Now, I had no idea what the Jefferson Bible was. I assumed it was just a Bible owned by Thomas Jefferson. But no, Thomas Jefferson was more radical than that. He took passages from the first four books of the New Testament and pasted them together in an assemblage he called “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.” So he skipped the bits he considered later additions, like the miracles, and stuck to Jesus’s life and teachings.

Look closely – this is literal cutting and pasting. He actually cut up books in four languages to make it. Each column is a different language. From left to right, that’s Greek, Latin, French, and English.

The two books in the back of this next picture are the two English-language Bibles he cut his passages out of.

Jefferson didn’t intend this for publication, but the Government Printing Office published a facsimile in 1904; that’s one in front. Until the 1950s, when copies ran out, newly elected senators were given a copy like this one.

The museum explains this book as part of Jefferson’s general Enlightenment-era revolutionariness. This is the guy who drafted the Declaration of Independence, after all, and why stop with the monarchy? He was a fan of Jesus, but he questioned the way he’d been portrayed.The book is on display now because the museum finished a big conservation project on it last year. (This was a book for private study, not a book to last through the ages; the 18th-century glue and the many kinds of paper and ink made it a special challenge.)

You can read the book for yourself on the American History website.

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Here’s a set of NASA pictures of Ham and a brief history of animals in space.

There’s a big emphasis on things you can try out yourself, like a nifty display case that shows the different ways that seeds or other bits of biological material can disperse to islands. (It used ping pong balls and levers and stuff. Really pretty fun.) Even before you go inside, in the parking lot, you get some real hands-on experience of a simple machine, by lifting this real live truck:

Obviously, as a reasonably-informed adult, and one who successfully completed the unit on simple machines in third grade, I know that you get more out of a lever the farther you are from the fulcrum, but boy, it takes on new meaning when you use it to lift a truck. (Note the actual space between the tires and the pavement.)

The museum has a lovely trio of space ships:

From left to right, a whole swath of space history: Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo capsules. That Mercury capsule is the very one that Ham the chimpanzee rode in on January 31, 1961. The Apollo capsule flew in 1975, which was after the moon landings were done; its main claim to fame is that it docked with the Russian Soyuz spacecraft. All three are on loan from the National Air and Space Museum. I wonder how many of these things the Smithsonian owns, and where they all live.

The Science Center has a huuuge exhibit on ecosystems (which is kind of tucked away and easy to miss – a shame, because it’s like 75% of the museum). I particularly enjoyed a room about polar research. It’s kept extra-chilly and there’s a wall of ice where you can feel how well different insulating materials work:

They have a mitt made of fur, one stuffed with down, and so on, so you can see which one feels warmest. I can’t remember anymore, but I had fun poking the wall of ice. In the neighboring desert room I was amused to see a display on Katy Hinman, a former bat researcher who I was distantly acquainted with in college.

One of the most striking things in the museum was in the L.A. section of the Ecosystems exhibit. An artist took glass plates, put stencils on them, and left them outside on roofs in Los Angeles for one month. Here’s what happened.

And that, my friends, is just how much particulate pollution falls out of the air in Los Angeles. Makes you never want to breathe there again, doesn’t it?

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When I was a kid, the elephant stood on a round platform in the middle of the rotunda, but now it has this more natural-looking home. I just spent a few minutes trying to figure out when that renovation happened (vague guess: 15 years ago?) and was unsuccessful, but I did learn a bit more about the history of the museum. The museum opened a little over 100 years ago, and it had a lot of art then, mostly in what is now the Ocean Hall. Odd, huh, for a natural history museum? The art is over at the American Art Museum now, but here’s a nice post about how art inspired taxidermy.

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The museum started in 1976, when a bunch of Japanese bonsai growers donated trees to the U.S. as part of the Bicentennial celebrations. This was one of the original gifts, and it’s the oldest tree in the collection:

This Japanese white pine has been “in training,” the label says, since 1625. 1625! It was passed down through generations of the Yamaki family, who had a bonsai nursery in Hiroshima. Their nursery was less than two miles from where the atomic bomb went off, but the Yamaki family and their trees avoided major injury. Here’s a nice article about the tree from the National Bonsai Federation.

Normally I think that tree is displayed with a less distracting background, but in winter they collect all the bonsai and penjing (the Chinese version of bonsai) in one pavilion and put a temporary roof on it. Since everything outdoors was covered with a hard, thin crust of ice yesterday, this decision seems to make a lot of sense. These trees are from temperate environments, so they need shorter days and cooler temperatures for part of the year, but that doesn’t mean they need East Coast-style ice storms. “Greetings, venerable pine! We hope you don’t mind if we hang 16 pounds of ice on your perfectly shaped branches!”

Those branches don’t perfectly shape themselves. Here’s a European Hornbeam having its twigs molded:

This plant is a bit younger–an upstart, really, compared to the Yamaki pine. It’s only been in training since 1972. The bonsai collection has been supplemented over the years by donations from bonsai enthusiasts, including a gorgeous Japanese white pine given by King Hassan the 2nd of Morocco. I don’t know if he was a bonsai grower, but he apparently owned at least one.

It’s cool to see all these plants in winter. It also made me want to go back to see them when they bloom and leaf out in the spring. Just think of the years, decades, and centuries of loving care that go into making and maintaining these perfect indoor representations of outdoor life.

Bonsai appeal to my sense of cuteness. You expect to see little fairies dancing on the moss under the trees. We’ll have to settle for this guy, though.

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The story is about a bunch of European veterinarians who wanted to figure out the best suture pattern for closing up a turkey. (Skin staples won. Ew.)

My story also ran on Wired Science.

If you’re missing my blogging these days, that’s because you’re reading the wrong blog. Between now and mid-December, I’m doing a ton of writing over on the Washington Revels Blog.

As we get ready for the show, I’m blogging on the Revels website. That blog is mostly by me, but the music director has written a few posts and the artistic director may eventually write something, too. Follow along as we get ready for the big show!

There are lots of species of poison dart frogs and they come in lots of colors and patterns, even within the same species. Their colors are advertisements to predators: don’t eat me! you’ll be sorry!

For ScienceNOW last week, I wrote about an experiment that figured out a little bit of how poison dart frogs stay so diverse.

It seems like poison dart frogs shouldn’t be so diverse, because if you’re the frogs, it seems like it would make more sense to just give the predators one warning to learn. But that’s not how it works. Read all about it.

photo: Mathieu Chouteau