The Smithsonian Libraries offer a vast amount of resources to the general public. This video gives you a peek into the amazing world of discovery and preservation offered by the Library. It also contains links to learn more.

This composite image of a galaxy illustrates how the intense gravity of a super massive black hole can be tapped to generate immense power. The image contains X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), optical light obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope (gold) and radio waves from the NSF’s Very Large Array (pink).

This multi-wavelength view shows 4C+29.30, a galaxy located some 850 million light years from Earth. The radio emission comes from two jets of particles that are speeding at millions of miles per hour away from a super massive black hole at the center of the galaxy. The estimated mass of the black hole is about 100 million times the mass of our Sun. The ends of the jets show larger areas of radio emission located outside the galaxy.

The X-ray data show a different aspect of this galaxy, tracing the location of hot gas. The bright X-rays in the center of the image mark a pool of million-degree gas around the black hole. Some of this material may eventually be consumed by the black hole, and the magnetized, whirlpool of gas near the black hole could in turn, trigger more output to the radio jet.

An X-ray image of 4C+29.30, a galaxy located some 850 million light years from Earth.

The bright spots in X-ray and radio emission on the outer edges of the galaxy, near the ends of the jets, are caused by extremely high energy electrons following curved paths around magnetic field lines. They show where a jet generated by the black hole has plowed into clumps of material in the galaxy (mouse over the image for the location of these bright spots). Much of the energy of the jet goes into heating the gas in these clumps, and some of it goes into dragging cool gas along the direction of the jet. Both the heating and the dragging can limit the fuel supply for the super massive black hole, leading to temporary starvation and stopping its growth. This feedback process is thought to cause the observed correlation between the mass of the super massive black hole and the combined mass of the stars in the central region or bulge of a galaxy.

These results were reported in two different papers. The first, which concentrated on the effects of the jets on the galaxy, is available online and was published in the May 10, 2012 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. It is led by Aneta Siemiginowska from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, MA and the co-authors are Lukasz Stawarz, from the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science in Yoshinodai, Japan; Teddy Cheung from the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, DC; Thomas Aldcroft from CfA; Jill Bechtold from University of Arizona in Tucson, AZ; Douglas Burke from CfA; Daniel Evans from CfA; Joanna Holt from Leiden University in Leiden, The Netherlands; Marek Jamrozy from Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland; and Giulia Migliori from CfA. The second, which concentrated on the supermassive black hole, isavailable online and was published in the October 20, 2012 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. It is led by Malgorzata Sobolewska from CfA, and the co-authors are Aneta Siemiginowska, Giulia Migliori, Lukasz Stawarz, Marek Jamrozy, Daniel Evans, and Teddy Cheung.

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra’s science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass.

They’ve got no roots or veins and grow in hanging pendants or tightly packed mats attached to stones, soil and wood. Called by some “the secret plants that surround us,” the bryophytes (mosses and liverworts) were the first plants to colonize dry land 475 million years ago. Today more than 26,000 bryophyte species populate the earth.

Now, a recent experiment with a number of tropical species of bryophytes in western Panama suggests that some of these plants may be able to adapt to the warming temperatures that global warming will bring.

Tropical moss of the species Leucoloma cruegerianum can bee seen growing to the right on this branch at a study site in western Panama. (Photo by Sebastian Wagner)

Researchers from the University of Oldenburg, Germany and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, collected 15 individual plants each of 9 common species of bryophytes found growing at cool higher altitudes in the tropics and transplanted them at lower altitudes where temperatures were an average of 2.6 to 3.6 degrees Celsius warmer.

In the tropics bryophytes are scarce in the warm, drier lowland areas but prolific in higher mountain areas where temperatures are lower and the humidity is higher. As botanist Gerald Zotz, of the University of Oldenburg and the Smithsonian explains, a bryophyte’s survival is a balancing act between its daytime intake of carbon during photosynthesis and its nighttime loss of carbon through respiration. This balance is dependent on temperature and humidity.

Specimens of pendant mosses of the Frullania species hang from wires in a study plot in western Panama. (Photo by Sebastian Wagner)

Higher temperatures and dry conditions can reduce daytime photosynthesis in bryophytes, leading to lower carbon intake. Warmer, dry conditions also increase carbon loss at night through higher respiration rates. (Earlier studies have shown that at optimum temperatures bryophytes lose at night on average 60 percent of the carbon they gained the previous day.) If a bryophyte’s carbon loss is greater than its carbon intake over an extended period the plant will die.

For the experiment, bryophytes growing at altitudes of 1,200 meters were transplanted in study plots at 500 meters. Bryophytes collected at an altitude of 500 meters were transplanted in study plots at sea level. The researchers then observed the transplanted plants for nearly two years to determine how the bryophytes responded in the short term and long term to the warmer temperatures and drier conditions of their new environments.

A majority of the bryophytes transplanted downhill to warmer spots died, but “the most striking result of our study was the finding that at least a few samples of most of the tested species survived higher temperatures for at least 20 months and totally recovered growth during this time,” botanists Sebastian Wagner, M.Y. Bader and Zotz write in a paper which appeared recently in the journal Plant Biology.

Research student Steve González takes growth measurements in a study plot of transplanted bryophytes at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute where scientists are assessing the ability of these plants to acclimate to global warming. (Photo by Sebastian Wagner)

“All species have a few individuals that can apparently deal with increased temperatures of 3 degrees Celsius,” Zotz says. “This indicates that there is indeed quite a bit of potential for acclimation.”

In light of these new findings, “it may be puzzling why we do not find more of these species in the lowlands,” Zotz points out. In fact, he continues, some highland bryophytes are found living in the warmer lowlands but they are usually restricted to moist microsites, such as the pendant mosses growing on Annona glabra trees around Lake Gatun, in Panama. Increased moisture may weaken the adverse impact of higher temperatures on bryophytes in the lowlands.

Bryophytes living in the lowlands in the tropics already seem to “live at the edge,” of their temperature tolerance,” Zotz adds. In an upcoming experiment “we are planning to expose lowland species to higher temperatures to see whether they are already at the very limit of their adaptive range,” Zotz says. “If this were true the predicted temperature increases in the future would have serious implications for lowland habitats.”

As the researchers conclude in their paper many species of bryophytes “from higher altitudes indeed will experience problems at higher temperatures,” with their population ranges potentially being shifted uphill.

Still, a second scenario for the impact of rising temperatures on bryophytes in the tropics is for “individuals having the acclimation potential to maintain populations at the present altitude, evolving to be better adapted to high temperatures,” the study says. Some species with a large acclimation potential might even benefit from global changes due to elevated carbon dioxide concentrations and/or reduced competition.  –John Barrat

The Smithsonian Libraries will open its new exhibition “Whales: From Bone to Book” in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History on May 25. This exhibition is a collaboration between the Libraries and the museum’s Department of Paleobiology. “Whales: From Bone to Book” will be on display through April 2014.

Accompanying this exhibition will be a free symposium: “Whale Research at the Smithsonian: Past, Present and Future,” at the National Museum of Natural History on Thursday, June 6. The event is free and open to the public. For a symposium schedule, click here.

Click Smithsonian Libaries blog to learn more about the exhibition. 

Have you ever wondered what it would look like if more than 2,000 planets circled a single star? Wonder no longer, because here’s the video. (It works best if you click the full screen icon to the right of “HD” at bottom.)

This scientific visualization is much more than a dizzying dance of whirling worlds. It shows 2,299 planets found by NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting spacecraft. All of the planets are drawn to scale with accurate sizes, orbital periods, and orbital distances relative to the star. (The large white circles represent the orbits of Mercury, Venus and Earth on the same scale.)

The video was created by Alex Parker, a planetary scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “I wanted to convey the astounding number of planet candidates Kepler has found in a way that would really impact the person watching this video,” Parker said.

The orbs in the video represent the majority of planet candidates identified by Kepler to date. Astronomers refer to them as “candidates” because some of the signals will prove to be false positives. However, researchers expect that most will turn out to be real worlds.

These planet candidates actually orbit 1,770 stars. (Some stars have more than one planet.) The worlds range in size from 1/3 to 84 times the diameter of Earth. Colors represent their estimated temperatures, with red indicating the hottest and blue the coldest planets.

Kepler finds planets by looking for a star to dim slightly as the planet crosses in front of it, which is known as a transit. Watching the video, you’ll notice that there are always transits happening. That’s because Kepler is watching so many stars that even though transits are rare and fleeting, it will always see several occurring at any moment in time.

Amazingly, up until a couple of decades ago, we didn’t know for sure that any planets existed beyond our solar system. And yet in all the time we looked, they were always there waiting to be found – hiding in plain sight.–By Christine Pulliam, SAO

For more examples of Parker’s work, see the Six-Planet Sonata of Kepler-11 and the Music of the Exploding Spheres.

The impact of industrial fishing on coastal ecosystems has been studied for many years. But how it affects food webs in the open ocean―a vast region that covers almost half of the Earth’s surface―has not been very clear. So a team of Smithsonian and Michigan State University scientists and their colleagues looked to the ancient bones of seabirds for answers, revealing some of the dramatic changes that have happened within open-ocean food webs since the onset of industrial fishing. The team’s research is published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

A Hawaiian petrel flies over part of its Pacific Ocean foraging grounds. (Photo by Jim Denny)

Few records of species that live in the open ocean date back more than 60 years, and the sheer size of open-ocean regions makes their food webs difficult to study. The Hawaiian petrel (Pterodroma sandwichensis), a crow-sized oceanic bird, offered the team a solution. These birds range widely over the northeast Pacific, and their diets integrate food webs from that vast area.

What the petrels have eaten is recorded in the chemistry of their bones. By extracting protein from bones and feathers and studying stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen in the protein, the scientists were able to assess the birds’ diet and how it changed over centuries. What they found from bones 100 to 4,000 years old were nitrogen isotope ratios that were consistently high, indicating a diet of relatively large prey. Those less than a century old, after industrial fishing started, had low ratios, revealing a shift to smaller fish, squid and other prey.

“The question is, have the effects of open-ocean fishing gone beyond targeted species, like tuna,” said Anne Wiley, lead author, Smithsonian postdoctoral researcher and former MSU doctoral student. “Our study is among the very first to show that it has, and because Hawaiian petrels eat such a wide variety of prey over a large area, our results suggest that fishery influence may be widespread and profound in the Pacific. Understanding the influence of fisheries on open-ocean food webs has been one of the great mysteries of biological oceanography.”

In this image lead author Anne Wiley examines a newly discovered, ancient Hawaiian petrel skull from Puu Naio Cave, Maui. After radiocarbon dating, the team learned that this bird died around 1400 A.D. (Photo by Andreanna Welch)

The team’s isotope records are unusual because they are from all the known populations of the species, which breed on different Hawaiian Islands. The records show that separate populations of Hawaiian petrels hunted in different areas of the open ocean for thousands of years. The scientists revealed a foraging shift in multiple Hawaiian petrel populations, emphasizing that the petrels’ diets changed across a very broad expanse of the ocean. This sudden shift in the past 100 years suggests a relatively rapid change in the composition of oceanic food webs in the Northeast Pacific.

“Conservation efforts for endangered seabirds take place mainly on land at breeding colonies where there are obvious threats like introduced predators,” said Helen James, coauthor and research zoologist at Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “Our study suggests we should pay more attention to the lives of these birds at sea.”

Detecting alien worlds presents a significant challenge since they are small, faint, and close to their stars. The two most prolific techniques for finding exoplanets are radial velocity (looking for wobbling stars) and transits (looking for dimming stars). A team at Tel Aviv University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) has just discovered an exoplanet using a new method that relies on Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

“We are looking for very subtle effects. We needed high quality measurements of stellar brightnesses, accurate to a few parts per million,” said team member David Latham of the CfA.

This artist’s conception shows Kepler-76b orbiting its host star, which has been tidally distorted into a slight football shape (exaggerated here for effect). The planet was detected using the BEER algorithm, which looked for brightness changes in the star as the planet orbits due to relativistic BEaming, Ellipsoidal variations, and Reflected light from the planet. (Image by David Aguilar)

“This was only possible because of the exquisite data NASA is collecting with the Kepler spacecraft,” added lead author Simchon Faigler of Tel Aviv University, Israel.

Although Kepler was designed to find transiting planets, this planet was not identified using the transit method. Instead, it was discovered using a technique first proposed by Avi Loeb of the CfA and his colleague Scott Gaudi (now at Ohio State University) in 2003. (Coincidentally, they developed their theory while visiting the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where Einstein once worked.)

The new method looks for three small effects that occur simultaneously as a planet orbits the star. Einstein’s “beaming” effect causes the star to brighten as it moves toward us, tugged by the planet, and dim as it moves away. The brightening results from photons “piling up” in energy, as well as light getting focused in the direction of the star’s motion due to relativistic effects.

This graphic shows Kepler-76b’s orbit around a yellow-white, type F star located 2,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus. Although Kepler-76b was identified using the BEER effect (see above), it was later found to exhibit a grazing transit, crossing the edge of the star’s face as seen from Earth. (Image by Dood Evan)

“This is the first time that this aspect of Einstein’s theory of relativity has been used to discover a planet,” said co-author Tsevi Mazeh of Tel Aviv University.

The team also looked for signs that the star was stretched into a football shape by gravitational tides from the orbiting planet. The star would appear brighter when we observe the “football” from the side, due to more visible surface area, and fainter when viewed end-on. The third small effect was due to starlight reflected by the planet itself.

Once the new planet was identified, it was confirmed by Latham using radial velocity observations gathered by the TRES spectrograph at Whipple Observatory in Arizona, and by Lev Tal-Or (Tel Aviv University) using the SOPHIE spectrograph at the Haute-Provence Observatory in France. A closer look at the Kepler data also showed that the planet transits its star, providing additional confirmation.

“Einstein’s planet,” formally known as Kepler-76b, is a “hot Jupiter” that orbits its star every 1.5 days. Its diameter is about 25 percent larger than Jupiter and it weighs twice as much. It orbits a type F star located about
2,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus.

The planet is tidally locked to its star, always showing the same face to it, just as the Moon is tidally locked to Earth. As a result, Kepler-76b broils at a temperature of about 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit.

Interestingly, the team found strong evidence that the planet has extremely fast jet-stream winds that carry the heat around it. As a result, the hottest point on Kepler-76b isn’t the substellar point (“high noon”) but a location offset by about 10,000 miles. This effect has only been observed once before, on HD 189733b, and only in infrared light with the Spitzer Space Telescope. This is the first time optical observations have shown evidence of alien jet stream winds at work.

Although the new method can’t find Earth-sized worlds using current technology, it offers astronomers a unique discovery opportunity. Unlike radial velocity searches, it doesn’t require high-precision spectra. Unlike transits, it doesn’t require a precise alignment of planet and star as seen from Earth.

“Each planet-hunting technique has its strengths and weaknesses. And each novel technique we add to the arsenal allows us to probe planets in new regimes,” said CfA’s Avi Loeb.

Kepler-76b was identified by the BEER algorithm, whose acronym stands for relativistic BEaming, Ellipsoidal, and Reflection/emission modulations. BEER was developed by Professor Tsevi Mazeh and his student, Simchon Faigler, at Tel Aviv University, Israel.

The paper announcing this discovery has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and is available online at

http://arxiv.org/abs/1304.6841

What can you do to bring some of the Smithsonian’s 137 million objects to life? Put them in 3-D!

This is a full-time job for two of the Smithsonian’s very own “laser cowboys,” Vince Rossi and Adam Metallo, who work in the Smithsonian’s 3D Digitization Program Office. They work hard to document, in very high three-dimensional detail, many of the institution’s many priceless and important collections so that the objects are available for research, education and general interest.

Click here for Smithsonian 3-D Digitization on Facebook:

There is little doubt that human activity is affecting planet Earth, but just how much? And is it all negative? Rick Potts is the director of the Human Origins Program and curator of anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History. In his nearly 30 years at the Smithsonian, Potts has studied the relationship between environmental change and human adaptation, leading excavations in the East African Rift Valley. In the interview below, Potts explores the human period of Earth’s history, the Anthropocene, and what it means for the future by looking far into the past.

Rick Potts studies and samples a portion of the long climate core obtained by drilling at the early human site of Olorgesailie. The core contains clues to the climate of the past 500,000 years, associated with the origin of our species. (Photo by Jennifer Clark)

Q: What exactly is the Anthropocene?

Potts: The Anthropocene is sometimes viewed as a new geological era on earth: the age of humans. But for many of us, that age has been so short-lived at this point that it’s more of a way of thinking about ourselves–acknowledging the enormous impact of human beings on planet earth.

Q: When was the beginning of the Anthropocene?

Potts: Asking to pinpoint the beginning of the Anthropocene is like asking, “When was the beginning of being human?” One could point to walking upright and making tools to do things and manipulate the world. Or one could look to recent times of the enormous population explosion since the industrial age. But there are all sorts of steps in between and I would say that the making of a stone tool more than 2 million years ago and controlling fire nearly a million years ago were the first real signs that something new was on the scene.

Approximately 2 million years old the Kanjera Stone Tool from Kanjera South, Kenya, is the oldest man-made object in the Smithsonian. According to anthropologist Rick Potts at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, the start of the Anthropocene is marked by the use of the first man-made tools.

Q: What are three major ways humans are impacting the earth’s ecosystems?

Potts: Humans control six times more water – fresh water – than is free flowing across the continents. Eighty-three precent of all viable land on earth is occupied, used or altered by human beings, so the imprint of human beings on the landscape is extensive. We have done so much to alter the ocean. Just from silts eroded from agricultural land into the ocean, we can totally alter the nature of marine ecosystems.

Q: What do you say to people who say global warming is a hoax?

Potts: I would say that the scientific evidence is really profound that the earth is warming. These problems are going to need to be solved by a concerted action across the world. Denying climate change is unfortunately part of the range of the ways people try to adjust to a fairly difficult situation.

In September 2012, Rick Potts’s team recovered the first long climate core from an early human site by drilling to the floor of the East African Rift Valley in southern Kenya. The core reached sediments more than 160 meters below the ground. (Photo by Jennifer Clark)

Q: Can we reverse some of the negative effects of the Anthropocene?

Potts: I think there are some things that are too late. For example, the use of carbon-based fuels. Even if we stop right now the earth is going to warm immensely. Population increase – it’s hard to get people to stop having fulfilling lives with families. I think a vision for the Anthropocene is really a matter of–do you try to lower the river or raise the bridge? Lowering the river is really hard to do when the flood of Anthropocene events are coming closer to our own communities. Is raising the bridge an option? Well, I think we need to look at a third option: that is, accommodate the rising tide of problems that the Anthropocene poses and realize we’re all in the same ship together. I believe we need to figure out a way to have a ship that is larger than ourselves and includes as much biological diversity and cultural diversity that can fit into the large boat. –Emily Grebenstein

Rope, golf balls, sweat pants, bottles and aluminum cans are a few of the discarded items biologist Matt Klope says he has found inside the stomachs of the dead whales he has helped necropsy over the years in and around Puget Sound, Washington. A necropsy is a common procedure done to determine an animal’s cause of death and take blood, skin, blubber and organ samples.

Laid out on the floor of the Marine Mammal Collection building at the Garber Facility in Suitland, Md., the recently acquired skeleton of a gray whale is a much welcome addition. The large skull at left is from a fin whale stranded at Cape Hatteras. Standing from left are Maya Yamato, Museum Specialist John Ososky, Charlie Potter and Marine Mammal Curator James Meade. (Photo by Don Hurlbert)

“They all have plastic in their stomachs, every one of them,” Klope says of California gray whales in particular. “Gray whales are bottom feeders. They don’t feed in the mid-water column but take bites out of the ocean floor and then filter it. So anything that’s on the floor they eat, and that includes a lot of plastic.”

Despite this, gray whales have made a remarkable comeback in California, says Klope, a member of the Central Puget Sound Marine Mammal Stranding Network. “They were endangered years ago but today gray whales are plentiful. They are everywhere up and down the West Coast. We get many reports of dead ones.” So Klope was shocked, he says, when he learned the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., did not have a California gray whale skeleton in its research collection.

A team of volunteers prepares to salvage the skeleton of a gray whale on Whidbey Island in April 2012. (Photo by M.J. Adams)

“One of our goals for many, many years has been to acquire the complete skeleton of a California gray whale,” says Charles Potter, Collection Manager of the Natural History’s Marine Mammal collection. “The problem has always been, of course, getting a massive whale shipped here from the West Coast either unprepared, which would mean we’d have to freeze it, or as a clean skeleton.”

Klope, who is also manager of the Bird Strike Prevention Program for aircraft at the Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, has been shipping bird specimens to Carla Dove in the Natural History Museum’s Ornithology Department for many years. He was sensitive to the museum’s need for research specimens, no matter how large they may be. “I’ll take care of it,” he told Potter.

Volunteers make the first cut through the blubber of the whale. (Photo by M.J. Adams)

So when a 38-foot long 30-ton gray whale was spotted floating near Camano Island State Park, in Puget Sound, in April 2012, Klope and what he calls his “army of volunteers” were ready. First he arranged to have the whale towed ashore at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station. He also alerted Potter who flew out with Smithsonian Buck Post-Doctoral Fellow Maya Yamato to help dissect the whale and salvage its bones.

“It was a young adult male about 7 to 8 years old and 38 feet long,” Potter recalls. “We spent the better part of a week working up this whale and collecting its skeleton with an amazing group of volunteers from the Puget Sound Marine Mammal Stranding Network. We got a huge response from local volunteers. Every bit of that whale was taken off the beach by hand.”

Charlie Potter, left, and Matt Klope examine the spinal column of a gray whale during the salvaging of its skeleton on Whidbey Island, Wash. (Photo by M.J. Adams)

Next the bones were lashed to plastic pallets and placed into open-top plastic drums then submerged back into the ocean at the Naval Air Station for a number of months. This allowed fish, crabs and other sea creatures to feast on the excess bits of meat and connective tissue still attached to the bones.

Later the bones were recovered, dried, and barnacles removed by hand.  Next, members of the Fleet Logistics Center Puget Sound Naval Air Station Whidbey Island volunteered on weekends to carefully wrap each bone in shipping paper and secure them in wooden shipping crates.

Volunteers clean barnacles from the gray whale’s bones after the bones had been submerged in the ocean for a number of months. (Photo by M.J. Adams)

Finally, Klope arranged for the free transport of the bones aboard a C-130 on a Military Training Logistics Flight from Whidbey Island to Andrews Air Force Base in Md., were staff from the Museum Support Center were able to pick them up and drive them to their new home in a museum collections building in Suitland, Md.

“I think Charley was a little afraid the bones were still going to be a little smelly and oozing when they got to him,” Klope says. “But they would never accept anything like that aboard a military flight, so the bones were well cleaned and shelf ready when he got them.”

What killed this particular gray whale is undetermined.

Examination of its skeleton back at the Smithsonian by Potter revealed the whale had a broken thoracic vertebra and two of its cervical vertebra were damaged. “It got a good whomp, probably from a ship strike or something,” Potter says. Bone tissue growth at the site of the breaks show the whale survived this injury however.

Charlie Potter and Maya Yamato examine a section of the gray whale’s spinal column at the Smithsonian’s marine mammal storage building in Suitland, Md. (Photo by John Barrat)

Klope believes the whale may have starved to death as it was thin. Its stomach contained shrimp and crab, sea grass and bark chips, bits of plastic, string, rope, fabric and other items.

“From the research side of things this is a really important acquisition and a major addition to our collection,” Potter says. “The Marine Mammal Stranding Network volunteers in Washington were amazing, as was the can-do attitude of the folks at the Naval Air Station. With their help we finally got this done after many years.”

In the meantime Klope is awaiting a call from his stranding network for sightings of other expired gray whales. His plans are to acquire a second skeleton for the Smithsonian. “What they’ve got is a young male,” he says. “They now need an adult female.” –by John Barrat

When it comes to brain size, Homo sapiens generally get the most credit. But to find the baby mammals with the proportionally largest brains on the planet, Smithsonian scientists had to search in Antarctica. In a study published online in April, they found Weddell seal pups have the most developed brains at birth recorded for any mammal so far.

By the time they are born, baby Weddell seal brains have already reached 70 percent of their adult size. (The brain of a human infant is a mere 25 percent of its adult size.) But the researchers found this rapid development carries a hefty price tag. Click here to read more at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center’s Shorelines blog.

Scientists from the Smithsonian and the University of Rhode Island have found unsuspected linkages between the oxidation state of iron in volcanic rocks and variations in the chemistry of the deep Earth. Not only do the trends run counter to predictions from recent decades of study, they belie a role for carbon circulating in the deep Earth. The team’s research was published May 2 in Science Express.

Molten magma erupted onto the seafloor freezes to glass that contains clues to its origin in Earth’s deep interior and ancient past (field of view ~1 cm). Volcanic glasses like this one may reveal a link between Earth’s oxidation state and the deep carbon cycle. (Image credit: Glenn Macpherson and Tim Gooding)

Elizabeth Cottrell, lead author and research geologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and Katherine Kelley at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography measured the oxidation state of iron, which is the amount of iron that has a 3+ versus a 2+ electronic charge, in bits of magma that froze to a glass when they hit the freezing waters and crushing pressures of the sea floor.

Due to the high precision afforded by the spectroscopic technique they used, the researchers found very subtle variations in the iron-oxidation state that had been overlooked by previous investigations. The variations correlate with what Cottrell described as the “fingerprints” of the deep Earth rocks that melted to produce the lavas—but not in the way previous researchers had predicted. The erupted lavas that have lower concentrations of 3+ iron also have higher concentrations of elements such as barium, thorium, rubidium and lanthanum, that concentrate in the lavas, rather than staying in their deep Earth home. More importantly, the oxidation state of iron also correlates with elements that became enriched in lavas long ago, and now, after billions of years, show elevated ratios of radiogenic isotopes. Because radiogenic isotopic ratios cannot be modified during rock melting and eruption, Cottrell called this “a dead ringer for the source of the melt itself.”

Carbon is one of the “geochemical goodies” that tends to become enriched in the lava when rocks melt. “Despite is importance to life on this planet, carbon is a really tricky element to get a handle on in melts from the deep Earth,” said Cottrell. “That is because carbon also volatilizes and is lost to the ocean waters such that it can’t easily be quantified in the lavas themselves. As humans we are very focused on what we see up here on the surface. Most people probably don’t recognize that the vast majority of carbon—the backbone of all life—is located in the deep Earth, below the surface—maybe even 90 percent of it.”

The rocks that the team analyzed that were reduced also showed a greater influence of having melted in the presence of carbon than those that were oxidized. “And this makes sense because for every atom of carbon present at depth it has to steal oxygen away from iron as it ascends toward the surface,” said Cottrell. This is because carbon is not associated with oxygen at depth, it exists on its own, like in the mineral diamond. But by the time carbon erupts in lava, it is surrounded by oxygen. In this way, concludes Cottrell, “carbon provides both a mechanism to reduce the iron and also a reasonable explanation for why these reduced lavas are enriched in ways we might expect from melting a carbon-bearing rock.”

Douglas Owsley, the division head for physical anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, presented today a forensic analysis of 17th-century human remains proving that survival cannibalism took place in historic Jamestown. The findings answer a long-standing question among historians about the occurrence of cannibalism at Jamestown during the deadly winter of 1609–1610 known as the “starving time”—a period during which about 80 percent of the colonists died. The announcement was made with chief archeologist William Kelso from the Jamestown Rediscovery Project at Preservation Virginia, and historian James Horn, vice president of research and historical interpretation at Colonial Williamsburg; each expert provided context about the discovery and the history of the site.

Owsley has worked closely with Kelso and his team of archaeologists since 1996, examining skeletal remains to help researchers understand the lives of individual colonial settlers in the Chesapeake. This particular incomplete human skull and tibia (shin bone) were excavated by Jamestown archeologists in 2012 as part of a 20-year excavation of James Fort. The remains were unusual due to their location and extensive fragmentation, so Kelso approached the Smithsonian’s forensic anthropologist for a comprehensive analysis.

This photo shows a forensic facial reconstruction produced by StudioEIS of Brooklyn, N.Y. in consultation with Smithsonian researcher based on human remains excavated in James Fort, Jamestown, Va. by William Kelso, chief archeologist at the Jamestown Rediscovery Project. (All photos by Don Hurlbert)

Owsley and his research team identified a number of features on the skull and tibia that indicated the individual was cannibalized. Four shallow chops to the forehead represent a failed first attempt to open the skull. The back of the head was then struck by a series of deep, forceful chops from a small hatchet or cleaver. The final blow split the cranium open. Sharp cuts and punctures mark the sides and bottom of the mandible, reflecting efforts to remove tissue from the face and throat using a knife.

This photo shows 17th-century human remains that were excavated from James Fort, Jamestown, Va., by William Kelso, chief archeologist at Jamestown Rediscovery Project, and analyzed by Douglas Owsley, division head for physical anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

“The desperation and overwhelming circumstances faced by the James Fort colonists during the winter of 1609–1610 are reflected in the postmortem treatment of this girl’s body,” said Owsley. “The recovered bone fragments have unusually patterned cuts and chops that reflect tentativeness, trial and complete lack of experience in butchering animal remains. Nevertheless, the clear intent was to dismember the body, removing the brain and flesh from the face for consumption.”

This photo shows four shallow chops to an incomplete skull excavated in James Fort, Jamestown, Va., by William Kelso, chief archeologist at the Jamestown Rediscovery Project.

Through specialized scientific analyses, Smithsonian scientists determined details about the life and story of this 14-year-old girl from England. By analyzing the dental development of the third molar and the growth stage of her shin bone, the research team determined that “Jane” was approximately 14 years old when she died. The cause of death could not be determined from the remains, estimated to be less than 10 percent of the complete skeleton.

Through a combination of digital and medical technologies, Smithsonian researchers led the effort to reconstruct the girl’s likeness through forensic facial reconstruction. After scanning the incomplete remains of the fragmented skull with the museum’s CT scanner, a virtual model of the skull was pieced together digitally. This digital rendering was sent to the Medical Modeling company to print a three-dimensional replica of the reconstructed skull. Finally, StudioEIS, in Brooklyn, N.Y., worked with Smithsonian scientists to create a forensic facial reconstruction of the girl’s likeness.

On May 3, the facial reconstruction will be on display in the National Museum of Natural History’s popular “Written in Bone: Forensic Files of the 17th Century Chesapeake” exhibition, alongside other materials and information about Smithsonian forensic science. The skeletal remains will be on display at Historic Jamestowne near the discovery site on Jamestown Island.

Miniature camels and horses, a rhinoceros and a giant bear-dog are among fossils unearthed in the recent excavations of the Panama Canal expansion project. These findings shed light on events millions of years ago that altered the Earth’s climate and dramatically changed the geographic distribution of plants and animals.

Juvenile dentition of Arretotherium merdionale, a hippo-like animal, from the Las Cascadas Formation, Panama Canal area. (Photo courtesy Florida Museum of Natural History)

On Friday, 26 Apr., scientists from the Smithsonian in Panama including Carlos Jaramillo, staff scientist and Bruce McFadden, visiting scientist and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Florida, and officials from the Panama Canal Authority including Engineer Ilya Marotta, Vice President of Engineering and Administration of Programs, gathered to celebrate the major accomplishments of an initial 5-year partnership that resulted in:

• Ten new species described based on fossil finds
• More than 6,000 samples collected and georeferenced
• New estimates for the timing of the tectonic and volcanic events that contributed to the formation of the land-bridge
• 50 scientific publications
• An international symposium at the Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America, 2012
• Presentations at many other international scientific meetings
• News reports in Panama and in major international media outlets
  

  University of Florida doctoral student Aldo Rincon holds the lower jaw of Aguascalietia panamaensis, a newly described species of ancient camel. The 20-million-year-old specimen was recovered from the Las Cascadas formation in Panama. (Photo by Jeff Gage, University of Florida)

“This is a win-win situation for both institutions and for the people of Panama,” said Elena Lombardo, from the Institute’s Office of External Affairs. “Just as the Panama Canal contributes to the world as a vital waterway for commerce, ongoing research in Panama contributes to the world’s understanding of geological history and the evolution of the plant and animal diversity in the American tropics.”

One of the most important results was the project’s contribution to training the next generation of scientists. The international division of the U.S. National Science Foundation granted an additional $4 million to researchers from the Smithsonian and the University of Florida to continue the project.

Following blasting to expand the Panama Canal, geologists and paleontologists organized by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute rush in to map, describe and recover any fossils they can find that might reveal more about the prehistoric ecology of Panama.

“These two projects, along with support from Panama’s national office of science and technology, SENACYT, have led to undergraduate and graduate-level training for students here and in the U.S.,” said Oris Sanjur, STRI’s Associate Director for Science Administration. “Panamanian doctoral student Catalina Pimiento organized the first paleobiology video telecourse for Panamanian students. The project also led to the first major in geology at the University of Panama, the first geology class at the Universidad Tecnológica de Panamá and major collaborations with the Universidad Nacional de Chiriquí, in western Panama.”

When the Panama Canal was built, enough rock was removed to bury Manhattan under 12 feet of rubble: 200 million cubic meters of earth. Now the slender waterway connecting the Pacific and the Caribbean is being widened to let through more and bigger ships, moving another 152 million cubic meters. This created the opportunity of a lifetime for geologists and paleontologists to understand Earth-changing events.

This fossil from a three-toed browsing horse, Anchitherium clarencei, found in the Panama Canal earthworks, is now in the collection of the University of Florida. (Photo courtesy Aldo Rincon)

More than 100 years ago, the scientific collaboration between Panama and the Smithsonian began when scientists conducted the Panama Biological Survey, basically an environmental impact statement for the construction of the Canal. From a storehouse full of fossil samples still to be processed and geological data to be analyzed, expect announcements of new findings about Panama’s unique geological and biological history for many years to come.