Natural History articles from April 2005

Natural History archives from April 2005

Hitchin' a ride.(THE NATURAL MOMENT)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2005... Usually when a creature is whisked around by a big, strong, winged animal--as so often happens in Fantasies for children--biologists call the hitch-hiker a parasite. Certainly the harlequin beetle (Acrocinus longimanus), pictured here, gains...

Hard to imagine.(UP FRONT)
April 1, 2005... Sometimes l think the only realities people respond to are the ones staring them in the face. Watching a sunset from a tropical beach in midwinter, I find it almost impossible to remember how cold, wet, and miserable I felt just days earlier,...

Dogfight.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2005... In their review ["Can Dogs Think?" 2/05] of my recently published book, If Dogs Could Talk: Exploring the Canine Mind, Bruce Blumberg and Raymond Coppinger seem to hold an a priori conviction that any traits of dogs that are similar to traits...

Young at heart.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2005... Adam Summers reports ("A Simple Heart" 2/05) on the elegant experiments of Jay R. Hove and Reinhard W. Koster, which suggest that the early heart of embryonic zebra fish creates shear forces that shape the heart itself. But those same shear...

Urban greenery.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2005... The ecological study of Pelham Bay Park, reported in Stephan Reebs's Samplings article "Green Gone" (12/04-1/05), highlights the challenges of maintaining biodiversity in urban settings. The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation...

A breath of fresh ... hydrogen.(SAMPLINGS)(microorganisms living hot springs )(Brief Article)
April 1, 2005... A sulfurous odor permeates the air around the hot springs in Yellowstone National Park. Hordes of microorganisms live in the springs, at temperatures that can exceed 158 degrees Fahrenheit, too hot for photosynthesis. So how do the...

Which way is up?(SAMPLINGS)(plant growth in the absence of gravity and light)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2005... Hikers' lore has it that (in the Northern Hemisphere) moss grows on the north, shady side of trees, and so can help you find your way through the woods. Not true: it often grows on the south side, or the leeward side, or evenly all around the...

Picky eaters.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2005... Vegetarians must balance their diet, because few plants can supply all the essential nutrients. The herbivores of the animal world do a balancing act as well, seeming to know instinctively what to eat, and in what proportions. Carnivores,...

Crow bar.(SAMPLINGS)(New Caledonian crow's behaviour)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2005... New Caledonian crows (Corvus moneduloides) are famous for poking twigs under bark or into crevices to dislodge grubs. Only one other species of bird, the wood-pecker finch, uses an object for probing--a cactus spine. But are these cases of...

Kindred strokes for different folks.(SAMPLINGS)(writing systems)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2005... Greek or Latin, Hebrew or Mongolian, Tagalog or Tamil, most of the writing systems devised throughout human history are at heart surprisingly similar--and the similarities are probably not coincidental, say two neurobiologists, Mark A. Changizi...

Slick sisters.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2005... Until recently, zoologists thought the membership list of the order Artiodactyla was limited to hoofed mammals with an even number of toes: camels, cows, deer, giraffes, goats, hippopotamuses, pigs, sheep. But mounting evidence suggests...

Landscape of plenitude.(SAMPLINGS)(Amazon river)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2005... No one is certain why the watershed of the Amazon River is home to such a profusion of flora and fauna. What scientists do know is that many of its millions of species appeared sometime in the past 5 million years. Investigators have speculated...

Returning Reeds?(SAMPLINGS)(marshes in southern Iraq)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2005... A mudhif (above) is a typical floating house made of reeds by the marsh dwellers of southern Iraq. Once inhabited by abundant fish, birds, and people, most of the marshes' original 6,000 square miles were desiccated by 2000--the result of...

Talented newcomer.(SAMPLINGS)(survival of an organism's genome )(Brief Article)
April 1, 2005... You might assume that the genes essential to the survival of an organism's genome would have evolved early in the history of the species. But it ain't necessarily so. Here's how an alternate scenario might work. Imagine taking a job at a...

New Brunswick, Canada: what would you say to a walk on the ocean floor? Say awe.(Special Advertising Section)
April 1, 2005... IT HAPPENS HERE IN NEW BRUNSWICK Canada's Bay of Fundy, One of the Marine Wonders of the World. Find yourself among three-hundred-million-year-old plant fossils embedded in some of the oldest visible rock on Earth. The natural wonders here are...

Nova Scotia: a destination for all seasons.(Special Advertising Section)
April 1, 2005... NOVA SCOTIA'S SPECTACULAR scenery, amazing wildlife and ecological diversity redefines the phrase 'abundance of riches. The most difficult decision is where to go first; an easier one is to come back again and again to discover the area's...

Orient Lines: seeing the world up close, in-depth.(Special Advertising Section)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2005... ORIENT LINES HAS CARVED OUT a special niche for passengers who truly want to experience the culture, geography, scenic wonders and spirit of a destination in-depth. Offering 10- to 26-day cruises to all four corners of the globe, the company's...

Egypt: where past is present.(Special Advertising Section)(Brief Article)
April 1, 2005... AUTHOR LAWRENCE DURRELL FAMOUSLY dubbed the port city of Alexandria "the Capital of Memory." An apt description. One of the great cities of antiquity, Alexandria throughout its rich history has had a great impact on the cultural, political, and...

The long and short of it: aunes, cubits, leagues, palms, stadia--old-fashioned units of measurement make it hard to do science.(UNIVERSE)
April 1, 2005... Give 'em an inch, they'll take a mile. Kids love to count stuff. Bees, birds, dogs, monkeys, and rats count stuff, too. But if you want to describe objects and phenomena in the physical universe, you must move beyond mere enumeration. You...

Descent with modification: a great-grandson of Charles Darwin's opens new vistas into the voyage of the Beagle.(CONTACT)(Interview)
April 1, 2005... Born in 1919, Richard Darwin Keynes is one of Charles Darwin's twenty-five great-grandchildren and one of Darwin's hundred or so living descendants. His mother was Margaret Elizabeth Darwin, daughter of Darwin's son George, and his father was...

Conrad Martens and the Art of the Beagle.(CONTACT)
April 1, 2005... As the artist who accompanied Charles Darwin for a time aboard the Beagle, Conrad Martens recorded firsthand many of the places and sights encountered on the ship's voyage of discovery. Born in London in 1801, Martens studied landscape painting...

Born to run: humans will never win a sprint against your average quadruped. But our species is well-adapted for the marathon.(BIOMECHNANICS)
April 1, 2005... Paleoanthropologists, the paleontologists of the human lineage, have a tough task. Hominid fossils are scarce, and they're usually incomplete. Worse, the missing bits are often the ones investigators would most like to find--making it difficult...

Announcing the Franklin Institute Awards.
April 1, 2005... Dating back to 1824, The Franklin Institute Awards Program seeks to Provide public recognition and encouragement of excellence in science and technology. Since 1874, recipients have been selected by the Institute's Committee on Science and the...

Ecological lessons in survival.(collapse)
April 1, 2005... Societies normally endure minor rises and falls of fortune, even conquest bya neighbor, without undergoing a drastic change in total population or social complexity. But some societies have truly collapsed: their populations crashed and their...

Fire Down under: bushfire season pays Australia a hellish visit each year. Drought and climate change could be making the infernos worse.(Cover Story)
April 1, 2005... By midday on January 18, 2003, a hot, summer Saturday in Canberra, Australia's capital city, smoke from the largest wildfires in the history of the surrounding Australian Capital Territory had eclipsed the Sun. Firefighters were battling flames...

The Philosopher Fish: Sturgeon, Caviar, and the Geography of Desire.(Bookshelf)(Book Review)
April 1, 2005... The Philosopher Fish: Sturgeon, Caviar, and the Geography of Desire by Richard Adams Carey Counterpoint, 2005; $26.00 The sturgeon, whose eggs are prized above those of all other fish, may be "the single most valuable wildlife resource...

Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World.(Bookshelf)(Book Review)
April 1, 2005... Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World by Londa Schiebinger Harvard University Press, 2004; $39.95 It is a measure of the richness of tropical biodiversity that even today, 500 years after Columbus's first...

Frozen Earth: the Once and Future Story of Ice Ages.(Bookshelf)(Book Review)
April 1, 2005... Frozen Earth: The Once and Future Story of Ice Ages by Doug Macdougall University of California Press, 2004; $24.95 It may seem counterintuitive, but it's no secret to geologists that we are living in an ice age. The simple fact is that...

Living with fire.(nature.net)
April 1, 2005... Those of us living in the hills around Los Angeles don't need to follow the news from Australia [see "Fire Down Under," by Dan Drollette, page 44] to understand what it's like to live with wildfire. Often enough, cool ash from the incinerated...

Ripples in the cosmic pond: astronomers have detected a long-sought relic from the early universe.(OUT THERE)
April 1, 2005... The next time you're walking beside a quiet body of water, toss in a handful of pebbles. Each pebble will create ripples that spread outward. Soon the ripples will collide, overlap, and form wavy, cross-hatched patterns that will expand outward...

The sky in April.
April 1, 2005... Mercury reaches its greatest western elongation, twenty-seven degrees from the Sun, on April 26. As viewed from mid-northern latitudes, however, the apparition, a morning one, is lousy. The zero-magnitude planet, which rises less than an hour...

FYi reader service.(Advertisement)
April 1, 2005... 1. ADVENTURE LIFE JOURNEYS Small group travel in the Andes, Amazon, Galapagos, Patagonia, Antarctica, and Central America. Expert local guides lead our cultural and ecological explorations and naturalist cruises. 2. ADVENTURES ABROAD...

Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History.(At the Museum)
April 1, 2005... Home to the world's largest collection of vertebrate fossils, the American Museum of Natural History has a long and distinguished history of paleontological research around the globe. Museum scientists in the Division of Paleontology study the...

Museum events.(Calendar)
April 1, 2005... EXHIBITIONS Totems to Turquoise: Native North American Jewelry Arts of the Northwest and Southwest Through July 10, 2005 This groundbreaking exhibition celebrates the beauty, power, and symbolism of the magnificent tradition of Native...