The post Smithsonian ecologist John Parker discusses his work with white-tailed deer and invasive plant species appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

The post Learn about the National Zoo’s flamingo flock with keeper Sara Hallager appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Jim Zimbelman, planetary geologist in the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, shares his three favorite images from the exhibition "Beyond: Visions of Our Solar System.” On view at the Air and Space Museum through May 2, 2011, the exhibition by artist Michael Benson combines art, science, photography and exploration to unveil the diverse landscapes found on the planets in our Solar System.

The post A new perspective on the Solar System with Planetary Geologist Jim Zimbelman appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

The post Learn about the ash that comes from volcanoes with Dr. Liz Cottrell, a geologist from the National Museum of Natural History appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

The post With the recent hatching of two Cuban crocodiles, the National Zoo just got a little snappier! appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

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 […]

The post The State of the Birds: Q&A with Peter Marra appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, the only museum in the U.S. devoted exclusively to design, reopens after a 3-year makeover with 60 percent more exhibition […]

The post Smithsonian Design Museum in NYC Reopens with High Tech Makeover appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

The Smithsonian Deep Reef Observation Project (DROP) captures a new species of deep-reef fish, the Godzilla goby, using the Curasub submersible. The lead scientist on […]

The post Capturing a new species with a submersible appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Gwen Ifill sat down with Lonnie Bunch, the director of the Smithsonian Museum of African American History and Culture, which is due to open this […]

The post PBS Newshour interview with Lonnie Bunch, African American Museum director appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Meet Nick Pyenson, one of our paleontologists at the National Museum of Natural History. His job as a time traveler is to make discoveries about […]

The post Time Travel With Smithsonian Paleontologist: Nick Pyenson appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Meet Amy Homma, the Director of Digital Learning at Art Lab+. Learn how Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has created a dynamic program to […]

The post An Active Environment With Smithsonian Educator: Amy Homma appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

At age 19, athlete Amy Purdy had both legs amputated below the knee due to a sudden illness that culminated in septic shock. Two years […]

The post With Grit and Innovation “Everyone Plays” appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

The storage and flux of terrestrial carbon (C) is one of the most uncertain components of the global C budget and detailed quantification of forest […]

The post Remote sensing of a Smithsonian forest with airborne LiDAR appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

New results from a massive study at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute show that interactions among community members play an important role in determining which organisms thrive.

The post Tropical tree study shows interactions with neighbors plays an important role in tree survival appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Recently a team of scientists working at the Smithsonian’s Tropical Research Institute in Panama, decided to try and learn for the first time just which body parts the gliding ant C. atratus uses to steer as they glide.

The post Gliding ants steer with hind legs as they fly backwards, scientists learn appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

The scientists staked out dozens of the gingers night and day while the plants flowered, but no long-proboscid pollinator ever appeared. Climate change, they surmised, was responsible for the loss of this highly specialized and now, perhaps forever unknown insect.

The post With specialist pollinator absent, Himalayan gingers must adapt appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

The post Community ecologist Sunshine Van Bael explains her work in Panama with leafcutting ants appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

The chief appeal of The Anatomy of Palms is some 800 color photographs that document the extent of palm anatomical diversity.

The post With 800 color photographs, new book takes a fascinating look inside palms appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

The Smithsonian Environmental Research Center has created NEMESIS--National Estuarine and Marine Exotic Species Information System--an online public database that provides key information about the non-native marine species throughout the United States.

The post New invasive species database allows public to ID marine invaders with a home computer appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Despite many laws to protect it, a new survey reveals wild ginseng in Maryland is on the decline.

The post Wild ginseng in steep decline in Maryland, survey reveals: Q&A with Smithsonian botanist Christopher Puttock appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Scientific inspiration springs from many sources. In the case of Smithsonian botanist David Kenfack, ant bites were the inspiration for a recent paper he co-authored […]

The post Sweet life: tropical plants attract ants with sugary nectar appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Living trees can rot from the inside out, leaving only a hollowed trunk. Wood rot in living trees can cause overestimates of global carbon pools, […]

The post Measuring trees with the speed of sound appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

The Smithsonian is celebrating Earth Day this month by hosting the first Earth Optimism Summit from April 21 to 23 in Washington, D.C. Its goal […]

The post The Smithsonian’s history is right in line with Earth Optimism appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

This Earth Day weekend in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian is convening the first Earth Optimism Summit. The three-day event, taking place April 21–23, will look […]

The post Earth Optimism: Smithsonian’s “Agua Salud” Project restores degraded land with forest appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

The cationic cyclo­metallated iridium(III) complex [Ir(C9H7N2)2(C12H8N2)](PF6) has been synthesized and crystallized by the inter-diffusion method. It contains an unknown number of solvent mol­ecules and has a different space-group symmetry (C2/c) structure than its solvatomorph (P21/c).

The new copper(II) complex [CuLCl2]2, where L is a product of Schiff base condensation between methyl­amine and 2-pyridine­carbaldehyde, is built of discrete centrosymmetric dimers.

This work presents a technique for extracting the detailed shape of peaks with extended, overlapping tails in an X-ray powder diffraction pattern. The application discussed here concerns crystallite size broadening, though the technique can be applied to spectra of any origin and without regard to how the profiles are to be subsequently analyzed. Historically, the extraction of profile shapes has been difficult due to the complexity of determining the background under the peak, resulting in an offset of the low-frequency components of the Fourier transform of the peak known as the `hook' problem. The use of a carefully considered statistical weighting function in a non-linear least-squares fit, followed by summing the residuals from such a fit with the fit itself, allows one to extract the full shape of an isolated peak, without contributions from either the background or adjacent peaks. The extracted shape, consisting of the fit function recombined with the residuals, is not dependent on any specific shape model. The application of this to analysis of microstructure is performed independently of global parametric models, which would reduce the number of refined parameters; therefore the technique requires high-quality data to produce results of interest. The effectiveness of the technique is demonstrated by extraction of Fourier transforms of peaks from two sets of size-broadened materials with two differing pieces of equipment.

The development of antiviral strategies requires a clear understanding of the principles that control the protein arrangements in viral shells. Considered here are those capsids that violate the paradigmatic Caspar and Klug (CK) model, and it is shown that the important structural features of such anomalous shells from the Picobirnaviridae, Flaviviridae and Leviviridae families can be revealed by models in the form of spherical icosahedral packings of equivalent rhombic structural units (SUs). These SUs are composed of protein dimers forming the investigated capsids which, as shown here, are based on the rhombic triacontahedron (RT) geometry. How to modify the original CK approach in order to make it compatible with the considered rhombic tessellations of a sphere is also discussed. Analogies between capsids self-assembled from dimers and trimers are demonstrated. This analysis reveals the principles controlling the localization of receptor proteins (which recognize the host cell) on the capsid surface.

To date X-ray protein crystallography is the most successful technique available for the determination of high-resolution 3D structures of biological molecules and their complexes. In X-ray protein crystallography the structure of a protein is refined against the set of observed Bragg reflections from a protein crystal. The resolution of the refined protein structure is limited by the highest angle at which Bragg reflections can be observed. In addition, the Bragg reflections alone are typically insufficient (by a factor of two) to determine the structure ab initio, and so prior information is required. Crystals formed from an imperfect packing of the protein molecules may also exhibit continuous diffraction between and beyond these Bragg reflections. When this is due to random displacements of the molecules from each crystal lattice site, the continuous diffraction provides the necessary information to determine the protein structure without prior knowledge, to a resolution that is not limited by the angular extent of the observed Bragg reflections but instead by that of the diffraction as a whole. This article presents an iterative projection algorithm that simultaneously uses the continuous diffraction as well as the Bragg reflections for the determination of protein structures. The viability of this method is demonstrated on simulated crystal diffraction.

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