teapots, invisibly steeping alongside the leaves of the tea plant on which it lives.

The post Primitive, bizarre, beautiful: New mite species reveal a lost world awaiting discovery appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Invertebrate Zoology Scientists studying pollinators of the yellow poppy (Meconopsis integrifolia) in the highlands of southern China have discovered a striking new species of flower fly […]

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A global analysis raises the minimum estimated number of tropical tree species to at least 40,000–53,000 worldwide in a paper appearing in Proceedings of the […]

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Residents of the southeastern United States might occasionally come across an oddity along a barbed-wire fence: a series of insects, mice or even small birds […]

The post Tiny, fierce and disappearing: breeding program aims to help the loggerhead shrike appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Nausea, vomiting and weakness are but a few of the symptoms one might anticipate after eating leaves from the Taiwanese shrub Erycibe henryi. This wild […]

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This year’s El Niño event is one of the strongest on record and is still ramping up. Large parts of the tropics are turning into […]

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How more than 1,000 tree species may occur in a small area of forest in Amazonia or Borneo is an unsolved mystery. Their ability to […]

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By charting the slopes and crags on animals’ teeth as if they were mountain ranges, scientists at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History have […]

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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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Living trees can rot from the inside out, leaving only a hollowed trunk. Wood rot in living trees can cause overestimates of global carbon pools, […]

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Named for Charles Darwin, the only known specimen of a newly discovered beetle, Darwinylus marcosi, died in a sticky battle in a gob of tree […]

The post Beetle and pollen trapped in 105 million-year-old amber reveal fourth major pollination mode in mid-Mesozoic appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Smithsonian scientists have discovered two new gecko species—the Lenya banded bent-toed gecko (Cyrtodactylus lenya) and Tenasserim Mountain bent-toed gecko (C. payarhtanesnsis)—in the little-studied lowland forests […]

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A tiny invasive insect from Asia might have an effect on Chesapeake Bay waters. The emerald ash borer is killing millions of ash trees in […]

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