In the spring of 1961, black and white civil rights activists rode buses to protest the segregationist policies of the Deep South (Marian Holmes, Brian Wolly, Photos courtesy of Corbis, Getty Images and Library of Congress, Audio clips courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways. Read more at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-freedom-riders-then-and-now-45351758/

The National Zoo gets a new state of the art Elephant Community Center complete with 8,943 square meters of romping room

Feeling blue? Try watching this one-minute video. Our Ask Smithsonian host, Eric Schulze, explains how colors affect our moods.

One of the most evocative and breathtakingly beautiful coastal landscapes in Britain is the historic county of Cornwall. It’s also a place steeped in legend, including that of Britain’s legendary King Arthur.

Forensic anthropologist Doug Owsley discusses the skeletal specimens in a new exhibit at the Natural History Museum (Meredith Bragg). Read more at: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/meet-the-scientist-who-reads-bones-40315000/

David Lynch | Smithsonian Magazine’s 2016 American Ingenuity Award Winner for Education As a filmmaker, Lynch has a reputation for creating dark, surreal movies such as Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart as well as the TV show “Twin Peaks.” In the education world, he's becoming known for something very different: promoting inner peace. Over the past decade, the David Lynch Foundation has sponsored Transcendental Meditation classes for half a million children in places as far-flung as the Bronx, Detroit, Los Angeles, Congo and the West Bank. The program, called Quiet Time, is now at the center of one of the largest-ever studies of meditation for children—a 6,800-pupil research project conducted by the Crime Lab at the University of Chicago and designed to learn if meditation can help kids in highly stressful environments fare better at home and in school. Read more about Lynch’s work: http://smithmag.co/9sHhtm | #IngenuityAwards And more about the American Ingenuity Awards: http://smithmag.co/77xPqy

Read more at http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/Hazel-Scotts-Lifetime-of-High-Notes.html In a performance filmed for World War II soldiers, Hazel Scott begins with a section from Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2" and ends with a jazzy tune (Army / Navy Screen Magazine).

Clues into the disappearance of the ancient Picts lie in the tiny Scottish village of Aberlemno: 1,700-year-old Pictish stones, marked with some very unusual carvings.

Capturing a piece of an asteroid and bringing it to Earth is even more difficult than it is time-consuming. After four years in space, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx craft made a brief landing on the asteroid Bennu to collect samples of the ancient rock. Six months later, part of the spacecraft began its journey home to Earth, and earlier this fall, that sample collection canister landed, via parachute, in Utah. Scientists will be studying those samples of Bennu for decades in the hope of unlocking the mystery of how life on Earth began — but they’ve already learned enough to get them excited. In this episode, we speak with Linda Shiner, the former editor of Air & Space / Smithsonian magazine, about the challenges and triumphs of the OSIRIS-REx mission, and what scientists hope it will teach us about how life on Earth began. Find prior episodes of our show here (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/podcast/) . There’s More to That is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions. From the magazine, our team is Chris Klimek, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly. From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Adriana Rosas Rivera, Genevieve Sponsler, Terence Bernardo, and Edwin Ochoa. The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales. Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson. Episode artwork by Emily Lankiewicz. Music by APM Music.

This video does not contain hidden messages that will make you want to watch more Smithsonian videos.

Teeth are key to identifying elderly remains

Some researchers initially dismissed the remains of Palaeopascichnus lineari as teeny turds from a bygone era

In a 11-4 vote, the City Council decided to remove the 65-foot-tall monument from its location in the heart of the city

Investigators discovered that the original print of "The Roaring Lion" had been sold to a buyer in Italy

"A Soldier's Journey," a 58-foot-long bronze artwork depicting vivid scenes from the war, was illuminated for the first time at a ceremony on September 13

Experts have confirmed that the image of "Knight, Death and the Devil" is a real master engraving by the renowned German artist Albrecht Dürer

Kleptoparasitism, in which a bird harasses another to steal its food, might introduce avian flu to the continent, currently the only one without the severe H5N1 strain

Scientists identified traces of the drug in the brain tissue of two individuals buried in the crypt of a hospital in Milan

The artist's cityscapes, once dismissed as too masculine, would later influence the floral artworks that became central to her iconic style

To boost the iconic queen conch's population, researchers are relocating the heat-stressed creatures to cooler, deeper waters to help them find mates

A ring could explain a mysterious arrangement of impact craters near the equator and might even have caused an ice age, according to a new study

A blockbuster exhibition in London examines the Dutch Post-Impressionist's creative output between 1888 and 1890, which was one of the most productive periods of his career

Experts are carefully uncovering traces of the original paint and fragments of gold leaf that once adorned the 2,000-year-old Temple of Edfu

The energetic streams are together 23 million light-years in length—roughly as long as 140 Milky Way galaxies lined end to end

Scientists have created "a form of information immortality" meant to instruct future species on how to recreate humans. But who, or what, will find it?

Una Pizza Napoletana on the Lower East Side has claimed the top spot in an annual ranking of pizzerias around the globe

Researchers say that the iconic painting's swirling sky lines up with Kolmogorov's theory of turbulence, suggesting that the artist was a careful observer of the world around him

A roughly 33-foot-long asteroid called 2024 PT5 will chart a horseshoe-like path around our planet

The Galeón Andalucía, which is now making its way to London, was designed to resemble the armed merchant vessels manufactured by Spain and Portugal between the 16th and 18th centuries

The technology, enabled by thorium atoms, could keep time more accurately than atomic clocks and enable new discoveries about gravity, gravitational waves and dark matter

The so-called good-luck flag, which hung on an American veteran's wall for many years, returned home last month after nearly eight decades

The baby pygmy hippopotamus in a Thailand zoo has taken the internet by storm, and keepers hope she will help gain momentum for conservation efforts

The viewfinders are outfitted with special lenses that help people with red-green colorblindness distinguish between hues

More than 250 years after a teenage Mozart wrote "Serenade in C," a copy of the piece has surfaced in the collections of a German library

An A.I.-assisted study identified 303 previously unknown geoglyphs in the Peruvian desert. The art features surprising figures, like orcas holding knives

Using sound recordings, the team identified the largest known population of the night parrot, a secretive species known as the "Holy Grail of birdwatching"

A new “health check” for our planet sounds an alarm bell on rising ocean acidification, which is driven by carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere

As hundreds of motorists take to the desert, their tracks damage the massive geoglyphs made by Indigenous groups in northern Chile

New research has revealed that the mysterious white substance found alongside three ancient mummies was once a soft cheese called kefir

A new exhibition in New York City uses more than 200 texts and artifacts to contemplate Lincoln's rise to the nation's highest office

Two members of Just Stop Oil staged the original demonstration in late 2022. Group members say the harsh penalties will not deter their efforts

In the dusty landscape surrounding the city of Marfa, a huge 3D printer is constructing 43 new rooms and 18 residential homes as part of an expansion of El Cosmico

The predatory pod hunts off the coast of Chile and is led by a matriarch called Dakota

The "John Evenson" tugboat was helping another ship enter the Sturgeon Bay Ship Canal in Wisconsin when it sank to the bottom of Lake Michigan in 1895

The Kyoto museum will feature interactive exhibits, gaming artifacts, workshop spaces and oversized controllers inspired by iconic video games

The show coincides with an initiative that will give away 49 of the tree's saplings to individuals and communities across the country

The wild canines have the same muscles used by domestic dogs to create the wide-eyed, pleading look that captures humans' hearts

The small town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, is one of the only sources of high-purity quartz on Earth, but it has been left battered by the storm's heavy rains

For years, the owner's son had wondered about the artwork, which features the Spanish painter's signature. Now, some experts think it's the real deal

Orbiting Barnard's star, the nearest solo star to Earth, the world is too hot to be habitable—a scorching 257 degrees Fahrenheit