Read more at http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/In-Vogue.html At 62 years old, Edward Steichen convinced the U.S. Navy to let him gather a team of photographers to capture the men serving their country in the Pacific Ocean during World War II.

"They have given mankind a completely new way of looking at the universe." – Stephen Hawking, congratulates Kip Thorne, Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Ronald Drever, the first scientists to detect gravitational waves. | Smithsonian magazine #IngenuityAwards The Smithsonian has been celebrating innovation in American culture for more than 150 years, and following in this tradition, Smithsonian magazine presents the American Ingenuity Awards, honoring revolutionary breakthroughs in the arts and sciences, education and social progress.

The American Ingenuity Award winner is on the brink of using the human genome to provide better diagnostics for deadly diseases

Smithsonian magazine commissioned Drew Gardner for a project that connects Black Americans today to their lost ancestry. Read about Gardner’s project and process, as well as more details about the subjects of this incredible series here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/descendants-black-civil-war-heroes-wear-heritage-pride-180983397/ Video produced by Sierra Theobald. Special thanks to Drew Gardner Additional credits: Emma MacBeath, WikiTree US Black Heritage project; Ottawa Goodman, research and coordinator; Sam Dole, Penumbra Foundation; Elizabeth Zuck, set design; Calvin Osbourne, props and costume; Angela Huff, hair and make up; Diego Huerta, Lexia Krebs, behind-the-scenes filming; background prints by Fujifilm USA

When it comes to bird calls, every chirp, trill, and warble tells a story. From eerie screeches to melodic tunes, these distinctive sounds from nature are sure to surprise you. --- For more videos from Smithsonian Magazine: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/videos/ Digital Editorial Director: Brian Wolly Supervising Producer: Michelle Mehrtens Producer: Nicki Marko Video Producer: Sierra Theobald Video Editor: Michael Kneller Script: Michelle Mehrtens, Michael Kneller Audio provided by the Macaulay Library at Cornell Lab

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

“Superman isn’t coming. It is a moment in our time when we must look to ourselves, and not take for granted or wait for something from the top to come down, but rather…pick up the torch, carry the torch, to find information and the truth…” – Erin Brockovich applauds Marc Edwards and LeeAnne Walters for their work exposing the Flint water crisis | Smithsonian Magazine American #IngenuityAwards Read more about Edwards and Walters’ work: http://smithmag.co/D4dIHy The Smithsonian has been celebrating innovation in American culture for more than 150 years, and following in this tradition, Smithsonian magazine presents the American Ingenuity Awards, honoring revolutionary breakthroughs in the arts and sciences, education and social progress. http://smithmag.co/R7hyRO

The noisy-but-shy bird, known as the hoiho, has earned the most votes for a second time amid threats to its survival

The annual award ceremony featured costumes, songs and paper airplanes as scientists recognized comedic research across ten disciplines

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

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

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

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 annual contest unveiled its winners, highlighting avian photos that focus on conservation issues, the beauty of birds and their sometimes hilarious behavior

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

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

The two artifacts donated by Blue Origin achieved record-breaking feats and will extend the museum's story of trailblazing space travel into the present

Across the country, revelers are dressing in costumes and gliding across bodies of water on stand-up paddleboards to ring in the spooky season

Using advanced imaging techniques, researchers discovered modern glue, drill holes and even a fragment of a drill bit in the pastiches

Travis Gienger, who nicknamed his prize-winning pumpkin "Rudy," has been growing gourds for nearly 30 years

The HMS "Trooper" likely sank after hitting an underwater German mine off the coast of an island in the Aegean Sea in 1943

This year, celebrants will likely be channeling characters from hit franchises like "Beetlejuice," "Inside Out" and "Deadpool"

A new exhibition in New York celebrates Berthe Weill, an often overlooked but visionary figure who jumpstarted the careers of many of modern art's giants

Created in London in the 1960s, the tracks are heading to auction as part of a larger collection of memorabilia connected to the famous American guitarist

The president atoned for the federal government's role in forcing Native American children into boarding schools, where many were abused and more than 900 died

After a years-long restoration, the unique device that recorded hits like "Come Together" and "Here Comes the Sun" is now fully functional

After a summer that tied for the country's hottest, meteorologists say an unusually warm autumn is delaying snowfall

The one-minute composition, which dates to the 1830s, was found on a piece of paper about the size of an index card at a museum in New York City

The team was analyzing the structure of a royal palace’s gate when they discovered 12 statues made out of sandstone

The bone, described two decades after its discovery, suggests the species might have grown up to 20 percent bigger than other terror birds

The viral king penguin chick at Sea Life Melbourne Aquarium is beginning to lose his youthful down, a process that will give him his distinctive and waterproof adult plumage

The actress becomes the first wheelchair user ever to take home the coveted prize at the 73rd annual award show

These grounded planes in the Congo have captured the imagination of these children

Police have reported that a man was fatally electrocuted in Torbay on Saturday evening. Two others are being treated for injuries.

As Week 3 of the provincial election campaign begins, there are questions about how Nova Scotia's major political parties plan to combat the rising number of opioid overdose deaths. 

Elections Nova Scotia is investigating PC candidate Susan Corkum-Greek's campaign to determine whether it broke the law by handing out gift cards on Saturday outside a Tim Hortons in Lunenburg, N.S. 

The Montreal English Theatre Awards ceremony is being held this evening at Le Gesù theatre. For the community, it's a time to celebrate their achievements and resilience coming out of the pandemic, together.

Shilei Du, 36, was charged Monday morning with the premeditated murder of his partner, Guangmei Ye, whose body was found Sunday in a residence on Fontenelle Street in Candiac, Que.

In insects, gustatory neurons sense chemicals upon contact and directly inform many behaviors critical for survival and reproduction, including biting, feeding, mating, and egg laying. However, the taste sensory system is underexplored in many anthropophilic disease vectors such as mosquitoes, which acquire and transmit human pathogens during blood feeding from human hosts. This results in a big gap in vector biology—the study of organisms that spread disease by transmitting pathogens—because insect vectors closely interact with humans while selecting suitable individuals and appropriate bite sites for blood meals. Human sweat and skin-associated chemistries are rich in nonvolatile compounds that can be sensed by the mosquito's taste system when she lands on the skin. Taste sensory units, called sensilla, are distributed in many organs across the mosquito body, including the mouthparts, legs, and ovipositors (female-specific structures used to lay eggs). Each sensillum is innervated by as many as five taste neurons, which allow detection and discrimination between various tastants such as water, sugars, salts, amino acids, and plant-derived compounds that taste bitter to humans. Single-sensillum recordings provide a robust way to survey taste responsiveness of individual sensilla to various diagnostic and ecologically relevant chemicals. Such analyses are of immense value for understanding links between mosquito taste responses and behaviors to specific chemical cues and can provide insights into why mosquitoes prefer certain hosts. The results can also aid development of strategies to disrupt close-range mosquito–human interactions to control disease transmission. Here we describe a protocol that is curated for electrophysiological recordings from taste sensilla in mosquitoes and sure to yield exciting results for the field.

The technique of visualizing axon pathways in the embryonic ventral nerve cord using antibody labeling has been fundamental to our understanding of the genetic and developmental mechanisms underlying nervous system wiring in Drosophila. High-resolution microscopic examination of the ventral nerve cord remains an essential component of many experiments in Drosophila developmental neuroscience. Although it is possible to examine the ventral nerve cord in intact whole-mount embryos, to collect the highest-quality images it is often useful to isolate the nervous system away from the other embryonic tissues through embryo dissection. This protocol describes methods for dissecting ventral nerve cords from Drosophila embryos that have been fixed and stained via immunofluorescence or horseradish peroxidase (HRP) immunohistochemistry. The process of making fine dissection needles for this purpose from electrolytically sharpened tungsten wire is also described. Dissected and mounted ventral nerve cords can be examined and imaged using a variety of microscopy techniques including differential interference contrast (DIC) optics, epifluorescence, or confocal microscopy.

With president-elect Donald Trump promising to drill in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the Gwich'in are preparing to fight for the Porcupine caribou herd.

Yukon appeal court Justice Karen Horsman granted a temporary stay of the requirement on Friday, the latest development in an ongoing legal battle over the property between the territorial government, cabin-owner Len Tarka and tenant Eric DeLong. 

A new film revisits the 90 minutes before the first episode of "Saturday Night Live" premiered on NBC on October 11, 1975

A new exhibition at the British Library explores the public, private and spiritual lives of such figures as Joan of Arc, Christine de Pizan and Hildegard of Bingen

The Sacro Bosco's meaning is the subject of debate, with scholars alternatively describing the sprawling complex as a memorial, an allegorical site or a tribute to ancient civilizations

A Romare Bearden print served as a starting point for the American playwright's 1987 drama, which follows a Black family's struggle to decide the fate of an ancestral heirloom

A jury has found a 20-year-old Moncton man guilty of second-degree murder in the 2022 death of an 18-year-old.

The University of Regina Rams knock off their provincial rivals, the University of Saskatchewan Huskies to win their second ever Hardy Cup championship. An emotional Rams head coach, Mark McConkey talks about how his team was able to overcome a rough regular season and win the title.

Families are grappling with the consequences of growing gun violence in Hamilton and across the Greater Toronto Area this year. Several of the region's police forces have warned of an alarming rise in shootings since January.