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Celebrate the International Whistlers Competition on your own with "Whistle Blues," a track from Mary Lou Williams' album "The Asch Recordings." Photo courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways.

One of the things I remember most about growing up is that my dad was always whistling. Always. While he did the dishes, was out in the yard, driving us to soccer practice and even, to our horror, while walking around in public places (cause enough for my brothers and I to quickly dash to another aisle in the grocery store.)

It wasn’t until I tried to whistle myself that I realized it was more of an art than an embarrassment. Some people I know can’t even make a sound when they try to whistle, and though I can whistle and even stay in tune, I don’t have nearly the range my father does. He even makes a nice vibrato.

Whistling is on my mind today as the 37th International Whistlers Competition kicks off today, drawing whistlers young and old from across the world.

The four-day event is held this year in Quingdao, China, but the competition began out of the Franklin County and Louisburg College Folk Festival in Louisburg, North Carolina. The festival began in 1970 and included competitions for professional and amateur performers. As the 1974 competition approached, according to the IWC, a man named Darrell Williams asked if he could whistle the song he wrote— “Little River Blues”—rather than sing it. The judges accepted it in a solo vocal category, which Williams went on to win.

After Williams won again the following year, the judges created a separate whistling category. And in 1980, the whistling competition was so popular it had to find it’s own sponsor, and became the National Whistlers Convention that summer. Soon, judges began inviting famous composers and whistlers to conduct workshops with the competitors. In 1996, the contest began to offer an international award, helping it evolve into the International Whistlers Competition it is known as today.

What? You can’t whistle? Don’t worry—the IWC folks tell us the competition “is also a time for non-whistlers to support whistling and for whistlers’ fans to join the festival of events.”

Get in on the action wherever you are with one of our favorite whistling tracks from Smithsonian Folkways, “Whistle Blues,” from Mary Lou Williams’ album “Mary Lou Williams: The Asch Recordings 1944-47.” (No relation)

The ProSolve 370e is coated with Titanium oxide, which combats several well-known air pollutants. Photo courtesy of the Cooper-Hewitt.

Imagine a sculpture that could help make the air cleaner simply by sparkling in the sunlight.

That’s the idea behind ProSolve 370e, one of the inventions currently on display at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York as part of the museum’s National Design Triennial: Why Design Now?

The sculpture, designed by the German-based company Elegant Embellishments, was crafted of round architectural tiles made of recycled ABS plastic and coated with titanium dioxide (TiO2). When exposed to sunlight, the titanium dioxide combats and neutralizes two key pollutants: Nitrogen oxide (NO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2), the elements that contribute to ozone depletion and acid rain, not to mention respiratory problems in humans.

Titanium dioxide, which is known for its “antimicrobial, self-cleaning, anti-fogging, and air-purifying qualities” has been used as an anti-pollutant since the 1970s, but the German-based designers Allison Dring (American, b. 1974) and Daniel Schwaag (German, b. United States 1972) say the ProSolve 370e takes the technology to the next level.  Their sculpture, they say, is more efficient, because they designed it so that the largest amount of surface area (painted with titanium dixoide) is exposed to sunlight—allowing a smaller, more compact sculpture to have the same effect as a larger piece with less exposure to light.

The ProSolve 370e can stand alone or be mounted on buildings. Photo courtesy of the Cooper-Hewitt.

In addition to acting as a free-standing sculpture, the ProSolve 370e can also be attached to overpasses, buildings and other structures, which means it doesn’t necessarily have to take up space on its own.

“[It's] modification that effectively ‘tunes’ existing buildings by enabling them to perform in new ways,” the designers wrote in the exhibit catalog.

Learn more about the sculpture and other green designs on the Design Triennial’s website—or go check out the sculpture yourself.

“Why Design Now” runs through January 9, 2011 at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, 2 East 91st Street New York, NY 10128.

In this image entitled, "Io High Above Jupiter’s Storms," Io appears near the center in the transition area between Jupiter’s day and night sides. Photo © Michael Benson; courtesy of the Air and Space Museum.

For centuries, most of our visual understanding of our own solar system has come by way of offerings from the scientific fields. Rarely have the sun and its planets been appreciated as art.

In the mid 1990s, artist Michael Benson set out to change that, using the Internet as a “personal space exploration” of thousands of single-frame images taken by unmanned spacecraft over the last 50 years. Benson hoped to expose them for their beauty and depth, not necessarily just what they could reveal about science.

Tomorrow, May 26, visitors to the National Air and Space Museum can view the finished products of Benson’s labors in Beyond: Visions of Planetary Landscapes, an exhibition of 148 photographs Benson culled and created with images from unmanned interplanetary probes, offering a bold visual tour of space.

“I began to realize that the legacy of space missions belonged to photography as much as to science,” he said. “We’re living in an era where science and art are coming back together.”

When compiling the project, Benson used the archives at NASA, the European Space Agency, and other organizations—which are largely open and available to the public online—to select the most striking images of each of the plants, their suns and their moons. He began to restore and reprocess them. Many of the images he found were only fragments of a larger picture, which meant he had to find several images and piece them together like a puzzle, he said.

Some of the images in the exhibit were first published in the 2003 book, Beyond:Visions of the Interplanetary Probes.  But many in the exhibit, which span 50 years of space exploration, reflect new work, too.

One of the oldest images, dating to the 1960s, is a stunning photo of the earth and the moon in the same frame (the first photograph on record of both as full spheres.) All of the original slides were in black and white, but for many, Benson dug into the images’ data to restore and reveal color for the first time. An image of Uranus radiates a robin’s egg blue; an image of the sun shows fiery shades of red and orange.

But Benson’s favorite? A beautifully eerie black and white depiction of Europa, Jupiter’s fourth-largest moon, offset by the Great Red Spot, a cyclonic storm system twice the size of the Earth that seems to explode behind it.

“It’s beautiful,” he said of the artwork. “I think it is the single most enigmatic object in the solar system.”

See all of the images at the museum this week, and don’t be surprised if it’s hard to pick a favorite.

“Beyond: Visions of Planetary Landscapes” is on view from May 26 to May 2, 2011 at the National Air and Space Museum, 6th and Independence Avenue S.W., Washington, D.C.

This Bill of Sale recently acquired by the National Museum of African American History and Culture was written in 1835 for a 16-year-old girl named Polly. Image courtesy of the museum.

On a worn, aged piece of paper dated 1835, a judge describes the details of his sale: a 16-year-old girl named Polly, with “yellow complexion and black eyes,” the sale and purchase of whom the judge says he will warrant and defend “at all cost.”

The Bill of Sale, as documents like this became known, is one of dozens of new artifacts that the National Museum of African American History and Culture is assembling for its growing collections. The Bill of Sale is one that Director Lonnie Bunch says can enlighten people’s knowledge about the lives of slaves.

“Part of what is so interesting to me is that there are so many aspects of the enslaved that we don’t know anything about,” he says. “But because they were treated as property we have a whole legal trail.”

This particular document reveals several things about the enslaved. For one, the buyer and the seller were from Arkansas, Bunch says, indicating that at the time, the use of slaves was spreading from areas like North and South Carolina to places further south and west, like Alabama, Kentucky and Arkansas. Also, the price paid for the slave girl—$600—also offers a way to measure how slavery evolved in later years: By the time the Civil War began, Bunch says, a girl of Polly’s age was sold for about $1,500.

Bunch says the bill will make an appearance in the museum, which is set to open in 2015, but that there is also a lot that can be done with the artifact online. Its simplicity will help it reach many people, he says.

“I think for me whats most important is trying to close my eyes and imagine what this girl felt like, that she had no control over where she was going; she has no idea what the future was going to hold for her,” he said. “The bill itself really is something simple, but to realize it’s something about a person makes it very powerful.”

To see some of the other artifacts in the NMAAHC’s collection, visit the online museum.

Tom, Huck and the Dead Cat (1939) by Richard Guy Walton. Image courtesy of the American Art Museum.

Monday, May 24: James T. Demetrion Lecture: Simon Schama

Columbia University professor of art history and history Simon Schama will be offering today’s lecture, “The Beast in Contemporary Art.” Some of you may be familiar with his work by way of his most recent PBS television series The Power of Art. Furthermore, he has written extensively on topics as diverse as 17th-century Dutch art, environmental history, 21st-century land and earth art, and the 2008 presidential election. Free. Hirshhorn, 7:00 PM.

Tuesday, May 25: Workers Rights, Day Labor, and Union Representation: Community Forum

This forum will discuss labor rights issues with the goal of helping you develop an understanding about how intertwined labor rights are for both legal and undocumented workers. Invited participants include National Day Laborer Organizing Network, DC Jobs with Justice, and AFL-CIO. Free. For reservations, call 202-633-4844. Anacostia Museum, 7:00 PM.

Wednesday, May 26: Bicentennial Celebration Concert: The Pan-American Symphony Orchestra

The Pan-American Symphony Orchestra is the first orchestra in the nation to focus solely on the musical heritage of Latin American. To celebrate the Bicentennial of Argentina’s 1810 May Revolution—a week-long overthrow of Spanish rule in what is today Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay—the orchestra will play a symphonic tribute to the Argentine songbook, including milongas, tangos, and music inspired by Argentine folk genres. This program, presented by the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian Latino Center, and the Embassy of Argentina in Washington, D.C. as part of the series “Argentina at the Smithsonian 2010.” Free. Seating is first come, first served. For more information, visit the Kennedy Center’s website here. John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Millennium Stage. 6:00-7:00 PM.

Thursday, May 27: Face-to-Face Portrait Talk: Mark Twain

In this week’s presentation, curator of photographs Frank H. Goodyear speaks about author and humorist Mark Twain. Twain is perhaps most famous for his novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and was recently featured in a Smithsonian magazine article. Free. National Portrait Gallery, 6:00-6:30 PM.

Friday, May 28: Hot Topics: Dialogue on the Relationship between Scientific and Religious Perspectives on Human Evolution

Hall of Human Origins curator Dr. Rick Potts and co-chair of the Human Origins Program’s Broader Social Impacts Committee Dr. Connie Bertka will lead an informal discussion on the relationship between scientific and religious perspectives on human evolution. Free. Natural History Museum, 3:00 PM.

For updates on all exhibitions and events, visit our companion site goSmithsonian.com