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The ʻIʻiwi, or Scarlet Hawaiian Honeycreeper, with an elongated bill adapted for extracting nectar from flowers.

Several million years ago, a progenitor of the group of songbirds known as the honeycreepers arrived in the Hawaiian Islands. The birds diverged into different species to fill a variety of niches, subsisting on everything from grubs to tree sap to nectar from tropical flowers. But until recently, scientists didn’t know exactly how the various honeycreeper species currently in existence were related to each other—or what bird from the mainland was their closest ancestor.

A new study by a team of Smithsonian scientists, published in Current Biology, has pieced together this puzzle and resolved the mystery. “This radiation is one of the natural scientific treasures that the [Hawaiian] archipelago offers out in the middle of the Pacific,” says Dr. Heather Lerner, a professor at Earlham College, who worked on the study as a postdoctoral researcher at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute with Rob Fleischer and Helen James.

Most species of honeycreeper are brightly colored and sing a canary-like song. But beyond that, they are remarkably diverse. ”You have honeycreeper species that are adapted for nectarivory, while others eat seeds, fruit, or even snails,” Lerner says. “You have some bill types that are just unique among birds.”

Like the famous finches Darwin studied in the Galápagos Islands, scientists have long considered the honeycreepers a textbook example of adaptive radiation—a group of species that evolved to fill a variety of niches upon arriving in a new habitat. “In trying to understand all of this diversity, if you don’t understand how and when it evolved, you really can’t test a lot of hypotheses,” says Lerner. “The phylogeny—the individual relationships between species—are fundamental.”

To begin sorting out this mystery, the research team gathered DNA samples from a wide variety of birds. In addition to sampling all 18 living honeycreeper species—and one recently extinct group—they took DNA from 28 bird species that appeared to share physical characteristics with honeycreepers or have similar ranges.

The researchers then used cutting-edge DNA sequencing techniques, some of which have been developed over the past few years. These methods were crucial, because sorting out the tangled relationships among various species required a massive quantity of DNA in order to find commonalities and differences in the genetic codes. “We would have been in the lab forever if we hadn’t used some new technologies,” Lerner says. “So what we did is, instead of copying maybe 500 DNA base pairs at a time, or 1000, we did 10,000 to 12,000 at a time. It’s a complete revolution in terms of DNA sequencing.”

The scientists examined a series of locations in the DNA to look for variations among the species. The degree of variation providing information about when the various species had diverged from each other, because DNA tends to mutate at a set rate over time. The more differences that exist between species, the longer ago their evolutionary paths diverged.

The team’s findings were somewhat surprising: As it turned out, an ancestor of the rosefinches, a group of Eurasian bird species, was the closest relative shared by all Hawaiian honeycreeper species. The founders finches likely immigrated to the Hawaiian Islands sometime between 7.2 million and 5.8 million years ago.

Hawaii’s unusual geology played a role in the rapid evolution of many honeycreeper species that followed. The volcanic islands have formed one by one over time, as the Pacific tectonic plate is dragged across a “hot spot” of magma, and each new island provided a new opportunity for colonization.

‘The timing that we get from our calibration suggests that they got there about the time that Kaua’i was forming,” Fleischer says. “But they didn’t really start to speed up the process of splitting into different lineages until the island of Oahu formed, when you now suddenly had a blank slate of open habitat.” Between 4 million and 2.5 million years ago, the DNA analysis indicates, the honeycreepers underwent a rapid period of speciation, with various species evolving new bill shapes and other features to take advantage of the many new niches available.

In recent years, honeycreeper species have suffered greatly from habitat loss and other problems posed by human development, with 38 species going extinct. The research team plans to use these DNA analysis techniques with samples taken from extinct museum specimens to see where the species fit into the evolutionary family tree.

Within this sarcophagus and underlying wrappings is the mummified body of a man who died 2,000 years ago (150 B.C.-50 A.D.) Photo courtesy of the Natural History Museum

Picture a mummy. You probably imagine a lurching horror-movie villain, lumbering out of a tomb with fraying cloth straps trailing behind.

The truth is quite different and no less fascinating. The Natural History Museum‘s new exhibition, “Eternal Life in Ancient Egypt,” reveals that Egyptians made mummies of loved ones, exotic animals and even pets as a means of communicating with the gods—and preserving the body to journey through the afterlife and reunite with the soul.

These mummies and associated artifacts, says curator Lana Troy of Uppsala University in Sweden, can serve as a valuable portal into the Egyptian belief system. Tentkhonsu—a female human mummy on display in the gallery—and the sarcophagus in which she was buried are covered with inscriptions and images that convey details of the Egyptians’ beliefs about life after death.

“This coffin is a product of a long tradition,” Troy says. “Perhaps the most interesting thing, for me, was discovering the way that the pictures actually fit together. They aren’t a compilation of scenes, but rather a narrative.” The detailed paintings that wrap around the outside of the sarcophagus and continue into the interior show the stages of the Egyptian afterlife, moving from death to judgement, the journey through the netherworld, and eventual rebirth.

“These were designed not as static objects, but as agents of resurrection,” says Troy. “They’re actively involved—by depicting the resurrection, showing it step by step, and placing gods in certain positions. It’s feeding into the energy of the coffin as a place where the dead are going to be revived.”

Perhaps even more than the human mummies, the dozens of animal mummies on display—ranging from tiny crocodile hatchlings to hawks to an enormous bull—most fully illustrate the importance of mummification in everyday Egyptian religious ritual. “If you go to a church, and you’re Catholic, you light a candle, and that is your offering,” says Salima Ikram of the American University in Cairo, who also curated the exhibit. “The Egyptians had animal mummies. The idea was that this creature would go and transfer the information to the god, and the god was more likely to hear you.”

A mummified cat, circa 332-30 BCE. Photo courtesy of the Natural History Museum

The array of animal mummies also tell us about Egyptian social class and status. “If you were a peasant, you would probably pick up a cat of your own and try and wrap it or just give it to the priest,” Ikram says. Some of the more ornate mummies in the show—such as a bronze statue of the god Horus, which probably once contained a bird mummy—likely came from a wealthy family, perhaps seeking to flaunt its high social status.

Legions of workshops created these tokens of piety by the dozen, with mummy industries often based around temple complexes to sell their wares to visiting worshippers. But recent advances in CT scanning have revealed an unexpected surprise about many of these “mummies”: they’re entirely empty.

“With this baboon, you look inside, and its completely fake,” says Ikram. “Baboons were really hard to come by, particularly in this time period, because they had to be imported from Sub-saharan Africa and moved up into the Nile River Valley, so people would make fakes and say, ‘there’s a real baboon inside.’” Other mummies on display, while not empty, include only fragments of animals, so that rare creatures might be split apart and used to create multiple items.

Advanced scanning technologies and forensic techniques were also used to gain information about a pair of the human mummies in the exhibition. Getting an up-close look at bone tissue helps researchers determine the sex and age of these corpses, and examining the details of the mummification process can also tell us about the social class of an individual. “These X-rays and CT scans completely change the way we look at the mummies,” Ikram says. “Our understanding of them is now so much greater.”

“Eternal Life in Ancient Egypt” is a new permanent display at the Natural History Museum.

Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-400 D. Photo by Jeffrey Milstein. Courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum.

As a kid growing up in California, Jeffrey Milstein loved to go to the Los Angeles International Airport to watch the planes come in. He quickly became obsessed with aircraft, building model airplanes and sweeping out hangars in exchange for flying lessons from a former Navy pilot. As a teenager, he earned his wings—a private pilot’s license.

Flying is a hobby for Milstein, not a profession, however. He studied art and architecture at the University of California at Berkeley and had a successful career as an architect and graphic designer. In the last decade, though, Milstein has concentrated his efforts on photography and, in doing so, has been able to work his love for aviation back into the fold.

“Returning to the airport approaches, this time behind a camera instead of a control column, he photographed aircraft at the precise moment when they passed overhead, inbound to land,” writes Walter J. Boyne, former director of the National Air and Space Museum in the foreword to Milstein’s 2007 book AirCraft: The Jet as Art.

Now, borrowing the same name as Milstein’s book, a new exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum through November 25, 2012, features 33 of Milstein’s formal portraits of the underbellies of airplanes. The images measure up to 50 by 50 inches.

“Milstein’s photographs of frozen moments evoke speed, technology and the excitement of flight,” said Carolyn Russo, curator of the exhibition, in a press release. “The enormity of the images seem to pull you into the air, as though you are going along for the ride.”

Capturing a plane traveling at up to 175 miles per hour at just the right moment and angle is no easy task. ”It’s like shooting a moving duck,” Milstein told msnbc.com. “The planes are moving so fast, and I have only a hundredth of a second to get my shot. I have to keep the camera moving with the plane and then fire the shot exactly at the top dead center. It took a lot of practice.” The photographer’s favorite place to shoot from is runway 24R at LAX. ”You have to find the right spot underneath the flight path. Not too far away and not too close. The plane can’t be coming in too high or too low, and if the wing dips a little bit to correct for wind, the symmetry will be unequal. It is just a matter of finding the ‘sweet spot’ so that the aircraft is lined up exactly in the camera’s frame,” he told Russo.

Then, in Photoshop, Milstein strips away the backgrounds of his photographs, replacing them with stark white backdrops as to not detract from the seams and detailing on the planes undersides. He blows them up in size and creates bold, photographic archival-pigment prints to sell and display in galleries.

“My first career was architecture, and if you think about it the way I am presenting the aircraft is really like architectural drawings,” said Milstein in a 2007 interview. Some describe the photographs as “clinical.” Russo has compared them to a collection of pinned butterflies. But, as Boyne puts it, Milstein allows the planes “to stand alone in all their stark, efficient, minimalist beauty.” Keyword: beauty. The way that Milstein presents the airplanes, they are eye candy for both aviation fanatics and art aficionados. His photographs cast airplanes as both marvels of engineering and masterpieces of art.

* For more of Milstein’s photographs, see Air & Space magazine’s story, “The Jet as Art.”

Esther Nisenthal Krinitz' fabric depiction of pasturing livestock next to a Nazi labor camp in Poland. Image courtesy of Art & Remembrance Organization.

For years, Holocaust survivor Esther Nisenthal Krinitz sought a way to show pictures to her daughters that told the story of her childhood. At the age of 50, she picked up her needle and began sewing.

“She decided that she wanted my sister and me to see what her house and her family had looked like. She had never been trained in art, but she could sew anything,” says her daughter Bernice Steinhardt. “And so she took a piece of fabric, and she sketched out her home.”

Krinitz stitched her childhood village of Mniszek, near what is today known as Annapol, in rich detail on a large fabric panel, including the Polish settlement’s houses, fields, animals and members of her family. Pleased with the results, she created a companion piece so there would be one for each of her daughters. But as time went on, she couldn’t stop stitching into fabric the images of her childhood, making a new panel for each episode of a story she wanted to tell. Eventually, she would add captions, stitching the words into the works. And over time, she produced works that grew in composition and complexity.

Thirty-six panels later, Krinitz’ story is stunningly visualized at the newly opened “Fabric of Survival” exhibition in the Ripley Center. In the tradition of the graphic novel Maus, Krinitz brings a horrifying story to life in an unidealized, accessible way. The large-scale artworks envelop the viewer, with bold depictions and vivid colors, evoking the emotions of a childhood disrupted by unthinkable trauma.

Krinitz was born in 1927, and enjoyed an idyllic rural childhood until Germany invaded Poland in 1939. “They occupied her village for three years,” Steinhardt says. “In 1942, they ordered all the Jews from the area to leave their homes. They were essentially being deported.”

At the age of 12 15—and somehow aware that complying with Nazi orders could mean certain death—Krinitz decided to take her fate in her own hands. “She pleaded with her parents to think of somebody that she could go to work for, a non-Jew.” says Steinhardt. “She actually left with her sister and they wound up spending the rest of the war under these assumed identities of Polish Catholic girls.” From the entire family, the only members that survived the war were Esther and her sister Mania.

The panels on display document Krinitz’ six-year-long saga as she survived the dangers of concealing her identity under Nazi rule. Many convey the terrors she experienced as a child—in one, German soldiers arrive in the night to her family’s house and force them to line up in their pajamas at gunpoint. In another, Krinitz and her sister are turned away from a friend’s house and spend the night hiding in a pile of farm debris.

But other images capture the boldness and playfulness that Krinitz exhibited even as a child during the Holocaust. Once, while suffering a terrible toothache, she posed as a German child and entered a Nazi camp to have the dentist remove her tooth. Other panels show the simple joys of baking traditional food during Jewish holidays and walking through the fields near her home village.

The residents of Krinitz' village are forcefully deported. Image courtesy Arts & Remembrance.

The works also show Krinitz’ evolving skill, over the years, as an artist. “She created the memory pictures completely out of order, she skipped around,” says Steinhardt. “So you can see the changing design and amount of complexity as you walk through the gallery.” While some of the early works, in terms of date of creation, are more simply designed, the latter ones are incredibly thorough in detail and sophisticated in their composition.

“Fabric of Survival” is especially useful in telling a difficult story to young people. In 2003, Steinhardt and her sister Helene McQuade created Art & Remembrance, an organization that seeks to use art such as Krinitz’ to engage young people in thinking about injustice and oppression. Art & Remembrance uses the works in the exhibition in school-based workshops, where students learn about the Holocaust and illustrate their own stories.

The full set of panels is viewable via a gallery on the organization’s website, but seeing the works in person is a wholly different experience from looking at images online. Up close a remarkable level of detail is revealed—individual stitches represent blades of grass and dozens of villagers can be identified by their distinguishing characteristics.

The story concludes with the final panels, which document Krinitz’ liberation as Russian infantrymen arrived in Poland and her subsequent journey to America. She had planned to make several more pieces to illustrate other anecdotes that occurred during her period of hiding, but was unable to finish the project before she died in 2001 at the age of 74.

Looking through the overwhelming library of fabric art she created, though, one can’t help but feel she completed her mission. “She understood that the world must not forget the Holocaust,” says Steinhardt. “She recognized the power of her pictures to carry her message, and knew that these would be her legacy.”

“Fabric of Survival: The Art of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz” is on display at the Ripley Center through January 29. The world premiere of the documentary based on Krinitz’ story, “Through the Eye of the Needle,” is part of the Washington Jewish Film Festival on Monday, December 5.

Enjoy an evening event at the groundbreaking exhibition "The Bright Beneath." Photo courtesy of the Natural History Museum.

Monday, November 28 Postal Museum Tours

Only have a limited time to see the sights at the Postal Museum and don’t know where to start? Take a docent-led tour of the museum’s collections to make sure you see a little of everything, and gain insight into the collection’s significance. DIY-ers can download this self-guide brochure. Tours are generally held at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. daily; call 202-633-5534 to confirm the day’s times. Free. National Postal Museum.

Tuesday, November 29 Viva Verdi

Come explore the remarkable life and career of Giuseppe Verdi, Italy’s great 19th-century opera composer. Coleen Fay, arts editor at WAMU, will lead a seminar that traces the evolution of Verdi’s works through multimedia recordings. Learn how Verdi overcame personal misfortune to compose some of opera’s most renowned masterpieces. This Residents Associates Program is $30 for members, $27 for senior members, and $40 for the general public. 6:45 to 9 p.m. Ripley Center.

Wednesday, November 30 Celebrating Roots, Creating Community

The Smithsonian Latino Center invites everyone to a bilingual night of music and spoken word performances. This program will feature local poets Quique Avilés, Naomi Ayala and Consuelo Hernández, as well as music by singer/songwriter Patricio Zamorano and his band. The event is part of the Latino D.C. History Project series, which documents the historical presence of Latino culture in the nation’s capital. Free. 6:30 p.m. American Indian Museum, Rasumson Theater.

Thursday, December 1 The Bright Beneath

Inspired by bioluminescent organisms from deep beneath the sea, installation artist Shih Chieh Huang has created an unearthly world of glowing creatures in the Natural History Museum. At this “Mingle at the Museum” event, enjoy a specialty cocktail and themed hors d’oeuvres as Huang and curator of fishes Lynne Parenti chat about the exhibition. Demonstrations of bioluminescent deep-sea creatures and real specimens will be on hand. This Residents Associates Program is $30 for members and $35 for the general public. 7:30 to 10 p.m. Natural History Museum, Sant Ocean Hall.

For a complete listing of Smithsonian events and exhibitions visit the goSmithsonian Visitors Guide. Additional reporting by Michelle Strange.