New director. Kevin Gover (Pawnee), 52, professor of law at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law at Arizona State University in Tempe and an affiliate professor in the university’s American Indian Studies Program, has been named director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Gover, who will begin work Dec. 2, succeeds W. Richard West Jr. (Southern Cheyenne), who was the founding director of the American Indian Museum, serving from 1990 to 2007. Gover grew up in Oklahoma and received a bachelor’s degree in public and international affairs from Princeton University and a law degree from the University of New Mexico.

Galaxy smash-up. A cosmic collision of massive proportions involving four different galaxies and millions of stars was recently detected by the Spitzer Space Telescope during a routine survey of a distant cluster of galaxies located 5 billion light-years from Earth. Kenneth Rines, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and researcher on the survey, compared the collision to “four sand trucks smashing together, flinging sand everywhere.” The clashing galaxies will eventually merge into a single behemoth galaxy up to 10 times as massive as our own Milky Way. It will be, Rines says, “one of the biggest galaxies in the universe.”

Fast jaws. By aiming a camera that records 40,000 frames per second at the tiny, snapping jaws of termites of the species Termes panamensis, researchers Marc Seid and Jeremy Niven of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama discovered that these insects close their mandibles at a speed faster than any other muscle-powered movement on Earth. When threatened, a termite snaps its mouth parts together with great force, using four sets of large jaw muscles in its head. Seid and Niven recorded the termite’s jaw movement at the incredible speed of 70.4 meters per second over the very short distance of 1.76 millimeters.

Ancient Egypt. Core samples of sediments recovered from deep below Alexandria’s East Harbor on the Egyptian coast of the Mediterranean have revealed evidence of a thriving city at this location dating as far back as 1000 B.C. Ceramic sherds, lead isotopes and associated data taken from the core sediments reveal the city of Alexandria did not grow from a barren desert but was built atop an active town whose inhabitants had for centuries taken advantage of the safe harbor on the Egyptian coast. Chief investigator on the project, Jean-Daniel Stanley of the Geoarchaeology Program of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, says evidence indicates that a coastal population flourished in this area as many as seven centuries before Alexandria was established.

Oak decline. Inventories of tree species in North American forests show a marked decline in young oak trees caused in part by changes in forest management, introduced pests and pathogens and increased deer populations. A recent paper written by William McShea, a mammalogist at the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park, and colleagues, and published in the Journal of Wildlife Management, points out that the decline bodes ill for wildlife in many deciduous forests. “Acorns are arguably the most important food resource for birds and mammals during the dormant season in hardwood ecosystems,” McShea and colleagues write. “These changes are not yet obvious in mast [acorn] production but will take decades to reverse.... Communicating proper forest management to public, commercial and private owners is the main challenge.”