Recent botanical exploration efforts in the rugged Marquesas Islands (French Polynesia) have increased the known flora of the archipelago by an impressive 20 percent. Field research and collecting in conjunction with the Vascular Flora of the Marquesas Islands and Flore de la Polynesie française projects have yielded 62 new species of ferns and flowering plants bringing the total native species to 360, of which 18 are newly described and illustrated in a special issue of PhytoKeys.

The post Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia yield 18 new species of rare ferns and flowering plants appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Nutmeg-loving toucans wearing GPS transmitters recently helped a team of scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama address an age-old problem in plant ecology: accurately estimating seed dispersal.

The post Toucans wearing GPS backpacks help Smithsonian scientists study seed dispersal appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

When you’re caught under the mistletoe, the tradition is to kiss the person next to you. But this holiday season you may want to wow them first with some cool mistletoe facts from Smithsonian botanist Sylvia Orli.

The post Mistletoe facts from a Smithsonian botanist appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

The post Smithsonian paleobotanist Scott Wing discusses ancient global warming & what it portends for the future appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

The National Park Service and the Smithsonian Institution have announced a new partnership to share responsibility for selected National Park Service natural history collections, making them more readily available to researchers through the Smithsonian.

The post National Park Service natural history collections transferred to care of the Smithsonian appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Small-Whorled Pogonia: Endangered Orchid on the Edge. The small-whorled pogonia (Isotria medeoloides) is endangered 16 of the 20 states where it still appears, earning it the title "rarest orchid east of the Mississippi."

The post Small-Whorled Pogonia: Endangered Orchid on the Edge 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.

The post Smithsonian scientists work to ensure survival of North America’s wild orchids appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

What can you do to bring some of the Smithsonian’s 137 million objects to life? Put them in 3-D! This is a full-time job for […]

The post VIDEO: 3-D scanning at the Smithsonian appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

They’ve got no roots or veins and grow in hanging pendants or tightly packed mats attached to stones, soil and wood. Called by some “the […]

The post Mosses have strong potential to acclimate to global warming, study indicates appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

South American rainforests thrived during three extreme global warming events in the past, say paleontologists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in a new report […]

The post Smithsonian scientists discover that rainforests take the heat appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

As the Rim Fire burns deeper into Yosemite, park managers are fighting fire with fire—and one of the Smithsonian’s ForestGEO plots was caught in the […]

The post Smithsonian research plot burns in Yosemite fires appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Tucked into the wooded landscape and rolling hills of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Md., is a new forest. Six months ago, a […]

The post Century-long Smithsonian experiment tests forest diversity appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Plants are among the world’s best carbon sinks, but there’s a side to the plant-CO2 love affair that’s rarely discussed. When carbon dioxide rises, plants […]

The post The strange, controversial way plants trap CO2 appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

A 57-acre research plot at a University of Michigan forest preserve northwest of Ann Arbor has been added to a Smithsonian Institution global network used […]

The post University of Michigan forest preserve joins Smithsonian global network appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History announced today that scientists with the museum’s Global Genome Initiative will attempt to capture the genomic diversity of half the […]

The post Smithsonian and Partners To Preserve Earth’s Genomic Plant Diversity appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

In a study published Sept. 28 in the journal Nature Plants, a team led by Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute scientists found that bigger trees suffer […]

The post Forest Giants Suffer Most During Droughts appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Invasive species have become a problem in marine environments around the world, and the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries are no exception. Non-native species of […]

The post Smithsonian Scientists Work to Stop Invasions appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Rattlesnake, zebra and peacock plants have a new wild relative, discovered by Rodolfo Flores, Panamanian botanist and intern at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). […]

The post Smithsonian Botanist Discovers New Ground-Flowering Plant in Panama appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

With net in hand and eyes peeled, Mauren Turcatel spent two-weeks last October chasing blood-thirsty predators through the Amazon jungle of Brazil. One-by-one they appeared […]

The post Blood-thirsty jungle horse-flies catch big chill from Smithsonian entomologist appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Given its scale and diversity, the Smithsonian’s collection of 154 million items presents a unique digitization challenge. This video showcases a conveyor belt driven imaging […]

The post Digitizing the Smithsonian’s Botany Collection appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Profound ideas don’t need to be complicated. A simple cube made of aluminum tubing, a centerpiece of a new exhibit “Life in One Cubic Foot,” […]

The post From Rochester to Polynesia, a simple cube unveils Earth’s dazzling biological diversity appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) celebrated with Panama the completion of the Panama Canal expansion project on June 26, 2016. The $5.6 billion engineering […]

The post Smithsonian celebrates Panama Canal expansion! appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Fort Pierce, Fla. – Fall in southern Florida is festival season: when the weather stops being oppressively hot and 70 degrees is positively autumnal.  On […]

The post Annual Smithsonian-led science festival draws crowds in Fort Pierce, Florida appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Spending time in a beautiful garden can be transformative. In fact, some visitors to the Smithsonian’s Mary Livingston Ripley Garden in Washington D.C. have taken […]

The post Monarch Butterflies Make the Most of the Smithsonian’s Gardens appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

A newly discovered Hawaiian tree recently had the distinction of being added to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Red List of Critically […]

The post Newly named, Hawaiian tree species already critically endangered appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

The Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation offers a range of compelling residential, hands-on, interdisciplinary programs in conservation biology for undergraduate and graduate students and professionals at […]

The post Field Research: Smithsonian-Mason School of Conservation appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Finding a mouse in your morning coffee might give you an unwelcome jolt, but there’s a strong connection between small mammals, birds and the plantations […]

The post Of mice and macchiato: Bird Friendly coffee gives a paw-up to small mammals as well appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

On Earth Day weekend, the Smithsonian will convene the first Earth Optimism Summit, a three-day event featuring more than 150 scientists, thought leaders, philanthropists, conservationists […]

The post Smithsonian To Convene Earth Optimism Summit April 21–23 appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Smithsonian scientists have discovered two new gecko species—the Lenya banded bent-toed gecko (Cyrtodactylus lenya) and Tenasserim Mountain bent-toed gecko (C. payarhtanesnsis)—in the little-studied lowland forests […]

The post Smithsonian Scientists Discover Two New Gecko Species in Vanishing Myanmar Rainforest 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.

Is it foolish to be optimistic about our environment and its future prospects? Every day, we hear dire warnings about the health of the planet […]

The post The Argument for Environmental Optimism: Opinion by Smithsonian Secretary David J. Skorton appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

If you’ve seen the movie Jurassic Park, you know that amber played a significant role in rebuilding a lost world: A mosquito trapped within its […]

The post Resin from shipwreck hints at trade routes and botany of ancient Asia appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

A tiny invasive insect from Asia might have an effect on Chesapeake Bay waters. The emerald ash borer is killing millions of ash trees in […]

The post Invasive ash borer found in Smithsonian Environmental Research Center forest; ash deaths may impact Chesapeake waters appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

(A male golden-collared manakin cleans up his display area.) Few of us would find a marriage proposal made amidst dirty dishes and messy clutter particularly […]

The post Clean = Sexy for this Panamanian Bird appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

According to a new study by biologists at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center and Virginia Tech the offspring of a certain songbird, the wood thrush, […]

The post Study: Large shady forest plots essential to survival of post-fledgling songbirds during drought appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

Millions, if not billions, of specimens reside in the world’s natural history collections, but most of these have not been carefully studied, or even looked […]

The post Using digitized Botany specimens, AI excels in simple curatorial tasks appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

 Mass Digitization of the living orchid collection maintained by Smithsonian Gardens.

The post Smithsonian Digitization: Orchid Collection appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

No green thumb? You don’t need to water these dazzling orchids to enjoy them. More than 8,000 living specimens in the Smithsonian Gardens Orchid Collection […]

The post See thousands of orchids in incredible detail in the Smithsonian’s newly digitized collection appeared first on Smithsonian Insider.

In the structure of the title salt, second-order Jahn–Teller distortion of the coordination octa­hedra around V ions is reflected by coexistence of short V—O bonds and trans-positioned long V—F bonds, with four equatorial V—F distances being inter­mediate in magnitude. Hydrogen bonding of the anions is restricted to F-atom acceptors only, with particularly strong N–H⋯F inter­actions [N⋯F = 2.5072 (15) Å] established by axial and cis-positioned equatorial F atoms.

The dihedral angle between the two aromatic rings of the title compound is 64.12 (14)°. The crystal structure is stabilized by a short Cl⋯H contact, C—Cl⋯π and van der Waals inter­actions.

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.

In a Model block, if the instance-specific value of a model argument has an anonymous structure type, an update diagram reports an error when there are multiple bus types that match that anonymous structure type.This bug exists in the following release(s):
R2020a

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