Smithsonian team finds northern snakehead fish in Maryland’s Rhode River
This is the first report of this invasive species in this area, and may indicate a recent range expansion of the snakehead population.
Science Spotlight
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Toucans wearing GPS backpacks help Smithsonian scientists study seed dispersal
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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Digitization project brings ancient Near Eastern inscriptions into 21st Century
The Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives announces a new 3-D digital resource that will enable scholars and the public to learn more about the ancient Near East through a unique group of pressed-paper molds called squeezes.
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Gale Crater to be landing site for NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory
During a press conference Friday, July 22 at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, NASA announced that Gale Crater will be the landing site for the Mars Science Laboratory. Scheduled to launch in late 2011 and arrive at Mars in August 2012, the Mars Science Laboratory is a rover that will assess the planet’s “habitability”—if it ever was, or is today, an environment able to support microbial life.
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Exoplanet aurora: An out-of-this-world sight
New research shows that aurorae on distant “hot Jupiters” could be 100-1000 times brighter than Earthly aurorae. They also would ripple from equator to poles (due to the planet’s proximity to any stellar eruptions), treating the entire planet to an otherworldly spectacle.
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Bird keepers at the National Zoo demonstrate the art of artificially inseminating Stanley cranes
Keepers at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo perform an artificial insemination procedure on a pair of Stanley Cranes. A Stanley Crane chick was successfully hatched on May 23, 2011.
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It’s no sweat for salt marsh sparrows to beat the heat if they have a larger bill
A team of scientists have found that because of this, high summer temperatures have been a strong influence in determining bill size in some birds, particularly species of sparrows that favor salt marshes.
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Stellar eclipse gives glimpse of exoplanet: New data reveals a ‘super-Earth’ next door, astronomically speaking
The far-out planet, named 55 Cancri e, is twice as big as Earth and nearly nine times more massive. It is most likely composed of rocky material, similar to Earth, supplemented with light elements such as water and hydrogen gas. Scientists estimate the planet’s surface is much hotter than ours: close to 2,700 degrees Celsius.
