Description: Investigating digital files from the 1980s turns up software that let people play matchmaker–for endangered species. Let’s see where this leads.
Description: Research on shark attacks began at the National Museum of Natural History in 1958 when the Shark Research Panel was formed to track attacks and develop shark repellents.
Description: Happy National Trivia Day! January 4th is the perfect day to break out all those endless bits of knowledge stored in your noggin and share them with others. As for the history of National Trivia Day, it's thought that the creation of the game Trivial Pursuit in 1979 sparked the beginning of our fascination with trivia, and everythinge else is history, as they say. To feed our
Description: If you are a regular reader, or someone who works for a museum, library, or archive, you intimately understand the difficulty in managing big collections. If you’re not in this world, you do understand how hard it is to manage family photographs, a collection of email love letters, or the folder tucked in the bottom of your closet with old college papers. When you multiply
Description: It can be so frustrating to put great effort into something, and then to have your work and achievements called into question. I can't begin to imagine how frustrated Samuel Pierpont Langley was in 1903. By that time, he had spent over forty years studying astrophysics and aerodynamics. His work on astronomically-derived time measurement in the late 1860's is the heart of the
Description: Objects Conservator Catharine Hawks (center), National Museum of Natural History, specializes in the preservation of natural history specimen and lectures widely on hazards related to collections. #Groundbreaker
Description: In honor of Dr. Knowlton winning the Smithsonian Secretary's Distinguished Scholar Award. Marine biologist, Dr. Nancy Knowlton, National Museum of Natural History, uses advanced molecular methods combined with globally standardized sampling to explore the hidden diversity that has been ignored by traditional approaches, a key component of the Smithsonian’s MarineGeo program.