Smithsonian.com

I was remembering the robin’s egg blue TI-36 scientific calculator that I had before upgrading to the TI-82 graphing calculator. I envied those who had the newer TI-83, and the much coveted TI-83 plus, both of which played games. That’s when one of the inventors of the hand-held calculator, Jerry Merryman, took to the podium at a donation ceremony at the Smithsonian Castle yesterday, and guessed at my thoughts.

“Does anyone remember their first calculator?” Merryman asked his audience of curators, teachers and press.

Merryman, along with co-inventors James Van Tassel and Jack Kilby, invented the four-function, nearly three-pound personal computing device that replaced its typewriter-sized, 55-pound predecessor.

In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the 1967 original, Texas Instruments donated a TI-58 and 59, a TI-30, a TI-Navigator Classroom System and the new TI-Nspire handhelds and computer software to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

“Invention is a big part of American history,” says the museum’s director Brent Glass. “If you think about the history of technological education, it’s amazing what one little instrument has meant.”

(Courtesy of the National Museum of American History. Above, Jerry Merryman)

Artist Morris Louis (1912-1962) produced 600 paintings in just eight years before succumbing to lung cancer at age 49. His method–to use acrylic paints to stain a canvas that hadn’t been primed so that the color seeped into the material–was an innovation that inspired a generation of artists. Tomorrow, a retrospective that includes 28 of his major works goes on view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

In a gallery this morning, members of the press gathered before his 8 foot by 11 foot Point of Tranquility (1959-60) and the equally large Where (1960). Adjacent was Para III (1959), which was recently purchased by Atlanta’s High Museum of Art, where the show originated. On the opposite wall was the 8.5 foot by nearly 12 foot Number 99 (1959-1960). The four huge paintings popped with a wonderful, vibrant energy against the museum’s stark white walls.

“This room is an explosion of color,” says Smithsonian curator Valerie Fletcher, “when you put [these works] together they talk to each other.”

There’s certainly an expressive dialogue going on in that gallery, and the observer comes away a richer soul for having been witness to it.

(Courtesy of the Hirshhorn: Para III, 1959, Acrylic resin [Magna] on canvas, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Gift of Marcella Louis Brenner.)

This summer, news reports rang with concern that the mighty Humboldt squid was expanding its home turf off the coast of California. Known to congregate in Baja’s Sea of Cortez, at least for the last 30 years, jumbo squid, up to seven feet long and weighing as much as 100 pounds, have been found in waters as far north as central California and southeast Alaska since the 1997 and 2002 El Nino episodes. Scientists note that the apparent range expansion could have something to do with climate-linked temperature changes in ocean water, the decline of predatory tuna and billfish populations and, as squid expert William Gilly of Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station hypothesizes, the Humboldt’s ability to inhabit a low-oxygen environment that excludes both their fish predators and feeding competitors.

Almost as equally debated is the squid’s temperament. Smithsonian cephalopod expert Clyde Roper from the National Museum of Natural History describes his aggressive run in with a Humboldt he lured into a cage some time ago while on a filming expedition in the Sea of Cortez:

“I was really interested in how her jaws worked, and I had this wonderful head-on view and her arms were splayed out so I could see the jaws at the base of her arms, the big lips. I think at some point she began to take exception to my examinations, and she just plain attacked without warning.

She was able to do this frontwards; this is the way they capture their prey, because they swim by jet propulsion. They take water into their body cavity, then seal the opening and contract the mantle, or body, and shoot the water out the funnel. But that funnel is very flexible so they can point it out beneath their head and it shoots them backwards or they tip it over, point it towards their tail and it shoots them forward. And that’s what she did at that point. It was just an instantaneous event. First of all, I didn’t have any place to go. I was in the chamber, and she just nailed me right on top of the thigh.

We were in [the water] for several more hours. Finally, at 3 o’clock in the morning, we’d had it and decided to go up on the boat. I had on a bathing suit, diving skins and a wetsuit. We all were ready to hit the sack so I stripped off my wetsuit, dive suit and bathing suit. All of sudden, the photographer looks over and says, ‘Clyde, what’s the matter with you?’ And I looked down and sure enough the blood was still running down out of the gash. The bite was around 2 inches long, right at the top of my thigh.

I could not call it an unprovoked attack. I had her in a cage she was unaccustomed to and I was hanging on to her. I never considered the fact that she was going to attack though. I was just interested in how she worked. And, well, I found out how.”

(Courtesy of Clyde Roper, measuring the length of a giant squid specimen.)

Jacolby Satterwhite, a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, cannot move his right arm. So, he uses his left arm to assist his right in painting. The 21-year-old painting major’s ingenuity, hard work and creativity haven’t gone unrecognized. His oil on canvas, Remission & Resilience (above), just earned him a $20,000 grand prize in an exhibition entitled “Driven,” which opened Saturday at the Smithsonian Institution’s S. Dillon Ripley Center.

“I think it [Remission & Resilience] was about my complexity of having illnesses and cancer. It can show up anytime, so I just continued to work and be resilient through these odds,” says Satterwhite, who lost mobility in his arm after a surgical procedure to treat bone cancer in his shoulder. “I was trying to create this piece about constant motion and activity, and I think it’s about the idea of work and conquering obstructions.”

Satterwhite created Remission & Resilience over the course of about two and a half weeks in 2006. The Columbia, South Carolina, native began painting while in high school at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities. Satterwhite mostly works with oil, painting pastoral landscapes and narratives centered around one metaphor, though he is dabbling in animation and sculpture.

On the recognition, Satterwhite says, “It was very encouraging, and I hope to be an advocate for artists who feel like they have something holding them back or a disability. I just feel it’s very rewarding in a testimonial sense. I am grateful, and I cannot wait to pursue projects, take care of my grad school applications and tuition with it [prize money]. I feel like it’s a blessing.”

“Driven” is co-sponsored by VSA Arts, an international nonprofit created to promote and showcase artists with disabilities, and Volkswagen of America, Inc. On view through to December 31, the exhibition will include the works of 15 emerging artists between the ages of 16 and 25 with disabilities.

(Courtesy of Jacolby Satterwhite, Remission and Resilience, oil on canvas)

Smithsonian founder James Smithson got air play this morning on local radio station 94.7, the Globe. The Weasel suggested that our man Smithson should be made into a bobble head.

Sure Weez. We’ll get right on that.

It was Asher B. Durand (1796-1886), a founding member of the Hudson River School, who taught us to appreciate nature, and to hike and bike and canoe through all of its rugged splendor. Without him and his companions, Thomas Cole, Frederic Church and William Cullen Bryant, we might be still battling a fear of beastly creatures that roamed the dark and terrifying forests—Rodents of Unusual Size, oh my!

“Durand was the first to give us the idea of the landscape as an escape,” says Eleanor Jones Harvey, chief curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where 57 Durand works go on view on Thursday through January 6, 2008.

Before Durand, nature, dark and dreary, was mostly depicted as tamed, cultivated or captured—landscapes were gentle pastoral scenes of farm, village, steeple and pasture. (Durand, too, painted his share of these.)

But by the middle of the century, Durand literally upended that notion, turning the canvas vertical—the better to craft towering forests and majestic mountains. From the 1840s to the 1870s, Durand spent many months each year on sketching expeditions that ranged from New York to New England, usually with other artists or members of his family. Raw, splendid nature, the stuff of westward expansion, became a kind of a paradise, a place for introspection and communion. A sensibility, says Harvey, that carries forward today.

Hudson Trail Outfitters and REI owe this guy big.

(Courtesy of SAAM: Asher B. Durand, In the Woods, 1855, Oil on Canvas, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, gift in memory of Jonathan Sturges, by his children, 1895; Asher B. Durand, Study from Nature: Rocks and Trees in the Catkills, New York, ca. 1856, Oil on canvas, The New-York Historical Society Museum, Gift of Mrs. Lucy Maria Durand Woodman, 1907.20)

In December 1982, Benjamin Victor, founder of the coral reef research initiative Ocean Science Foundation, was diving in a reef just offshore of a Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute field station when he scooped up an adult goby. The fish looked slightly different from its Atlantic goby kin, but its features weren’t unique enough to declare it a new species.

Victor suspected that the differences ran deep in the goby’s genetic makeup, but the species identification system, based purely on physical identifiers such as markings, numbers of fins and shapes of bones, failed him. He would need a second specimen and DNA analysis. So the specimen sat, and sat–on Victor’s desk, actually–for close to 25 years.

In March 2006, Dave Jones of the National Marine Fisheries Service collected a larval specimen reminiscent of Victor’s goby in a trap off of Mexico’s Yucatan. From there, the new taxonomic technique of barcoding allowed Victor to match the DNA of the larva with that of the adult and declare the goby a new species, one that diverges from its Atlantic goby kin by a whopping 25 percent (keep in mind: humans and chimpanzees are only 1-2 percent different).

The fish’s claim to fame is that its identity has been nailed down by a DNA barcode. The barcode, taken from an agreed-upon location in the genome, acts like a consumer product’s barcode in that it seals the deal in terms of identification.

Named Coryphopterus kuna, the goby has become the first vertebrate species to have its DNA barcode included in its official species description. About 30,000 known species, from mushrooms to birds, have been barcoded, but in all cases, the species were found and scientifically described before the barcodes were created. The Barcode of Life Initiative, of which the Smithsonian Institution is a partner, is urging that the short DNA strands be collected and put in an open-access database.

“There was no way to make it easy and consistent to identify a fish. You usually had to be an expert and would have to have a good adult specimen to examine and then it was your opinion,” says Victor of taxonomy pre-barcoding. “Now anyone with access to barcoding technology can say for sure, the sequence matches species X, even if what you have is an egg, larva, or a scale or piece of skin.”

(Courtesy of STRI)

An intruder is among us. A hairy-clawed invertebrate is trying to invade the Chesapeake Bay and Smithsonian officials want help rounding up the villain.

The critter, which the U.S. Feds call “injurous wildlife,” is the Chinese Mitten Crab, or Eriocheir sinensis. It is a harmful invasive species that burrows into embankments and causes erosion and threatens levies. An established population can be so overwhelming in sheer numbers that the critters clog fishing equipment and the cooling systems of power plants. Since 1927, the crab has been spreading throughout Europe and reached California’s San Francisco Bay in 1992.

Smithsonian officials confirm ten captures of the crab, which measures about four inches across its back and varies in shades from light brown to olive green, in the Chesapeake Bay, the nation’s largest estuary. The crab likely made its way here from Asian ports in the ballast tank of an ocean-going vessel, says Gregory Ruiz, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), with headquarters on the Rhode River in Edgewater, Maryland.

Unlike Maryland’s native blue crab, young mitten crabs prefer fresh water, and so experts say the animals could be lurking in places up to 50 miles inland from Bay waters.

The crab is easily recognized by its so-called “mittens,” a fur-like coating on its oval-shaped claws. It looks nothing like a native blue crab, however young mitten crabs may be confused with the Harris mud crab, which burrows into the same areas. To make a positive ID of the culprit, check for the furry claws.

SERC officials warn, however, that if you catch a mitten crab, you should not throw it back alive. They want you to note the exact location of where the animal was found, take its picture if possible, then freeze the animal on ice, or preserve it in rubbing alcohol. The Mitten Crab Hotline is 443-482-2222.

(Courtesy of SERC)

“Lucy,” the renowned fossil skeleton of one of the world’s earliest known human ancestors, which was recovered in Hadar, Ethiopia, in 1974, recently began a six-year tour in the United States, organized by the Houston Museum of Natural Science. The fossil, however, will not go on view at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Paleoanthropologist Rick Potts, director of the museum’s Human Origins Program, explains why:

“From the outset, the plan to bring ‘Lucy’ to the U.S. ignored an existing international resolution signed by scientific representatives from 20 countries, including Ethiopia and the U.S. The resolution calls for museums–in fact, all scientific institutions–to support the care of early human fossils in their country of origin, and to make displays in other countries using excellent fossil replicas.

It’s especially distressing to museum professionals I’ve talked with in Africa that ‘Lucy’ has been removed from Ethiopia for six years, and that a U. S. museum has been involved in doing so. The decision to remove ‘Lucy’ from Ethiopia also goes against the professional views of Ethiopian scientists in the National Museum of Ethiopia, the institution mandated to safeguard such irreplaceable discoveries.

As a leading research institution in the study of human origins, we at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History believe it is best to support our fellow scientists and institutions that have such mandates and to listen to what our counterparts in other countries have to say.”

Above: A cast of the “Lucy” skeleton, housed in the Human Origins Laboratory, Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. The cast is a replica of the original fossilized bones, and is conserved in protective foam. The head end of the skeleton (at right) includes Lucy’s nearly complete lower jaw, and the foot end (left) includes thigh, shin, and foot bones. The fossil’s field number is AL-288, and it represents the 3.2-million-year-old species Australopithecus afarensis.

(Courtesy of Rick Potts)