Recently a team of scientists working at the Smithsonian’s Tropical Research Institute in Panama, decided to try and learn for the first time just which body parts the gliding ant C. atratus uses to steer as they glide.
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.
A diminutive bat with cinnamon-brown coloring collected in 1979 in Ecuador by mammalogist Don Wilson of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History represents a new species a recent paper in the journal “Mammalian Biology” has revealed.
The turkey has become synonymous with Thanksgiving in the United States. But when exactly where turkeys first domesticated? And where? Bruce Smith, senior archeologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History has the answers.
Although the La Loma tree frog, Hyloscirtus colymba, is notoriously difficult to care for in captivity, the Panama Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project is the first to successfully breed this species.
Known as one of the greatest racehorses of his day and sire to more winning horses than any other American thoroughbred before or since, this Smithsonian loan returned the legendary Lexington’s remains to the town of his birthplace some 160 years after he was born.
Today, researchers who found the first hypervelocity stars escaping the Milky Way announced that their search also turned up a dozen double-star systems. Half of those are merging and might explode as supernovae in the astronomically near future.
Astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have found evidence of the youngest black hole known to exist in our cosmic neighborhood. The 30-year-old object is a remnant of SN 1979C, a supernova in the galaxy M100 approximately 50 million light years from Earth.
Science Spotlight
