Tabla de contenidos para November 2021 en Smithsonian Magazine

IN FEBRUARY 2010, a Smithsonian off-site collections storage facility collapsed from the heavy weight of snow during one of the most severe winter storms in Washington, D.C. history. In 2012, Superstorm Sandy caused severe flooding at the Smithsonian’s George Gustav Heye Center in Lower Manhattan in New York City. This past summer and fall delivered another wave of environmental catastrophes across the nation: destructive hurricanes and floods, punishing droughts, devastating wildfires and more. For the Smithsonian and other cultural institutions, we are confronting not only threats to our collections and infrastructure, but threats to the values we hold most dear: preserving the heritage, culture, health and livelihood of the communities we serve. The climate crisis touches on nearly every aspect of human lives—where we live, how we work, what we…

THE LONG VIEW MOJAVE DESERT LAND TRUST SEED BANK Since 2016, this organization has collected seeds and spores from more than 500 Mojave Desert species to provide an insurance policy against the plants’ extinction. Specimens are harvested, cleaned, documented and stored in refrigerators. The group has already deployed seeds from the depository in restoration projects, including in places where wildfires have destroyed wide swaths of vegetation. DNA DELIVERANCE THE JOSHUA TREE GENOME PROJECT As climate change threatens to eliminate the Joshua tree, these scientists are working to sequence the plant’s genome. With help from citizen scientists and local conservation organizations, the project has also planted thousands of Joshua trees at four different sites that represent the climatic range spanning the Mojave. By monitoring these plants, scientists hope to pinpoint the…

MUSTARD Using seeds from the Brassica juncea plant as seasoning dates at least to 3,000 B.C. in Sumeria and India; the Sumerians were likely the first to grind them into a paste. King Tut was buried with a passel of the seeds, to spice up the afterlife. The Romans mixed the ground seeds with wine, creating a tart sauce we might recognize today. The sauce was later called mustum ardens—Latin for “burning wine”—and shortened to “mustard.” SOY SAUCE One of soy sauce’s main forerunners was a flavorful Chinese paste known as jiang, which emerged before 256 B.C. and was made with fermented meat, fish or grain. Sometime around A.D. 960-1279, jiangyou appeared—a more watery condiment, made by boiling and fermenting soybeans in brine. By the 17th century, Japanese soy sauce—shoyu,…

Q: How do snails get their shells? — Peter Ramirez | Gladstone, Oregon ALL MOLLUSKS build their own shells, whether they live in water or on land. Creatures like snails, clams, oysters and mussels use an organ called a mantle to secrete layers of calcium carbonate, which crystallize and harden. Mollusks have a physical bias toward the right, just as most humans are right-handed, and this makes their shells spiral clockwise. (Very rare mutations can produce “left-handed” mollusks, whose shells spiral counterclockwise.) These coiled shells are compact and have a low center of gravity, making them efficient to carry as they protect their soft-bodied inhabitants from predators (and in the case of ocean mollusks, from tides and waves). Mollusks stay in the same shells for their entire lives and never…

TWITTER: @SmithsonianMag INSTAGRAM: @smithsonianmagazine FACEBOOK: smithsonianmagazine “I find it very encouraging that a serious scientist can still keep an open mind.” For Sake’s Sake I read “Sake in the USA” (October 2021) with pride to be an American. An entrepreneur named Atsuo Sakurai was discouraged in his home country because of unnecessary and unproductive government regulations. He legally immigrated to the U.S. and worked hard to achieve his dream. The Holbrook, Arizona, City Council supported him, and even though the residents of his new home don’t look like him, and may not partake of his product, they are happy for his success. Even the governor of Arizona gave congratulations. This is the America I know. — Paul Johnson | Orlando, Florida Aliens and Astronomy Avi Loeb truly is a wonder—a…

FROM THE BOOK OF GENESIS to traditional African religions, human stories about the beginning of the universe are often remarkably similar, says Yannis Davy Guibinga, whose new series of photographs, “Tales of the First Sunrise,” imagines what that long ago dawn might have looked like to those who witnessed it. “There’s always an Adam type, and an Eve, two or three people who do something that triggers the rest of creation,” says Guibinga, who grew up in the central African nation of Gabon and is fascinated by indigenous spiritual practices. Now based in Montreal, the 26-year-old has been unable to return to Gabon because of the Covid-19 pandemic, but his art—with its vivid colors and aesthetic inspired by African woodcarving—helps him stay in touch with his homeland. “With photography, I…

SINCE 2015, Queen Elizabeth II has released more than 100,000 pages of documents in the Royal Archives relating to King George III. They reveal a startlingly new picture of the last king of America—one about as far removed as possible from the description of George in the Declaration of Independence: “A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” We can now see, for example, George’s fervent denunciation of slavery in an essay he wrote as Prince of Wales in the late 1750s, after reading Charles de Montesquieu’s classic enlightenment text, The Spirit of the Laws (1748). Indeed, George’s comments go even further than Montesquieu’s own opposition to the practice. “The pretexts used by…

AS THE LEGEND GOES, it was 19th-century Mormon settlers who gave the Joshua tree its name, inspired by the plant’s bent and clubbed branches, which recall the biblical Joshua raising his arms in prayer. The etymology is apocryphal, but given the threats posed by climate change, these eccentric plants, and the California park named after them, might well need divine intervention—as well as new legal protections and conservation measures. Ringed by mountains and covering parts of the Mojave and Colorado deserts, Joshua Tree National Park’s rugged landscape features granite boulders, miles of cactus-filled flats, animals like the darkling beetle that can go a lifetime without a sip of water and the park’s namesake plant in all its twisted glory. Now completely arid, the land cradling the park once contained grasslands…

The Benjamin L. Hooks Central Library, a building of pale concrete and greenish glass, rises four stories in midtown Memphis. Walking through its automatic doors on a weekday afternoon, I hear unexpected sounds, muffled but unmistakable, almost shocking in a library context: the deep, quaking bass beats of Memphis hip-hop, plus a faint whine of power tools cutting through metal. It’s difficult to summarize the myriad changes taking place in American public libraries, but one thing is certain. Libraries are no longer hushed repositories of books. Here at the Central branch in Memphis, ukulele flash mobs materialize and seniors dance the fox trot in upstairs rooms. The library hosts U.S. naturalization ceremonies, job fairs, financial literacy seminars, jazz concerts, cooking classes, film screenings and many other events—more than 7,000 at…

IN JULY 2016, an elderly American named Stephen Rozenfeld ascended the bimah, or prayer platform, of an ornate synagogue in Lisbon. Before him in the pews sat some 40 women and men from all over the world who had one thing in common: They or their forebears had been saved by Aristides de Sousa Mendes. Now they had returned, along with Olivia Mattis, president of the Sousa Mendes Foundation, and two of Sousa Mendes’ grandsons, to retrace the passage from Bordeaux to Lisbon and to pay homage to the man who had rescued them. When Germany invaded Poland, in September 1939, Rozenfeld’s father was away on business, in Belgium. Four months later, Rozenfeld and his mother fled their home in Lodz to try to meet him. They traveled to Germany…