Since its doors first opened in 1910, the National Museum of Natural History has inspired curiosity and learning about the natural world and our place in it. Building upon the strong foundation of our extensive collections, the staff of the museum have been at the forefront of essential scientific exploration and research, and groundbreaking public exhibition and education. This slideshow and the website (www.mnh.si.edu/onehundredyears/) is a living documentary of the Museum’s 100-year history.

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Donated to the Smithsonian by the Wellness Center of Providence, R.I., FluMist joins the ever-growing collection of vaccines in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History’s Division of Medicine and Science.
“The Museum has a significant collection of vaccines covering about 120 years of development – from our earliest specimens of smallpox vaccines and diphtheria antitoxin of the late 19th century to the FluMist of the 21st century,” says Diane Wendt, associate curator in the Division of Medicine and Science at the museum. 

Photo: This image of the newly identified H1N1 influenza virus was taken in the Influenza Laboratory. of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

FluMist is not only the first intranasal administered influenza vaccine in the United States, it’s also the first live virus influenza vaccine approved in the United States. What does this mean? Basically, the flu vaccine most of us have received in the past via injection is a “killed” virus, one that cannot multiply but can still trigger an immune response to prevent future infection. FluMist works by exposing you to a small dose of a very weak form of the virus, which helps your body to develop immunity to the disease.

“FluMist represents a new development in the influenza vaccine,” Wendt explains. “It is a great addition to our collection of vaccines.” —Jessica Porter

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Image right and below left: These two images show measurements of wood thickness on the top board of two different violins used in the study. Red indicates a thickness of 4 millimeters or higher, green a thickness of 2 millimeters or less. Yellow is a mid point between the two thicknesses. 

In a pilot study that used seven Stradivari violins made between 1670 and 1709, the researchers scanned each violin with a CT scanner then used the data to create digital, 3-D images of each violin. Using the scanner they recorded exact digital measurements of the dimensions of each instrument; recorded the volume of material used to build each instrument; recorded the volume of air inside the body of each violin; and measured variations in the thickness of the thin layer of wood that makes up the top board and back board in each instrument. A number of the violins used in the study are from the collection of the Division of Musical Instruments of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The project was a collaboratin between the American History Museum and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Many intricate and previously unseen details were revealed in the digital images, such as repair patches in a violin’s interior, the exact yet subtle slope of each back and front board, and the location of ivory and ebony inlays. Most importantly, when the data for each violin was compared, the researchers could see how the manufacture of the violins changed over time.

“The use of the scanner has improved our access to research data which otherwise would be inaccessible,” says Bruno Frohlich of the Anthropology Department at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. “Obviously, we cannot take these instruments apart and study how they were made. Yet the digital models made with the scanner are factual representatives of the original objects and allow us to study how the instruments’ general architecture and other features have changed over time.”

One discovery the team made was that the volume of wood made in the construction of the violin bodies varied by 41.6 percent from 1670-1709, yet, the volume of air inside the violin bodies varied by only 8.2 percent. “Stradivari tried to keep the air volume in his violins as constant as possible, even as the trend of construction over time moved in the direction of a thinner wood board,” Frohlich says. The thickness of wood used in the construction affects the weight of the instrument, the strength and possibly tone.

With the success of the pilot study, the researchers now plan to analyze and compare data collected from scans of 47 other old instruments made by Stradivari, Nicolo Amati, Joseph Guarneri and other luthiers. When compiled this data should tell an interesting story of how violin making has changed, or remained remarkably the same, in the last 350 years.

Image: This 3-D model reveals the shape and volume of the air mass located inside the body of a Stradivarius violin.

The research team included Bruno Frohlich, Gary Sturm of the Division of Music, Sports and Entertainment at the National Museum of American History; Janine Hinton, of the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History and Else Frohlich of the Department of Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering, Boston University. Support for the project was provided by Siemens Medical Solutions in North Carolina and Materialise in Belgium and Ann Arbor in Michigan.

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When geologist Jeffrey Post recently embarked on an experiment involving the Hope Diamond, at 45.52 carats, the world’s largest deep-blue diamond and one of the most famous and valuable museum objects on earth, he and his colleagues locked themselves and the diamond inside a large vault in the depths of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Photo: The 45.52 carat, deep-blue Hope Diamond is shown here inside its surrounding pendant of 16 pear- and cushion-cut white diamonds. (Photo by Chip Clark)

Post was investigating a phenomenon that the millions of museum visitors who gaze at the diamond on its rotating pedestal behind bulletproof glass will never see—the mysterious red phosphorescent glow the stone emits when exposed to ultraviolet light.

The Hope Diamond’s red glow has long been considered a unique property of that stone. Most blue diamonds produce a bluish-white phosphorescence if exposed to ultraviolet light. The few other diamonds known to emit red phosphorescence were commonly assumed to have been from the even larger original stone from which the Hope was cut.

 “It is something that always intrigued people,” says Post, curator of the Smithsonian’s National Gem and Mineral Collection. “For people who like the whole idea of a curse and that kind of story, the fact that this thing phosphoresces a bloody red color is just too good to be true.”

Photo: The Hope Diamond, right, without its white-diamond pendant, and the 30.62 carat Blue  Hart Diamond.

Post timed his research to occur in the hours after the museum closed for the evening and before it reopened the next day. With guards standing by, the diamond was removed from its pedestal in the Harry Winston Gallery.

“We had a local jeweler come in and take it out of its setting for us,” Post says. (The jeweler returned early the following morning to reset the stone.) Next, Post and fellow diamond investigators from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, Ocean Optics Co. and Pennsylvania State University locked themselves in the vault with the diamond and a portable spectrometer.

 “The clock was running,” Post says, and the scientists got to work. The diamond was positioned on a piece of clay inside a box that could be sealed to keep out ambient light. A fiber-optic cable connected to an ultraviolet light source was extended into the box and “pushed up against the top face of the Hope Diamond,” Post says. Then the diamond was exposed to ultraviolet light for several seconds.

When the light source was turned off, the diamond began to emit its characteristic red glow, a phenomenon that lasts several minutes. A second fiber-optic cable in the box channeled phosphorescent light from the diamond to the spectrometer.

Photo: The Hope Diamond emits a red phosphorescence after being bombarded with ultraviolet light. (Photo by John Nels Hatleberg)

Spectrometers measure wavelengths of light, and the display on a laptop computer hooked to the spectrometer revealed the Hope Diamond’s red light was more than just red. “That was the first time we had been able to see a display of what the phosphorescence spectrum looked like for the Hope Diamond,” Post says.

 “We saw two strong peaks in the spectrum,” Post explains. One was in the red portion of the spectrum, “but the second peak, interestingly, was in the green portion of the spectrum.”

 In the vault that night, the scientists also collected spectrum readings from other diamonds, including the second largest known deep-blue diamond, the 30.62 carat Blue Heart, also in the Smithsonian’s gem collection.

Later, Post and his colleagues hauled their portable spectrometer to New York City’s Diamond District, an area of Manhattan that is a center of the world diamond industry. A dealer known to Post granted the researchers access to dozens of valuable blue diamonds in his safe for further spectrum measurements.

The scientists learned that all blue diamonds show red and green peaks in their phosphorescence spectrum. But the relative intensity of those peaks and the rate at which they decay varies from diamond to diamond, leading to differences in the phosphorescent glow seen by the naked eye.

Diamonds are composed of carbon, and impurities in the carbon give rise to an individual stone’s color. Blue diamonds have relatively high levels of boron impurities but low levels of nitrogen. Post believes that the red phosphorescence emitted to some degree by all blue diamonds is likely due to interaction between those two elements. To test that possibility, he is continuing his study of blue diamonds, using a different kind of instrument that lets him measure the amount of boron and nitrogen in individual stones “and then correlate that with the particular spectra that we’re getting off those diamonds.”

Photo: Photographed through the thick protective glass of the Hope Diamond’s exhibition case, Jeffrey Post returns the diamond to its pedestal in the Harry Winston Gallery of The Janet Annenberg Hooker Hall of Geology, Gems, and Minerals in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. (Photos by Chip Clark)

Post’s work has already yielded knowledge of interest not just to scientists but to diamond sellers and their customers. Because the relative intensity of the blue and red components of each blue diamond’s phosphorescence is unique, the same sort of analysis that the researchers did in the museum vault might be used to fingerprint individual blue diamonds and to distinguish natural stones from man-made ones.

No stranger to spectacular gems, Post still gets a thrill from working with the Hope Diamond. “Every time I look at it I kind of go, ‘My gosh!,’” he says, noting that it is impossible to overlook the stone’s “human history, the curse and the kings, the queens, the thefts.”

 However, the scientist believes that his recent research underscores the famous diamond’s importance as “a unique natural history object.”

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That discovery inspired him to study early Samoan collections in other museums more closely, leading Helgen to discover a second new species of flying fox bat in the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. This specimen had been collected in Samoa even earlier than the first, between 1839 and 1841, and had been mislabeled as a different but similar species. 

Photo: Kristofer Helgen with specimens of flying fox bats in the mammal collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Both species of these newly discovered bats were very large, with wingspans of approximately two and three feet, respectively, and are now believed to be extinct.

The first specimen was collected on the Samoan island of Upolu in 1856 and had gone virtually unnoticed in the Academy of Natural Science’s collections since that time, says Helgen, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Helgen had traveled to Philadelphia specifically to study other kinds of mammals, but it was the bats in the Academy’s collection that grabbed his attention.

“I found this bat in my first hour at the Academy,” he says. Its small body and teeth immediately drew the attention of Helgen, who is an expert on flying fox bats. Drawing on features of the specimen’s skull, teeth and other body parts, Helgen, and his colleagues, Smithsonian mammalogist Don Wilson and museum specialist Lauren Helgen, determined the long-preserved specimen was a species unknown to science. They gave it a new scientific name, Pteropus allenorum.

During the meticulous study of P. allenorum, the scientific team compared its morphology to that of dozens of other flying fox bat specimens in natural history collections around the world—including London, Paris, Berlin, and the United States. It was at this time that Kristofer Helgen discovered a second new Samoan bat species, represented by two specimens in the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

“The distinctions that set this second new species of Samoan bat apart were more subtle than the first,” Helgen says. “Basically all of the teeth of this specimen were larger, particularly the canine teeth; the jaw was much more robust, the skull larger and the muscles involved in chewing bigger.”

Photo: The skull of a flying fox bat from the Smithsonian’s mammal collections. (Photos by John Barrat)

All flying fox bats are herbivores, Helgen says, and the larger jaw and teeth of this bat indicate that it fed upon hard nuts or really thick skinned fruit.  Helgen and his colleagues gave this second new species the scientific name Pteropus coxi; it is the largest kind of bat known from the Polynesian region.

Both new bat species were described in a recent article in American Museum Novitates, a scholarly journal from the American Museum of Natural History in New York. No other specimens of these species are known.

Because they are capable of flight, bats were the only mammals to naturally colonize many of the more remote islands in the southwest Pacific, Kristofer Helgen says. The European discovery and arrival of new influences to Pacific islands in the 1700s and 1800s accelerated the extinction of many native vertebrates, such as birds, lizards and bats, causing many species to go extinct soon after their discovery.

“In forests bats serve a critical role as seed dispersers and plant pollinators,” Helgen says. “It is interesting to consider how the forests of Samoa may have changed with the extinction of these two bats. It is unlikely that the two species of flying fox bats we know still live in Samoa are dispersing the seeds and pollinating the flowers of all of the plant species that these two extinct bats once did.” —John Barrat

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