Word: smithsonian
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...long time, Heye's was a collection in search of a larger home. Now it has one more spectacular than even that insatiable man could have hoped for. Next week the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian, for which Heye's collection serves as the nucleus, opens on a prominent corner of the National Mall in Washington, four-plus acres that adjoin both the heavily trafficked National Air and Space Museum and the iconic I.M. Pei--designed East Wing of the National Gallery of Art. A friend of Heye's speculated that his collection may have been...
...track comets; in Cambridge, Mass. Whipple correctly proposed that the core of a comet consists of ice, ammonia, methane and carbon dioxide, and that its tail is formed by particles that break off from the mass as it approaches the sun. Over seven decades at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Whipple also discovered that the source of meteors is not far-flung stars but Earth's solar system. Anticipating space flight, he invented in 1946 a thin outer skin of metal known as a meteor bumper, or Whipple shield, to protect spacecraft from high-speed particles. The device...
...held together by gravity. Whipple argued that the core of a comet consists of ice, ammonia, methane and carbon dioxide, and that its gossamer tail consists of particles that break off from the mass as it approaches the Sun. Over seven decades of work at Harvard University and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Whipple also discovered that meteors do not come from far-flung stars, but the Earth's solar system. He was an inventor as well. Anticipating space flight, he invented in 1946 a thin outer skin of metal known as a meteor bumper or Whipple shield, intended to protect...
...England 150 years ago when a Victorian walker left a bottle by Cranmere Pool, Devon, with his calling card in it and an invitation to those who found the bottle to add theirs. It caught on in the U.S. after a 1998 article about the British pursuit appeared in Smithsonian magazine. Since then, more than 9,000 letterboxes have been planted in state parks and nature preserves around the country. Each waterproof box contains a logbook and a rubber stamp. Visitors mark the book with their stamp and use the stamp in the box to document the discovery in their...
...Lene V. Hau, McKay professor of applied physics, supervised an experiment that slowed light to about 40 m.p.h. In 2001, a team led by Lukin and Ronald Walsworth of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and independently, a team led by Hau, stopped a light pulse by storing it in the form of excited atoms to be converted back into a light pulse...