Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
As part of the Smithsonian’s third annual (and first virtual) Women Filmmakers Festival, artist, filmmaker, and writer Mariam Ghani will join Saisha Grayson, time-based media curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Sabrina Sholts, curator of biological anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, for a conversation about the history of pandemics. The conversation will include clips of her film
DIS-EASE, which delves into themes of illness and invasion as well as excerpts from her in-progress short
The Fire Next Time, which traces the connection between epidemics and social upheaval from the 1800s to the present. Through the end of the week, Ghani’s feature-length documentary
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“We have spent the first 15 years fighting to tell our story and promote our brand,” says Hong Kong and Taipei, Taiwan–based high jewelry designer Cindy Chao, a wildly coveted name in contemporary high jewelry design that’s well-known to those who float in international, high-net-worth circles.
In 2020, she celebrated the 15-year anniversary of her brand, Cindy Chao The Art Jewel, and will be marking the milestone over the span of several months this year with a staggered debut of several one-of-a-kind designs. Only the first two have been released thus far (and are showcased here); all will encapsulate Chao’s singular East-meets-West aesthetic and what has become her signature: gems of the highest order, so special, in fact, that they beckon collectors from all over the world to board their private jets and meet her for tea.
March 11, 2021 |
Skateboarding
Tony Hawk is the ultimate skateboarder and someone who had a multi-generational influence in the way skaters ride the concrete.
He is one of the most recognized sportsmen on the planet and one of the best all-around skaters in the sport s history.
Whether Hawk is vert skating, pulling off tricks at street level, or shredding the local skatepark, he is always on top of his game.
Today, TH runs a skateboarding empire of apparel, gear, merchandising licenses, video games, and media content.
But business ventures have never stopped him from pushing the sport s limits and setting new heights for the Olympic sport.
Photograph by JMPhoto64 via iStock.
Pestilence follows pandemic this year as the 17-year cicadas dubbed Brood X emerge in May. Although one
could embrace the return of the bugs that allegedly taste like shrimp, you wouldn’t be blamed for wanting to hightail it away from the flying insects.
Spots in Southern Maryland and parts of the Eastern Shore south of Kent County should be havens from the rude brood, according to a map tracking cicadas in the Mid-Atlantic region.
“It’s going to be super intense, especially in DC as well as most of Maryland. [In] areas of the Eastern Shore, it’s going to be mostly clear.” says Floyd Shockley, the collections manager for the Department of Entomology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. “We know places that they prefer not to be.”
Humans Have Surprising Similarities to Strange Creatures From 550 Million Years Ago
9 MARCH 2021
From what little we know of them, they seem so different. Mysterious creatures that lived in the ocean half a billion years ago – headless, limbless things, seemingly alien to us in all respects.
Except they weren t, new research suggests. In fact, the Ediacaran biota – a collection of ancient oceanic life-forms that dwelled on Earth between 570 to 539 million years ago – would have shared a number of genetic similarities with modern metazoans (multicellular animals) including humans, scientists say.
Not that the resemblances border on the uncanny, or anything. None of them had heads or skeletons, explains palaeobiologist Mary Droser from the University of California, Riverside.