Nearly 20 years after the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute became the first to produce an Eld’s deer fawn through artificial insemination, SCBI scientists have now contributed to the birth of the first Eld’s deer via in vitro fertilization.
Suzan Murray, chief veterinary medical officer at the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park, recently returned from Hanoi, where she led a team of scientists training pathologists from Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam to better sample, recognize and detect wildlife diseases in hopes of preventing emerging pandemic disease.
Molynocoelia erwini, is a new species of fruit fly from Ecuador recently described by USDA entomologist Allen Norrbom, who works in the Systematic Entomology Laboratory of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington,...
Ornithologists Carla Dove and Storrs Olson used 700- to 1,100-year-old feathers from a long extinct species of Hawaiian ibis to help determine the bird’s place in the ibis family tree. The feathers are the only known plumage of any of the prehistorically extinct birds that once inhabited the Hawaiian Islands.
Bruce Smith, anthropology curator at the Smithsonian’s Naitonal Museum of Natural History, talks about the Smithsonian explorations in the 1880s to determine who built the ancient earthen mounds in eastern North America.
This image shows one of three newly discovered North Atlantic deep sea acorn worms–Purple species–recently captured by scientists from deep in the mid-Atlantic Ocean. These worms are members of the family Torquaratoridae. DNA analysis conducted...
Meet Smithsonian scientist Justin Touchon, a National Science Foundation (NSF) postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.
Justin’s work focuses on developmental ecology and reproductive plasticity of the hourglass treefrog (Dendropsophus ebraccatus) and red-eyed treefrog (Agalychnis callidryas). Justin and his advisor, Karen Warkentin, were the first to have witnessed the frogs laying eggs in water, in addition to doing so on land — something with major implications for the evolutionary biology of similar creatures.
Astronomers are confident the Cygnus X-1 system contains a black hole, and with these latest studies they have remarkably precise values of its mass, spin, and distance from Earth.
Science Spotlight
