BioScience articles from January 2004

BioScience archives from January 2004

The new creationism and its threat to science literacy and education.(Editorial)
January 1, 2004... Just how widespread is science literacy in the United States? That this country is the acknowledged leader of scientific research in terms of quantity and overall quality suggests our scientific enterprise is robust. Nevertheless, there is...

The vital study of botany.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2004... William Allen's Eye on Education article, "Plant Blindness" (BioScience 53: 926), is timely. Moves are afoot in our department to dismantle botany and zoology as the required introductory courses for biology majors. They would be replaced by...

Challenges of restoration.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2004... Karen Holl and colleagues ("Landscape Restoration: Moving from Generalities to Methodologies," BioScience 53:491-502) show how hard it is to design a workable typology of landscape restoration practices even where the written record and...

Science and policy--uneasy partners.(Viewpoint)
January 1, 2004... The misuse of science in the creation and advocacy of environmental policy is often decried within the scientific community, and it is facilitated by low public awareness of the state of the science for important environmental issues. Recently,...

The wildest urban river: Potomac River gorge.(Feature)
January 1, 2004... Gary Fleming leads a small party across the tall bluffs, through the thick forest, and down the steep ravines that characterize the Virginia side of the Potomac River just north of Washington, DC. Fleming points to the stately beeches,...

Undergraduate mentoring program targets hard-to-find students.(Eye on Education)
January 1, 2004... In its program announcement for Un dergraduate Mentoring in Environmental Biology (UMEB), the National Science Foundation clearly spells out whom the program is meant to attract: "members of those racial and ethnic groups underrepresented in...

Developing the federal natural resource workforce.(Washington Watch)
January 1, 2004... Awareness of the government's need to replenish a scientific, technical, and managerial workforce soon to be decimated by the retirement of the baby-boom generation has grown in recent years. Decisionmakers are pondering how best to recruit and...

Monoamines and the orchestration of behavior.(Articles)
January 1, 2004... Animals possess a Hch repertoire of behaviors, each generated by the orchestrated activity of assemblies of neurons. Neuromodulators, and particularly monoamines, have been found to play a role in the recruitment of such assemblies. The role of...

Marine reserves as a tool for ecosystem-based management: the potential importance of megafauna.
January 1, 2004... Marine predators attract significant attention in ocean conservation planning and are therefore often used politically to promote reserve designation. We discuss whether their ecology and life history can help provide a rigorous ecological...

Photoprotective strategies of overwintering evergreens.(Articles)
January 1, 2004... High levels of solar radiation (direct and reflected off snow) can be absorbed by green leaves in the winter. However, the energy that is absorbed by these leaves often cannot be used through photosynthesis under winter conditions. Most colored...

The practices of wolf persecution, protection, and restoration in Canada and the United States.(Articles)
January 1, 2004... Wolf management can be controversial, reflecting a wide range of public attitudes. We analyzed wolf management case histories representing a spectrum of approaches in Canada and the United States. During the early 20th century, wolves were...

Rethinking the vision for environmental research in US agriculture.(Roundtable)
January 1, 2004... Environmental research in agriculture is today largely reactive, focused on problems at small scales and conducted within narrow disciplinary boundaries. This approach has worked to abate a number of environmental problems created by...

The value of museum collections for research and society.(Forum)
January 1, 2004... Many museums and academic institutions maintain first-rate collections of biological materials, ranging from preserved whole organisms to DNA libraries and cell lines. These biological collections make innumerable contributions to science and...

A Pandora'sbox for longevity.
January 1, 2004... Longevity: The Biology and Demography of Life Span. James R. Carey. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. 2003. 278 pp., illus. $75.00 (ISBN 0691088489 cloth). This book definitively announces a scientific revolution in our...

Developmental Plasticity and Evolution.
January 1, 2004... Mary Jane West-Eberhard. Oxford University Press, New York, 2003. 794 pp., illus. $100.00 (ISBN 0195122348 cloth). One can formalize evolution by natural selection using the equation [DELTA][bar]z = [sV.sub.G]/[V.sub.P]; that is, the change...

Experimental Design for the Life Sciences.
January 1, 2004... Graeme D. Ruxton and Nick Colegrave. Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom, 2003. 136 pp., illus. $24.95 (ISBN 0199252327 paper). Whenever the words "experimental" and "design" are placed together in a sentence, some biologists...

New titles.(Books)
January 1, 2004... A Bat Man in the Tropics: Chasing El Duende. Theodore H. Fleming. University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003. 311 pp., illus. $50.00 (ISBN 0520236068 cloth). The Biology of Death: Origins of Mortality. Andre Klarsfeld and Frederic...

IBRCS white paper on developing and governing NEON released.(AIBS news)
January 1, 2004... AIBS has released a report detailing recommended plans for developing and governing the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). This report, the second in a series of white papers associated with the Infrastructure for Biology at...

BioScience to join JSTOR collection.(AIBS news)
January 1, 2004... BioScience has been invited to join a new online ecology collection maintained by JSTOR, an independent, not-fur-profit organization "dedicated to the creation and preservation of an electronic archive of the full back runs of scholarly...

Applications for AIBS Emerging Public Policy Leader Award due 2 February 2004.(AIBS news)
January 1, 2004... As part of its focus on engaging scientists in the public policy process, the American Institute of Biological Sciences is pleased to announce the AIBS Emerging Public Policy Leader Award, an opportunity for graduate students in the biological...

AIBS Secretary Dan Johnson Gains High Honor as Canada Research Chair.(AIBS news)
January 1, 2004... Dan Johnson, a grasslands ecosystem researcher already well known in the Lethbridge, southern Alberta, and international research communities, will join the University of Lethbridge on 1 January 2004 as the institution's fourth Canada Research...

2004 AIBS annual meeting updates.(AIBS news)
January 1, 2004... The program for the 2004 AIBS annual meeting continues to grow. Registration is online at www.aibs.org/annual-meeting-2004/index.html. Don't delay in registering for this exciting program, entitled "Invasive Species: The Search for Solutions."...

Recent public policy reports online at www.aibs.org.(AIBS news)
January 1, 2004... Public Policy Report for 8 December 2003 * NSF to receive 5% increase if omnibus conference report adopted * Congress directs NSF to continue refining NEON plan * A look at NSF's education and human resources funding *...

Calendar of meetings.(Calendar)(Calendar)
January 1, 2004... February 11 "Living with Nature: Everyday Actions to Sustain Our Planet," Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, American Museum of Natural History, New York; Web site:...

Lessons learned from documenting the decline.
January 1, 2004... Two long-term studies of tropical forest fragments illustrate how habitat fragmentation effects species loss. One study shows how quickly South American bird species are lost in forest fragments of different sizes, and the other shows how the...

Protecting species on private land.
January 1, 2004... Does listing a species as endangered help protect it? Amara Brook, Michaela Zint, and Raymond De Young, at the University of Michigan--Ann Arbor, take a crack at this tough-nut question in an article published in the December issue of...