Tag Archives: art

The Story of Charles Willson Peale’s Massive Mastodon

In the 18th century, French naturalist George-Louis Leclerc, Comte du Buffon (1706-1778), published a multivolume [...]

The Creepy, Crawling History of Insect Art

One day when Barrett Klein was a young boy, he found a dead butterfly in [...]

Why Science Needs Art

Karen Osborn, invertebrate zoologist and curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, uses [...]

Using Soil to Make Art

In September, as wildfire raged in Medicine Bow National Forest, Karen Vaughan watched smoke billow [...]

The Sad Truths Behind These Unsettling Works of Art

Talk about unsettled. Just as a new exhibition titled “Unsettled Nature” that combined art and [...]

A Monumental Portrait of NASA Astronaut Stephanie Wilson Crops Up in Atlanta

While most artists measure their artworks in inches, Stan Herd measures his in acres. For [...]

Fantastical Art Joins Hundreds of Blooming Orchids to Shed Light on Conservation Efforts

A roomful of hundreds of blooming orchids is always a spectacular sight. But Smithsonian Gardens [...]

How a Victorian Dinosaur Park Became a Time Capsule of Early Paleontology

When the Crystal Palace and Park opened in south London in 1854, it was an [...]

These Entrancing Maps Capture Where the World’s Rivers Go

A few years ago, Hungarian cartographer Robert Szucs poked around the internet for a global [...]

Ten Wild Facts About Octopuses: They Have Three Hearts, Big Brains and Blue Blood

Octopuses, those whip-smart, bizarre cephalopods, embody everything creepy and mysterious about the sea. Their soft, [...]

See Seven Stunning Gold Paintings Inspired by the Brain

Inside the artist Greg Dunn’s Philadelphia studio, the acrid smells of solvent and dye hang [...]

10 Incredible Uses for Eggs

Reader, consider the egg. It can be poached, scrambled, scotched, roasted, hard-boiled, devilled, pickled, and [...]