Articles

A bull walks in front of a cow. If they mate, the bull’s sperm will likely cluster together as they swim through the female’s reproductive organs.

Bull Sperm Get by With a Little Help From Their Friends

Traveling together helps the sperm navigate a tricky, sticky migration through a cow's reproductive tract

A sculpture by artist Arlene Love and a tray of bottled scents in Joel Mainland’s office at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia.

Sniffing Out the Science of Smelling

From the lab to the art gallery, the latest efforts to understand the fragrant, musky, stinky and utterly baffling world of your nose

Members of the Preservation All Stars perform in the hall on August 18, 2022.  

How Preservation Hall Has Kept New Orleans' Iconic Jazz Alive

The plucky institution staged a brassy comeback for America’s signature music

Market research firm Fact.MR estimated that global nonalcoholic wine sales reached $1.6 billion in 2021 and will double in the next decade.

The Science Behind Nonalcoholic Wine

Drinking habits are changing, and vintners are exceeding tasters' expectations with new options stripped of their alcohol

The Bell X-1, a miracle of form and function.

How the Bell X-1 Ushered in the Supersonic Age

The speeding-bullet design propelled Chuck Yeager into history

The signpost of hometowns for each of the characters in the sitcom "M*A*S*H" is now held in the collections of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, where it will go on view December 9.

The Stars Are Aligned at the National Museum of American History

Fifty Years and TV's 'M*A*S*H' Still Draws Audiences

Fans are making plans to visit the Smithsonian this December when the show's signature signpost goes on view in the new exhibition "Entertainment Nation"

One reader wonders: Why did ants make it all over the Americas while anteaters didn’t?  

Why Do Anteaters Live Only in the Tropics and More Questions From Our Readers

You've got questions. We've got experts.

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The Noble Fury of Samuel Adams

How America’s “first politician” galvanized a colony—and helped set a revolution in motion

Bakhtiari nomads in the Zagros Mountains of Iran in June 2017

How Nomads Shaped Centuries of Civilization

A new book celebrates the achievements of wanderers, whose stories have long been overlooked

Detail of the Chief Johnson totem pole

The World's Largest Collection of Standing Totem Poles Keeps Getting Bigger

Eighty sculptures in and around Ketchikan, Alaska, tell the ancestral stories of Indigenous clans

The Radcliffe Camera, part of Oxford’s Bodleian Library. Tolkien once had a vision of this structure as a temple to Morgoth, the villain of Middle-earth.

How J.R.R. Tolkien Came to Write the Stories of 'The Rings of Power'

Haunted by the approach of another world war, the beloved fantasy author created a new story of Middle-earth that few people even knew about—until now

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The Remarkable Effort to Locate America's Lost Patents

An 1836 blaze destroyed thousands of records that catalogued the young nation's ingenuity, but recent discoveries indicate that originals may still exist

After the manta ray filters out the tiny plankton from the water it ingests, the excess water exits through the dark gill slits on the ray's ventral side. 

Planet Positive

Why Conservationists Are Hopeful About the Manta Ray's Future

The giant fish faces threats from poachers, boat strikes and climate change

An experimental vineyard at Cornell AgriTech’s McCarthy Farm in Geneva, New York, where researchers are studying hybrid grapes

Are Hybrid Grapes the Future of Wine?

Scientists, growers and winemakers are working with experimental varieties to adapt to the effects of climate change

Paula, Sam and Sol Messinger aboard the M.S. St. Louis in May 1939. The U.S. denied the ship entry, forcing its 937 passengers to return to Europe. More than a quarter of these refugees were later killed in the Holocaust.

Untold Stories of American History

Why Was America So Reluctant to Take Action on the Holocaust?

A new Ken Burns documentary examines the U.S.' complex, often shameful response to the rise of Nazism and the plight of Jewish refugees

About two to three million birds of prey fly through Panama each fall, in what amounts to the world’s third-largest raptor migration.

Panama

Watch Millions of Raptors Fly Across Panama This Fall

The country’s unique shape makes it a perfect migratory pathway for the birds of prey

The data, says the exhibition director Rachel Goslins, offers "a potential roadmap for anyone seeking to be inspired, as well as to inspire hope and action." (Above: the two-story interactive me + you, by the New York artist and architect Suchi Reddy, incorporated the latest in artificial intellegence analysis.)

What It Will Take to Inspire Hope for a Better Tomorrow

Visitor data from the Smithsonian’s FUTURES exhibition provides a road map for how to navigate the world ahead

A pharmacist prepares to administer a Covid-19 booster shot to help protect a patient against the Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5.

Four Big Questions About the New Covid-19 Boosters, Answered

The FDA and CDC recently recommended new boosters to target the Omicron subvariants. Here’s what you need to know about them.

The da Vinci surgical robot, shown here on a US Navy hospital ship, is one of the most widely used devices to assist doctors in laparoscopic surgery. The procedure — in which tools are inserted through tiny holes in the abdomen instead of cutting a long incision — allows patients to recover more quickly.

The Past, Present and Future of Robotic Surgery

After decades of merely assisting doctors, are sophisticated machines ready to take charge?

The newly discovered Opisthiamimus gregori preys on a now-extinct water bug.

Scientists Discover Bug-Eating Reptile That Lived Among Dinosaurs

Delicate fossil reveals a cousin of the modern tuatara

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