Explore a “day in the life” of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the nation’s first collection of American art and home to one of the […]

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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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Did you know the Smithsonian’s museum support center is home to the largest collection of whale bones EVER? Madeline Sofia from Joe’s Big Idea takes […]

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Scientists in the US are helping to preserve this near-threatened species native to South America.

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The storage and flux of terrestrial carbon (C) is one of the most uncertain components of the global C budget and detailed quantification of forest […]

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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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Here’s how the Smithsonian Institution is prepping the 9,000-pound capsule used during Apollo 11 for a two-year road trip.

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 The zoo extends the collecting mission of the Smithsonian into the realm of the living. From the Series: Stories From the Vault: Random? http://bit.ly/2gfy5hO

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An overview of the Smithsonian Affiliations program and its reach in communities across the United States. Is the Smithsonian in your neighborhood?

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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, […]

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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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New on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings: This official music video is for “Ripest of Apples” by Anna & Elizabeth, from the new album ‘The Invisible Comes […]

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 Husband and wife artists, Mr. and Mrs. Ferguson, (who married at Burning Man in 2011) create detailed, tactile, often whimsical large-scale artworks, including the […]

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On May 4, 2018, members of the DC R2D2 Builders Club visited the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History with their droids. Along with thousands […]

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At the 2018 Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Armenian participants Mariam Hovhannisyan and Stepan Toroyan—who were recently married—recreated a traditional ceremony on the National Mall, with contributions […]

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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.

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The state's online registration for Covered California has been up for a couple of weeks, and reaction has been mixed.

Steve Julian: Business analyst, Mark Lacter, what's your take on how well Californians are getting into the Affordable Care Act?

Mark Lacter: It's hard to get a good read, Steve, because it's hard to measure the success of what is really a new marketplace.  If you're basing it on the number of unique visitors coming to the Covered California website, well, then the program clearly has attracted lots of interest - they had almost a million visitors during the first week of eligibility.  But, maybe a better measure would be the number of people whose applications actually have been received by the insurance companies that are going to handle the claims.  If that's your measuring stick, then the numbers have been far smaller so far.  Now, it's worth pointing out that California - and particularly L.A. County - have a higher percentage of households without insurance than other parts of the nation, and so you'd expect there to be lots of interest.

Julian: So the question, then, is how many folks turn into actual policyholders paying actual premiums each month.

Lacter: The truth is nobody knows, which is why state officials want to sign up as many people as possible in the early going when the program is getting so much attention.  This is especially true for younger and healthier people who are needed to help offset the cost of caring for older and sicker people.

Julian: And, that's also why any computer glitch can be such a headache...

Lacter: That's right.  Covered California did run into problems in the early going, but everybody agrees that things are going much better than the federal website, which is the default site used by folks in states that don't have their own program to oversee the health care laws.  That federal site has been an utter disaster.  So, by comparison, California is ahead of the game.

Julian: It's a work in progress, even here.

Lacter: Very much so.  The California website still doesn't have a way for enrollees to find out which doctors and hospitals are included in each health plan.  And, that's a big deal because  insurance companies are limiting the options available as a way of keeping premiums low.  So, it's possible that the doctor you had been using for your individual insurance plan will not be on the list of doctors that can be used for one of the cheaper plans.  Of course, for someone who doesn't have any health coverage, none of that is likely to matter.

Julian: And then, there's the continued threat of a U.S. default...

Lacter: You know, Steve, this is like watching the beginning of a bad traffic accident in slow motion - and we're all pretty helpless to do anything about it.  And, so are the financial markets, which are moving back and forth not based on what's going on with the economy or with any industry, but on the latest press conference out of Washington.  One thing we do know is that if the nation does go into quote-unquote default - and we're not even sure what that might mean - but if Wall Street and somehow declares this a major crisis, it's going to be bad.

Julian: Who gets hit?

Lacter: It'll impact anyone who has a retirement account, any business wanting to borrow money, and potentially it's going to impact the budgeting of the state.  You know, one of the things we were reminded of during the Great Recession was how reliant California has been on higher-income individuals who make a lot of their money through the stock market and other investments.  So, when those folks do well - as they have been over the last year - the state coffers will do well.  And when they don't, as was the case in 2008 and 2009, the state takes a huge hit because there's not enough tax dollars coming in.  Gov. Brown and others have tried to lessen the reliance on those top tiers - so far without success.

Julian: And the state's budget situation is so much better than it was a year or two ago.

Lacter: That's the real pity.  And, even if the House and Senate reach a temporary agreement on the debt ceiling, it's just a matter of weeks or months before another deadline crops up - and more uncertainty for the financial markets.  I guess Chick Hearn would have called this nervous time.

Mark Lacter writes for Los Angeles Magazine and pens the business blog at LA Observed.com.

This content is from Southern California Public Radio. View the original story at SCPR.org.

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The Weeping Goldsmith, written as a first-person narrative, follows Botanist John Kress through nine years as he surveys Myanmar’s teak forests, bamboo thickets, timber plantations, rivers and mangroves to document its incredible botanical biodiversity.

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Follow botanist Candy Feller of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center as she conducts field work on mangrove ecosystems at Carrie Bow Cay, a Smithsonian field research station in the Caribbean.

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This new research has revealed that in areas considered unsuitable for farming today, "pre-Columbian farmers constructed thousands of raised fields in the seasonally flooded coastal savannas of the Guianas.

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Since its doors first opened in 1910, the National Museum of Natural History has inspired curiosity and learning about the natural world and our place […]

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Two grass species that had been relatively rare in the plots, Spartina patens and Distichlis spicata, began to respond vigorously to the excess nitrogen. Eventually the grasses became much more abundant. Nitrogen ultimately changed the composition of the ecosystem as well as its capacity to store carbon.

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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.

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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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Obsessive in his collecting and emotionally invested in contributing to science and perpetuating knowledge, Palmer lived the adventurous yet nomadic life of a collector.

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The Center for Tropical Forest Science, which manages a global network of temperate and tropical forest research plots, will utilize the funds to conduct workshops in the Americas and Asia to investigate how taxonomic, functional, and genetic dimensions of diversity affect tree communities and their resilience to global change.

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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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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.

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This 1950 Federal Bureau of Investigation photo shows T. Dale Stewart, M.D., Curator of Physical Anthropology, in his office at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of […]

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The post Community ecologist Sunshine Van Bael explains her work in Panama with leafcutting ants appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Candy Feller, senior ecologist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md., will lead an effort to track more than 100 miles of Florida mangrove forests that are encroaching on salt marshes to the north.

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Can a tendency to get distracted lead to a career in science? It did for paleoecologist Conrad Labandeira. Working on his family's farm, he would find himself falling into a study of insect life in the fields. "If you go after what interests you," he says, "the rest will always fall into place."

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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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In 1909, naturalist Dr. Edgar A. Mearns joined Theodore Roosevelt and scientists from the Smithsonian and New York’s American Museum of Natural History on an […]

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The post Introducing Leafsnap, an electronic field guide to North America trees run on a mobile phone app appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

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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When you’re caught under the mistletoe, the tradition is to kiss the person next to you. But this holiday season you may want to wow them first with some cool mistletoe facts from Smithsonian botanist Sylvia Orli.

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The National Park Service and the Smithsonian Institution have announced a new partnership to share responsibility for selected National Park Service natural history collections, making them more readily available to researchers through the Smithsonian.

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Ancient pollen and charcoal preserved in deeply buried sediments in Egypt’s Nile Delta document the region’s ancient droughts and fires, including a huge drought 4,200 years ago associated with the demise of Egypt’s Old Kingdom.

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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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Despite many laws to protect it, a new survey reveals wild ginseng in Maryland is on the decline.

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