"The Story of Golden Locks," painted by Seymour Joseph Guy in 1870, is an illustration of how art can both depict and tell stories.

What’s going on in this picture? Isn’t it obvious? The two 7-year-old boys lay in bed, feeling gloomy. Maybe they’re brothers, scolded for misbehaving. Sent to bed without supper.

The young lady sitting by their side—an older sister, or is it cousin….—wants to cheer them up with a story. A fairy tale of course. Every child loves fairy tales.

As the boys listen to her read, they think about tomorrow. The game of ball that they will play. The bugs they will chase. Soon the words about bears and porridge being too hot melt into silence. The brothers drift off to sleep.

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Who is the storyteller when it comes to a work of art—the artist or the viewer?

A little of both, suggests Catherine Walsh, a doctoral candidate at the University of Delaware. Through a fellowship, she will be spending the next year at the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum, digging through 150-year-old works, diaries and letters looking for examples of storytelling in art, specifically between 1830 and 1870. A period, she says,  when a flood of storytelling images appeared in popular works.

“A lot of artists thought of themselves as storytellers,” Walsh says. “They aimed to create a narrative in their painting.”

Walsh also believes that museum visitors create narratives when they view a painting. As a family stares at a work, you can hear them engaging with the art. “He’s laughing at her,” a mother will tell her son or “She just told him a secret,” a teenager tells his date.

“Scholars don’t generally take this seriously,” Walsh says. She believes we need to give the general public a little more credit and find value in the narratives a museum visitor constructs on the part of the artist.

Because the conversations Walsh wants to study are in the 19th-century, she will need to rely on written records to form her arguments. She will be focusing on the way viewers see and discuss images, specifically scholars with an interest in visual culture.

Walsh believes that narrative haven’t been properly applied when thinking about American subjects. She wants to explore the elements that artists include in their work that let viewers construct stories about what they see. “I want to take this world of academics, that is so distant from the everyday person, and try to make it more relevant,” she says.

This Afaso Flag is 1 of 130 objects on display at the "Artful Animals" exhibit on view through February 2010. (Photo by Franko Khoury, Courtesy of African Art Museum.) Click above for 10 additional photos of artworks on exhibit.

Bryna Freyer’s biggest problem with Disney’s 1994 film, The Lion King, was the lack of people. Sure, the animals could talk, but to Freyer, the film seemed to perpetuate the stereotype that Africa is a giant animal-filled savanah.

“Artful Animals,” a family-friendly exhibition opening today at the National Museum of African Art, examines how African artists create cultural objects inspired by domestic and untamed animals.

Freyer, who curated the exhibit, selected 130 works from the museum’s collections that would appeal to younger audiences—including a toy turtle made from a gourd, a mask in the shape of a hippo, and teddy bears made of mohair. To see ten of the artifacts on display in the show, check out this photo gallery.

Freyer wants visitors to realize that both Africans and Americans assign human-like characteristics to animals. Each culture’s values are exhibited in the way it represents animals. “How did we come up with dirty dogs, greedy pigs and sly foxes?” she says. In Africa, emblems for royal tribes rarely contain lions, a Western symbol of nobility and leadership. In the course of assembling the exhibit, Freyer even pondered the representations of animal mascots for sports teams, political parties as well as cartoon brands like Sonic the Hedgehog and Arthur the Aardvark. “He doesn’t even look like an aardvark! And hedgehogs don’t really move very fast…,” she notes.

And the portrayal of the snake as vicious or threatening is a Western ideal, Freyer says. Africans emphasize the snake’s patience as it waits on a path for a bird or small rodent to come along. Not to mention that a snake, like the gaboon viper of South-Saharan Africa, shows good judgment, in that it won’t bother people unless provoked. “They think these are qualities that a person, especially a ruler, should posses,” Freyer says.

Through a Smithsonian-wide partnership with the National Zoo, the National Postal Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Discovery Theater, “Artful Animals” will present African animals not only as works of art, but also the show will explore animals and their motifs through the lens of anthropology, history, science and the performing arts.

The National Zoo, for example, has produced an array of signs that identify zoo animals represented in the African Art museum’s show, like the gaboon viper. In addition, The National Postal Museum will highlight stamps from its international collection designed with African animals. The National Museum of Natural History, home to the largest African elephant on display, has developed activity carts on communication and elephants. Discovery Theater adds performances, dance and storytelling to the mix.

The celebration of “Artful Animals” will continue through February 21, 2010.

One of the giant beetles discovered and seized by the U.S. Postal Service. (Courtesy of U.S. Department of Homeland Security.)

Postal workers, like emergency room nurses, have one of those jobs where they see everything.

Americans are adamant about their right to send weird things through the mail: Wrapped bricks, coconuts, bags of sand and dead fish cross state lines every day.

But even employees at the Mohnton post office in Pennsylvania were surprised in May 2008 when they heard scratching coming from a box marked “toys, gifts, and jellies.”

Upon opening the package, the postal workers found 26 live, giant beetles, each big enough to sit in the palm of your hand. The species, native to Asia, included Hercules, elephant and giant stag beetles.

The recipient, 36-year-old Marc T. Diullo, pleaded guilty to purchasing and importing the beetles without a permit. According to news reports, he told the judge that he has collected insects since sixth grade. ”I’m just a very inquisitive type of person—very curious,” he is reported to have said.

Diullo’s curiosity will now be shared with the entire nation. Last week, the rare and exotic beetles, long dead, were donated to the Smithsonian for its educational programming. According to David Furth, a Smithsonian entomologist at the National Museum of Natural History, the specimens will demonstrate animal diversity to the public.

Furth also emphasizes that importing foreign beetles, even as a hobby, carries environmental risks. “Illegal import of live organisms poses potential threats to agriculture through opportunities for them, their parasites or diseases to invade crops and to spread to other potential hosts in the United States,” he says.

The beetles will be kept in the Natural History Museum’s entomology collection.

The National Air and Space Museum's SR-71 Blackbird is really Jetfire in disguise. (Courtesy of iphotobucket user MustangPilot007.)

The Smithsonian is having a blockbuster summer, thanks to two sequels.

In May, “Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian,” premiered. The first feature film to use the interior of the museums has grossed more than $100 million domestically, and continues to draw audiences.

Today, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” hits box offices, and visitors to The National Air and Space Museum’s Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia, will be pleased to see heartthrob Shia Labeouf and a scantily-clad Megan Fox admiring the Enola Gray Gay and other historical fight pieces as they search for a transformer hidden in the museum.

Not to give too much away, but at this point in the film, the stars’ characters are looking for someone who might be able to read an ancient robot language. They find their robot hiding as an out-of-commission Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird. (Learn more about the plane in this month’s Object at Hand.) Known as Jetfire, he turns out to be a bearded, cranky old-timer, who creaks when he transforms. “It’s sort of like arthritis,” director Michael Bay told Empire Magazine. Despite Jetfire’s bad attitude, and his previous identity as a decepticon (the villains of the Transformers universe), he is partially responsible for the movie’s climactic ending.

The SR-71 featured in the movie–filming was done on location at the museum–was a reconnaissance aircraft used by the military and NASA. In 1990, it took its final flight from Palmdale, California, to Chantilly, Virginia. Upon arrival, the Blackbird became a permanent addition of the National Air and Space Museum’s collection, going on display in 1993.

So, if you’re a fan of the Smithsonian, don’t miss this cinematic opportunity to watch a 50-foot tall robot blast a hole through the Udvar-Hazy Center’s side door.

The cover of a Homosexual Rights pamphlet published in 1956. (Courtesy of NMAH Archives Center Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Collection.)

One of the first Smithsonian efforts dedicated to gay and lesbian Americans is tucked away on the first floor of the National Museum of American History. The small show,  located outside of the Archives Center, denotes the beginning of the modern gay civil rights movement. The display was assembled in recognition of the 40th anniversary of the riots in Greenwich Village, New York. It will be on view through August 2.

On June 28, 1969, police raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar on the lower east side. Raids were a fact of life for the gay men and women who sought community in the nightlife, but years of oppression and aggressive police actions, sparked a flame among the bar’s patrons. For the first time, gay men and women fought back, resulting in five days of protest.

No artifacts from that night are on display, but what visitors can see are samples of some of the victories won and lost since the riots. Artifacts include advertising for the Showtime television show Queer as Folk, a Gay Games program, and HIV/AIDS paraphernalia. For this exhibit, the Smithsonian’s Franklin Robinson chose items from the Archives Center, which specializes in collecting primary sources for research, documenting a few aspects of gay history and culture in the United States.

“We hope the exhibit will spur useful and conductive conversations for the people who view it,” says Robinson. And in fact it has already, just two days after the cases went on view, a D.C. charter high school teacher contacted the American History museum to say that his ninth-grade students were studying gay rights and other movements and that he would be bringing his class to see the display.

As the nation struggles with the question of gay marriage and gays in the military, the museum’s collection as it represents gay history, is a story waiting to be told. The collection, Robinson says, is shaped entirely by donations. Two years ago, Frank Kameny, a pioneer of the gay rights movement, gave the Smithsonian his protest signs and papers. John-Manuel Andriote, author of “Victory Deferred: How AIDS Changed Gay Life in America,” has also donated his extensive research and interviews.

Because there is no staff member at the Smithsonian, yet, who actively collects objects or materials related to gay history, perhaps figures from historical and current civil rights battles need to reach out to the museum. This first exhibit is a historical moment itself, but should not be the beginning and end of the conversation about gay Americans.

Scientists have excavated hundreds of 20-million-year-old fossils at the Panama Canal expansion sites. (Courtesy of STRI.)

There was a time when North and South America did not share a land border. Instead, a large river separated the two land masses. The animals and plants on the continents kept to themselves mostly, with the exception of the birds that refused to call any one place home.

Then, 15 million years ago, the North and South collided, volcanoes erupted and the Atlantic was separated from the Pacific. About 12-million years later, a land bridge formed between the two continents, and the animals and plants began to travel freely.

This land bridge formation occurred near the site of today’s Panama Canal, which makes the area an attractive site for paleontologists who want to learn the continental origins of individual species. Thousands of fossils, ripe for analysis, lie in the canal walls. But the scientists who want them must act fast. The Panama Canal widening project, due to be completed in 2011, has already removed 10-million cubic meters of earth, with more to come.

Teeth belonging to the three-toed browsing horse were unearthed in a Panama Canal widening site. Proof that the horse's range expanded from South Dakota to Panama 15-to-18 million years ago. (Courtesy of STRI)

Smithsonian researchers are now trying to stay one step ahead of the bulldozers. Working in collaboration with the University of Florida and the Panama Canal Authority, the scientists move in, following dynamite blasts, to map and collect fossils. As of last July, 500 fossils, from rodents, horses, crocodiles and turtles, some dating back 20-million years, have been uncovered.

“We expect the fossils that we have been salvaging to resolve some major scientific mysteries,” says Carlos Jaramillo, a Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute scientist. “What geological forces combined to create the Panama land bridge? Was the flora and fauna in Panama before the land bridge closed similar to that in North America, or did it include other elements?”

At least one answer to Jaramillo’s second question has already been found. Aldo Rincon, a paleontology intern, unearthed a set of fossilized chops belonging to the three-toed browsing horse, known to have grazed in Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota between 15-to-18-million years ago.

According to Beth King, the Institute’s science interpreter, (who was recently featured in a Scientific American podcast), the presence of this horse in Panama significantly extends the southern tip of its range from previous finds, supporting the hypothesis that the habitat was probably a mosaic of relatively dense forest and open woodlands.

There are many more fossils to be found at the Panama Canal widening site, and King expects there to be many papers published within the next five years regarding their significance.

Like pots? Participate in the "Ceramics in Mainland Southeast Asia" Webinar. Tonight at 8:00 p.m. (Courtesy of Freer and Sackler Galleries.)

For all of our readers who are experts or interested in Southeast Asian ceramics, bookmark the new online catalog published by the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler Galleries. It’s your one shot stop for in-depth information about Longquan ware covered jars from Zhejiang province, China, or Alms bowls from Burma.

Celebrate the creation of this new resource by participating in the webinar, “Ceramics of Mainland Southeast Asia,” to take place Tuesday, June 23, 2009, at 8:00 p.m., EDT, in collaboration with the John Hopkins University Museum Studies program. Join Louise Cort, curator of ceramics at the Galleries, along with a panel of experts, for a discussion of how the development of ceramics and the history of Southeast Asia are intertwined, and the clays and used in Southeast Asian ceramics.

Scott Solomon is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Smithsonian's Ant Lab. He blogs about his field experiences at "The Ant Hunter." (Courtesy of the scientist.)

When troops of “crazy rasberry ants” invaded Texas last year, surprised homeowners found the bugs wedged inside personal computers and shorting out  electrical devices. Even NASA grew concerned when the ants marched into the  Johnson Space Center. As the species’ seeming attraction to electronics became a news maker, Scott Solomon explained over at Slate:

“Invasive species like the crazy rasberry ant are adapted to environments that are constantly changing, so they are always searching for new homes. Electrical switch boxes, gas meters, or your PC make ideal homes because they are dry and have small, easily defendable entrances,” Solomon wrote.

Solomon, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Smithsonian’s Ant Lab, enjoys sharing his passion for science with the public. He wrote about the effort to create a virtual Lucy fossil for Wired.com and scribed science feature articles for his student newspaper at the University of Texas. But his most personal project is his blog, “The Ant Hunter,” where he shows, through pictures and words, both the unglamorous and the exotic world of entomological research.

In the blog, Solomon writes about crawling through a Brazilian desert at night, dodging scorpions and spiky shrubs, as he searches for ant colonies. The fieldwork he does is far from a leisurely vacation. At some points, dinner has consisted of instant coffee and crackers, highlighted by a trip to a nearby diner for grilled goat. Sleeping can be a hazard as well, especially if army ants are seizing your bed. And Solomon always seems to travel during the wet season. “Sometimes it’s miserable,” he says, “but I love it and it’s a lot of fun.” According to his 10-year-old cousin, Solomon is like the Crocodile Hunter for ants.

The Ant Hunter is also an amateur photographer of his work, as evident by his Flickr page. (Courtesy of S. Solomon.)

The blog began as a way for the ant hunter to keep in touch with family and friends abroad, and to keep writing skills sharp. But now that Solomon’s fieldwork has wound down, he plans on writing behind-the-scenes accounts of Smithsonian ant research for the general public.

But what exactly is there to research about ants? Solomon is interested in the origin of leafcutter ants. These are species that gather fresh leaves, and use fungi to break it down for nutrients. “It’s like an external digestive system,” he says. A huge number of new leafcutter ant species appeared in evolutionary history 10 million years ago and Solomon wants to know why.

He uses his trips to the wilderness of Brazil and other spots in South America to learn about the leafcutter’s closest relatives, Trachymyrmex, a relatively unknown genera of ants that also farm fungi. Solomon, who has an interest in evolutionary biology and genetics, hopes to use the information to determine the key molecular and ecological differences between leafcutters and Trachymyrmex. To learn how the research unfolds, be sure to follow The Ant Hunter on his blog.

With a title like that, perhaps the Smithsonian Channel will give Solomon his own series.

Ants star in the new Natural History Museum exhibition “Farmers, Warriors, Builders: The Hidden Life of Ants,” on view through October 10, 2009.

1.Nikki the Bear Lost 110 Pounds on the National Zoo Diet

When Nikki the spectacled bear came to the National Zoo, he looked more like Winnie the Pooh. At 500 pounds, Nikki was so obese that animal handlers had trouble locating his tail underneath layers of fat. Luckily, the National Zoo came up with a step-by-step diet plan to help Nikki shed the pounds within a year.

2. Carol Burnett-We Just Can’t Resist Her!

Movie parodies were always a mainstay of the Carol Burnett Show—and her 1976 Gone With the Wind takeoff is unforgettable. The curtain rod dress from the sketch now graces the hallowed halls of the Smithsonian as a part of the American History Museum’s Kennedy Center Honors collection. No word, yet, on if and when, it will go on public display, but we’ll be sure to keep you posted. Because, frankly, we give a damn.

3. Last Minute Halloween Costume Ideas

Last Halloween, we knew our readers were scrambling to get a costume together. We thought the portraits at the National Portrait Gallery might provide inspiration. Disney’s version of Pocahontas depicts her wearing a tasseled, leather dress. But that costume was already done by thousands of young girls. Pocahontas was converted to Christianity, baptized as Rebecca and married the English settler John Rolfe. So try pulling off Rebecca Rolfe. It might take some explaining. But don’t most last-minute costumes?

4. They Call Him the “Starfish Guy”

Christopher Mah is one of a growing number of scientists who are blogging. As part of a National Science Foundation requirement to make his research easily accessible, Mah started “The Echinoblog.” Now a year old, he has blogged on topics ranging from “Giant Green Brittle Stars of Death! When they Attack!” to “What are the World’s Largest Starfish?”

5. The Ruby Slippers Return to the Museum of American History

For 70 years, The Wizard of Oz has given faithful service to its evergreen fashion philosophy: there is nothing more important than owning the right pair of shoes. After a two-year vacation at the Air and Space Museum, Jesse Rhodes was among the first to see the shoes find their way home last fall to the renovated Museum of American History. There they are, and there they’ll stay.

6. That’s Some Bad Hat, Chuck. (As in Mangione)

Jeff Campagna was on hand with a tape recorder when a very dapper Chuck Mangione, dressed in all black, signed away a cache of his musical memorabilia to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Included in the donation were scores to his most important works, albums, photographs and his signature brown felt hat.

7. Secret Message Found in Lincoln’s Watch

It was high drama at the American History Museum back in March. Beth Py-Lieberman was on the edge of her seat. Word was out that a pocket watch that once belonged to Abraham Lincoln might have a secret message engraved inside of it. And sure enough, the inscription was there, “Jonathan Dillon April 13-1861 Fort Sumpter [sic] was attacked by the rebels on the above date  thank God we have a government.”

8. Science Education Grant Brings Sesame Street Planetarium Show

Joseph Caputo joined Big Bird and Elmo for a bit of stargazing at the National Air and Space Museum’s premier of Sesame Street’s “One World, One Sky” planetarium show. Listen to Caputo interview Elmo, who came to the premier dressed as an “elmonaut,” much to the delight of the preschoolers in the audience, what he learned from being part of the show.

9. National Postal Museum: Greening the Mail

Could we recycle more mail? The United States Postal Service has a green Web site that says that all mail is recyclable. Yet Michael Critelli, executive chairman of the mailing company Pitney Bowes, says that only 35.8 percent of it actually ends up in the recycle bin, as opposed to 77 percent of newspapers.

10. Rachel Carson: A Life That Inspires a Sense of Wonder

Actress Kaiulani Lee spent over three years studying Rachel Carson’s life and work before  composing and starring in her one-woman show, A Sense of Wonder. Pulling off a one-person anything requires an intensely magnetic personality—and Lee brings this to the table in spades. And, with about 80 percent of the show’s dialogue being culled from Carson’s writing, it’s an excellent introduction to the environmentalist’s life and legacy.

Shellfish, like oysters, are especially vulnerable to climate changed-induced ocean acidification. (Free image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user Chris 73.)

In a paper published last month in PLoS One, a team led by ecologist Whitman Miller, showed that the shells of Eastern oysters, Crassostrea virginica, the jewels of the Chesapeake Bay, will be slightly smaller (16 percent decrease in shell area) and weaker (42 percent reduction in calcium content) in the waters of 2100. The other species tested, the Suminoe oysters from Asia, showed no change in an acidic ocean.

“We are bound to our bodies like an oyster is to its shell,” said Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher.

But that was over 2,000 years ago, long before rising levels of carbon dioxide began to trap heat in our atmosphere and seep into our oceans. As CO2 dissolves into seawater, it is broken down into carbonic acid and hydrogen ions. Hydrogen determines whether a liquid is acidic or basic. The more hydrogen ions that leach into the ocean, the more acidic it becomes.

As more of the green house gas, carbon dioxide, is released, the world’s oceans are slowly becoming more acidic, and shellfish, like oysters are especially vulnerable to this kind of change. An acidic ocean hinders the ability of some species of oyster young to build their shells, scientists with the Smithsonian’s Environmental Research Center found.

According to the scientists, the results suggest that acidification may be tied to a species’ unique evolutionary history, implying that predictions may be more complex than previously thought. “In the Chesapeake Bay, oysters are barely holding on, where disease and overfishing have nearly wiped them out,” Miller says. “Whether acidification will push Eastern oysters, and the many species that depend on them, beyond a critical tipping point remains to be seen.”

The photogram Six Color Curl from "Directions: Walead Beshty: Legibility on Color Backgrounds." On view at the Hirshhorn Museum through September 13. (Courtesy of the Hirshhorn.)

The stacks of FedEx boxes and cubes of cracked glass scattered throughout the third floor of the Hirshhorn don’t look like priceless works of contemporary sculpture, which is probably why museum visitors keep crossing the security tape and setting off the alarms.

Or maybe they do it just to get a closer look. The shatterproof glass cubes are mailed from exhibit to exhibit, accumulating cracks, dents, chips, and other abrasions that the artist, Walead Beshty, can’t anticipate.

The box sculptures are featured in the new exhibit, “Directions: Legibility on Color Backgrounds,” which focuses on Beshty’s creations. Though, what place do the boxes have next to his multicolor photograms and his black and white portraits? According to Colby Caldwell, a DC-based artist and professor, who gave one of the museum’s Friday Gallery Talks last week, part of the fun of the exhibit is figuring out what Beshty is up to.

“He’s trying to put together a conversation,” Caldwell says, pointing first to the photograms. To create a photogram, the artist lays out objects on top of photographic paper and exposes them to light. “The thing that is happening here is the interaction between light and time,” Caldwell explains. His evidence is that Beshty invests great detail into the titles of his art, including the angles of light sources, along with the site and date where a work is created. (For example, pictured above is Six Color Curl (CMMYYC): Irvine, California, July 18th 2008, Fuji Crystal Archive Type C, 2008.)

But what does this have to do with the boxes? Well, another clue is the black and white photographs, hanging salon style in the corner of the exhibit. They are portraits—of a curator, a studio manager, a FedEx delivery man, even the horizontal enlarger that created the prints. Through the various characters in the photographs, Beshty is telling the story of the artistic process.

Though the British and American artist’s work is often categorized as abstract photography, Caldwell argues Beshty is more of practitioner. “His work has more in common with the Human Genome Project than art,” Caldwell says. Rather than being the traditional photography show, Beshty uses his exhibit to explain the DNA of photography: Light, time, technology, people and just a bit of luck.

The black and white photographs, photograms, and the decaying glass boxes are all offspring of the same formula. Their existence with the space is like a conversation between siblings.

“Legibility on Color Backgrounds” is on view at the Hirshhorn through September 13. To learn more about the artist, check out this video produced by the Whitney Museum of American Art:

Ellen Lupton, contemporary design curator at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York, co-edits Design-Your-Life.org with her identical twin sister Julia. (Courtesy of Ms. Lupton.)

Ellen Lupton is the kind of person who ponders the necessity of toasters.

“Is civilized life possible without this fundamental kitchen gadget?,” she muses in her book Design Your Life: The Pleasures and Perils of Everyday Things. “Could a 21st-century family get by with no toaster at all?”

Well, yes… Lupton concludes [pdf]. But compared to broiling, frying or microwaving your bread, you can’t beat the convenient predictability of a toaster.

Lupton, a design critic and curator at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York, teamed up with her identical twin sister Julia, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, to co-write the book and its ongoing companion blog, Design-Your-Life.org.

On the blog, created in 2005, the sisters question the way we use and interact with everyday objects: What are the secret lives of scarves? How can a personal Web site help you curate the self? And what creative possibilities exist with file folders? Each post is accompanied by photographs and original illustrations that add to the authors’ points.

According to Ellen Lupton, writers are attune to grammatical errors the way design critics are inspired by and sensitive to the way things are put together. The blog is not a diary, but a first-person account of these aesthetics. “Design is critical thinking and creative thinking,” she says. “If you don’t have a design point of view you tend to accept everything as it is and not wonder how it came to be that way.”

When Lupton does find room for improvement in everyday design, her words can draw fire. In the book, a chapter dedicated to the annoyances of luggage with wheels, known as roller bags, led to a passionate response. Roller bag supporters say the invention allows travelers to carry more and is better on the back and neck. “It’s certainly an area of debate,” Lupton says. “People don’t’ realize how much space they’re taking up. You have a product that has great benefits but also makes people behave badly.”

The blog is a hub for these kinds of conversations. And because Lupton is a combination writer/curator/speaker/mother/teacher/etc…, there is some commentary on life as well. For example, after being asked if she was a workaholic, Lupton didn’t hesitate to say yes. But, she explains, there’s a difference between a high-functioning workaholic versus a sloppy workaholic. See where you fit in.

Below are three photographs that show the range of Peruvian wildlife. For 20 more images, check out the Zoo’s Flickr Page.

Gotcha! An Amazon Red Squirrel, a common site in Peru, appears to pose for the camera. (Courtesy of the National Zoo.)

An adult male jaguar "stalks" the camera. He was photographed nine times at four different cameras. (Courtesy of the National Zoo.)

There's a reason this armadillo is called giant. Members of this species can weigh up to 71 pounds. The photo was taken at night. (Courtesy of the National Zoo.)

A rhesus monkey, Able, is being ready for placement into a capsule for a preflight test of Jupiter, AM-18 mission. AM-18 was launched on May 28, 1959 and also carried a squirrel monkey, Baker. (Courtesy of NASA.)

On May 28, 1959, a rhesus monkey named Able, plucked from a zoo in Independence, Kansas, and a squirrel monkey named Baker, made history as the first mammals to survive space flight.

Strapped into specially-designed couches inside a Jupiter missile nose cone, Able and Baker flew 300 miles above the surface of the earth reaching speeds more than 10,000 miles per hour.

Animals had been sent into space before. In 1957, two years before the monkeys’ flight, the Soviets watched Laika, the space dog, orbit around the Earth. She did not survive.

But Able and Baker did, and their survival was evidence that mammals, even humans, could safely travel through space. Two years later, in 1961, Yuri Gagarin, a Soviet, became the first person in space, making a 108-minute orbital flight in his Vostok 1 spacecraft.

Unfortunately, a few days after the historic flight, Able did not survive surgery to remove an infected electrode from under her skin. Her body was preserved and is now on view at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum.

Able recently found new life as a star in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. She and partner-in-mischief Dexter, a capuchin monkey from the first Night at the Museum movie, can be seen testing security guard Larry Daley’s patience with some slapstick comedy.

A young boy makes his name as a scientific illustrator for the Smithsonian in "The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet," a new novel by Reif Larsen.

If one could guess the species of bird that fatally crashed through the kitchen window at the moment of T.S. Spivet’s birth, it would be the Baird’s sparrow, Ammodramus bairdii.

The spirit of Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet, the brainy 12-year-old protagonist of the new novel, “The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet” by Reif Larsen, seems loosely inspired by the second secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Spencer Baird, (1823-1887).

More than a dozen species, including the sparrow, are named for Baird, who was a passionate scholar of natural history, especially ornithology. Not only did he increase the Smithsonian’s collection from 6,000 to 2.5 million specimens, he founded the Megatherium Society, a group of young explorers who lived in the towers and basement of Smithsonian Castle when not venturing across the United States acquiring specimens.

In this story, fact meets fiction. When the fictional T. S. Spivet hears the true story of the society, he goes silent for three days, “perhaps out of jealousy that time’s insistence on linearity prevented me from ever joining,” he writes. Spivet then asks his mother to start one in his home state of Montana. To which she replies, “The Megatheriums are extinct.”

But luck finds Spivet when a Mr. G. H. Jibsen, Undersecretary of Illustration and Design at the Smithsonian, informs the preteen that he’s won the Institution’s prestigious Baird Award for the popular advancement of science. Though only 12, Spivet already made a name for himself in the field of scientific illustration. He could map, for instance, how a female Australian dung beetle Onthophagus sagittarius uses its horns during copulation. The catch is that nobody knows he’s 12.

This is how “The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet” begins. The gifted young artist, who loves mapping the world as much as Spencer Baird loved collecting it, sets off from Montana to Washington D.C. to meet Mr. Jibsen and claim his prize.

The author, Reif Larsen, began writing “T. S. Spivet” while an MFA student at Columbia University. He later decided to incorporate scientific illustrations in the margins (drawn by the author) to add an extra dimension to the read. In an era where the Internet and Kindle rules all, Larsen’s unique hybrid of literature, art and science, offers a rare moment when you can sit and truly experience what you are reading. A possible exception to 19th-century scientist Louis Agassiz’s remark, “Study nature, not books.”