Table of contents for March 2023 in Smithsonian Magazine

THE KNOTTY question of the origins of our alphabet has been partly straightened out by the discovery of a comb. In June 2016, an archaeological excavation of the ancient Canaanite city of Lachish led by Yosef Garfinkel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Michael Hasel of Southern Adventist University uncovered what was initially misidentified as a small bone. On closer inspection, Edward Maher, a zooarchaeologist, surmised the object was an ivory comb, though the teeth had broken off. Microscopic examination revealed the fossilized remains of lice, confirming Maher’s theory. Two experts verified that the comb, which is 1.44 by 0.99 inches, is made of ivory. So it must have been an import—there were no elephants then in Canaan. But the comb’s true significance wouldn’t become apparent until Hebrew University…

CRADLING HER 4-YEAR-OLD SON, Cowboy, Camille Cabello watches tumbleweeds blow across an emerald green field of newly sprouted alfalfa toward a small canal. Water spills over the canal’s side, glistening in the brilliant Arizona sun. Not far away, her husband, Cimarron, his head covered in a western hat, guards the stream with a pitchfork. As the tumbleweeds roll into the water, he fishes them out. “On a windy day like this we have to stay out here,” Camille says, a dust devil spiraling skyward in the distance behind her. “If we don’t get them out of there it will clog the canal and cause problems.” This desert tableau is at once modern and ancient. Modern because the arrow-straight canal, lined with concrete and designed with turnouts that divert water to…

Across 1 ___ Fridays (restaurant chain) 4 Possess 8 Like someone who’s just won the jackpot 10 Taking advantage of 12 Tons and tons 13 Innovator of the jungle gym 15 Jeans, chinos and khakis 17 When tripled, “Blah blah blah” 18 Many a rescue off Iceland’s southern coast 21 Pop star from the Bronx, to fans 24 Hospital scan, for short 25 What the “L” stands for in 22-Down 26 Item smuggled by Muriel Gardiner during WWII 29 ___ Canal, project once disparagingly called “Clinton’s Folly” 30 Popular gambling mecca across the sea from Hong Kong 34 What a ruined du Pont powder yard was transformed into 37 Crop studied closely by Barbara McClintock 38 Home of the Dolphins 39 Follow orders 40 Surprising omission from the Oscars 41…

WHEN SEBASTIAN “Ted” Hinton was a child, his father, a Princeton mathematician, built a cubic bamboo grid in the family’s backyard to teach Hinton and his siblings to visualize space in three dimensions as they moved through the structure. But the kids were more drawn to climbing and swinging on the bars. Reflecting on this experience years later, Hinton envisioned a variant on his father’s design—a cubic metal playground frame fashioned like “a kind of forest top through which a troop of children may play in a manner somewhat similar to that of a troop of monkeys.” On October 23, 1923, Hinton—a patent attorney—was awarded the first of a series of U.S. patents for his “jungle gym,” and the monkey bars were born. These days, hardly anyone is aware of…

Two small, round eyes glint like shiny black sequins in the flashlight beam sweeping under the truck bed. It’s a cold, rainy September night, and the dark figure huddled in the shallow space below is barely visible—but for its striking white chest. A young girl in a bright orange jacket crouches on the wet ground nearby, trying to coax the creature out. It’s well past the hour you’d expect kids their age to be in bed. But 9-year-old Sigrun Anna Valsdottir, peering under the truck bed, and 12-year-old Rakel Rut Runarsdottir, shining the light, don’t seem to notice the time or the cold. They’re on a mission to rescue a puffling. That’s the name for a baby Atlantic puffin. This one made a wrong turn and got stranded on its…

A BASALT COASTLINE crowded with large, lounging iguanas looks nothing short of Jurassic. When I first saw these striking creatures in the Galápagos, I was impressed most by their placidness. Unfazed by humans, they spend long, sunny days warming in the equatorial sun like scaly house cats, sometimes in heaps, between foraging missions at sea to feed on marine algae. Charles Darwin was famously unimpressed with this rare seafaring lizard. “It is a hideous-looking creature,” he wrote in The Voyage of the Beagle, “stupid, and sluggish in its movements.” Since those encounters, however, the iguanas have won over many scientists. “I enjoy them because they come across as very amiable and easygoing,” says Amy MacLeod, a conservation biologist at Leipzig University, who studies marine iguana populations. “They are quite ungainly…

ATERRIFIED BALD MAN stood in front of a Viennese apartment building on a cold evening. It was March 1938, and Nazi Germany had just annexed Austria. An unassuming woman opened the front door. “Mary,” the man whispered. It functioned almost as a password. His name was Manfred Ackermann. A socialist leader as well as a Jew, Ackermann was in danger. He hoped he would be safe with Mary, 36, who had a reputation in the Austrian Resistance for helping its members evade Nazis. Inside her apartment, Ackermann and Mary spoke in whispers. Ackermann needed a fake passport and a hiding place until he could escape Austria. Mary assured him she could take care of both. He handed her his photograph, and she took him outside and led him to a…

“SCIENCE IS ABOUT DISCOVERY—AND HISTORY OFTEN PROVIDES THE KEY.” MOST PEOPLE WOULDN’T look at an ear of corn and imagine it could contain the secrets of life. But Barbara McClintock knew better. McClintock dedicated her life to studying corn, and by doing so shaped our fundamental understanding of the possibility of changes in the human genome. McClintock earned the Nobel Prize in 1983, the first (and, so far, only) woman to win an unshared prize in Physiology or Medicine. Her discovery of transposable elements, or “jumping genes,” revealed that a genome is not static but can be altered and rearranged. This insight laid the groundwork for today’s genetics—including progress with the genome editing possibilities of CRISPR. McClintock was born in Connecticut in 1902, and her family expected she would dedicate…

WHEN ROMAY JOHNSON DAVIS was in her 20s, she decided to do something millions of young men across the country were doing: enlist in World War II. All five of her brothers had already joined up. “They were being pulled away one by one, and I had no playmates,” Davis recalls. Most young women were staying in the United States and helping out on the home front. Even the iconic Rosie the Riveter was urging women to work in factories, not ship out overseas. But Davis’ parents supported their only daughter’s decision. “My father was skeptical sometimes about my going off. But Mama said, ‘Child, see the world while you can.’” “WE MUST NOT FAIL AMERICA, AND AS AMERICANS, WE MUST NOT LET AMERICA FAIL US.” That’s how Davis found…