Fulcaldea stuessyi is a newly discovered member of the Barnadesioideae, a subfamily of the Compositae, or sunflower family of flowering plants. It was found in northeastern Brazil and is described in the August 2011 issue of the journal “Taxon” by botanist Vicki Funk of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and Nádia Roque of [...] [...more]
For the first time in decades, researchers have found a new bird species in the United States. Based on a specimen collected in 1963 on Midway Atoll, Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, biologists have described a new species of seabird, Bryan’s shearwater [...more]
Kandula, an 8-year-old male Asian elephant at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo, recently demonstrated to researchers for the first time that elephants are capable of insightful problem solving. [...more]
What Google is attempting for books, the University of California, Berkeley, plans to do for the world's vertebrate specimens: store them in "the cloud." [...more]
The 5.8-magnitude earthquake that shook the eastern United States on the afternoon of Tuesday, Aug. 23, caused minor damage to some of the Smithsonian's natural history collections. All public Smithsonian museums are open and have been determined safe for visitors and staff. [...more]
Two studies appearing in the Aug. 25 issue of the journal Nature provide new insights into a cosmic accident that has been streaming X-rays toward Earth since late March. NASA's Swift satellite first alerted astronomers to intense and unusual high-energy flares from the new source in the constellation Draco. [...more]
Meg studies intergroup competition in white‐faced capuchin monkeys by tracking them through radio telemetry collars and observing their behaviors. [...more]
The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, more commonly known as the Jefferson bible, is a volume created by Thomas Jefferson containing passages he chose from the four Gospels of the New Testament. Jefferson cut these passages out and pasted them on to blank pieces of paper which were then bound into a book. [...] [...more]
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