Today the Smithsonian Institution announced Eva J. Pell, Senior Vice President for Research and Dean of the Graduate School at Pennsylvania State University, will be the new Under Secretary for Science at the Institution.

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The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum has opened a new Public Observatory that contains a 16-inch, 3,000-pound Boller and Chivens telescope, on loan from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Through this powerful telescope, museum visitors can now observe the sun (with a special filter), the moon and the brighter stars and planets, such as Venus, Jupiter and Saturn, during daylight hours. Funding for the project was provided by the National Science Foundation.

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The spread of Africanized honey bees across Central America has had a much smaller impact on native tropical bee species than scientists previously predicted...

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Recently, researchers from Boston University and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama have been taking a closer look at the vibrations that red-eyed treefrog embryos use as cues to trigger early hatching. They discovered that treefrog embryos can evaluate different features of vibrations.

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A meteorite that crashed through the roof of a Lorton, Va., doctors’ office on Monday, Jan. 18, 2010 was recently identified by scientists in the […]

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For the first time, astronomers have found a supernova explosion with properties similar to a gamma-ray burst, but without seeing any gamma rays from it.

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Staff had been on a pregnancy watch focused on the 3 1/2-year-old clouded leopard Jao Chu (JOW-chew) for four days. Jao Chu gave birth to the first cub at 6:04 p.m. and the second cub at 6:20 p.m.

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The results show mergers of two dense stellar remnants are the likely cause of many of the supernovae that have been used to measure the accelerated expansion of the universe.

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Eleven bats remain in the National Zoo’s colony. The initial challenge the team faced was how to feed the animals. Virginia big-eared bats, which are a subspecies of the Townsend’s big-eared bat (Corynorhinuss townsendii), eat while flying.

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"Just like mirrors in a changing room show you a clothing outfit from all sides, interstellar dust clouds act like mirrors to show us different sides of the supernova," Rest explains.

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Discoveries of three new from species in Panama lead to hope that project researchers can save these animals from a deadly fungus killing frogs worldwide and the fear that many species will go extinct before scientists even know they exist.

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The funding will allow the National Science Resources Center to validate its LASER (Leadership Assistance for Science Education Reform) Model. LASER, a systemic approach to reform, is a set of processes and strategies designed to help state, district and school leadership teams effectively implement and sustain
high-quality science education for elementary, middle and secondary school students.

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The science-based study will evaluate elephant welfare along a quality continuum, assessing the impact of zoo management practices by looking at the elephants’ responses to differences in practices among zoos.

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New research by astrophysicist David Kipping has revealed that in some special cases, a star can be weighed directly. Such a star must have a planet orbiting it with a moon orbiting the planet.

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Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have found evidence of the youngest black hole known to exist in our cosmic neighborhood. The 30-year-old object is a remnant of SN 1979C, a supernova in the galaxy M100 approximately 50 million light years from Earth.

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Twenty years ago scientists at the Marine Invasions Lab of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md., began studying the interactions between native grass […]

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"Physics for the 21st Century," a free, on-line course developed at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics about current research in physics is now available.

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To honor Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer John Huchra, who passed away in October 2010, his friends and colleagues at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have created a […]

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As researchers investigate the impact of the Burmese python in the Everglades, scientists from the Smithsonian Institution, South Florida Natural Resources Center and the University of Florida examined the snake’s predation of the area’s birds. They found that birds, including endangered species, accounted for 25 percent of the python’s diet in the Everglades.

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To help regulators and engineers develop and test such treatment systems, and ultimately enforce these standards, a team of researchers developed a statistical model to see how to count small, scarce organisms in large volumes of water accurately.

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The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has been selected by the National Science Foundation as the recipient of a 12-meter (39-foot) radio antenna designed for submillimeter-wavelength astronomy. The ALMA Vertex Prototype Antenna was one of three antennas built as prototypes for the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, a 66-dish radio observatory currently being constructed in Chile.

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Sita (SEE-ta), a 2-year-old female clouded leopard at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Va., gave birth to these two cubs on Monday, […]

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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has made available to the public a new online collection of images that capture the excitement of planetary exploration and the journey to understand the origin and evolution of the solar system.

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Researchers at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and partnering organizations will build a frozen repository of Great Barrier Reef coral sperm and embryonic cells. Genetic banks composed of frozen biomaterials hold strong promise for basic and applied research and conservation of species and genetic variation.

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A local supernova factory has recently started production, according to a wealth of new data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory on the Carina Nebula.

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Five cheetah cubs were born May 28 to 6-year-old Amani at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Va. Amani is a dedicated mother according to keepers, who have observed her nursing and grooming the cubs.

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In 1987, light from an exploding star in a neighboring galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud, reached Earth. Named Supernova 1987A, it was the closest supernova explosion witnessed in almost 400 years, allowing astronomers to study it in unprecedented detail as it evolves.

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Using the deepest X-ray image ever taken, astronomers found the first direct evidence that massive black holes were common in the early universe. This discovery from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory shows that very young black holes grew more aggressively than previously thought, in tandem with the growth of their host galaxies.

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A scientist from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute uses a pick to dislodge the fossil skull of an extinct toothed whale from sediments on the […]

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Scientists and educators from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and George Mason University broke ground June 29 on a green-design conservation complex that embodies the concept of the living classroom.

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Gray whales survived many cycles of global cooling and warming over the past few million years, likely by exploiting a more varied diet than they do today, according to a new study by University of California, Berkeley, and Smithsonian Institution paleontologists.

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Alaska’s pristine coastline is ripe for an influx of invasive marine species such as the European green crab and the rough periwinkle (an Atlantic sea snail) warns a new study by a team of scientists from the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center.

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What Google is attempting for books, the University of California, Berkeley, plans to do for the world's vertebrate specimens: store them in "the cloud."

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Invertebrates make up more than 80 percent of all known species and provide humans with a myriad of valuable services—from crop pollination to their use as food—yet they are overlooked and underrepresented in conservation decisions and on priority lists of threatened and endangered species.

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Now, for the first time scientists at the Smithsonian’s Museum Conservation Institute have developed a fast and reliable method to date silk.

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These green crabs have been doing a number on native shellfish. They eat a lot of clams. And they're a very cosmopolitan species—they've now spread all over, to places as far afield as the West Coast of the U.S. and South Africa.

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A new study on the dodo’s island home of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, paints a picture of this unusual bird as an intrepid survivor on par with the giant tortoise for its resiliency.

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Astronomers are confident the Cygnus X-1 system contains a black hole, and with these latest studies they have remarkably precise values of its mass, spin, and distance from Earth.

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Nearly 20 years after the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute became the first to produce an Eld’s deer fawn through artificial insemination, SCBI scientists have now contributed to the birth of the first Eld’s deer via in vitro fertilization.

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In a laboratory at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md., scientist João Canning Clode and colleagues tested the cold-water tolerances of a number of invasive green porcelain crabs.

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The fastest wind ever discovered blowing off a disk around a stellar-mass black hole has been observed by a team of astronomers using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

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The discovery of two new extinct camel species by scientists from the University of Florida and the Smithsonian is casting new light on the history of the tropics, a region containing more than half the world's biodiversity and some of its most important ecosystems.

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A new X-ray study of the remains of an exploded star indicates that the supernova that disrupted the massive star may have turned it inside out in the process.

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The crustaceans are much more effective when they fight together than when they fight alone, a process McKeon calls the Multiple Defender Effect. “It is a clear example of synergy, and one that underscores the importance of biodiversity in the ocean.”

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The snakes are not only eating the area’s birds, but also the birds’ eggs straight from the nest.

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When most people look at a forest, they see walking trails, deer yards, or firewood for next winter. But scientists at the Harvard Forest and […]

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Two very different models explain the possible origin of Type Ia supernovae, and different studies support each model. New evidence shows that both models are correct - some of these supernovae are created one way and some the other.

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Scientists determine there is more to the shape and length of bird bills than just how they “get the worm.”

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Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have detected X-rays emitted by the debris from the explosion of supernova 1957D.

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“Ignition Sequence,” 1968, Vincent Cavallaro, oil on canvas. The power of the ignition and launch sequence of a NASA rocket is portrayed in an abstract […]

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