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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Astronomers are piecing together the reasons for these huge energy outputs, while sorting out why our own galaxy is so modest. The two primary suspects are bursts of star formation that produce many hot young stars, and processes associated with accretion of material onto a supermassive black hole at a galaxy's nucleus.

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Funded by BP through the Florida Institute of Oceanography, the scientists will make the 10-day trip aboard the institute’s 115-foot research vessel. The divers, scientists and photographers will document hard bottoms of Florida, from the Keys to the Panhandle, to gain a better understanding of these sponge- and coral-dominated communities

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For more than three decades JoGayle Howard dedicated her life and work to reproducing endangered species.

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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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Astronomers of the future won't have to take the Big Bang on faith. With careful measurements and clever analysis, they can find the subtle evidence outlining the history of the universe.

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The new research reveals that from the period between 1100-1600 small agricultural settlements up and down the Delaware River Valley caused a 50-percent increase in sediment runoff into the Delaware River.

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By compiling and comparing long-term data from stranding records and visual sighting records, both taken from nearly every ocean basin in the world, Pyenson verified that stranding records “faithfully reflect the number of species and the relative abundance” found in live surveys.

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Today, Wednesday, May 25, astronomers unveiled the most complete 3-D map of the local universe (out to a distance of 380 million light-years) ever created. Taking more than 10 years to complete, the 2MASS Redshift Survey (2MRS) also is notable for extending closer to the Galactic plane than previous surveys – a region that’s generally obscured by dust.

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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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The recent field of invasion biology faces a new challenge as 19 eminent ecologists issue a call to "end the bias against non-native species" in the journal Nature.

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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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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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This image of lawyer Clarence S. Darrow (center) talking with group of men in Dayton, Tenn., in July 1925 is one of 10 photographs from […]

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Small tissue samples collected from 238 wild turtles at 15 different locations across their range in Southern Mexico, Belize and Guatemala revealed a “surprising lack” of genetic structure, the scientists write in a recent paper in the journal Conservation Genetics.

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The far-out planet, named 55 Cancri e, is twice as big as Earth and nearly nine times more massive. It is most likely composed of rocky material, similar to Earth, supplemented with light elements such as water and hydrogen gas. Scientists estimate the planet’s surface is much hotter than ours: close to 2,700 degrees Celsius.

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This is the first report of this invasive species in this area, and may indicate a recent range expansion of the snakehead population.

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In a new paper appearing this week in Science, a group of biologists have shown that females themselves can also limit the evolution of increased elaboration.

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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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Researchers at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute have discovered why older females are rarely able to reproduce—and hope to use this information to introduce vital […]

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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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Astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory discovered the first pair of supermassive black holes in a spiral galaxy similar to the Milky Way. Approximately 160 million light years from Earth, the pair is the nearest known such phenomenon.

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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 by a team of scientists from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, the National University of Singapore and the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts have unlocked the secret to mate binding in orb web spiders, and revealed just how it calms the cannibalistic female spider.

The post Suitor’s gentle massage soothes aggressive, cannibalistic female spiders, researchers find appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

For the first time, astronomers have detected around a burgeoning solar system a sprawling cloud of water vapor that’s cold enough to form comets, which could eventually deliver oceans to dry planets.

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The first DNA barcoding survey of crustaceans living on samples of dead coral taken from the Indian, Pacific and Caribbean oceans suggests that the diversity of organisms living on the world’s coral reefs—one of the most endangered habitats on Earth—is seriously underestimated.

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Researchers who will study the microbial communities living on the skins of frogs that are surviving the fungal scourge of chytridiomycosis, deadly to the frogs.

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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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Paleontologists studying an extreme short-term global warming event have discovered direct evidence about how mammals respond to rising temperatures. In a study that appeared recently […]

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A newly described species of toothed whale that lived some 3-4 million years ago during the Pliocene, is causing scientists to reconsider what is known about its living cold-water relatives: narwhals and belugas.

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A new study by astrophysicists at the University of Utah and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., has found a new explanation for the growth of supermassive black holes: they repeatedly capture and swallow single stars from pairs of stars that get too close.

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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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More than 70 scientists from 9 institutions including the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, sequenced the entire genome of the butterfly genus Heliconius, a brightly colored favorite of collectors and scientists since the Victorian era.

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Scientists from the Smithsonian and University of British Columbia have discovered a sensory organ in the chin of rorqual whales that communicates to the brain. It orchestrates the dramatic adjustments needed in jaw position and throat-pouch expansion to make lunge feeding successful

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New research by a team of astronomers found that planets smaller than Neptune are located around a wide variety of stars, including those with fewer heavy elements than the Sun.

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The newly reported reconstruction of Amazonian prehistory by a Smithsonian scientist, Dolores R. Piperno, and her colleagues suggests that large areas of western Amazonia were sparsely inhabited.

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A new video to help aviators identify the cause of bird strikes has been posted on YouTube by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services Airport Wildlife Hazard Program and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

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By attaching tiny radio transmitters to more than 400 seeds, Patrick Jansen, scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Wageningen University, and his colleagues found that 85 percent of the seeds were buried in caches by agoutis, common, house cat-sized rodents in tropical lowlands.

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Scientists at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and their colleagues at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies have invented a new computational approach that can accurately follow the birth and evolution of thousands of galaxies over billions of years.

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The Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation, a unique program in terms of its academic offerings and contributions to the field of conservation, celebrated the completion of its expansive new academic facilities today, Oct. 18, at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Va.

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The goal of the project—the Smithsonian’s Tennenbaum Marine Observatories—is to monitor the ocean’s coastal ecosystems over a long period of time.

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This past summer, Laura Walker became the first scientist to collect slime molds from soils at the Barro Colorado Nature Monument in Panama, a reserve administered by the Smithsonain since 1946.

The post Panama’s slime molds get attention from Arkansas University grad student appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

This image shows the active star-forming galaxy M82 in three wavelengths: UV (blue), near-infrared (green) and far-infrared (red). New research indicates that even in the […]

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Imagine a sphere more than 2 million miles across – eight times the distance from Earth to the Moon – spinning so fast that its […]

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The uplift of the Isthmus of Panama 2.6 million years ago formed a land-bridge that has long thought to be the crucial step in the […]

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Africa isn’t the kind of place you might expect to find penguins. But one species lives along Africa’s southern coast today, and newly found fossils […]

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The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum announced that it will receive a $6 million donation from the Thomas W. Haas Foundation to establish an […]

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To download the free e-book Best of Both Worlds: Museums, Libraries, and Archives in a Digital Age, by G. Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian, […]

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The giant panda cub born at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo Aug. 23 received her first veterinary exam late yesterday afternoon and was given a clean […]

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