Word: smithsonian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Arriving at work one day, a Wasp lawyer for Washington's Smithsonian Institution finds a carton on her desk. She is stunned. Inside the box are some clumps of dirt and a note proposing that the contents -- the remains of her grandparents, freshly dug up from a New England cemetery -- be put on display by the museum. The sender is a part-Navajo conservator at the institution, furious that such a fate has befallen the bones of his ancestors...
Last week the Smithsonian signed a landmark agreement with leaders of two national Indian organizations that both sides hope will help defuse the issue. The institution, which has 18,500 human remains and thousands of other burial artifacts, agreed to inventory its collection. Remains that can be clearly identified as belonging to an individual or a surviving tribe as well as all burial artifacts will be offered to the Native Americans for reburial. In return the Indians dropped their demand that the Smithsonian surrender all its remains, many of whose origins are unknown...
...burning of the Amazon could have dramatic effects on global weather patterns -- for example, heightening the warming trend that may result from the greenhouse effect. "The Amazon is a library for life sciences, the world's greatest pharmaceutical laboratory and a flywheel of climate," says Thomas Lovejoy of the Smithsonian Institution. "It's a matter of global destiny...
Perhaps indicative of modern Japanese attitudes is a question posed by a member of the Japanese contingent to a Smithsonian Institution symposium on the ethics of whaling. The representative asked how a whale differed from a mosquito, not to argue that both should receive protection but that both are expendable. "The Japanese don't seem to accept the concept of sustainable development," contends conservationist McManus, "((the idea)) that there can be a middle ground between total exploitation or total protection...
...space because there is no air or other medium to carry them. So when the waves reach the surface of the sun from below, they bounce back into the interior, where the greater heat bends them toward the surface again. The result, says astronomer Robert Noyes of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is a "sun ringing like a bell, but not one that is being struck by a clapper. Rather, it is vibrating somewhat like a bell suspended in a sandstorm, continuously struck by tiny grains of sand...