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Head out to the National Zoo in honor of Teacher Appreciation Day! Detail of Class learning about the Sahara Desert, Washington, D.C. (1957) by the Scurlock Studio.

Friday, November 5:

Sorry kids, no special evening events happening at the Smithsonian tonight.

Saturday, November 6: Teacher Appreciation Day

After spending a week at school, teachers need a day of fun just like the kids they have to put up with, er, nurture for seven hours a day five days a week. In honor of Teacher Appreciation Day, the National Zoo has put together a special lineup of programs especially for educators, including animal demonstrations and exhibit programs that will hopefully inspire classroom activities. You will also have an opportunity to take a peek at the new exhibit Amazonian Science on a Sphere, view the documentary The Monarch Effect and much more. Go to this website for a full list of events. Teachers will also receive discounts for the day, such as a $10 flat rate for parking, a 15 percent discount in National Zoo stores and 30 percent discount at the Mane Restaurant. Free, but registration is required. Call 202-633-3059 or send an email for more information. And don’t forget to bring your school ID! National Zoo, 10:00 AM-4:00 PM

Sunday, November 7: Experiments in 19th-Century Color Photography

Cameras are everywhere nowadays so it’s easy to take for granted the technology we have at our fingertips. As far as photography has come along, it’s not always easy to look back and figure out the processes shutterbug pioneers used to create their images. Case in point, the development of color photography. It wasn’t always a matter of course, which makes some modern scholars wonder: how’d they do that? (Smithsonian contributor Robert Poole wrote “In Living Color,” a piece on an early, obscure color photography process that employed potatoes.) In this scholarly symposium, come listen to a collective of international specialists and learn how color photography came about. Speakers will include: Michelle Delaney, curator, Photographic History Collection, National Museum of American History; Dr. Susan Stulik, senior scientist, The Getty Conservation Institute; Grant Romer,senior conservator, The International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House; Kelly Wright, adjunct professor and doctoral candidate, University of Cincinnati and Francois Brunet, professor of art history and literature, University of Paris. This event is part of Fotoweek DC.

And don’t forget, Smithsonian magazine’s 7th annual photo contest that is coming to a close on December 1, 2009. Time is running out to enter your photos! Free. American History Museum, 10:00 AM-5:00 PM.

For more information on events and exhibitions at the Smithsonian museums, check our companion website, goSmithsonian.com, the official visitor’s guide to the Smithsonian.

Aerobics for Everyone (1982). Image courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways.

Autumn is upon us, which means we must once again turn our thoughts to the Halloween/Thanksgiving/Christmas triumvirate of culinary evil. No matter how much goodwill you show to your friends, family and neighbors, it won’t save your waistline from the smorgasbord of rich foods that you traditionally encounter this time of year. That said, let’s turn our thoughts to a bygone era, that of the 1980s, that age where you could don shoulder pads large enough to create the illusion of having a slimmer midsection that than what you actually had. Also, it was an age of star-studded aerobic exercise, be it with Jane Fonda in pastel leggings helping you look your Barbarella best or Richard Simmons encouraging you to sweat to the oldies (or start a grass roots Rockette troupe—I could never really tell.) Not to be outdone, Smithsonian Folkways has in its collections a handy dandy workout record of its own from 1982: Aerobics for Everyone. No, you don’t get the benefit of working along with a video and watching someone do the moves with you—although, per the cover, the vocal and included written instructions are easy enough to follow—you do get to drop a stone or two to the tune of world music classics like “Hava Nagila,” “The Mexican Hat Dance” and the “Tarantella.” (If you can work out to the latter while tossing pizza dough, you’re an exercise ace.)

Listen to a few selections from this album. Audio Courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways, the nonprofit record label of the national museum. For CDs or digital downloads please visit folkways.si.edu

Jim by Rebecca Westcott (2003) / Jim Houser, Philadelphia, PA / NPG, SI

“If one paints someone’s portrait, one should not know him if possible. No knowledge. I do not want to know him at all,” German Expressionist Otto Dix once said.  With that kind of detachment, it’s likely Dix wouldn’t have approved of the new Portraiture Now: Communities exhibit, where artist and subject are pals and everybody seems to know everybody, and in fact, a whole town, from the mayor to the fireman, hangs together like the neighbors they are in the museum’s gallery.

The exhibit opens tomorrow, Friday, November 6 at the National Portrait Gallery.

The three featured painters, Rose Frantzen from Maquoketa, Iowa, Jim Torok from Brookland, Brooklyn, New York, and Rebecca Westcott from Philadelphia, offer up a mix of portraits of family members, friends and neighbors.

The figures in the late Rebecca Westcott’s full-length portraits of her fellow Philadelphia twenty-somethings are slinky and elongated. There is an urban edge to her style, despite the slightly muted colors. “I think of my paintings as separate parts,” she has said, “that make up a whole world when exhibited together.”  Westcott  was  struck by a car  in 2004 at the age of 28. This is the first showing of her work in Washington, DC.

The painstakenly-created miniature portraits created by Jim Torok may be small, but the intense sharpness, color and lighting that appears almost photographic in nature entices the observer to look more closely. “Scale matters,” as curator Frank Goodyear explains. Torok’s portraits, one of which can take up to a year to complete, depict fellow New York artists like Trenton Doyle Hancock, as well as the portraits of three generations of a family from Colorado.

Rose Frantzen takes visitors back to her hometown of Maquoketa, Iowa, in both sight and sound. With her series of 180 oil portraits of fellow townspeople, she brought portraits back to the common man, literally offering her neighbors a chance to have their likenesses painted for free. When one enters the exhibit, walls full of Maquoketans greet you, their eyes gleaming, while a surround-sound recording of their voices play on a loop, telling you about life in a small town in Iowa.

“Portraiture Now: Communities” runs from November 6thuntil July 5th, 2010 at the National Portrait Gallery.

The ease of positioning the Flex-Straw made it appealing for hospital use. Joseph B. Friedman Papers, NMAH Archives Center

They are everywhere. Those quirky, bendy straws that make the satisfying crunching sound when flexed. They are in every soft drink, every restaurant… even when we don’t ask for them, those bendable straws magically appear in front of us. They’re one of the most undistinguished of utilitarian items of our time, yet few have surely ever paused to think about how they came to be.

Thankfully, for all those now hung-up on the history of the FlexStraw, the American History Museum has slurped up some straw stats to quench your thirst for knowledge.

The FlexStraw owes its existence to Joseph B. Friedman, (1900 – 1982) an independent American inventor, who came up with numerous interesting ideas that never really succeeded in the marketing world. When he was just 14, his list of inventions included an ice cream dispenser and the “pencilite”—a pencil with a light—creations that eventually granted him nine U.S. patents and even more in Great Britain, Australia and Canada. However, it was while working as a realtor in San Francisco, California in the 1930s, that Friedman experienced his most “prolific patenting period,” according to the museum. Six of his nine U.S. patents were issued then, one proving to be his most successful invention—our friend, the flexible drinking straw.

His “Eureka!” moment came when he was in an ice cream parlor with his young daughter, Judith. The tiny girl was struggling to get some height on a stiff straw while seated at the counter. Friedman had an idea. He began to experiment with an upgrade.

Pencil sketch of flexible drinking straw, no date.

According to the  Archives Center at the American History Museum, Friedman took a paper straight straw, inserted a screw and using dental floss, wrapped the paper into the screw threads, creating corrugations (see drawing at right). After removing the screw, the altered paper straw would bend conveniently over the edge of the glass, allowing small children, including his daughter Judith, to better reach their beverages. A U.S. patent was issued for this new invention under the title “Drinking Tube,” on September 28, 1937. Friedman attempted to sell his straw patent to several existing straw manufacturers beginning in 1937 without success, so after completing his straw machine, he began to produce the straw himself.

Today, from 12 to 12:30, you can see the machine that was used to make the FlexStraw, samples of the straw, and other items from the exhibit, “The Straight Truth About the Flexible Drinking Straw” at the “Meet the Museum” event held most Thursdays at the museum.

Merlin, the National Zoo's 27-year-old sloth bear, died this morning. Photo courtesy of the Zoo.

It’s a sad day at the National Zoo. Merlin, the National Zoo’s 27-year-old sloth bear, died this morning after a 48-hour illness. Merlin was born at the Zoo in 1981, and helped to introduce millions of visitors to this fascinating, but unfamiliar, bear species.

On Monday morning, Merlin underwent a routine physical examination. The examination went well, but Merlin did not fully recover from the anesthetic by the afternoon. Veterinarians also noticed that he had vomited some fluid with blood in it. Because of his medical history—he suffered a gastric volvulus, “twisted stomach” in 1994—staff members evaluated him again on Monday.

Veterinarians did blood work, ultrasounds and radiographs and decided that he needed surgery to correct a partially twisted spleen. After the procedure, Merlin seemed to be getting better, but further blood work revealed possible circulatory shock and renal failure. Staff stayed with Merlin 24 hours a day for two days until he passed away this morning.

Merlin fathered seven cubs, the youngest of which—3-year-old Balawat—left the National Zoo earlier this year to join a female cub at the Akron Zoo in Ohio. Balawat and Merlin bonded last fall after Hana, Balawat’s mother, was not receptive to mating with Merlin. Zookeepers introduced the two males last October. It took a month or so, but the pair eventually hit it off. Staff found them playing together for the first time in November. After playing, the keepers reported, the two sloth bears curled up together and took a nap.

Sloth bears, who use their curved claws to pick up ants and termites, are native to the Indian sub-continent. They use their long snout and lips to create a vacuum-like seal to suck up the insects. Sloth bears are the only bears to carry young on their backs. National Zoo scientists, engaged in sloth bear conservation efforts since the 1970s, estimate that about 6,000 to 11,000 sloth bears remain in the wild. The animals face critical loss of habitat and as a result, the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species categorizes sloth bears as vulnerable.

Merlin’s death at age 27 —the oldest sloth bear in captivity died at 29—will be reviewed. A necropsy will be performed to determine the exact cause of Merlin’s death, but results won’t be available for a few weeks. Two female sloth bears, Hana and Khali, remain on exhibit.

Smithsonian American Art Museum staff install Albert Paley’s Portal Gates at the museum’s Renwick Gallery. Photo by Gene Young.

The Renwick Gallery’s famed Portal Gates by master sculptor and blacksmith Albert Paley are once again back home, reinstalled last week on the second floor in a custom-made alcove, after going on exhibit at Iowa State University. The gates have been a much-loved staple at the gallery since their installation in 1976, when they met with critical acclaim and praise from the press. The Washington Post called them “one of the most important iron and brass works of art since Louis Sullivan.”

In fact, a work by Louis Sullivan figures in the story of how the gates came to be commissioned by the museum. When the newly renovated Renwick Gallery opened in 1972,  two elevator grills designed by Louis Sullivan for the Stock Exchange in Chicago were lent to the gallery by another Smithsonian museum,  the National Museum of American History, and installed in an alcove adjacent to the museum’s store. But according to the Renwick’s then-director Lloyd Herman, American History officials had second thoughts about the loan once they saw how beautiful the work was at the Renwick. So, “they asked for them back for installation there,” Herman explained in a letter to a visitor in 1982.

After losing the Sullivan elevator grills, the Renwick decided to commission the creation of new artwork from contemporary artists and invited several metalsmiths, including Paley, to submit designs. Paley, an art professor at the University of Rochester in New York and internationally reknowned for his one-of-a-kind jewelry pieces, won the $4,800 commission. His detailed drawings, Herman wrote in the same letter, made a “stunning addition to this fine old building.”

Paley and his assistant, Richard Palmer, spent 3,800 hours and seven months creating the 1,200-pound gates. (For the re-installation, museum staff had to use a crank to lift and position them.) Their scale had an overwhelming effect on the young jeweler.  “I felt rather like Gulliver,” he told the Washington Post.  “It didn’t seem as though the objects I was working on changed in scale but instead it was as if I had suddenly shrunk to Lilliputian size.”

Paley was born in Philadelphia in 1944 and grew up in a middle-class family. He decided against attending college, and instead worked as a salesman in a department store until someone suggested he attend the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. “I got a scholarship,” he told the Post.  “And I realized that art was who I was.” He worked primarily as a jeweler until attending a three-day blacksmith’s workshop at Southern Illinois University in 1970. Today, Paley holds an endowed chair at the Rochester Institute of Technology and continues to work in his studio there.

See more photos from the installation on the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Facebook page.

The VERITAS telescope is located at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory near Amado, Arizona. Image courtesy of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

Shooting through space with the greatest of ease, cosmic rays can careen through the universe at nearly the speed of light. (Cosmic ray is a bit of a misnomer. The term really describes subatomic particles, but using an umbrella term like “cosmic thing” would just be aggravatingly vague.)

But what is the driving force behind these little bits-n-pieces?  Scientists suspected that shock waves from supernovae and massive stars were propelling the superspeedy particles, but they couldn’t prove it in part because they could only observe cosmic rays that hit the Earth’s atmosphere. The VERITAS telescope—which is partially funded by the Smithsonian Institution—however, has allowed scientists to see indirect evidence of cosmic rays much farther away in the universe. While observing the M82 galaxy—which resides about 12 million light-years away from the Earth—VERITAS produced evidence that may shed some light on the matter.

M82 is a “starburst” galaxy, meaning that it is rich with newborn stars. Although VERITAS cannot observe cosmic rays directly, it can detect gamma rays—a form of radiation that is produced when cosmic rays interact with interstellar gas. It took more than two years of data collection, but VERITAS was ultimately able to detect gamma radiation emanating from M82. “The detection of M82 indicates that the universe is full of natural particle accelerators, and as ground-based gamma-ray observatories continue to improve, further discoveries are inevitable,” said Martin Pohl, a professor of physics at Iowa State University who helped lead the study. This evidence supports the theory that supernovae and massive stars are the universe’s predominant accelerators of cosmic rays.

Trek Lime Bike, winner of the People's Design Award. Courtesy of Trek Bicycle Corporation.

Every year, the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum asks the public, what constitutes good design? This October, a couple hundred products were nominated and thousands of votes were cast in the fourth annual People’s Design Award contest—and the winner was (drum roll, please)…the Trek Lime bicycle.

Marketed for the 65 percent of Americans who do not own or ride a bike, the sleek, three-speed automatic shift Lime with push-back brakes is the perfect urban commuting bike. Flip up the saddle, and it has a handy-dandy storage compartment for a wallet and keys.

Its designer, Hans Eckholm of Waterloo, Wisconsin-based Trek Bicycles, accepted the award at the National Design Awards gala on October 22 in New York City. I suspect it was a proud moment for Eckholm, whose sister wrote on the contest’s comment board, “He has been engineering bikes since he was little. He would take bikes apart, put them back together and customize them to his liking!…He is our rock star and I hope this design wins!”

It has been a big couple years for bikes at the Cooper-Hewitt. In 2008, the museum partnered with New York’s Department of Transportation on the CityRacks competition to design a new sidewalk bicycle rack.