Natural History articles from April 2006

Natural History archives from April 2006

I spy.(THE NATURA MOMENT)(crab spiders)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... Enthroned on a golden flower, a female crab spider holds dominion over most visitors that stop to rest or refuel. But there's not much pomp: no intricate web, no hairy legs, no red hourglass. Instead, the spider--weighing in at about 0.005...

Weevil evil.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2006... Robert W. Jones's fascinating article on the boll weevil, "March of the Weevils" [2/06], recalls the lines from an old blues song describing with chilling effect what the weevil did to African-American farmers in the South: Boll weevil...

Cloudy skies.(SAMPLINGS)(air pollution due to emissions by ships)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... Cars, planes, trucks, and trains are infamous air polluters, but ships are often overlooked. Yet increased shipping in recent decades has led to a dramatic rise in ships' fuel consumption, which more than quadrupled between 1950 and 2001. Now,...

Millipede soccer.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... For the coati, a small mammal that ranges from the southwestern United States to South America, few snacks are more tempting than a juicy millipede. But something unpleasant stands in the way of an easy meal: evolution has equipped the...

A very dry white.(SAMPLINGS)(ancient Egyptians buried with both red and white wine)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... The ancient Egyptians loved their wine. They buried their dead with wine-filled amphorae, or clay vessels, to ensure a comfortable afterlife, and they painted scenes of viticulture and winemaking on the walls of tombs. But what varieties did...

Made in India.(SAMPLINGS)(population genetics )(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... A dizzying variety of cultures and languages flourish among India's billion-plus residents. Did the differences arise among the descendants of that nation's first settlers, who likely arrived in South Asia from Africa more than 40,000 years...

Ocean genome.(SAMPLINGS)(genetic study of oceanic microorganisms)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... Microscopic life thrives in the open ocean, where it plays a key role in the complex flux of matter and energy. Yet its ecology remains poorly understood. At the ALOHA oceanographic station, sixty miles north of the island of Oahu, in...

Time dilation.(SAMPLINGS)(evolutionary genetics)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... Like every other living thing, we humans and our nearest relatives, the chimpanzees, have "junk" DNA. It probably doesn't code for anything functional, but it sure is useful to evolutionary biologists. Because mutations within noncoding DNA are...

Survival of the rarest.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... Tropical forests may be more resilient than their reputations would have you believe. The forests appear to bolster the tree species most vulnerable to extinction: the rare ones. Christopher Wills, an evolutionary biologist at the...

Sing it to me.(SAMPLINGS)(young zebra finches learn to sing from the adult zebra finches)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... Young male zebra finches learn to sing by listening to adult tutors--often their fathers--and by rehearsing endlessly. To get a tune just right, a young bird must compare the sounds it makes with its memories of the songs its tutor sang. The...

Fish story in reverse.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... In January, ichthyologists announced they'd discovered the world's smallest vertebrate. One female Paedocypris progenetica, a carp relative from Indonesian swamps, measured just 7.9 millimeters. That's not so small, countered Theodore Pietsch,...

Impermafrost.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... People living in the Far North have often built their homes on solidly frozen earth. But their heirs may have to contend with wildly listing floors. Permafrost--soil frozen for two or more years, with a thin top layer that may seasonally...

When the moon hits your eye: more knowledge and better data only deepen the beguiling appeal of the best-known object in the night sky.(UNIVERSE)
April 1, 2006... Countless cultures have spun countless tales about Earth's nearest neighbor in space. To the ancient Greeks, the Moon was a pale-faced young woman riding across the sky in a horse-drawn chariot. To the Aztecs, no strangers to blood and gore,...

Secrets of the sacred lotus: for the lotus leaf, being dirt-free means shunning water with a rough, waxy surface.(BIOMECHANICS)
April 1, 2006... According to my wife, I can't see dirt. I'm oblivious to disorder, she says, blind to dust, ignorant about the positive effects of a good vacuum cleaner. Truth be told, more pressing things always do seem to suck up my time. But in nay usual...

The biggest fish: unraveling the mysteries of the whale shark.(Cover story)
April 1, 2006... One hot, windless May morning, five of my colleagues and I boarded our small research boat and motored out into the waters of Western Australia's Ningaloo Reef. We were searching for whale sharks--the world's largest fish--hoping to attach...

The worlds behind the glass: museum dioramas create such a compelling "virtual reality" that visitors can forget the artifice and engage with nature itself.
April 1, 2006... From their very first appearance in science museums in the late 1800s, dioramas have been designed to nurture a reverence for nature. The best ones duplicate the wonder of an intimate, personal encounter with a real creature in its habitat....

Alaska's underground frontier: an observatory that looks down--not up--at the planet's microbial diversity.
April 1, 2006... The workboat I'm riding whips down the Tanana River in the interior of Alaska, just west of Fairbanks. Rains in the past two weeks have made the Tanana high and swift in its rush to meet the Yukon River, on its way to the Bering Sea. Today is...

Green fingers: a woodland revives among the glacier-carved lakes of central New York.(THIS LAND)(Finger Lakes, New York)(Geographic overview)
April 1, 2006... In 1891 President Benjamin Harrison signed legislation authorizing the establishment of national forests in the United States. Since that time, 155 national forests have been designated, scattered within the boundaries of forty-four states,...

Chasing Spring: An American Journey Through a Changing Season.(BOOKSHELF)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Chasing Spring: An American Journey Through a Changing Season by Bruce Stutz Scribner, 2006; $24.00 At the beginning of this spring-chasing journey, set in 2004, neither Bruce Stutz nor his automobile is a good bet to finish a three-mouth...

Parenting for Primates.(BOOKSHELF)(Book review)
April 1, 2006... Parenting for Primates by Harriet J. Smith Harvard University Press, 2006; $29.95 Dear Harriet: My son Carl, who is eight, just can't seem to sleep alone. It's gotten worse since Cindy, my youngest, was born. Needless to say, I have...

The Electric Life of Michael Faraday.(Book review)
April 1, 2006... The Electric Life of Michael Faraday by Alan Hirshfeld Walker and Company 2006; $24.00 The twenty-first century would not exist as we know it were it not for a nineteenth-century English experimenter named Michael Faraday. Lest that...

New moon.(nature.net)
April 1, 2006... The Moon reveals just one side to admirers on Earth, yet our satellite seems an object with a thousand faces. It smiles with romantic light and winks at armchair space travelers. For me, most of all, it is the place where the Apollo 11...

Crash! A close encounter of the cometary kind.(OUT THERE)(astrogeology)
April 1, 2006... The term "astrogeology" (from the Greek for "star" and "earth") is either an overgeneralization or an oxymoron. If you're an astrogeologist, do you study Earth, or the universe beyond Earth, or both? And if you study both, what else is left?...

The sky in April.(planetary systems)
April 1, 2006... On April 8, one day after passing aphelion (its farthest point from the Sun), Mercury reaches its greatest western elongation. One might hope for good viewing, since the planet attains its greatest possible angular separation from the...

Starting life.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2006... Thank you, Antonio Lazcano, for your summary of the most up-to-date information on how life began ["The Origins of Life," 2/06]. Since the seventh grade I have been curious about how life got started, and I've wondered what great advances in...

Expanding space.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
April 1, 2006... I am struggling with one of Neil deGrasse Tyson's statements in "Fire and Ice" [12/05-1/06]: If the fastest known speed is that of light and other electromagnetic waves--186,000 miles per second--how could the universe expand to "about a...

Moveable Museum fleet expands.(At the Museum)
April 1, 2006... Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries is the latest addition to the Museum's fleet of Moveable Museums--converted recreational vehicles outfitted as state-of-the-art, walk-in exhibition spaces. This newest Moveable complements the...

New book on AMNH dioramas: Windows on Nature.(American Museum of Natural History (New York, New York))(Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum of Natural History)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... The American Museum of Natural History in partnership with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., has published the first and definitive book on the Museum's famous habitat dioramas. Titled Windows on Nature: The Great Habitat Dioramas of the American Museum...

The Butterfly Conservatory.
April 1, 2006... The perennially popular Butterfly Conservatory has been extended and will now be on view until June 23! Visitors can stroll among up to 500 live butterflies while learning about their life cycle and conservation efforts, and, with luck, one of...

Craig Chesek: Senior Photographer Department of Communications.(PEOPLE AT THE AMNH)(American Museum of NaturalHistory)(Brief article)
April 1, 2006... When Craig Chesek first saw an ad for a photographer specializing in shooting gems, minerals, and artifacts, he responded quickly. The job description closely fit his interests and background as a commercial photographer. But as Senior...

Museum events: American Museum of Natural History.(Calendar)
April 1, 2006... EXHIBITIONS Darwin Through August 20, 2006 Featuring live animals, actual fossil specimens collected by Charles Darwin, and manuscripts, this magnificent exhibition offers visitors a comprehensive, engaging exploration of the life and...

Chernobyl paradox.(ENDPAPER)
April 1, 2006... Twenty years ago, on April 26, 1986, a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power station exploded and burned, spewing radiation around the globe and blanketing large swaths of what was then the Soviet Union with heavy contamination. Ever since...