• Nine Science Stories You Should Have Read This Year

    Updated: 2009-12-30 15:00:34
    It’s also been a good year for science stories in Smithsonian magazine, including our special issue, Exploring the Frontiers of Science. Here are nine you should read if you haven’t already: Gene Therapy in a New Light: A husband-and-wife team’s experimental genetic treatment for blindness is renewing hopes for a controversial field of medicine What Darwin Didn’t [...]

  • Visualize More Sunshine

    Updated: 2009-12-28 15:44:01
    We’re past the winter solstice (finally!) and, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, getting a bit more sunlight every day. It’s hard to see a difference yet—in Washington, D.C., the days are lengthening by only about half a minute per day this week. (You can chart your local sunrise and sunset times here.) So it [...]

  • Science Books for Kids

    Updated: 2009-12-21 16:15:31
    For weeks, Smithsonian editor Kathleen Burke has been sifting through piles of kids’ books to put together her annual list of notable books for children, now online. I dove in behind her to pull out some of the wonderful science books that I would have loved to have read when I was young: Almost Astronauts: 13 [...]

  • Picture of the Week—The Swirls of Mars

    Updated: 2009-12-18 14:58:45
    The atmosphere on Mars is very different from Earth’s. It is composed primarily of carbon dioxide, which condenses into dry ice at the poles during winter. And it’s thin, with only one percent of the pressure of the Earth’s atmosphere. But it sure is pretty at times, especially as seen through the lens of the [...]

  • Volcano Red

    Updated: 2009-12-11 14:58:40
    This photo, of Montserrat’s Soufriere Hills volcano in 1996, is one of 50,000 made freely available this week by the British Geological Survey via their new web service OpenGeoscience. The 1000 x 1000 pixel images, from the BGS’s National Archive of Digital Photographs, are free to download for non-commercial use and cover a range of [...]

  • A Musical Interlude

    Updated: 2009-12-10 15:29:47
    One more suggestion that I left off of Tuesday’s holiday gift list: The band They Might Be Giants released their album “Here Comes Science” earlier this year. And here are videos from three of the songs, “Why Does the Sun Shine? (The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas),” “Meet the Elements” and “Science is [...]

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