Tabla de contenidos para June 2025 en Smithsonian Magazine

THE WORLD’S OLDEST known prosthesis is a superbly sculpted 3,000-year-old wooden toe. Discovered in the late 1990s in the tomb of Tabaketenmut, an Egyptian priest’s daughter buried in a site dubbed “The Valley of the Nobles,” the ancient big toe has three parts laced together to flex with the foot while walking. It blends beauty and function in a way that, for most of human history, was available only to individuals of high social status like Tabaketenmut. In fact, the precious materials and pain-staking craftsmanship of these artifacts may partly explain their survival over the centuries. Some of the biggest mechanical breakthroughs came in the 16th century, many building off one another in unexpected ways: European locksmiths, clockmakers and even gunsmiths used their new techniques to create luxe artificial limbs. The…

On a cold night along the coast of Washington State, two women on boogie boards paddle furiously across surging waters. Clad in survival suits and headlamps, Jennifer Sevigny and Amanda Summers are heading back from a harbor seal gathering in Port Susan Bay with dry bags full of seal scat. The pair are biologists, employed by the Stillaguamish Tribe of Indians, and they’re mining the smelly, oily stuff for solutions to a wrenching conflict between some of the region’s most cherished marine creatures. THE FLOTILLAS OF SEALS AND SEA LIONS plying Puget Sound today are a conservation success story. Because of their competition with fishermen, these animals were the target of state-sponsored bounty hunter programs in Alaska, Washington and Oregon. By 1960, the region’s pinniped numbers had been dramatically reduced. With…

TO UNLOCK THE secrets of the atmosphere, first, travel away from cities, forests, cars and people, to somewhere the air blows clean. Say, the top of a Hawaiian volcano. Bring two round glass flasks, volleyball-sized but with the air vacuumed out, wrapped in surgical tape for safety. Point the glass nozzle jutting from each toward that fresh air. Now hold your breath and walk at least ten feet into the wind. Open the valve, let the air rush in and, well after the hissing has stopped, close it back up. “Then you can breathe once you’ve done all that,” says Tim Lueker, a scientist with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “Now you have an air sample, and I’m still amazed that it works.” Charles David Keeling established this method in…

Julie Meachen, an expert in Ice Age megafauna, skirts a dirt ledge called “the Saddle” deep inside a remarkable hollow in northern Wyoming known as Natural Trap Cave. She stops to observe Megan Hormell, a graduate student at Des Moines University and one of several volunteers who have rappelled into the cave on a nylon line dangling from the entrance 80 feet overhead. Sunlight streams through a jagged skylight to illuminate a bell-shaped chamber 140 feet in diameter. I sit to one side of the Saddle as remains of Ice Age mammals slowly emerge into the light. Like the scientists scattered over the subterranean hillside, I wear warm clothing, boots and a caving helmet. My cumbersome climbing gear rests, along with everyone else’s, on a tarp. Aboveground, on the western flank…

The flight from Paris to the island of Réunion, a French overseas department in the Indian Ocean, takes 11 hours, skirting the smoldering crater of the Piton de la Fournaise volcano before landing just shy of the water. But after disembarking at Roland Garros Airport—the pioneering French aviator was from Réunion—you find yourself in a tropical paradise with all the trappings of its motherland, with French wine and cheeses in its supermarkets and a boulangerie around every corner. Four hundred miles east of Madagascar, Réunion is a sort of Francophone Hawaii. It’s a magnet for adrenaline junkies, known for its 600 miles of marked hiking trails, its zip-line and white-water rafting adventures, its lava tube expeditions and perfectly cresting surfing waves, as well as the dubious distinction, from a few…

Across 1 Seize 5 Queen of the ___, nickname for Bessie Coleman 8 ___ Wilson, potter believed to have founded the first Black-owned business in Texas 10 Member of an ancient Mesoamerican civilization 12 Word that “Opry” riffed on when naming the Grand Ole Opry 13 Foolish person, in quaint slang 14 Big coffee holder  15 One dependent on the Ecuadorean rainforest habitat for its survival 17 Past the deadline  19 What an “O” might symbolize 20 Creatures vying for salmon along Puget Sound 24 Mafia boss  25 “___ do this thing!”  27 French island that was once the so-called vanilla capital of the world 31 Mauna ___, where the Keeling flask was first opened 32 Trade shows 33 Home of the 2026 Winter Olympics  35 Simple tune 36 Exciting discoveries…

IT FELT LIKE A HOMECOMING. Thousands of onlookers cheered wildly as daredevil pilot Bessie Coleman arced her Curtiss Jenny biplane into a spiral above a Houston field. The weather was scorching, but Coleman kept her cool as she cruised through loop-de-loops and gunned across the blue skies at 75 miles per hour. The aviator was already a colossal figure to many in the audience. In recent years, her globe-trotting escapades had taken her to Los Angeles, Chicago, Paris, Amsterdam and beyond. The Chicago Defender had declared her the “Queen of the Air.” Now, back home in Texas on June 19, 1925, she was finally achieving her true aerial ambitions, as a main attraction in the first-ever all-Black air show in the state—and doing it on Juneteenth, no less. “I am…

WHEN ITS FIRST lunch counter opened in New Albany, Indiana, around 1923, the F.W. Woolworth Company was already known for innovation. Founded by Frank Winfield Woolworth in New York in 1879, the retail chain sold staple items from pencils to base-balls at low prices, often just a nickel or a dime, a revolutionary concept that helped Woolworth’s expand to 5,500 five-and-dime stores nationwide at its peak. Then, the company took the concept a step further by offering shoppers an affordable meal. A 1939 menu featured cubed minute steak, pan gravy and buttered beets with a roll and French fries for 25 cents—about $5.68 today. Like many public spaces in the mid-1900s, some lunch counters were subject to Jim Crow laws, and thereby inadvertent political crucibles. In 1960 four Black college…

Map, graphics and illustrations by 5W Infographics “We are finding, through ancient DNA, that many of the species are hybrids between North American and Eurasian populations.” SOURCES: J.A. MEACHEN, ET AL., A HISTORY OF PALEONTOLOGICAL EXCAVATIONS AT THE ENIGMATIC PLEISTOCENE FOSSIL SITE NATURAL TRAP CAVE, WYOMING, JOURNAL OF PALEONTOLOGICAL TECHNIQUES; QUATERNARY INTERNATIONAL VOLUMES 647–648, FEBRUARY 20, 2023; SCIENCEDIRECT.COM; FREEPICK.COM (3); DEPOSITPHOTOS.COM; FANDOM.COM; HORSETV.ES; PINTEREST (2); OHIOHISTORY.ORG…

COILED IN THE CANOPY of the lowland rainforests of northwestern Ecuador and southwestern Colombia, the elusive and endangered Blomberg’s tree boa can remain motionless for hours, like a trap waiting to be sprung. The snake uses large eyes in daylight and heat-sensing divots along its lips in darkness to detect and ambush unlucky birds, bats and rodents that come too close, stopping their hearts with a muscular embrace. The constrictor, named for Rolf Blomberg, the Swedish naturalist who first described the species, can reach six feet in length and comes in an array of earthy browns, oranges and reds, with patterned spots along its sides. Despite these sometimes vibrant colors, the snake is nearly impossible to spot in daylight. “I’ve seen this species alive in the wild twice during my…