Jan. 6, 2015—As the year’s first blanket of snow coated the Washington, D.C. area today, giant panda Bao Bao at the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park spent much of the morning playing in it for the very first time. The 16 month-old panda cub tumbled down the hill in her outdoor enclosure, climbed trees and pounced on her mother Mei Xiang.

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How 3D technology is used at the Smithsonian to create world class exhibits!

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Yellowstone National Park is one of the world’s most protected ecosystems. But that’s still not enough to keep its grizzly bears completely safe. Click here for show times of Smithsonian Channel’s “Mass Extinction: Life at the Brink.”

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When two red panda babies are born in critical condition at Smithsonian’s National Zoo, caretakers make the crucial decision to raise them by hand.

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Ever wonder why only male peacocks have such extravagant plumage? We ask caretaker Gwendolyn Cooper at Smithsonian’s National Zoo to explain.

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The moon passed between the Earth and the sun on Thursday, Oct. 23. While avid stargazers in North America looked up to watch the spectacle, the best vantage point was several hundred kilometers above the North Pole.

Astrophysicist Patrick McCauley from the Smithsonian’s Astrophysical Observatory explains how the Hinode satellite, which has a polar orbit, was in the perfect position to record a very different view of the solar eclipse.

What does the footage from the satellite show?

McCauley: We are looking at an annular eclipse that was observed by an X-ray telescope on the Hinode satellite. An annular eclipse occurs when the moon passes directly between the observer and the sun. In this type of eclipse the moon’s shadow is not quite large enough to cover the full disc of the sun, resulting in a visible ring.

The x-ray telescope on the Hinode satellite is used to monitor the outer atmosphere of the sun, called the corona. The sun’s outer atmosphere is much hotter than its surface. The surface is about 5000 Kelvin and the corona can get up to 10 million Kelvin. That is hot enough to produce X-rays, which is what we are seeing with this telescope.

Why couldn’t we see an annular eclipse from North America?

McCauley: We could only see a partial eclipse because the Moon did not pass directly in front of the sun from our perspective on the ground. Instead, the center of the moon’s shadow was cast above Earth’s north pole, which allowed it to be viewed as an annular from Hinode’s perspective in orbit.

What can scientists learn by recording this solar eclipse?

McCauley: The eclipse observation allows us to better calibrate the instruments aboard Hinode. When the moon passes in front of the sun the detector on the X-ray telescope should go completely dark – you shouldn’t be able to see anything where the moon is. In fact, you do see a little bit of light and that is because of scattered light within the telescope. The eclipse observations allow us to better understand this scattered light and improve calibrations of the instrument.

X-ray image of the solar eclipse observed, on Nov. 3, 2013. (Photo: NASA/Hinode)

What other things do you study with the X-ray telescope?

McCauley: We are very interested in studying solar flares. Flares are most dramatic in X-rays and we’re using the X-ray telescope to better understand the physical mechanisms that drive flares so that they might someday be forecasted. We’re also interested in understanding why the corona is so much hotter than the Sun’s surface. Read more on how tiny nanoflares might heat the Sun’s corona.

Hinode is a Japanese mission developed and launched by the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) /Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), with the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) as a domestic partner. NASA and the Science & Technology Facilities Council are Hinode international partners. It is operated by these agencies in cooperation with the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Norwegian Space Center (NSC). 

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Each year, a mysterious group of night herons flock to Smithsonian’s National Zoo. Then, they vanish. In episode three of our series, we go behind the scenes with the zoo’s caretakers as they investigate why.

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A fringe-lipped bat, “Trachops cirrhosus” (Photo: Lars Heiden/ STRI)

How do you train a wild animal to come back to you after you have set it free? If it is a fringe-lipped bat, Trachops cirrhosus, just play a bit of heavy metal music.

Bat researcher and postdoctoral fellow, Inga Geipel from the Smithsonian’s Tropical Research Institute in Panama, says the key to training a bat is to get the animal to associate a specific sound with food.

“For fringe-lipped bats, that food is the túngara frog. In the wild these bats find male túngara frogs by listening for the mating calls they make” Geipel explains. “We use this natural behavior to train the bats by slowly switching the sounds they associate with food from frog calls to music.”

The training is essential for Geipel’s research on echolocation, investigating how bats alter their sonar abilities according to their surroundings.

Training these highly intelligent animals only takes Geipel one night inside a specially designed flight cage. She begins by placing a piece of fish on top of a speaker that broadcasts the mating call of the túngara frog. Fish pieces are used as a food reward rather than the frogs themselves as fish are much easier for Geipel to collect. Once the mating call is played, the bat swoops down to the speaker to snatch its prey, and although its not quite what the bat expected, it seems satisfied with its fish reward.

With each feeding, Geipel slowly fades out the frog calls being played and fades in the dramatic crescendoing of heavy metal guitar music. By the end of the night, only the looping notes from the German metal band, Planks, is playing through the speaker.

“The bats are pretty well trained to associate the music with food by the end of the first night, but to make sure that it really sinks in, I give them another night of reinforcement with just the music,” Geipel says.

A fringe-lipped bat, “Trachops cirrhosus,” with its fish reward (Photo: Lars Heiden/ STRI)

Geipel has trained four bats to return to the music speaker once she releases them into the forest.

“I am comparing echolocation calls I record from bats in the artificial flight cage with calls from the same individuals in the forest. To record the echolocation calls in the forest I need the bats to come close enough to my microphones to pick up their calls,” explains Geipel.

“That’s why I am training the bats to come back to the speaker. It not only brings the bats close enough for the microphones to record their echolocation calls but allows me to be fairly sure that the bats that I record in the forest are the same individuals that I recorded in the flight cage. It is highly unlikely that bats other than the ones I have trained would respond to the music.”

By repeating the experiment when she returns the bat to the forest, Geipel aims to reveal possible differences in how bats use echolocation to approach prey in varying environments. From her recordings, Geipel aims to identify changes in the directionality (the width of the bat’s acoustic beam), intensity and frequency of the calls between the forest and the flight cage. If identified, these changes could demonstrate the potential flexibility bats have to rapidly adjust their calls in response to changes in their surroundings.

Inga Geipel recording bat calls (Photo: Sean Mattson)

But for the experiment to work, the bats must remain close-by long enough for Geipel to record their calls. So far she has had a high success rate, with three of the four bats returning to the speaker once released back into the forest.

“The bats usually return to the speaker within two to three minutes of being released.” Geipel says. “I think the one bat that didn’t return was most likely due to the problems we had with the speaker that night. It probably didn’t recognize the music.”

Heavy metal music is certainly not everybody’s cup of tea, and Geipel has considered looking into the musical taste of bats more closely.

“I selected a section of the song where it changed from a soft to heavy motif, so that it parallels, in a very general sense, the complex túngara frog call, which also has two dynamically different components,” Geipel explains.

“I don’t know whether bats like this heavy metal music better than other types of music. That is something I would like to find out in an upcoming experiment.”

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Ever wonder what it’s like to be an endocrinologist at the National Zoo? Meet Sarah Putman, endocrinologist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute.

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Learning from the forest. Setting up a long-term forest research plot in a tropical dry forest in the heart of Panama City.

Click here for a Methodology Guide for the establishment of a forest research plot.

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Lion start vocalizing as soon as they’re born. But when and why do they start to roar? We ask caretakers at Smithsonian’s National Zoo.

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The nation’s top bird science and conservation groups have come together to publish The State of the Birds 2014—the most comprehensive review of long-term trend data for U.S. birds ever conducted.

The report finds bird populations declining across several key habitats, and it includes a “watch list” of bird species in need of immediate conservation help.

The report also reveals, however, that in areas where a strong conservation investment has been made, bird populations are recovering. The full report can be found at stateofthebirds.org.

#STOB14

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myVolcano is a crowd-sourcing app that enables you to share your photographs and descriptions of volcanic hazards, as well as collecting samples and measurements of volcanic ash fall, helping scientists to gather vital new information about volcanic eruptions. myVolcano has been made possible through collaboration with the British Geological Survey and the Smithsonian Institution’s Global Volcanism Program. Click here to learn more.

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In honor of its 125th anniversary, the Smithsonian’s National Zoo is once again home to American bison, the animal that began the Zoo’s living collection in 1889 and sparked the conservation movement. Learn more at www.americanbison.si.edu.

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The National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., has closed its Dinosaur Hall for a five-year renovation. But before the overhaul can begin, the resident dinosaurs need to be removed. A highly specialized crew is dismantling a meat-eating dinosaur called Allosaurus piece by piece.

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