Natural History articles from April 2003

Natural History archives from April 2003

So fleeting a spring. (The Natural Moment).
April 1, 2003... Every year in Panama, just after the first downpour of the rainy season, the flowers of the guayacan tree (Tabebuia guayacan) burst open. The explosion of blossoms, whose timing coincides with the northern temperate spring, announces the end of...

Life on ice. (Up Front).
April 1, 2003... I know, the picture on our cover this month makes it look as if we re all about to collide with an iceberg. And, truth be told, there seems plenty to be anxious about. A few weeks ago, those of us who live or work in Manhattan (the editorial...

Foresight and hindsight. (Letters).
April 1, 2003... After reading T.V. Rajan's article on lymphatic filariasis ["The Worm and the Parasite," 2/03], I thought your readers might like to know of ongoing efforts to apply recent medical discoveries to the treatment and possible elimination of both...

Family ties. (Letters).
April 1, 2003... It is not at all clear, as Carl Zimmer writes in "Searching for Your Inner Chimp" ["The Evolutionary Front," 12/02-1/03], that human beings and chimpanzees are so "astonishingly similar" genetically. DNA sequences are one-dimensional,...

Misting in action. (Letters).
April 1, 2003... In "Grain Gain," ["Samplings," 2/03], Stephan Reebs states: "Methane is the second most damaging greenhouse gas in the atmosphere." Indeed, methane is the second most damaging greenhouse gas governed by the Kyoto Protocol, but the major...

Reading the tree leaves. (Letters).
April 1, 2003... Egbert Giles Leigh Jr. and Christian Ziegler ["Biosphere III" 2/03] make the important observation that the interplay between plant and animal species is central to shaping the diversity of tropical forests. Their study of the fragmentation of...

Erratum.(Correction Notice)
April 1, 2003... The caterpillar pictured on page 55 of "Biosphere III" (February 2003) should have been identified as belonging to the family Saturniidae, not Limacodidae.

Incredible journey II. (Samplings).
April 1, 2003... Here's one for the record books: longest documented travel in the wild by a wild mouse. The new world-record holder is a three-quarter-ounce female white-footed mouse that took just a month to travel at least 9.2 miles across a stretch of New...

Your place or mine? (Samplings).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... Think of the word "household," and the associations that usually come to mind are positive: warmth, safety, sharing, interconnectedness. But conservationists are beginning to understand the word in a negative way. The problem is that in many...

Multitasking. (Samplings).
April 1, 2003... If you're lucky enough to have a backyard vegetable garden this summer, pull up a bean plant (or any other legume) and take a look at its roots. The little swellings you'll see are nodules formed by the plant and inhabited by bacteria. But...

Eau de danger. (Samplings).(reactions in animals)
April 1, 2003... Do animals smell fear? Mostly the answer is no. Sight, not smell, is what reveals a frightened creature's (or person's) emotional state. But for animals in a watery environment, the smell of fear does indeed act as a strong signal--albeit more...

Reaching for the stars: instead of counting smart bombs, perhaps we should count smart scientists. (Universe).
April 1, 2003... In the months since the space shuttle Columbia's fatal reentry through Earth's atmosphere, it seems that everyone has become a NASA critic. After the initial shock and mourning, no end of journalists, politicians, scientists, engineers, policy...

Fin tuning. (Findings).
April 1, 2003... Bears that live near salmon streams and spawning grounds tend to grow larger, have more cubs per litter, and belong to denser populations than do bears without access to salmon. No big surprises there. But what difference do the bears make to...

New Brunswick: from breathtaking views to spectacular natural sites and preserved sanctuaries, there's a world of wonder waiting for you next door in new Brunswick, Canada! (Distinctive Destinations: Special Advertising Section).
April 1, 2003... New Brunswick, Canada has so many wonders waiting to be experienced and explored! New Brunswick's Bay of Fundy is One of the Marine Wonders of the World. Twice a day the world's highest tides rise and fall almost 48 feet (that's equivalent to a...

Throwing yourself into it: were the weights held by Greek long jumpers a help or a hindrance? (Biomechanics).
April 1, 2003... At the Summer Olympics of 1968, in the dry, thin air of Mexico City, Bob Beamon redefined the limits of human performance. The altitude of the venue had led many sportswriters to speculate that records would fall, and the long-jump record was...

Date with extinction: for a thousand years before people settled in New Zealand, a small alien predator may have been undermining the islands' seabird populations.
April 1, 2003... Our yellow Zodiac bobbed across the choppy sea and made its way slowly through the clouds of seabirds that wheeled and soared around us. Albatross, cape pigeons, diving petrels, monymawks, mottled petrels, and sooty shearwaters all took their...

Arctic covenant: in the springtime the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge of Alaska comes to life.
April 1, 2003... Here the summer sun lingers above the horizon from mid, May until mid-August. Here the sky of the long winter night dances with the luminous curtains of the aurora borealis. The setting is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, in the...

Happy Birthday, DNA! Return with us now to those thrilling days of discovery, fifty years ago this month.('Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution' and 'Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA')(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution by Victor K. McElheny Perseus Publishing, 2003; $27.50 Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox HarperCollins, 2002; $29.95 James D. Watson opened his irreverent and at...

Among Stone Giants: The Life of Katherine Routledge and Her Remarkable Expedition to Easter Island.(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... by Jo Anne Van Tilburg Scribner, 2003; $26.00 Almost a century has passed since Katherine Routledge and her husband Scoresby raised the anchor of their custom-built ninety-foot schooner Mana and set sail for adventure. Few Europeans had...

Tycho & Kepler: The Unlikely Partnership That Forever Changed Our Understanding of the Heavens.(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... by Kitty Ferguson Walker & Company, 2003; $28.00 When Copernicus first proposed a universe with the Sun at its center in 1543, most of his sixteenth-century contemporaries regarded the idea as interesting but hardly revolutionary....

Smokechasing.(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... by Stephen J. Pyne The University of Arizona Press, 2003; $37.50 When the harmattan blows south from the Sahara, nighttime satellite images of Ghana and Nigeria light up like fireflies on a summer's evening: West Africa is burning. The...

Oil to burn? (nature.net).
April 1, 2003... Daniel Yergin, writing at the end of the 1990-91 Gulf War, concluded his monumental history of oil, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power, with this prediction: "The fierce and sometimes violent quest for oil--and for the riches...

Warp factor: a spinning dwarf may have twisted our galaxy's disk. (Out There).
April 1, 2003... Astronomers sometimes describe the shape of our home galaxy, the Milky Way, as a thin-crust pizza with a plum stuck in the middle. The plum is the slightly oblong central bulge, protruding about 3,000 light-years above and below the galactic...

The sky in April.(Calendar)
April 1, 2003... Mercury climbs progressively higher above the western horizon every evening at dusk in the first half of the month, but the improving view is offset by the planet's fading brilliance. On the 1st the planet shines at magnitude -1.4; about thirty...

An interview with Melanie Stiassny. .(Interview)
April 1, 2003... Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life Reopens May 17 Melanie Stiassny is Axelrod Research Curator of Ichthyology in the Division of Vertebrate Zoology and a lead curator of the renovation of the Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life. She spoke...

Starry Nights hits the airwaves.
April 1, 2003... After three years of crowd-pleasing performances, Starry Nights, the American Museum of Natural History's jazz performance series, burst onto the airwaves this winter. The Museum and WBGO Jazz 88.3 FM have teamed up to broadcast select Starry...

Museum events.
April 1, 2003... EXHIBITIONS Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind & Spirit Through January 4, 2004 Gallery 77, first floor This comprehensive exhibition presents Vietnamese culture in the early 21st century. The visitor is invited to "walk in Vietnamese...