Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin, where scientists search for fossils to better understand ancient climate change. Image via Dave Bezaire and Susi Havens-Bezaire

In a relatively short time, global emissions of carbon dioxide increased massively. Through the greenhouse effect, they raised temperatures around the planet by an average of 7 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit; they also changed the chemistry of the oceans, triggering a surge in acidity that may have led to mass extinctions among marine life. Overall, during this era of rapid change, global sea levels may have risen by as much as 65 feet.

Reading this, you could be forgiven if you assume we’re talking about a scenario related to the present-day climate crisis. But the previous paragraph actually refers to a 20,000-year-long period of warming that occurred 55 million years ago, an event scientists call the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (or PETM for short). Scott Wing, a paleobiologist at the Natural History Museum who has studied the PETM for more than 20 years, says, “If all this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s essentially what we’re doing right now.”

As we embark on an unprecedented experiment with the Earth’s atmosphere and climate, the PETM is suddenly a hot topic among scientists in many disparate fields. “It’s an event that a lot of people are interested in, because it is the best example we have of a really sudden global warming connected to a large release of carbon,” Wing says.

Although scientists still don’t fully understand what triggered the PETM, it is clear that more and more carbon was injected into both the atmosphere and the oceans, initiating the climate change. This carbon may have been supplied by volcanic activity, the spontaneous combustion of peat or even the impact of a particularly carbon-rich comet. Additionally, the initial warming likely led to a release of methane gas from the seafloor, acting as a positive feedback that led to even more climate change. It’s also clear that all this warming wreaked havoc on the world’s ecosystems, leading to extinctions and altering the ranges of numerous plant and animal species.

There is, of course, one key difference: During this previous episode, all that warming took several thousand years. This time, carbon emissions are rising ten times faster than during the PETM, with the warming happening in a century—the geologic equivalent of a blink of an eye.

The sharp uptick in the green line towards the upper-left of this climate chart represents the PETM, the closest analog for our present era of climate change. Image via Wikimedia Commons

Scott Wing researches the PETM by digging for ancient plant remains in Wyoming’s Bighorn Basin. Over several decades of work, he has constructed a general picture of what types of plants thrived before, during and after the warming period, attempting to identify the sorts of trends in plant life we can expect as we change the climate going forward.

A 65-million-year-old leaf cuticle, the sort of specimen used by scientists like Scott Wing to understand the Earth’s ancient climate. Photo by Joseph Stromberg

“During the warm period, essentially none of the plants that had lived in the area previously survived—their local populations were driven extinct,” Wing says. The area had been dominated by ancestors of the types of plants that live in temperate deciduous forests today, such as dogwood, sycamore and redwood trees.

But as the region heated up, these were replaced by a variety of plants related to the present-day bean family, most commonly found in warmer, drier areas such as southern Mexico or Costa Rica. “We believe that what happened is the dispersal into this region of plants that were living somewhere else, probably much farther south,” says Wing. His team has also uncovered evidence that the warmer climate led to a greater level of insect pest damage on the plants that did survive the PETM.

His research has, however, turned up one trend from the PETM that could be a reason to hope ecosystems can someday rebound from climate change. After roughly 200,000 years, long after the PETM subsided and temperatures returned to normal, many of the temperate plants that had lived in the Bighorn Basin finally returned.

“One possible explanation,” Wing says, “is that there were cooler climates in the nearby mountains that served as refuges for these species.” In that scenario—one that he and his research team plan to more closely investigate as they continue to excavate and piece together the fossil record—these types of plants would have waited out the PETM in the relatively cold highlands, then returned to recolonize the basin afterward.

If our climate continues to change as rapidly as it has over the past few decades, though, such a scenario seems less likely—immobile organisms such as plants need hundreds of years to gradually migrate from one area to another. Thus, one key aspect of preserving our planet’s ecosystems, in addition to limiting climate change as much as possible, is slowing it down as much as we can.

That this event happened today—the same day a 147-foot wide asteroid will whiz extremely close to the Earth at 2:26 p.m. EST—seems to be a coincidence of astronomical proportions, as experts say the two events are entirely unrelated. But unlike the asteroid, which will cause no physical damage, the meteor’s sonic boom as it entered the atmosphere, fractured roughly 18 to 32 miles above the ground and subsequently rained fragments over the region, led to as many as 900 injuries, 31 hospitalizations and widespread damage including the collapse of a rooftop at a zinc factory .

So, what caused this massive explosion? “For one, meteors move extremely fast—faster than the speed of sound—so there’s a ton of friction being generated as it comes through the atmosphere,” says Cari Corrigan, a geologist with the Natural History Museum who specializes in meteors. “If there are any weaknesses in it already, or if there is ice that melts and leaves empty fractures—like freezing and thawing in a pothole—it could easily explode.”

To get a knotty bit of nomenclature out of the way, meteor refers to a variety of pieces of debris—made up of either rock, metal, or a mix of the two—that enter the atmosphere from outer space. Before doing so, they’re called meteoroids. Most burn up entirely during their descent, but if any intact fragments do make it to the ground, they’re called meteorites. Meteors are also called “shooting stars” because of the heat and light produced when they slam into the still atmosphere at supersonic speeds—today’s meteor was estimated to be traveling faster than 33,000 m.p.h.

The distinction between this meteor and the asteroid that will fly past us later today, according to Corrigan, is a matter of size and origin. “Asteroids are generally bigger, and they typically come from the asteroid belt, between Mars and Jupiter,” she says. The size difference also explains why we were able to predict the arrival of the asteroid nearly a year ago, but this meteor caught us by surprise: It’s impossible to spot the smaller meteoroids up in space with our telescopes.

Meteors like the one that fell today aren’t exceedingly rare, but for one to cause this much damage is almost unheard of. “There are events like this in recorded history, but this is likely the first time it’s happened over such a populated area and this level of destruction has been documented,” Corrigan says. Notable meteors in recorded history include the Tunguska event (a 1908 explosion over a remote area in Russia that knocked down more than 80 million trees covering an area of some 830-square miles), the Benld meteorite (a small object that landed in Illinois in 1938 that punctured the roof of a car) and the Carancas impact (a 2007 meteorite that crashed in a Peruvian village and may have caused groundwater contamination).

In 1938, a meteorite fell over Benld, Illinois, puncturing the roof of a car, become embedded in the backseat. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Shsilver

Much larger meteorites have fallen in prehistory and been discovered much later, including the Willamette Meteorite, a 32,000-pound hunk of iron that fell millennia ago and was transported to Oregon during the last ice age. The largest meteorite ever discovered in North America, it is now part of the collections of the Natural History Museum.

The Willamette Meteorite is on view at the Natural History Museum. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Dante Alighieri

Early reports suggest that remnants of the meteor have fallen into a reservoir near the town of Chebarkul; testing on these meteorite fragments could provide more information on the object’s composition and origin. “It might be an ordinary chondrite—which is  what 90 percent of the meteorites that we have are made of—or it could be something more rare,” Corrigan says.

While chondrites are made mostly of stone and result from the relatively recent breakup of asteroids, iron meteorites originate from the cores of more ancient asteroids, and even rarer types come from debris broken off from the moon or Mars. ”Every meteorite that we get is another piece of the puzzle,” says Corrigan. “They’re clues towards how the solar system and Earth were formed.”

The impacts of Hurricane Sandy, among other events, convinced Clough that the Smithsonian needs to pair its cutting-edge research with more effective communication of climate science to the public. Image via NASA

“What we have here is a failure to communicate,” said G. Wayne Clough, the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, reflecting on the Institution’s role in educating the public about climate change. “We are the world’s largest museum and research center. . .but if you wanted to find out something about climate change and went to the Smithsonian website, you’d get there and have trouble finding out about it.”

In “Climate Change: Connecting the Dots,” a wide-ranging speech the Smithsonian secretary made today about the state of climate science and education at the Smithsonian, Clough conceded that, while the Institution has led the way in many fields of scientific research relating to the issue, it’s been less effective at conveying this expert knowledge to the public. “We have a serious responsibility to contribute to the public understanding of climate change,” he said.

Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough. Image courtesy of Smithsonian Press Office

Clough recently decided that communication the issue is a priority, he said, while contemplating the unprecedented damage of Hurricane Sandy and its link to climate change. Previously, while speaking to friends and outside groups about the impacts of climate change in other areas, such as the Yupik people of St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Strait, or the citizens of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, he’d frequently encountered an attitude of apathy.

“I would tell all of my friends, ‘this is a big deal,’ and inevitably, what they told me was, ‘well, those people in New Orleans build houses at places that are below sea level,’” he said. “‘That’s their problem, that’s not our problem.’”

The tragic consequences of Hurricane Sandy, though, have changed the climate of discussion around the issue. “Sandy and some other recent events have made this easier. You cannot run away from the issues we’re facing here,” Clough said. “Suddenly, it’s now become everyone’s problem.”

In response to this problem, he announced a pair of initiatives to expand the Smithsonian’s role in climate science. The Tennenbaum Marine Observatories will serve as the first worldwide network of coastal ocean field sites, designed to closely monitor the effects wrought by climate change in ocean ecosystems around the globe. TEMPO (Tropospheric Emissions: Monitoring of Pollution), conducted by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, will be the first space-based project to monitor pollution in the North American upper atmosphere in real time.

These will join dozens of climate-related research projects that have been ongoing for decades—research on wetlands, oceans, invasive species, carbon sequestration by ecosystems, wisdom on climate change from traditional cultures, historical changes in climate and other fields.

For an Institution that has become embroiled in controversies over public education on climate change over the years, making the issue an overall priority is significant. Clough feels that an inclusive approach is key. ”Let’s start with the idea that everybody’s educable, that everybody wants to learn something, and they’re going to go someplace to try to learn it,” he said. “No matter who you are, I think the place that you would want to come is the Smithsonian. So part of our communications task is to bring as many people to the table as possible to have this discussion.”

This week, if you take a stroll through the Haupt Garden, past the Sackler Gallery and into the Moongate Garden, you’ll come upon something you likely won’t see everyday: a 1500-year old intricately painted Buddhist cave from northwest China. Okay, but not really. In a remarkable marriage of the ancient and the high tech, the Sackler welcomes an innovative and precise 3D digital representation of one of the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, also known as the Mogao Caves, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that is one of the finest examples of Buddhist art in existence.

“There are over 600 caves in this escarpment, and they were painted over a period of about 1,000 years,” says Jeffrey Shaw, a professor at the City University of Hong Kong, who created the digital exhibition Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottes at Dunhuang, along with the Dunhuang Academy. “It is certainly one of the great art treasures of the world, and what we have here is a prototype for being able to explore the caves using digital data.”

Image courtesy of the Sackler Gallery

Until you visit the exhibition, now shown outside China for the first time, you might be tempted to dismiss it as a gimmicky sideshow. But once you step inside the darkened tent and position the 3D glasses on your nose, the 360-degree virtual cave comes to life. It is utterly unlike the supposedly 3D experience you get, say, in a movie theater. Standing inside the tented chamber and seeing the richly detailed paintings and rock faces jut out at you from all sides, it really feels as though, if you reached out, you’d feel weathered millennial aged stone, rather than a smooth plastic screen. The digital cave, in short, is unnervingly lifelike.

Image courtesy of the Sackler Gallery

The digital interface is controlled by a custom app installed on an iPad mini at the center of the room, which allows a tour guide to select from a menu of different options for displaying the work. It initially appears as a dark room, with a virtual flashlight’s beam bouncing around and illuminating small portions of it. Then, suddenly, the virtual house lights come up, and the six projectors and next-generation 3D technology provoke a wave of oohs and aahs from the tour groups crowding in to see it this week.

The fact that the entire experience is virtual gives visitors superpowers when exploring the cave. With a tour guide’s tap on the iPad, the group can suddenly move up to the ceiling, zoom in on a particular element with a massive magnifying glass or even animate elements of the paintings, bringing dancers or musical instruments out of the ancient painting to seemingly hover and perform in midair.

These capacities also allow visitors to experience the work in a pristine form unavailable at the actual cave. With another click, the seven medicine Buddhas are transformed, their dull pigments becoming vivid colors. “Here, the Buddhas have been virtually repainted to match the color quality of the original paintings,” Shaw says. “This is based on research by the Dunhuang Academy looking at what the original coloration would have been.”

Image courtesy of the Sackler Gallery

One of the key motivations for the innovative project is conservation. “The Chinese want to reduce the amount of tours in the caves, because they are causing damage to them,” Shaw says. “The idea is that this will take some of the stress away from the touristic boom of interest in the caves themselves.” In addition to the touring exhibition, a permanent virtual cave will be installed at Dunhuang, along with the real ones, to accommodate the increasing level of cultural tourists without putting the grottoes at further risk.

“The Sackler is fast becoming a museum of the 21st century, taking the lead in adapting digital technology to a museum context,” said Julian Raby, the Director of the Sackler and Freer Galleries, at an event marking the Sackler Gallery’s 25th anniversary last week. “The ‘Pure Land’ project exemplifies the exhibition experience of the future.”

Image courtesy of the Sackler Gallery

Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottes at Dunhuang will be open through December 9th. Timed tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis at the Sackler Pavilion. The show will also return in the spring of 2013 for a longer-term installation at the International Center Gallery.

The Prince Sultan speaks at the opening of the “Roads of Arabia” exhibition. Image courtesy of the Sackler Gallery

Sultan bin Salman, the son of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, serves as the Secretary-General of the country’s Supreme Commission for Tourism and Antiquities. A former fighter pilot, he became the first-ever Arab in space while serving on the fifth flight of NASA’s Discovery program as a payload specialist in 1985. He recently traveled to Washington, D.C. for the North American premiere of the “Roads of Arabia” exhibition, now on view at the Sackler Gallery—a groundbreaking collection of newly discovered artifacts from the Arabian Peninsula—and sat down with Around the Mall to discuss the show, the U.S.-Saudi Arabian relationship and what it’s like to look at Earth from space.

What’s so special about this exhibition, and why did you decide to travel here for the opening of it?

It is really a window to [a] Saudi Arabia not seen before. It’s a new focus on the heritage of Saudi Arabia, and its history, that connects very much to its future.

People have to see Saudi Arabia as not being just a barren desert. Although people of the desert, like myself, take offense when people say it’s a “barren desert.” The desert is very rich: One night in the desert will really show you a different version of the universe that you’ve never seen before. And Saudi Arabia is not all desert to begin with—we have mountains, beautiful countryside, rivers and very vibrant communities.

But this window is opening to something new, to the history of Saudi Arabia, to the cultures and civilizations that have crisscrossed it. Hence the name, “Roads of Arabia.” This [is a] very critical and important part of the world, in the sense of its geographic location. The great religions of the world were all created in that part of the world. And Saudi Arabia has been the center of incredible civilizations, going back thousands of years. It’s very important for the world to see another dimension of Saudi Arabia. This is a nation that didn’t come from nowhere. And also, Islam, as a great religion, came to Mecca, a site and a place where culture and politics and trade [were] well and alive. So Islam came to a place in the world that is very complex, very rich, and not void.

So it is really timely. If you’re going to see Saudi Arabia well, you need to see it from where it came, in terms of history. This is represented by the artifacts and beautiful objects that tell the story.

A collection of tomb markers at “Roads of Arabia.” Image courtesy of the Sackler Gallery

What can museumgoers learn about Saudi Arabia that might surprise them?

Every culture that has come through Saudi Arabia, every civilization that has crisscrossed the “Roads of Arabia,” has left its imprint. Some of these civilizations have left an imprint in terms of objects. Many of them have left archaeological sites, like Mada’in Saleh, which was the first UNESCO World Heritage Site in Saudi Arabia. It is the Southern capital of the Nabateans, or the original Arabs, who wrote the original Arabic language.

These civilizations also left a lot of stories, whether stories written in rock art or other artifacts—the beautiful statues, jewelry and pottery in the exhibit. The diversity of things that we’re discovering today in Saudi Arabia is staggering, and we’re not even scratching the surface, according to the experts of antiquities.

When Americans think about cultural tourism, they might think of Petra in Jordan or Machu Picchu. Do you imagine Saudi Arabia as someday being a destination for cultural tourism?

I have to assure you one hundred percent that this exhibition is not really meant to encourage people to go to Saudi Arabia. We are not even open for tourism, the way you see it. We are really in the build-up stage of our national tourism. Sites are not necessarily prepared the way we want them to be prepared, including Mada’in Saleh.

So this is mainly a window on a country that is very much intertwined with America, in particular. We have been friends for tens of years, and we’ve gone through thick and thin together. But Saudi Arabia has always been seen by most of the American public simply as the world’s largest producer of oil. When oil prices go up, we take the brunt of criticism, to say it politely, while we probably are not to blame.

We are keen that, in the U.S., people see Saudi Arabia from a different light. It’s almost like if you came to a major art exhibition, or you came back to a major architectural exhibition of Saudi architects, but on a much deeper scale. You’d see a human dimension. In this exhibition, you’re seeing multiple human dimensions throughout thousands of years of history.

When this exhibition was shown in Europe, what did people think?

It was stunning—between a million and a half and two million people visited the exhibition. Those are not people going for joyrides, they’re people that went on a learning experience. We think that, in America also, this will be a learning experience. We invest a lot in America, and I don’t mean financially—we are investing in bringing closer, rather than standing between people. I think these are two countries that need to work together towards the future. It’s very important. It’s a must that people understand each other better. Your President Obama has always spoken of Saudi Arabia as a great nation, and a great friend of the U.S., so as did the other predecessors. And we in Saudi Arabia think of America as a great nation that is leading the world towards the future. We all, as humans of one earth—having also seen earth from the perspective of space—eventually we’re going to have to find those common grounds. One of those common grounds is understanding where we came from.

The Prince Sultan aboard NASA’s Discovery Shuttle (right) with Patrick Baudy. Image via NASA

It’s funny you mention space—for our readers, who are really interested in science and space as well as art, I wanted to ask you what it was like to actually go into orbit.

It’s an incredible revelation. I still carry the memory of seeing Earth smaller, a lot smaller, than I thought it was. I still carry the memory of seeing Earth in the vastness and blackness of space. That hit me hard. Thinking, we all have different languages and different cultural backgrounds and different religions, but we all actually live on that one space ship, one planet. Our fate is very much connected, intertwined.

This is, to me, the transition that has not been made, as much as we have become more sophisticated, talking to each other through social media and mobile phones. I still don’t know why we haven’t transitioned as humans. As many pictures as we’ve seen of earth from space, we still haven’t transitioned to understanding that this is a pretty small place, and we are not much different. We speak different languages but it is the same language, it’s a human language.

A backup duplicate of the original Telstar satellite, housed in storage at the Air and Space Museum. Photo courtesy of the museum

Television penetrated the average American life with astonishing speed. At the end of World War II, just a half percent of U.S. households had a TV set; by 1962, that number had increased to 90 percent. But no matter how many TVs we bought and broadcasting stations we constructed, the reach of broadcast signals over long distances was still limited by a basic physical problem: the curvature of the earth.

“The TV signal, which is a radio wave signal, travels in straight lines,” says Martin Collins, a curator at the Air and Space Museum. “So if you’re having to overcome the curvature of the earth, signals can only go so far before they need to be picked up by an antenna and repeated.”

All this changed with the launch of a rocket in Cape Canaveral on July 10, 1962, exactly 50 years ago, today. The rocket carried the Telstar communications satellite, the first ever spacecraft that served to actively relay communications signals between distant points on earth. “In essence, it meant putting a relay station high up in orbit, instead of on the ground,” Collins says. ”From a technical perspective, the satellite was a nifty solution to a basic problem of physics.”

The spacecraft allowed broadcasting stations in both the U.S. and Europe to send signals up into space, bounce them off the satellite, and have them received across the Atlantic nearly instantaneously, revolutionizing mass communications between the continents. The device could also be used for phone calls and even faxes. To celebrate the achievement, authorities conducted an international demonstration of Telstar’s capabilities. “There was an exchange of programs—first from the United States to Europe, and then from Europe to the U.S.” says Collins. The American broadcast included a press conference with President Kennedy, a baseball game and images of famous places such as the Statue of Liberty and Mt. Rushmore.

Telstar, an experimental satellite, successfully relayed signals for just under a year before various technical problems forced it offline. But it played a crucial role in shaping the development of subsequent satellites and helping us understand how we could conduct communications through space. The satellite employed solid state technology, provided information about how electronics functioned in the radiation of the Van Allen Belt and assisted in developing techniques to establish contact between ground antennae and spacecraft.

The launch was also tremendously valuable for an American psyche rattled by the early Soviet dominance of space during the Cold War. “Telstar was an event that signaled U.S. achievement in an area that the Soviets themselves had not done,” Collins says. “The perception was that the Soviets were ahead in human space flight, and they were creating new accomplishments faster than the U.S., but Telstar represented an aspect of space flight that the U.S. was clearly first in.” The fact that the satellite was developed primarily by AT&T, a private firm, further served to demonstrate the power of private industry, as compared to the U.S.S.R.’s state-run model.

To celebrate the golden anniversary of the achievement, the Air and Space Museum—which is home to a backup duplicate of Telstar, produced along with the actual satellite launched—is hosting a day of special events on Thursday, July 12. A live satellite connection will be established with the Telecommunications Museum in Pleumeur-Bodou, France, which was the site of the original French ground antenna. The broadcast will be followed by a special symposium of space historians and industry experts, including Martin Collins, and will feature original footage from the 1962 broadcast. The event is open to the public, and will be available as a live webcast for those outside Washington.

In addition to the museum’s special events, there’s yet another way to celebrate Telstar’s legacy: by looking to the skies. Although the satellite was ultimately disabled by radiation in 1963, it has remained in orbit ever since, reliably circling the earth every 2.5 hours. Modern satellites have outstripped Telstar’s capabilities by several orders of magnitude, but the relic lives on as a physical reminder of our first successful foray into space communications.

Guest blogger and Portrait Gallery historian Amy Henderson

This post is part of our ongoing series in which ATM invites guest bloggers from among the Smithsonian Institution’s scientists, curators, researchers and historians to write for us. The National Portrait Gallery’s cultural historian Amy Henderson recently wrote about Louis Armstrong’s last recorded performance at the National Press Club.

A front page article in May 23’s Washington Post captures a signature irony of life in 2012: the past is revealed best not by digging through dry-as-dust artifacts and manuscripts, but by the wonders of today’s technology. The article describes how one woman researching her family history was overjoyed at finding details of their daily life revealed in the recent release of the 1940 U.S. Census. On a digitized image of the original census ledger, she discovered a long-lost cousin who lived at a boarding house on P Street NW. It was like a magical secret door to her past had suddenly opened, and her next step was going to be finding that house and photographing it to paste in a family album.
The 1940 Census, embargoed for 72 years to maintain confidentiality during the then-normal life span of seven decades, is today an enormous boon for researchers of all kinds. The Census reveals details about life in 1940 that are rich, poignant, and illuminating. And, as the Post reports, “thanks to technology, the information will be more accessible, more quickly, than that from any previous census.”

The Census release made me think about how new technologies enhance contemporary culture by personalizing everything that attracts attention—movies, music, fashion, even the way we get our news. Today’s interactive media has created a culture whose common experience is Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Tumblr. Connected 24/7, we are a species soldered to our media devices: our whole world is in our hands…and eyes and ears.

The ubiquity of this experience is showcased in two fascinating new exhibitions that opened recently in Washington: “The Art of Video Games” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Hewlett-Packard New Media Gallery at the Newseum.

The American Art Museum’s exhibition focuses on how video games have evolved as an increasingly expressive medium in modern society. Beginning with Pac Man in 1980, games have entranced generations with striking visual effects and the creative use of the newest technologies: for SAAM, the virtual reality of video games has generated “a previously unprecedented method of communicating with and engaging audiences.”

At the Newseum, the HP New Media Gallery “places visitors at the center of the news revolution” through live Twitter feeds on touch-screen monitors that instantly connect visitors to news stories as they happen around the world. This instant communication allows people to experience first-hand how new media is changing the way news is generated, reported and absorbed in the 21^st century.

Because social media customizes individual experience, today’s culture tends to be dominated by information that is personalized and “narrowcast” rather than “broadcast” to a mass audience. When I’ve talked about this with my interns, their eyes pop at the very idea that media once served as a cultural unifier. But as alien as this seems to today, American culture in the 1920s and 30s was shaped by a mass media that targeted a mass audience. Media then consisted of a mere handful of outlets—NBC and CBS radio, movie studios like MGM, Warner Bros., and RKO, and magazines like The Saturday Evening Post and LIFE—and all combined to generate a mainstream, shared culture. Everyone listened to such top-rated radio shows as “The Jack Benny Show” and “Burns and Allen,” smiled at Norman Rockwell’s illustrated magazine covers, and congregated in neighborhood movie theaters to experience Hollywood’s golden age in communal gatherings. Mass media generated a cultural flow that, even during the Depression, glued the nation together by common experience.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt by Douglas Granville Chandor, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

Why this happened is partly because mass media technology kept enlarging its ability to reach ever-broader audiences.  But the rise of a shared mainstream culture was also possible because mid-20^th century America was so radically different from America today. The revelations of the 1940 Census provide quantitative clues that help explain why a shared culture was possible.

In today’s terms, the 1940 Census is an historical Facebook of the 132 million people who then lived in the United States. In 1940 almost 90 percent of those surveyed identified themselves as white; 9.8 percent were black and 0.4 percent registered as “other.” Contrast that to 2010: 72.4 percent said they were white, 12.6 percent African American, 16.3 percent Hispanic, 4.8 percent Asian, and 2.9 percent declared themselves to be two or more races.

Education levels have changed radically: in 1940 only 5 percent had college degrees; in 2010, that had risen to 28 percent. Occupations have also transformed American life: in 1940, the top five industries were manufacturing (23.4 percent), agriculture (18.5 percent), retail (14 percent), personal services (8.9 percent), and professional services (7.4 percent). In 2010, nearly a quarter of the population was employed in educational services, health care, and social assistance; next came retail (11.7 percent), professional, scientific, management and administrative services, waste management services (10.6 percent), and construction (6.2 percent).  The median annual wage for men in 1940 was $956, and $592 for women; in 2010, the median income for men was $33,276, and for women, $24,157.

In 1940, Ira May Fuller became the first person to receive Social Security benefits—a check for $22.54. Glenn Miller had such hit songs as “In the Mood” and “Tuxedo Junction,” while Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra featured Frank Sinatra and the Pied Pipers singing “I’ll Never Smile Again.” American inventions included rayon, zippers and cellophane. Men wore wide ties and sported fedoras, while women wore hats, gloves and padded shoulders. Radio’s top-rated program featured Edgar Bergen, a ventriloquist, and his wooden dummy Charlie McCarthy. The 1940 Academy Award ceremony gave the Best Picture Oscar to Gone with the Wind, and Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win an Academy Award (Best Supporting Actress). There were 7 million cars on the road, and Franklin Roosevelt ran for an unprecedented third presidential term.

Today, the 309 million people in the United States live in a world that is infinitely more diverse and educated. Many work at jobs that didn’t exist 72 years ago. And for generations immersed in social media, culture means a different thing than it did in 1940. As the American Art Museum, the Newseum, and many other museums have figured out, the way culture is presented and interpreted needs to reflect a 21^st century perspective. Contemporary audiences may be attracted to “retro,” but like their predecessors, they search out experience in real time. Even if it’s virtual.

Robert Weingarten's layered composite portrait of Dennis Hopper. Photo courtesy of the American History Museum

From now through Friday, you have the chance to do something special: choose a figure from American history to put in the American History Museum. As part as the Frame an Iconic American contest, the public has the chance to play curator, voting among five different choices to determine who will have a biographical portrait composed by artist Robert Weingarten.

Right now, salsa music queen Celia Cruz is in the lead with 44.6 percent of the vote, followed closely by World War II hero Audie Murphy, who has 34.2 percent. Women’s suffrage activist Alice Paul, inventor Samuel Morse and abolitionist Frederick Douglass round out the field. To read more about all of the candidates and to cast your vote, visit the museum’s blog, “O Say Can You See?”

The contest was inspired by an upcoming exhibition of Weingarten’s works that will open at the Ripley Center on July 2nd, “Pushing Boundaries,” which features 16 innovative digital composite portraits of a range of notable Americans, including Dennis Hopper, Hank Aaron and Sandra Day O’Connor.

The noted artist’s portraits are rather unusual in one particular sense: they don’t contain any images of the actual subject. Rather, the layered composites include photographs taken by Weingarten of a number of items and places that the subjects themselves chose to represent them. ”These sit in a unusual position in terms of the difference between portraiture and self-portraiture, because I ask the subjects to define their own list,” Weingarten says. “I go to a chosen icon and I ask, ‘If you were to make a self portrait, but you couldn’t photograph yourself or family members or friends, what would be the items that would metaphorically represent you?’”

Weingarten then photographs the selected items and creates a digital composite image, combining the elements to achieve a composition he feels represents the subject. “They’re layered compositions,” he says. “Especially in person, you can look through each layer to the one behind it, so it’s almost like you’re pulling back the metaphorical layers of a person.”

When Weingarten gets to work crafting a portrait of the contest winner, he’ll be presented with a new challenge: whoever wins won’t be around to tell him which items and places they want to be represented by. “All my previous subjects were alive, and I worked closely with them in terms of creating the list and understanding the relative importance of each of the things on it,” he says. “Now, I’ll be working with a curator, so it’ll be a little more of a historic look, rather than a personal look.”

While you’re waiting until July to see Weingarten’s acclaimed works at the Ripley Center, take the chance to vote now and have your say in whose portrait he creates next. Instead of collaborating with an American icon, he’ll be working with the American public. “It’s really intriguing,” he says. “I’m looking forward to see what excites the public, and who they want to see in the Smithsonian.”

The National Zoo's new cheetah cubs, at 16 days old. Photo by Adrienne Crosier, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute

On April 23, veterinarian Copper Aitken-Palmer was examining Ally, a cheetah from the National Zoo who had just given birth to a male cub. As she leaned in closer, she was surprised to hear a faint beating, distinct from the animal’s own heartbeat.

Listening carefully, she realized what it was: the heartbeat of several more cubs, who had remained inside Ally despite the fact that she had stopped having contractions several hours earlier. Quickly, a team of vets and scientists performed an emergency cesarean section to deliver the remaining offspring in the litter.

“Given how rare this procedure is, we thought it’d be unlikely for any of the cubs to survive,” said Adrienne Crosier, a cheetah biologist at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (SCBI) in Front Royal, Virginia, according to a Zoo press release. “But that little female is a fighter. Once we got her breathing, she just kept going. It was a very intense, stressful experience, but among the most inspiring of my career.”

Three weeks later, after intensive efforts to resuscitate the litter and provide round-the-clock care, the surviving cub (a female) and the first-born male took up residence at the National Zoo on May 18. The two cubs and the mother all appear to be in good health, a cause for celebration among Zoo staff and cheetah enthusiasts everywhere.

Because the mother had abandoned the male cub from the start—relatively common practice for first-time mothers in captivity—the pair are being hand-raised, and still require vigilant care. Late this summer, once they have developed further and keepers are confident they are ready, they will make their debut to the public. “The cubs will continue to need care and we’re not out of the woods yet,” said Tony Barthel, curator of the Zoo’s Cheetah Conservation Station. ”The goal is to ensure that the cheetahs thrive and become ambassadors for their species.”

Part of the cause of celebration for these births is how vulnerable the species already is. There are only an estimated 7,500 to 10,000 cheetahs left in the wild after decades of hunting and habitat loss in Africa, the species’ native range. Ally and the father, Caprivi, were specifically paired as part of the cheetah’s Species Survival Plan, which is put in place by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums to maximize genetic diversity and stability in the threatened population.

“There are now two new genetically valuable cubs in a population that so desperately needs them,” Aitken-Palmer said. “So this is really a success for this struggling species.”

The other cause for celebration: the cheetah cubs are just so darn cute. Take a look at the Zoo’s flickr page for more photos of the pair, and keep checking in throughout the summer to see when the cubs will make their public debut.

One of the cheetah cubs, at just two days old. Photo by Adrienne Crosier, Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute

17-day-old cheetah cub. Photo by Janice Sveda, Smithsonian's National Zoo

The cheetah cubs are being hand-raised, and will require round-the-clock care. Photo by Janice Sveda, Smithsonian's National Zoo

On April 23, first-time mom Ally gave birth naturally to one cub, a male. Hours later SCBI veterinarian performed a cesarean section procedure while animal care staff attempted to resuscitate the three cubs that came from that procedure. One, a female, survived. Photo by Meghan Murphy, Smithsonian's National Zoo

Chuck Brown pioneered the genre of Go-Go and became intricately connected with DC's cultural identity. Photo by James Hilsdon - Hilsdon Photography LLC

Washington, D.C. lost a musical icon yesterday. The legendary Chuck Brown died at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore at the age of 75. Brown will be remembered for his decades of engaging live performances, his distinctive stage personality and his development of go-go music, a sub-genre of funk which incorporated R&B, early hip-hop elements and audience participation.

“He’s got such a legacy in music in creating a genre of its own,” says Dwan Reece, a curator of music at the National Museum of African-American History and Culture. “The chanting, the call-and-response—it was, more than anything, one long party.”

Brown was born in Gaston, North Carolina in 1936; after moving around as a child, his family settled in Washington, D.C. in the early 1940s. As a boy, he hustled, shining shoes and selling newspapers in the street. During this time, he met many prominent African-American entertainers—he said that he once shined Louis Armstrong’s shoes at the Howard Theater. His musical talent showed early on, as he sang in church from the age of two and learned to play the piano by ear as a seven-year-old.

The performer endured a turbulent adolescence, in which he worked odd jobs, hopped trains as a hobo and served three years of prison time (the crime was assault, but Brown maintained that he acted in self-defense). While at Lorton Penitentiary, Brown rediscovered his love of music, teaching himself to play guitar and putting on shows for other inmates. Once he was paroled, he began performing in clubs and lounges around D.C.

In the early ’70s, Brown put together a band called the Soul Searchers and began innovating his signature sound: go-go. He blended funk, R&B, the call-and-response tradition from African-American church culture and other elements to create a highly energetic, danceable style that took the city by storm. “He started off playing with rhythm and percussion, and adding Latin instruments,” Reece says. “Then he learned that he could keep the percussion going between songs, so there was always some kind of activity, no break. He would chant, he would rhyme, and it became like a house party, a really familiar, down home environment.” His biggest early hits included “We Need Some Money” and “Bustin’ Loose.”

Brown’s close relationships with neighborhood audiences enabled him to take participation to a whole new level. “People would shout out birthdays, they’d send notes of things for him to say. he would call them out, and the audience would repeat back, and then he’d break into the next song,” Reece says. “There was an energy, and it was infectious. There was no line between the performer and the audience.”

Brown never became well-known nationally—his music had to be appreciated in a live setting to truly understand what made it so special. In D.C., though, where he played as often as six nights a week and sometimes twice a night, he became an icon. “He was so intricately tied to this city,” says Reece. “There are certain cities that are just defined by their music—when you think jazz, you think of New Orleans, and for R&B, you think Memphis. When you look at go-go, it is really the only music indigenous to Washington, DC.”

Although it never took off as a country-wide phenomenon, go-go had an indelible impact on contemporary American music. “It was definitely influential, especially with hip-hop,” Reece says. “His music involved samples, and was all about rhyming and the beat, and using energy to keep it going.”

Brown said that the genre took its name because “the music just goes and goes.” And just like his music, the legendary performer kept on going, regularly performing through his final years.

The National Museum of African-American History and Culture, set to open in its own building on the Mall in 2015, will feature an exhibition called “Musical Crossroads” that examines the influence of African-Americans on music. “The exhibit will have a section on music on the city, with go-go as a case study, looking at the role that place and community play in helping to define music,” says Reece. “We had been talking to Chuck Brown, and he was very excited about it, so I’m sad that he won’t be able to see it, but it will certainty illustrate his legacy in a larger way.”

"Jeopardy's" Power Players Week is filmed at Constitution Hall in DC. Photo by Kris Connor / Getty Images

Last month, at DC’s Constitution Hall, Alex Trebek read clues under the gaze of Abraham Lincoln. CNN host Anderson Cooper, NBA Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and others went for daily doubles amidst a patriotic set, in front of a giant map of the U.S, and in front of a live audience of thousands.

The event was the filming of shows for “Jeopardy’s” third-ever “Power Players” week: “Celebrity Jeopardy,” DC-style. The “Power Players” shows are airing all this week nationally.

“We’ll be doing the same thing we always do, except we’ll be doing it in front of ten times as big an audience as we usually do,” said Trebek in an interview earlier this month. “We’ve done shows at Constitution Hall on two previous occasions, and they have gone very well, so it’ll be a lot of fun.”

A total of 15 journalists, newsmakers and other notables participated in the slate of five shows, including former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, comedian and frequent contributor to “The Daily Show” Lewis Black, and NBC News reporter Kelly O’Donnell. All reported they were thrilled at the chance to participate in the series, which has been among the most popular game shows in the country for decades. “‘Jeopardy’ is omnipresent in television, and I worked in local TV news, so I always saw it,” O’Donnell said during the event. “Who doesn’t love ‘Jeopardy?’ Who doesn’t think Alex is cool? To be a part of it is amazing.”

Despite a resume that includes three Pulitzer Prizes, columnist and author Friedman professed to being nervous about the round just before it started. “I look at this as the journalistic Hunger Games—I just want to be a survivor at the end,” he said. “Just avoiding a ‘Youtube’ moment, that’s what it’s all about.”

Anderson Cooper, who had appeared on “Jeopardy” twice previously, winning once, said that one particular element of the game is most important than viewers might realize. “A lot of it is about the buzzer, and getting into a groove with the buzzer,” he said. “Obviously, knowing answers helps, but buzzing in at the right time is really very critical. That’s something you don’t see at home.”

During the commercial breaks, Trebek chatted with the audience, receiving heavy applause for his quips and amusing answers to questions.  ”When I get to talk to people in the audience, it’s a good back and forth exchange,” Trebek said. “And the best part, in DC, is that I’m not running for any office.” Audience members asked Trebek a variety of questions, including his favorite TV show apart from ‘Jeopardy,’ his favorite meal, and why he shaved his moustache. His answers, respectively: ‘Law and Order,’ fried chicken and rice, and “Because I felt like it!”

Each of the participants played for a charity of their choice, with a minimum of $50,000 for the winner’s charity, and $10,000 for each of the others. The various causes ranged widely, with projects supporting suicide prevention, biodiversity conservation and education of writing and the creative arts.

“The nice thing, obviously, is that the charity gets an amount of money no matter what,” Cooper said. “But, obviously, winning would be nice.”

Jeopardy: Power Players Week will be airing from May 14th through 18th. Check your local listings.

The IMAX camera shared majestic views of outer space to audiences down below

Starting in 1984, NASA’s space shuttle missions carried a device that visually captured space travel like never before. The IMAX camera provided sweeping, immersive views of Earth and intimate windows into the minutae of astronauts’ lives in zero gravity. The footage, collected over 17 missions, produced six movies, such as The Dream is Alive and Blue Planet—films that brought moviegoers as close as possible to the experience of what it’s actually like to orbit in space.

Now, with the shuttle program retired after two decades of service, two of the IMAX cameras come to their final destination: the Air and Space Museum, where the idea for filming space with IMAX technology originated in the first place.

“This building had barely opened in 1976 when our first director, Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins, had an idea,” said space shuttle curator Valerie Neal. “He proposed to NASA that an IMAX motion picture camera be taken into space aboard one of the early space shuttle flights. Having been to space himself, and having been to the moon and back, he saw that the IMAX camera could bring that experience to far more people than would ever have the chance to go into space themselves.”

One of the IMAX cameras used on the space shuttle missions, now part of the Air and Space Museum's collections. Photo courtesy of NASA/Paul E. Alers

Thirty-six years later, IMAX co-inventor Graeme Ferguson and museum Associate Director Peter Jakab presided over the donation of two of the cameras used aboard the shuttle to the museum last week. The battered black camera on display during the ceremony, which weighs about 80 pounds, made a number of journeys into space, documenting missions all the way up 1998. ”This is a marvelous acquisition for the Air and Space Museum,” Jakab said. “It’s an object that represents the merging of the creative arts with technology—which is the mission of the Smithsonian, the mission of NASA, and the mission of IMAX. It’s an object that allows us to tell a great many stories.”

To understand just how richly these stories can be told with IMAX technology, you really have to sit in front of the museum’s five-story-high IMAX screen and absorb the immense scale of outer space. Seeing a film produced with this camera is entirely different from seeing movies about space travel, or watching on a TV. The screen almost entirely fills your field of vision, so the astronaut’s views become your views, and the entire surface pops with vivid detail.

This is enabled by the cameras’ ability to take in an incredible amount of visual information, shooting film with oversized, 70 mm frames—providing more than eight times the area of traditional 35 mm film. “We focused on two things when designing the camera. The first was that it was a very large format, so it could gather a great deal of information. If it were digital, you’d say it had a lot of megapixels,” Ferguson said. “The other thing we worked very hard at was making it small, because with this format, in which a frame is about three inches wide, if you just scaled up a normal movie camera it would be enormous.”

Astronauts underwent extensive training to use the cameras, since they had been designed to be used only by expert filmmakers. “In some respects, it was an extremely primitive camera,” said Ferguson. “It had no mirror reflex—which movie cameras have had since the 30s—it had no zoom, it had no autofocus, or autoexposure, which every point-and-shoot camera like now has. It was probably the least user-friendly piece of machinery that ever went into space.”

The cameras were minimally altered for flight, with bumpers added to the sharp corners to prevent injuries. But using them was still an ordeal for astronauts: the film had to be re-loaded after every three minutes of filming and extra lighting was required to produce attractive footage.

Still, Ferguson says, astronauts were interested in getting a chance to use the camera from the very start. “They would come up to me and say, ‘Is there any chance of getting IMAX on my flight?” Ferguson says. “That really shows the power that The Dream Is Alive had in conveying the stories that the astronauts wanted to tell.”

Both of the cameras first flew aboard Space Shuttle Discovery. The in-cabin camera will go on display in the museum’s “Moving Beyond Earth” gallery this summer. The payload-bay IMAX camera may go on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in the future, alongside the Space Shuttle Discovery, which will be welcomed into the collection on April 19.

As part of the Google Art Project, you can now virtually wander the halls of the American Art Museum and see remarkably detailed reproductions of hundreds of works

Have you ever wanted to wander the halls of the Portrait Gallery or Smithsonian American Art Museum—or see some of their works, such as Andrew Wyeth’s ‘Dodges Ridge,’ in exquisite detail—but can’t make it to DC at the drop of a hat? Now, thanks to the museums’ collaboration with the Google Art Project, you’ll have the opportunity to virtually experience all they have to offer from the comfort of your own home.

On Tuesday, as part of a major expansion of the project, the museums officially became participants, joining 150 other museums and institutions from around the world. As part of the collaboration, Google has created ultra high-resolution scans of 149 of the Art Museum’s pieces and 192 of the Portrait Gallery’s are now freely available for anyone to see online. For some museums, Google has selected a signature image to present at a size over 1 billion pixels (1 gigapixel), allowing viewers to examine the paintings down to remarkably minute details. By comparison, a typical digital camera produces photographs around 10 megapixels in size, or 1000 times smaller than a gigapixel.

Additionally, Google has used its Street View technology to provide remote viewers the chance to virtually tour the halls and galleries of the museums. The company’s special panoramic camera was brought in this past December to capture the interiors, and users can navigate it much as they might tour the streets of the city outside using Street View.

A panoramic camera is used to capture the museum's Kogod Courtyard. Photo courtesy of the American Art Museum

The project was started in February 2011 by Google, and now encompasses more than 32,000 works in total, including paintings, sculptures and drawings. The Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York also became an official participant today, with more than 1500 pieces represented online. The Smithsonian Institution’s involvement started last year, when more than 200 works from the Freer Gallery were captured and made available as part of the first phase of the project. At the time, Julian Raby, the Freer and Sackler Gallery’s director, commended the level of detail made available in the online reproductions and felt the project would only increase interest in the museum’s offerings.

“The gigapixel allows you to see elements that you would really never ever see, certainly in traditional means of reproduction. You might see the crackle in the oil of a painting, you can sense the brushstroke in the artist’s hand and energy, you can see narrative details you would never see otherwise,” he said. “The traditional thing has been to say that any form of surrogate photograph, video, film will mean that people won’t come to the museums; actually, the experience is quite the opposite. In this particular case, I think it will create a sense of fascination that will engage completely new audiences.”

Check out the project to tour museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery in London in addition to the three four Smithsonian museums that have joined on. You can wander the halls, select your favorite pieces, and build your own virtual gallery that brings together works from around the world. Google encourages art students and teachers to use the content as educational material, and plans to continue expanding the project in future years to make as much art as possible available to anyone, anywhere—so long as they have access to a computer.

An artist's conception of a runaway hypervelocity planet. Image courtesy of David Aguilar, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

In 2005, Warren Brown of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory noticed something rather unusual in the sky: a star traveling out of the Milky Way galaxy at roughly 1.5 million miles per hour. The strange discovery could only be explained by an even stranger prediction, made nearly two decades earlier by an astronomer named J.G. Hills.

“He predicted that if you have two stars orbiting each other—a so-called binary system—and they get too close to the central black hole in the Milky Way, they will get ripped apart,” says SAO astrophysicist Avi Loeb. “One of the stars will go into a tighter orbit around the black hole, and the second one will be flung out of the galaxy.”

Since Brown’s 2005 discovery, at least 21 hypervelocity stars (as they’ve come to be called) have been observed speeding out of our galaxy. But only recently did anyone look to see if there might be hypervelocity planets, as well. “My collaborator Idan Ginsburg and I did some work on hypervelocity stars, and at some point, I was talking with him about perhaps looking into planets,” Loeb says. “One day, at lunch, it clicked: we could actually write a paper on them, because there is a method of finding them.”

Loeb had realized that a planet orbiting one of these hypervelocity stars could be observed by what’s called the transit method: when a distant planet crosses between its star and our telescope, the light of the star dims slightly, indicating the presence of the planet. First, though, he and Ginsburg had to determine whether these planets could theoretically exist in the first place. Their calculations, published last week in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, went beyond even what he had suspected.

Hypervelocity planets can indeed exist—and according to the research team’s simulations, they may approach speeds as high as 30 million miles per hour, making them some of the fastest-moving objects in the known universe.

“We asked what would happen if there were planets around hypervelocity stars,” Loeb says. “So we started with a simulation of a binary system, and then sprinkled planets around each of the stars.” Their calculations showed that, if the binary star system was ripped apart by gravitational forces near the galaxy’s central black hole, a small percentage of the planets would stay bound to one of the stars, either following them on their journey out of the galaxy, or diving more closely into the depths of the black hole. The majority of planets, however, would be flung away from their parent stars, traveling even faster to the edges of the Milky Way.

“Their speed can reach up to ten thousands kilometers per second—a few percent of the speed of light,” says Loeb. “If you imagine a civilization living on such a planet, they would have a tremendous journey.” The voyage from the center of the galaxy to the edge of the observable universe, he says, would take 10 billion years.

The potential existence of hypervelocity planets is far more than a mere curiosity, since it would provide us information about conditions near the center of the galaxy, and if planets can even form there. “It’s a very unusual environment, because the density of stars there is more than a million times than the density near the sun,” Loeb says. “There is a very high temperature, and every now and then the black hole at the center gets fed with gas, so it shines very brightly, which could in principle disrupt a system that tries to make planets.” His team’s calculations showed that, if planets can indeed form in this area, they should be observable when bound to hypervelocity stars.

None of these planets has been spotted, but Loeb hopes that some will be found in coming years. Just as astronomers have recently discovered hundreds of extrasolar planets using the transit method as part of NASA’s Kepler Mission, they can scrutinize hypervelocity stars in much the same way to spot these runaway planets. And if things progress along the same time frame as J.G. Hills’ 1988 prediction of hypervelocity stars, Loeb can expect to have his predictions confirmed within his lifetime—sometime around the year 2029.

A new exhibition will examine the ecological and cultural ramifications of cell phones. Photo courtesy of Flickr user Sascha Pohflepp

As you sit down to read this blog post, there’s likely a cell phone in your pocket, on your desk or in your bag. Within the past hour—if not the past few minutes—you’ve probably used it to call someone, send a text or check email. This device probably also functions as your alarm clock, your calendar and even your camera. Suffice to say, cell phones are an irreplaceable part of our modern lives.

But how often do we stop to consider what’s inside them?

This question is at the heart of a new exhibition and research project in the early stage of development by Joshua Bell, an anthropologist and curator of globalization at the Natural History Museum, along with Joel Kuipers, an anthropologist at George Washington University. “The working title of the exhibition, which I hope will stick, is ‘A Natural History of the Mobile Phone,’” Bell says. “We want to get people to realize that this is not just a manmade object, but something that connects different people and different places around the world.”

Bell and Kuipers plan to explore the intersection of mobile phones and globalization via a pair of different approaches: the ecological impacts of phone production, and the cultural variability with which phones are used around the world.

Mobile phones are constructed using hundreds of different chemicals and elements, and each of these relies on a complex commodity chain with impacts around the world. Bell points out that the plastic in his phone originated from a petroleum product which was likely shipped to China for manufacturing, while the lithium battery includes ions mined in the salt flats of Bolivia and the capacitors include the element tantalum, which is produced in Congo and has been linked to local conflicts.

Alexis Demetriades 2012

“If you think about anything you consume, all of its components come from somewhere else,” says Bell. “Your phone is not just connecting you to your parents or children that you talk to on it, but also to Chinese workers in an electronics factory, who are maybe being paid substandard wages, and electronic waste dumps, like in Ghana.” These connections have human and ecological consequences, and since the average American now buys a new phone every two years, the impacts can be steep.

The exhibition, Bell says, will also look at the cultural dimensions of cell phone use in different countries and in different communities. Bell and his research assistants plan to conduct research and interviews on cell phone use among four groups in the DC area: El Salvadoran communities in Mt. Pleasant (a neighborhood in Northwest Washington), Vietnamese communities in Falls Church, Virginia, an African immigrant group in Maryland and George Washington University students.

“Phones allow us to engage in amazing cultural innovation,” he says. “Everything from simply being able to talk to each other and video chat to new innovations in texting language.” The research team plans to track the diversity of these sorts of innovations across the different groups.

The project is still in its initial phases, so it will be some time before we see an exhibition on the Mall, but Bell already has in mind the effect he hopes the show will have on visitors. ”I would love for people to walk away from the exhibit realizing what is in a mobile phone, what it helps us to do, and the cultural variability of its use,” he says. “Cell phones are not the only objects that create global interconnections, but they are some of the most visible.”

Political Ecologies of the Cell Phone is an interdisciplinary project and a collaboration between GWU and the Smithsonian that explores the connections between the intimate and global connections made through cell-phones. Field research in the DC metro area is just beginning and workshops are planned for the Fall.