Julia Child cooks up a batch of primordial soup and explains how these simple ingredients produce amino acids - the building blocks of life. This video played in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Life in The Universe gallery from 1976 until the gallery closed. [...more]
The National Zoo has been awarded a grant from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to establish a captive population of the Virginia big-eared bat at the National Zoo’s Conservation & Research Center near Front Royal, Va. Only 15,000 Virginia big-eared bats remain living in caves in West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina, and these are threatened by the white-nose syndrome. [...more]
Fluorite is well known and prized for its rich variety of colors, most commonly pale green, purple, yellow, orange, blue, pink and colorless. “We acquired this specimen because it is a very nice quality fluorite with an attractive color and it is large enough to be exhibited,” Curator Jeff Post says. [...more]
Native to Africa and Madagascar, females of the species have a body length of 1.5 inches and a leg span of 4 to 5 inches. Males are tiny in comparison. [...more]
The John Marshall Ju/'hoan Bushman Film and Video Collection, 1950-2000, was among 35 documentary heritage items of exceptional value added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2009. [...more]
With the help of forensic anthropologists from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, restoration crews at Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. are carefully excavating human remains from burial vaults before making much needed repairs. [...more]
A major new exhibition hall dedicated to the discovery and understanding of human origins will open next year at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History: The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins [...more]
The spread of Africanized honey bees across Central America has had a much smaller impact on native tropical bee species than scientists previously predicted... [...more]
This fossil represents a new genus and species of extinct aneuretopsychid, Jeholopsyche liaoningensis, recently described in a paper in the journal ZooKeys by Conrad Labandeira of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and Dong Ren and ChungKun Shih of the College of Life Sciences, Capital Normal University, Beijing. The aneuretopsychidae are a family of long-proboscid insects that lived in Asia from the Late Jurassic to Early Cretaceous. The paper documents the first formal record of fossil Aneuretopsychidae in China. The new fossils reveal previously unknown and detailed structure of the mouthparts, antennae, head, thorax, legs and abdomen of this distinctive insect lineage.
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