Megan Gambino

Megan Gambino

 

Megan Gambino is a senior web editor for Smithsonian magazine.

Sprites over Red Willow County, Nebraska, on August 12, 2013

Scientists Capture Rare Photographs of Red Lightning

Graduate student Jason Ahrns and colleagues hunt the skies for sprites—fleeting streaks and bursts of color that can appear above thunderstorms

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Cosmic Portraits Created From Hubble Space Telescope Images

Sergio Albiac generates images of people by collecting their head shots and replacing pixels with snippets from pictures of stars and galaxies

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Why the Next Silicon Valley Will Be in the Middle East

Venture capitalist Christopher Schroeder sees the Arab Spring giving rise to a new innovative center in Egypt and beyond

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Is There a Liberal Bias to Political Comedy?

There is a liberal bias in America’s political comedy scene, says Alison Dagnes. What gives?

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These Ocean Waves Look Like Liquid Sculptures

Photographer Pierre Carreau captures waves mid-break, showing the surf's delicate balance of power and fragility

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Sharks Made Out of Golf Bags? A Look at the Big Fish in Contemporary Art

Intrigued by the powerful hunters, artists have made tiger sharks, great whites and hammerheads the subjects of sculpture

Bacterial Dragon (Paenibacillus dendritiformis), by Eshel Ben-Jacob

Colonies of Growing Bacteria Make Psychedelic Art

Israeli physicist Eshel Ben-Jacob uses bacteria as an art medium, shaping colonies in petri dishes into bold patterns

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Toxic Runoff Yellow and Other Paint Colors Sourced From Polluted Streams

An engineer and an artist at Ohio University team up to create paints made of sludge extracted from streams near abandoned coal mines

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Nobel Prize Winners Are Put to the Task of Drawing Their Discoveries

Volker Steger photographs Nobel laureates posing with sketches of their breakthrough findings

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The Macabre Beauty of Medical Photographs

An artist-scientist duo shares nearly 100 images of modern art with a ghastly twist—they're all close-ups of human diseases and other ailments

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The End of the World Might Just Look Like This

Artist Ron Miller presents several scenarios—most of them scientifically plausible—of landscapes imperiled and of Earth meeting its demise

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Inside the Alien's Guide to the Ruins of Washington, D.C.

To us, the architecture of the Lincoln Memorial is an iconic callback to ancient Greece. But what would extraterrestrials make of it?

The city of Shanghai presents A True Story (above), an impressive work of mosaïculture, at Mosaïcultures Internationales de Montréal 2013.

Horticultural Artists Grow Fantastical Scenes at the Montréal Botanical Garden

Take a peek at some of the living artwork entered in an international competition in Quebec this summer

San Francisco-based entrepreneur Antony Evans plans to insert genes from bioluminescent bacteria into a species of flora as a first step to creating glowing trees.

Creating a New Kind of Night Light: Glow-in-the-Dark Trees

A group in California is starting to engineer plants that could one day replace streetlights

What do you see?

Fruits and Veggies Get a Close-Up

In the darkroom, photographer Ajay Malghan creates abstract art by casting light through thin slices of produce

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These Bright Webs Depict Flight Patterns Around Major Airports

Software engineer Alexey Papulovskiy has built Contrailz, a site that generates visuals of flight data over cities around the world

Less conspicuous than the rugged Rocky, Cascade and Coast Mountain Ranges in this photograph are the markings of agriculture, in the bottom center.

It’s a Green, Green, Green, Green World

NASA and NOAA release satellite images of Earth and all its vegetation

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The Big Bang: Enthralling Photos of Exploding Bullets

Houston photographer Deborah Bay captures the violent power of projectiles lodged in bulletproof plexiglass

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The Scientist Comes to the Classroom

Partnerships that pair schools and working scientists are helping kids think about science—and science careers—in ways they never imagined

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This Incredible Art Installation Makes It Rain, Everywhere But On You

"Rain Room," on display at MoMA, is an indoor downpour that detects the presence of people and adjusts to keep them dry

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