Smithsonian Magazine

01/30/2025

To encourage the decipherment of the ancient Indus script, the government of Tamil Nadu, a state in southern India, announced a massive cash prize for anyone—scholar or amateur—who can crack the code and begin the process of better understanding the enigmatic Indus Valley civilization.

The enigmatic Indus Valley civilization left behind a script that today's historians haven't yet deciphered. While amateur theories abound, scholars are increasingly relying on computer science to crack the code

01/30/2025

A region of the Pacific Ocean that’s larger than Switzerland is now fully protected from fishing, thanks to the creation of a massive new marine sanctuary in the Marshall Islands.

The waters around two remote atolls in the central Pacific Ocean—spanning 18,500 square miles—are now protected from fishing

01/30/2025

How did a Tesla end up in space?

The car, launched in 2018 on a SpaceX rocket’s upper stage, is one of many human-made objects in deep space that could potentially be mistaken for natural celestial bodies

01/30/2025

Last spring, the world’s most-visited art museum, the Louvre in Paris, proposed moving its most popular artwork—Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa—to its own subterranean room. Now, that idea is becoming reality.

As part of a massive renovation, the Leonardo da Vinci portrait will get its own gallery space accessible from a separate entrance

01/30/2025

For about a century, the 14-karat gold spike has been in the hands of private owners outside Alaska. But now, it’s coming home.

The spike's installation marked the completion of the Alaska Railroad in 1923. It's spent most of the time since then in the hands of private owners

01/30/2025

Move aside, lobster—a newly described giant isopod from Vietnam is now a seafood delicacy, and it has a cool name to go along with this status: Bathynomus vaderi, in homage to Darth Vader.

In recent years, the deep-sea giant isopod has also become a seafood delicacy in Vietnam, where it was discovered

01/30/2025

Researchers who discovered “dark oxygen” on the ocean floor are planning a new project to learn even more about their mysterious—and controversial—finding.

Last year, the team made headlines when it published a paper describing how metal lumps at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean seemed to produce oxygen without sunlight

01/30/2025

The next time you visit the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, be on the lookout for a bulky young Amur tiger.

The 2-year-old male tiger is now at home with the other residents of the Great Cats exhibit. Get the facts on how animal care teams helped this endangered animal adjust to his new surroundings.

01/30/2025

The Archives of American Art is launching a new season of “ARTiculated: Dispatches from the Archives of American Art,” highlighting artists who have continued to blaze their own trails.

Season 4 of "Articulated" chronicles the lives and work of ceramicist and textile artist Anita Fields (Osage), muralist Leo Tanguma, painter and photographer Lenore Chinn, and painter Pat Steir as they’ve navigated their careers over the decades

01/30/2025

When the sun sets on the fifteenth day of the Lunar New Year celebrations, hundreds brave the freezing February temperatures to see the town’s unusual pyrotechnic display, part of the annual Yu County Lantern Festival.

Dubbed the "poor man's fireworks," the spectacular pyrotechnic display is a 500-year ritual in Nuanquan, China

01/30/2025

In a triumph for NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission, new findings suggest that tiny bits of rock retrieved from the asteroid Bennu hold lingering traces of ancient salt water.

Two new papers describe hints to a brine-filled environment on the 4.5-billion-year-old space rock and the presence of amino acids, offering clues to how early Earth got its ingredients for life

01/29/2025

Archaeologists in Luxembourg have unearthed a stash of Roman gold coins dating back some 1,600 years.

Three of the coins are particularly rare: They portray Eugenius, an illegitimate emperor who reigned for just two years in the late fourth century C.E.

01/29/2025

To toast this wisdom-suffused slice of the Chinese zodiac cycle, we summoned six of nature’s cleverest serpents and paired them with “chengyu,” usually four-character Chinese idioms that are used to convey wisdom.

These fascinating serpents embody acclaimed qualities including cunning and intelligence

01/29/2025

Discover how an Italian scientist is uncovering secrets that could help combat a growing agricultural crisis. Our latest podcast episode, "How to Use Renaissance Paintings to Improve the Farming of Tomorrow," will take you on a journey through Renaissance paintings, medieval archives and cloistered orchards. You'll meet “arboreal archaeologist” Isabella Dalla Ragione who talks about how her work to identify long-lost fruits could bolster our food supply in a changing climate. You'll also hear from Smithsonian writer and investigative journalist Mark Schapiro.

Join host Ari Daniel for this new episode of "There's More to That": https://apple.co/3PSajWm

01/29/2025

This stunning marble depiction of the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom and warfare is now on public display in the atrium of the Wrightwood 659 gallery in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood.

After spending centuries on a British aristocrat's estate in North Yorkshire, the marble masterpiece will be unveiled in Chicago's Wrightwood 659 gallery later this week

01/29/2025

Hey true crime fans! Take a peek at the National Museum of American History's new exhibition, "Forensic Science on Trial."

This year, the museum opened

01/29/2025

When the New York Evening Mirror published Edgar Allan Poe’s poem "The Raven" on January 29, 1845, it catapulted both the work and its author to instant fame.

Published on this day in 1845, the work used alliteration, internal rhyme and repetition to draw in readers, lending it a dark and melancholic tone

01/29/2025

Los Angeles is burning, but it isn’t alone. In recent years, fires have blasted through cities in Colorado, the southern Appalachians and the island of Maui, along with Canada, Australia, Portugal and Greece.

Human use of fire has produced an era of uncontrolled burning