Approximately 148 million: That’s the number of specimens – including plants, animals, minerals and human artifacts – curators estimate are held in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

Centuries after its invention, the microscope continues to prove that it is not only crucial to science but can also produce works of art—a feat acknowledged each year by the Nikon Small World Award, ...

For more than 25 years, Arthur Earland and Edward Heron-Allen partnered in studying fossils of Foraminifera, a phylum of marine single-celled organisms often protected by shells of calcium carbonate.