To celebrate a cool Halloween creature–bats–we teamed up with the Smithsonian’s Kristofer Helgen, curator of mammals at the National Museum of Natural History. Here, he answers three commonly asked questions about these winged mammals.
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.
A roundup of recent articles featuring spiders, bats and rats….
The science-based study will evaluate elephant welfare along a quality continuum, assessing the impact of zoo management practices by looking at the elephants’ responses to differences in practices among zoos.
“Places of Invention,” a planned 3,500-square-foot exhibition at the National Museum of American History scheduled to open in 2014, will feature a selection of “hot spots” of invention and innovation—places where a critical mass of inventive people, networks, institutions, funding and other resources come together and creativity flourishes.
Should global warming cause sea levels to rise as predicted in coming decades, thousands of archaeological sites in coastal areas around the world will be lost to erosion. With no hope of saving all of these sites, three archaeologists—Leslie Reeder of Southern Methodist University, Jon Erlandson of the University of Oregon and Torben Rick from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History—have issued a call to action for scientists to assess the sites most at risk around the world.
Recent analysis using DNA sequencing of ancient Roman pills found aboard a ship that sank in Italy’s Gulf of Baratti between 140 -120 B.C, has revealed that the medicines consist of material from simple garden plants, namely carrot, radish, parsley, celery, wild onion and cabbage.
Healthy reefs with more corals and fish generate predictably greater levels of noise, according to researchers working in Panama. By analysing recordings of coral reefs from the Las Perlas Archipelago in Pacific Panama ( Central America ), marine biologists working from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute have found that some reefs are noisier than others, and these differences in noise provide useful information about the health of the reef.
Science Spotlight
