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Actress Betty White holds a lemur leaf frog during her tour today at the National Zoo. Photo courtesy of the National Zoo.

Betty White is a self-described “zoo nut.” At age 90, she balances her still-thriving acting career with advocacy work for zoos—particularly the Los Angeles Zoo, where she serves as a trustee. “Wherever I travel, I try to steal time to check out whatever zoo is within reach,” she writes, in her latest book Betty & Friends: My Life at the Zoo.

White visited with Mei Xiang, a 13-year-old panda. Photo courtesy of the National Zoo.

Last night, here in Washington, D.C., White regaled an audience at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium with stories of the many animal friends she has had over the years. The Smithsonian Associates, a division of the institution that offers lectures, film screenings, live performances and workshops, hosted the sold-out event.

The actress gets a quick lesson in kiwi reproduction. Photo courtesy of the National Zoo.

Today, White made a stop, as one might expect, at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo. When I interviewed White last week in anticipation of her trip, she was excited for this side excursion. “I have been to the National Zoo a couple of times, but this time I get a backstage tour, and I am really thrilled,” she said.

White hugs a kiwi goodbye, before heading on to see the zoo's Western lowland gorillas. Photo courtesy of the National Zoo.

White started her morning at the Giant Panda House, where she met 13-year-old Mei Xiang. She fed Mei a pear, and the panda showed White how she extends her arm through the cage to have her blood routinely drawn. Next, White visited the Bird House, where she hugged a kiwi. “We have a very unusual kiwi here, our ambassador kiwi,” says Kathy Brader, the zoo’s kiwi expert. “Kiwi are not known to be warm and fuzzy creatures. In fact, they are usually quite aggressive. But Manaia is just this really laid back kind of puppy dog.” White fed six-year-old Manaia some “kiwi loaf,” a mixture of beef, mixed vegetables, chopped up fruit and bird pellets, and the bird climbed up into her lap. “I have only seen him do that with two other people, besides me,” says Brader. Not only did she respond to the bird himself, adds Brader, but White wanted to hear about the zoo’s work with the birds. The zookeeper gave the actress a little lesson in kiwi reproduction. “They actually lay one of the largest eggs per body weight,” Brader later explained to me. “In human terms, it is like a 100-pound woman having a 15 to 20-pound baby.”

White then watched the Western lowland gorillas, including three-year-old Kibibi, in their habitat. She held a tiny lemur leaf frog, admired some Japanese giant salamanders and visited with the elephants. (White had heard about Shanthi, the zoo’s harmonica-playing elephant.) She was even introduced to “Rose,” the zoo’s Cuban crocodile, named after her “Golden Girls” character, Rose Nylund. “You could tell that this was someone who really generally cares about zoos,” says Brader. After her tour, from 12:30 p.m. to 2 p.m., White signed copies of her books for the public.

The National Zoo tweeted: "Ambika, our 64-year/old elephant, seems to sense a kindred spirit in @BettyMWhite." Photo courtesy of the National Zoo.

In Betty & Friends, the actress credits her love for zoos to her parents, who were also animal lovers. ”It was from them I learned that a visit to the zoo was like traveling to a whole new country inhabited by a variety of wondrous creatures I could never see anywhere else in quite the same way,” she writes. “They taught me not to rush from one exhibit to the next but to spend time watching one group until I began to really see the animals and observe their interactions.”

It its collection, the National Museum of American History has a fallout shelter, exhumed from a yard in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Image courtesy of NMAH.

“We do not want a war. We do not know whether there will be war. But we know that forces hostile to us possess weapons that could destroy us if we were unready. These weapons create a new threat—radioactive fallout that can spread death anywhere.

That is why we must prepare.”

-The Family Fallout Shelter (1959), published by the United States Office of Civil and Defense mobilization

The Andersons of Fort Wayne, Indiana, were preparing for nuclear fallout even before the government disseminated this booklet, which includes building plans for five basic shelters. In 1955, the family of three purchased a steel fallout shelter, complete with four drop-down beds, a chemical pit toilet and a hand cranked air exchanger for refreshing their air supply, and had it installed 15 feet below their front lawn for a total of $1,800.

Neighbors watched as a crane lowered the shelter, resembling a septic tank, into a pit. A few years later, in 1961, there was reportedly more commotion, when, at about the time of the Berlin Crisis, the Andersons had the shelter reinterred. Because it had not been sufficiently anchored, with the area’s water table in mind, it had crept back up until it finally poked through the surface.

Larry Bird, a curator in the division of political history at the National Museum of American History, first heard about the Cold War relic in 1991. Tim Howey, then-owner of the Fort Wayne home, had written a letter to the museum. He had removed some trees and shrubs that had hid the shelter’s access point and a few ventilation pipes for years, and, as a result, was fielding more and more questions from curious passers-by. While Howey was tiring of the attention, there was clearly public interest in the artifact, and he wondered if perhaps the Smithsonian would want it for its collection.

At the time, Bird was on the lookout for objects that would tell interesting stories about science in American life. Some of his colleagues at the museum were preparing an exhibition on the topic and were trying to recruit him to curate a section specifically on domestic life. “I saw the letter, and I thought this is your science in the home right here,” recalls Bird.

The curator had to see the fallout shelter for himself, and in late March of 1991, he made a scouting trip to Fort Wayne. Louis Hutchins, a historian, and Martin Burke, a museum conservator, accompanied him. “When you actually see it and sit in it,” says Bird, “it raises more questions about just what they thought they were doing.”

Martin Enterprises removed the shelter from Tim Howey's front yard. Image courtesy of NMAH.

For starters, in the case of nuclear attack, exactly how long was a family expected to stay burrowed in this tiny space? (Bird recently posted a video (embedded below) to YouTube of his first climb down into the shelter, which gives a sense of just how cramped the quarters are.) ”There is enough space for a six-foot person to stand up in the crown of it,” he says.

The curator found most government literature on fallout shelters to be pretty nondescript in terms of how much time had to pass after a bomb struck before it was safe to emerge, but the magazine Popular Science made an estimate. “The best guess now is: Prepare to live in your shelter for two weeks,” declared an article from December 1961. After being in it, Bird says, “That is probably about the length anyone would want to stay in one of these things before they killed each other or ran out of supplies and then killed each other.”

The fallout shelter, the museum team decided, was a powerful symbol of the fear that was so pervasive in the United States during the Cold War. “If you had money and you were frightened enough, it is the kind of thing that you would have invested in,” says Bird. And, in the 1950s and ’60s, many people, like the Andersons, were investing. “The shelter business is booming like a 25-megaton blast,” Popular Science reported.

The shelter was delivered at the museum, where it was on display from the spring of 1994 to this past November, when the "Science in American Life" exhibition closed. Image courtesy of NMAH.

The National Museum of American History arranged for Martin Enterprises, the company that had originally installed the shelter, to exhume it and haul it to Washington, D.C. on a flatbed. (As it turned out, the company did it for free.) “Some people thought that it would be so corroded. But you have to go along and do the job to find out,” says Bird. “It turned out it was fine.”

Until this past November, the family fallout shelter was on display in the museum’s long-running “Science in American Life” exhibition. A window was cut into the side of the double-hulled structure, so that visitors could peer inside. The museum staged it with sleeping bags, board games, toothpaste and other supplies from the era to suggest what it might have looked like when its owners had readied it for an emergency.

After his involvement in the acquisition, Bird started to get calls to let him know about and even invite him to other fallout shelters. “There are many, many more,” he says. “I imagine that the suburbs in Virginia and Maryland are just honeycombed with this kind of stuff.”

* For more about disaster shelters, read Smithsonian staff writer Abigail Tucker’s story on a recent boom in the luxury bomb shelter market.

A scene from Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, designed for PlayStation 3 in 2009. Sony Computer Entertainment America / SAAM

On March 17, Ollie Cantos took his 12-year-old triplet sons, Leo, Nic and Steven—not otherwise big fans of art—for a visit to the Smithsonian American Art Museum. But what Cantos hadn’t told the boys was that the museum was debuting its new exhibition “The Art of Video Games.”

“They absolutely live for video games,” says Cantos, an attorney that works for the federal government. The boys have a Nintendo GameCube and a Wii, also a broken PlayStation 2. They are aficionados of combat games, such as Dragon Ball Z and Marvel vs. Capcom, and play them in a room in their home equipped with a booming surround sound system.

“When we finally got there, we walked in, and they had no idea still. We went to the front desk, and I said, ‘Hi, we are here for ‘The Art of Video Games?’” says Cantos. “Suddenly, the three of them lit up. ‘Video games!’”

To a lot of folks, Cantos says, our interest in gaming seems counterintuitive. “Because none of us can see at all,” he says. “We are totally blind.” Cantos has been blind his entire life. “I have light perception, but they don’t,” he says, of his three sons.

Cantos and his sons spent more than three hours touring the exhibition. Leo, Nic and Steven played Pac-Man, Super Mario Brothers, The Secret of Monkey Island, Myst and Flower in one room, where the games are projected on backdrops 12 feet high. Another room contains an interactive timeline of the 40-year history of video games, with 20 kiosks featuring systems from the Atari 2600, released in 1977, to Wii and PlayStation 3. Each kiosk has the actual gaming device in a display case, and visitors can press buttons to hear about four games that were popular on the system. “They listened to every word on the headsets at every kiosk,” says LeeAnn Lawch, a docent at the museum.

Video games are just as addictive to the visually-impaired, explains Cantos, a former owner of an Atari 2600 and a fan of classic games including Space Invaders and Ms. Pac-Man. (He also plays Ms. Pac-Man, Angry Birds and Temple Run on his iPhone.) As for his sons, he adds, “They are making their way through the levels somehow.”

Leo, Nic and Steven prefer combat games, because they can compete head-to-head and stay within one virtual space. “I thought maybe driving games aren’t their thing, but they love Mario Kart 7,” says Cantos. “I don’t really know how they do it, but they keep doing really well.” Adventure games that require maneuvering through a three-dimensional space, jumping over and through things, are, naturally, more difficult for them. But Cantos has coached some of his sons’ friends to provide verbal cues as they navigate their way through different scenes. “Their friends feel like they get to help. They don’t want my boys to die in the game, so they are like, ‘No, no, no. Go left! Right!’ There is a lot of yelling that tends to take place. In the meantime, my boys are in suspense too. Their adrenaline is going because they are trying to do exactly what their friends tell them,” says Cantos. “When they succeed, they all feel victorious.”

As the Cantos family toured “The Art of Video Games,” Lawch read panels and described the graphics and actions of the games. A retired registered nurse, she has experience working with visually-impaired individuals. “Mostly, I tried to translate the visuals to descriptions utilizing additional senses. ‘The air appears hot. There don’t appear to be any nature sounds like birds or waterfalls—just hot, dusty and dry wind. It might smell like hot metal or burning tires,’” says Lawch. Keeping up with the action was a challenge. “He’s running through fire, jumping over a cliff. He’s going to fall. Things are exploding,” says Lawch. “I have never talked and read so fast in my life!”

Cantos and his sons visited the exhibition during the opening weekend in hopes that they would cross paths with some of the movers and shakers within the video game industry. They met Billy Mitchell, a former record holder for Kong and Pac-Man and star of the 2007 documentary “King of Kong,” as well as Chris Melissinos, the exhibition’s curator and self-admitted game addict. Now, they are eager to connect with video game designers. “The big thing that we want programmers to know is to just factor us in,” says Cantos. “We would like to not be an afterthought. We are just another part of the video game market.”

At this point, text-adventure games accommodate the visually-impaired, but many graphics-based games, popular today, could use some accessibility features. Cantos suggests that designers program the games so that menu options and any other text or narrative that appears on the screen is read aloud. Like subtitles for the deaf, maybe an option for verbal descriptions could be offered at the beginning of a game.

“My boys are willing to market test it,” says Cantos. His sons, he adds, have spread the Gospel of video gaming to others who otherwise may not have considered it much. “They are very, very passionate about this stuff,” says Cantos.

As a father, Cantos is grateful to the video game industry for providing an incentive for his sons to do well in school. “If they don’t do well with their grades, then they don’t get to play,” says Cantos. “They are just like any other kids. They like to have fun.”

The Huichol, a native people in the Sierra Madre mountains of west-central Mexico, are known for their elaborate beadwork. Typically, the community’s artisans adorn bowls, masks, animal skulls and gourds with brightly-colored glass beads. The tiny beads are arranged in geometric patterns as well as to represent fanciful depictions of animals and crops that carry spiritual significance.

However, in 2010, two Huichol families—the Bautistas from Jalisco and the Ortiz from Nayarit, Mexico—embarked on a project that gave a contemporary spin to the traditional art form. In no less than 9,000 hours, eight family members used resin to adhere more than two million beads to the exterior of a 1990 Volkswagen Beetle, on display at the National Museum of American Indian through May 6. The eye-catching work of art is called the Vochol, a name derived from a combination of “Vocho,” a slang term in Mexico for a VW Beetle, and “Huichol.”

In this video, Kerry Boyd, assistant director of exhibitions, operations and program support at the American Indian Museum, describes the car and its vivid imagery. The Vochol was given a grand welcome Tuesday evening by Smithsonian Institution Secretary G. Wayne Clough, Mexican Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan, museum director Kevin Gover and the Washington, D.C.-based mariachi ensemble Mariachi Los Amigos.

The art project was made possible by the Museo de Arte Popular in Mexico City, the Association of Friends of the Museo de Arte Popular, the Embassy of Mexico and the Mexican Cultural Institute. After its stay at the American Indian Museum, the car will continue on its international tour, and will ultimately be auctioned off with the proceeds to go towards promoting the work of other native Mexican artists.

In January 2011, the Smithsonian Channel approached Kevin Hockley, an Ontario-based model maker, with a tall (and rather long) order: Build us a snake.

Several years ago, Carlos Jaramillo, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and scientists from the University of Florida, University of Toronto and Indiana University unearthed fossils of a prehistoric snake in northern Colombia. To tell the story of the discovery, the film producers wanted a full-scale replica of the creature.

Kevin Hockley and his model of Titanoboa. Courtesy of Robert Clark / INSTITUTE

The snake, however, was not your typical garter snake or rattlesnake, which Hockley had sculpted before, but Titanoboa, a 2,500-pound “titanic boa” as long as a school bus that lived 58 million years ago.

Hockley’s 48-foot long replica of Titanoboa slurping down a dyrosaur (an ancient relative of crocodiles), is being unveiled today at Grand Central Station in New York City. The sculpture will be on display through March 23, and then it will be transported to Washington, D.C., where it will be featured in the exhibition “Titanoboa: Monster Snake” at the National Museum of Natural History, opening March 30. Smithsonian Channel’s two-hour special of the same title will premiere on April 1.

“Kevin seemed like a natural choice,” says Charles Poe, an executive producer at the Smithsonian Channel. Poe was especially impressed by a narwhal and a 28-foot-long giant squid that the artist made for the Royal Ontario Museum. “He had experience making museum-quality replicas, and even more important, he’d created some that seem larger than life. When you’re recreating the largest snake in world history it helps to have a background in the fantastical,” Poe says.

In fact, Hockley has been in the business of making taxidermy mounts and life-size sculptures for more than 30 years. He mounted his first ruffed grouse as a teen by following instructions from a library book. Hockley spent his high school years apprenticing as a taxidermist in Collingwood, Ontario, and he worked a dozen years at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, creating mounts as well as artistic reconstructions of animals and their habitats. Today, as owner of Hockley Studios, a three-person operation headquartered on the 15-acre property where he lives, near Bancroft, Ontario, he builds bronze sculptures of caribou, lynx and wolves and life-like replicas of mastodon and other Ice Age animals, such as extinct peccaries and jaguars, for museums, visitor centers and parks.

Creating Titanoboa wasn’t easy. Scientists piecing together what the prehistoric creature might have looked like provided Hockley with some basic parameters. “They linked it strongly to modern-day snakes, which was very helpful,” says Hockley. “It was sort of a blend of a boa constrictor and an anaconda.” He studied photographs and video of boas and anacondas and visited live specimens at the Indian River Reptile Zoo, near Peterborough, Ontario. “I could see the way the skeleton and the musculature moved as the animal moved,” says Hockley. “There are all these little bulges of muscle at the back of the head that convey the animal’s jaws are working.” He made sure that those bulges were on his model. Hockley also noted the background colors of anacondas and the markings of boa constrictors. Jason Head, a vertebrate paleontologist and herpetologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, surmised that the coloration of the prehistoric snake might have been similar. “Of course, this is speculation,” says Hockley. “It could have been pink with polka dots for all we know.”

A replica model of the 45-foot-long snake thought to be of Anaconda descent. Courtesy of Robert Clark / INSTITUTE

The first step to building the replica was coming up with a pose. Hockley produced a scale model in clay, an inch of which represented a foot of the actual replica. The snake’s body forms two loops, where museum visitors can wander. “I tried to make it interactive, so you can actually get in and feel what it is like to be surrounded by a snake,” says Hockley. He stacked large sheets of 12-inch-thick Styrofoam high enough to make a snake with a 30-inch circumference. He drew the pose on to the Styrofoam and used a chainsaw, fish filet knives and a power grinder with coarse sand paper disks on it to carve the snake. Hockley applied paper mâché to the Styrofoam and then a layer of polyester resin to strengthen it. On top of that, he put epoxy putty and used rubber molds to texture it with scales. “The hardest part was trying to make the scales flow and continue as lines,” he says. When the putty dried, he primed and painted the snake. He started with the strongest markings and then layered shades over the top to achieve the depth of color he desired. “It makes the finished product that much more convincing,” he says. The snake was made in six sections to allow for easier transport, but devising a way to seamlessly connect the parts was also tricky. Hockley used a gear mechanism in a trailer jack, so that by racheting a tool, he can draw the pieces tightly together.

From start to finish, construction of the replica took about five months. As for materials, it required 12 four-foot-by-eight-foot sheets of Styrofoam, 20 gallons of polyester resin, 400 pounds of epoxy resin and numerous gallons of paint. Smithsonian Channel producers installed a camera in Hockley’s studio to create a timelapse video (above) of the process.

“It was an amazing opportunity,” says Hockley. The artist hopes that his model of Titanoboa gives people an appreciation for how big animals could be 60 million years ago. Since snakes are coldblooded, the size they can attain is dependent on the temperature in which they live, and temperatures during Titanoboa‘s time were warmer than today. As a result, the snake was much bigger than today’s super snakes. “Hopefully they will be awestruck by its realism,” he says. “A little bit of fear would be nice.”