Natural History articles from April 2004

Natural History archives from April 2004

Disappearing act.(The Natural Moment)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... Juvenile eels, though far from microscopic, are nearly invisible. The leptocephalus, or eel larva, pictured here measured about eight inches long, two inches high, and a few millimeters thick. Peter Herring, a marine biologist based in...

For the sake of the kids.(Up Front)(Editorial)
April 1, 2004... For some people, April is the month of fools and showers and cruelty; for me, it will always be the month of a kids' game. Never mind that this year's calendar moves baseball's opening day into late March; April is the real beginning of the...

For richer or poorer.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2004... In his review of Paul Farmer's Pathologies of Power ["Why Must the Poor Be Sick?" 2/04], Jeffrey D. Sachs doesn't seem to understand what structural violence is. It is an injury imposed on people by a social, political, and economic system,...

Beetlemania.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2004... In his "Biomechanics" column ["Like Water Off a Beetle's Back," 2/04], Adam Summers cites investigators who suggest that a surface mimicking a long-legged Namib beetle's back would be a useful means to collect fog. But in our view, a solid...

Snap judgments.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2004... In "Underwater Urbanites" [12/03-1/04], J. Emmett Duffy describes Darwin's problem with social insect species in which most individuals are sterile. Mr. Duffy then goes on to discuss William D. Hamilton's "animal altruism" explanation, based on...

Amendment.(Letters)(Correction Notice)
April 1, 2004... AMENDMENT: The Web address for a report about the global trade in fishes was given incorrectly ("Finding Nemo," by Melanie L.J. Stiassny, 3/04). The correct address is www.unep-wcmc.org/ resources/publications/ WCMC_Aquarium.pdf Natural...

Ice age Siberians.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... The verified human history of eastern Siberia just got 16,000 years longer. Several hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, along one of northeast Asia's largest rivers, a team led by Vladimir V. Pitulko, an archaeologist at the Institute for...

Palliative or poison?(Samplings)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... Vultures, the quintessential garbage collectors, were a familiar sight in South Asia just a decade ago--particularly the Oriental white-backed vulture, Gyps bengalensis. But sometime in the 1990s they began dying off at an alarming rate. So J....

Evolutionary circles.(Samplings)(Calyptraeidae(snails))(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... According to Dollo's law--an evolutionary maxim named after the nineteenth-century Belgian paleontologist Louis Dollo, and much favored by the late Stephen Jay Gould--complex physical features lost during evolution are seldom regained. Why?...

All in the family.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... Rafflesia, a plant genus native to the jungles of Southeast Asia, is notorious for its flowers, the largest in the world. A Rafflesia flower can be as broad as three feet across and weigh close to twenty pounds. The plant is also completely...

You take the muscles, I'll take the ears.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... Geneticists are fond of pointing out that the DNA of people and chimpanzees is nearly 99 percent identical [see "Searching for Your Inner Chimp," by Car/Zimmer, December 2002/January 2003]. Explaining the manifest differences has become...

Cryptic creatures.(Samplings)
April 1, 2004... Only three of these pictures are close-ups of the same animal. Which one doesn't belong? [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] Answer to "Cryptic Creatures" puzzle (page 14): c [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED]

Feeling pressured.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2004... Several hours before tropical storm Gabrielle struck Florida's Gulf Coast on September 14, 2001, all the juvenile blacktip sharks living in a shallow coastal nursery in Terra Ceia Bay moved to deeper--and safer--waters offshore. Michelle R....

Launching the right stuff: who (or what) will make the better space explorer: robot or human being?(Universe)
April 1, 2004... More than a year has passed since the space shuttle Columbia broke into pieces over central Texas. This past January President Bush announced a long-term program of space exploration that would return human beings to the Moon, and thereafter...

Distinctive destinations: from the moors of Scotland to the beaches of Bermuda: far-flung and nearby destinations for nature lovers.(Special Advertising Section)(Advertisement)
April 1, 2004... Bermuda Bermuda, a 21-square-mile subtropical paradise, is known for its pink-hued beaches and turquoise waters, pastel cottages and pristine gardens, and British propriety. The Island offers splendid golf courses (most with an ocean view)...

Mud's eye view: to understand the world of the fiddler crab, ecologists peer through a lens that renders a landscape as a doughnut-shaped panorama.(Field Notes)
April 1, 2004... As I stood on a coastal mudflat in northeastern Australia, the morning sun glistened off the wave-rippled surface of the muck. To the west, I was the only vertical feature for a quarter mile; to the east, the flatness reached clear to the...

A fly in the curveball: as the 103rd Major League baseball season opens, physicists have now shown that a well-hit curveball trumps a well-hit fastball. Pitchers must be so scared.(Biomechanics)
April 1, 2004... There is a morbid fascination in watching a Little League pitcher who develops a good curveball at a tender age; more than one talented young fastball hitter has switched to basketball after facing that aerodynamic phenomenon, which can turn...

Supercrop: the yam bean, a tuber undaunted by drought, poor soil, or insects, produces astonishing yields. The crop is the focus of a worldwide effort to unlock its potential.(Cover Story)
April 1, 2004... If you have ever sampled the menu at restaurants that offer such showstoppers as salmon encrusted with black sesame seeds, or breast of chicken in mango-ginger sauce, or mesclun salad with pear slices and Gorgonzola, there's a good chance you...

Virtual universe: centuries of astronomy, plus video-game technology, combine to offer a stunning new perspective on our place in space.
April 1, 2004... Gazing up at the sky on a clear, dark night, you can readily convince yourself that the stars are tantalizingly close--close enough, if not to touch, then at least to visit with a spacecraft. A small dose of astronomy, however, quickly dispels...

No place to call home: Japanese Brazilians discover they are foreigners in the country of their ancestors.
April 1, 2004... From my window on the train rolling into the station in Tokyo, the people waiting on the station platform were a blur. As we slowed down to our precise stopping point, Japanese faces came into focus. The doors opened, and people shuffled in or...

Singapore's vest-pocket park: a rainforest survives within sight of skyscrapers.(This Land)
April 1, 2004... In 1819 the English administrator and naturalist Thomas Stamford Raffles landed on what is now Singapore's main island, with a mandate to establish a colonial port. He found a population of about 150 Malay inhabitants and a tropical rainforest...

Heat exchange: the global warming debate mixes daunting complexity with high political stakes, a toxic brew that continues to test dispassionate science.(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... The Discovery of Global Warming by Spencer R. Weart Harvard University Press, 2003; $24.95 The complex mix of science and politics bundled together under the label "global warming" usually prompts one of two generic responses in books for...

Ishi's Brain: in Search of America's Last "Wild" Indian.(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... Ishi's Brain: In Search of America's Last "Wild" Indian by Orin Starn W. W. Norton & Company, 2004; $25.95 When Orin Starn visited the Olivet Memorial Park cemetery, just south of San Francisco, several years ago, he could not help noting...

The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus.(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... The Book Nobody Read: Chasing the Revolutions of Nicolaus Copernicus by Owen Gingerich Walker & Company, 2004; $25.00 Everybody knows that a book by Nicolaus Copernicus set in motion the scientific revolution of the Renaissance, but it's a...

A Bat Man in the Tropics: Chasing El Duende.(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... A Bat Man in the Tropics: Chasing El Duende by Theodore H. Fleming University of California Press, 2003; $50.00 A disclaimer: my experiences with bats amount to a few memorable jousts at two A.M., when, roused from my slumber by a thrumming...

The good Earth.(nature.net)
April 1, 2004... With the coming of spring and the return of green to the Northern Hemisphere, what better way than the Web to explore the extraordinary process of photosynthesis? If you're lucky enough to cultivate your own garden, you know you must seed on a...

Gas guzzlers: when great galaxies gobble gobs of matter, new stars are born.(Out There)
April 1, 2004... Young galaxies grow by making lots of new stars. Those stars begin to form when diffuse gas collects into clouds; eventually the clouds collapse under their own weight, and their cores become hot and dense enough to ignite nuclear fusion. So if...

The sky in April.
April 1, 2004... Mercury can be spotted for the first few evenings of April far to the west of Venus. On the evening of the 1st, Mercury shines at magnitude 0.6 and sets at about the end of twilight. Look to the west-northwestern horizon about forty-five...

Science Bulletins: bringing science news into the halls--and beyond.(At the museum: American Museum of Natural History)
April 1, 2004... New planets! New species! Eruptions! Quakes from space! How can a museum present science in a way that reflects its dynamic nature? When the Museum opened a series of permanent exhibition halls--the Hall of Biodiversity in 1997, the Gottesman...

Museum events: American Museum of Natural History.(Calendar)
April 1, 2004... EXHIBITIONS Exploratorium/AMNH Through August 15 This exhibition invites visitors to explore fundamental concepts and phenomena in the natural sciences. Fun, hands-on displays clustered around four themes--Earth processes,...