Chris Mah, researcher at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in the invertebrate zoology department, describes the characteristics of different sea star species observed on the final dive of the Laulima O Ka Moana expedition. (Credit: Video courtesy of the NOAA Office of Ocean Exploration and Research, 2017 Laulima O Ka Moana)

High-speed video captures the unique ability of a leaping praying mantis to control its spin in mid-air and precisely land on a target.

With millions of men serving in WWII, the nation needed pilots to ferry planes from the factory to the air bases. That’s when Jackie Cochran proposed a novel idea: why not let women fly?

Henry Ford was a genius who virtually created the automobile industry as we know it. But what's less lauded was his talent for publicity—and his ability to partner with other pioneers such as Ohio's Harvey Firestone.

See the process involved when a massive specimen arrives at the Smithsonian

Chef Darin Nesbit demonstrates how to cook cricket-crusted redfish. (Still Image: Natthanan Chumphookaew/iStock)

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma talks with the founder of the Girls Computing League about the promise of her generation

Every week, the Floyd Country Store draws musicians and their fans from across southwest Virginia

If you need something while up in space, soon all you'll have to do is print it.

The MIT professor believes many of the financial products sold today will be rightly regarded as not in the best interest of consumers

Art car designers tour the country with their cars, some thousands of miles a year, not for fame or money, but just to make people smile. (Produced by: Abby Callard and Ryan Reed)

Coffee - it's a staple of American life, and inside the vaults of the National Museum of American History, they know the secret to its wide spread success: packaging

By 2020, the Starkey Hearing Foundation plans to donate one million hearing aids to kids in the developing world

A small pebble with ornate markings is Britain’s earliest piece of Mesolithic art—but what do the markings denote, and was it worn for cosmetic purposes or spiritual ones?

In the jungles of Cambodia, villagers travel along abandoned railway tracks on a norry, a rickety transport of spare lumber with a speedy (and loud) motor attached Video, Photographs and Narration by Russ Juskalian

The Black Death of 1348 was a devastating event, wiping out half the population of Britain. And in churches like this one, drawings on the wall provide a haunting visual record of the scale of the tragedy.

In March 1895, Boston and New York City began an epic and highly competitive race to become the first American city with a working subway system.

By late September 1918, in a bid to contain the spread of the flu, the U.S. had made the decision to cancel the draft. It was too little, too late—in October alone, over 200,000 Americans were killed by the disease.

Kenneth Morris is the great-great-great-grandson of the heralded abolitionist and helped compile an illustrated biography of his ancestor. (Credit: Drew Gardner)

Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough offers personal insights on the realities of climate change and the best ways for society to adapt

The water torture cell escape was arguably Houdini’s most memorable stunt. So much so that many people wrongly assume it killed him–a myth invented by the 1953 movie about his life starring Tony Curtis.

In 1536, Thomas Cromwell spotted an opportunity to enrich his master, Henry VIII, and further increase his own standing: the dissolution of the monasteries and claiming their wealth for the Crown.

A curator from the Houston Museum of Natural Science explains how the terra cotta warriors were discovered and what they reveal about China’s Qin dynasty

For the first time ever, researchers observed a cricket as a pollinator for a flower

Credit: Ken Catania, PNAS, 2016

Mineralogist Bob Hazen talks about what he loves about walking along the coast of the Chesapeake Bay, hunting for fossils and shark teeth hidden in the sand

Fossils found in Colombia indicate that a giant snake may have roamed the earth 60 million years ago

Author Harold Holzer discusses Abraham Lincoln's presidency and the President's lasting impact on modern American politics and nostalgia (Meredith Bragg). Read more at http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/life-of-lincoln.html

The first plane to fly nonstop from New York to Paris will reside on the ground level of the National Air and Space Museum for the next five months as it undergoes preservation (Courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum)

Our giant of a host, Eric Schulze, explains why size mattered in prehistory.

New technologies helped marine archaeologists recover the H.L. Hunley, a Civil War submarine

Credit: Carlos Jaramillo, German Bayona and Edward Duarte, using Gplates and VideoPad by NCHsoftware

Jeff Bezos | Smithsonian Magazine’s 2016 American Ingenuity Award Winner for Technology The Princeton-educated Amazon founder, Washington Post owner and new-economy pioneer also helms an innovative spaceflight company, Blue Origin, which he founded in 2000. This year it became the first aerospace manufacturer to launch, land and relaunch a rocket into space—an essential leap toward our extraterrestrial future. Bezos aims to revolutionize travel and work in space by making spaceflight so inexpensive that entrepreneurs will rush to create new businesses that have not even been imagined yet. Blue Origin’s achievement has been described as comparable to the shift from the sail to the steam engine. Read more about Bezos’ work: http://smithmag.co/GICDO2 | #IngenuityAwards And more about the American Ingenuity Awards: http://smithmag.co/77xPqy

Researchers from South Korea have discovered a unconventional way to produce gasoline.

DC chef Erik Bruner-Yang interviews Jill-of-all-trades Kaitlyn Hova about her plan to infuse STEM education with open source, 3D printable instruments.

Venture into Virunga National Park with Smithsonian writer Paul Raffaele as he examines the threats facing mountain gorillas in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

A step-by-step tour of the renovation of the National Museum of American History (Narration by Beth Py-Lieberman / Edited by Ryan Reed and Brian Wolly)

Aziz Ansari | Smithsonian Magazine’s 2016 American Ingenuity Award Winner for Performing Arts The actor, comedian and author is being honored for his starring role as Dev Shah in “Master of None,” the Netflix series that he created with Alan Yang. Like the character he plays, Ansari is the son of Indian immigrant parents, and his smart, surprising take on life, love, technology and cultural identity in the United States has helped make the show “the year’s best comedy straight out of the gate,” as the New York Times put it. Among Ansari’s other accomplishments are his unforgettable portrayal of the loopy Tom Haverford on NBC’s “Parks and Recreation,” his best-selling book about dating in the internet age, Modern Romance (co-authored with Eric Klinenberg), and his blockbuster stand-up act that sold out Madison Square Garden. Read more about Ansari’s work: http://smithmag.co/jvdAaL | #IngenuityAwards And more about the American Ingenuity Awards: http://smithmag.co/77xPqy

In the Virunga National Forest, the mountain gorilla population sits in the middle of a war zone in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as forest rangers track and keep a watchful eye on the threatened primates Music: Kevin MacLeod

The Director of the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum predicts what the museum's collections will hold in the next 40 years Read more at http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/40th-anniversary/Arts-Bold-New-Direction.html

Over the course of 50 years, John Marshall filmed the African tribe, tracking how their nomadic culture slowly died out

An oral history of the March on Washington: http://j.mp/1feuQK3 John Lewis, Eleanor Holmes Norton and others relive the pivotal moment of the Civil Rights Movement.

The power behind the music of Our Native Daughters comes from giving voice to the struggles of those who came before us—and few have struggled to be heard as much as black women.

Filmed by the famous photographer during the Spanish Civil War, this clip debuted at the 2010 Orphan Film Symposium

Winter in Washington, D.C. may be too warm for outdoor ice skating, so organizers at the National Zoo brought in a special kind of rink for their annual "Zoo Lights" celebration

Sally, a Labrador retriever, sniffs sock samples and then pauses on the sample worn by a child with malaria. (Durham University/Medical Detection Dogs/London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine)

Honeybees get a caffeine buzz and memory boost when they drink coffee nectar

Take in the sights and sounds of the European influences of Argentina's capital city (Produced by: Brendan McCabe). Read more at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/daniel-politi-on-hola-buenos-aires-138874294/