Natural History articles from December 2003

Natural History archives from December 2003

Ah ... heaven!(The Natural Moment)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Thirty-four years ago this January, a snow monkey much like the bathing beauties pictured here made the cover of Life magazine. Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata), as they are also known, have always been quick to soak up human culture. People...

Once more, to Mars!(Up Front)
December 1, 2003... One of the defining episodes in the public embrace of the Internet was the 1997 Pathfinder mission to Mars. Sojourner, the six-wheeled rover deployed by the Pathfinder lander, was the little robot that could. After Pathfinder shed the air bags...

Food fight.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2003... As Marc J. Cohen writes in his review ["Crop Circles," 10/03], "few aspects of everyday life provoke such sharp disagreement as the emerging biotechnology of food." Barely mentioned by Mr. Cohen, the farmer is a major player in the battle over...

Moonlighting.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2003... G. Jeffrey Taylor, in his article "Moonstruck" [9/03], refers to the Earth's tidal pull. But if the same side of the Moon always faces Earth, there should be no lunar rides. Shouldn't the force simply be Earth's gravitational pull? He also...

Universal clock.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2003... Neil deGrasse Tyson closes his column "In the Beginning" [9/03] with what seems to be a meaningless question: "What happened before the beginning?" Didn't time itself begin with the big bang? David G. King Southern Illinois University...

The best defense?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2003... I was surprised that one of the more infamous reasons for "pee" dumping by frogs wasn't mentioned in the "Endpaper" by Ryan C. Taylor ["Pees & Cues," 10/03]. If any urine makes contact with a creature's eyes, it will cause immediate burning...

When the bough doesn't break.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2003... The lianas discussed by Adam Summers ["Extreme Forestry," 7/03-8/03] illustrate well the biomechanical problems faced by plants. Apart from the physical structure of a cell wall, the elasticity of tissues should be considered. For example, the...

Save the earth.(Samplings)(soil conservation)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Probably the first thing concerned citizens think of when the word "endangered" pops up is an animal: the California condor, the giant panda, the bowhead whale, the leatherback sea turtle. But right under our feet may be something equally...

Small is powerful.(Samplings)(genetics of cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Sometimes small is ineffectual. But not when it comes to photosynthesis. The single-celled cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus--0.00002 inch in diameter--is the smallest known organism capable of photosynthesis. Yet numbers can make up for size:...

Many moons.(Samplings)(new moons are constantly being discovered)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Astronomers have long known that Mercury and Venus have no moons, Earth has but one, and Mars two. The count for the other planets in the solar system, however, is far from fixed. New moons are constantly being discovered, and the pace has...

Fair is fair.(Samplings)(evolutionary origins of the sense of fairness)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... For more than two years Sarah F. Brosnan and Frans B.M. de Waal have been bartering with brown capuchin monkeys. Sometimes the animals get a fair deal, sometimes not. It's all part of a study the two primatologists are conducting at the Yerkes...

The mouse that roared.(Samplings)(anatomy of the largest extinct rodent)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Anybody unlucky enough to have rodentophobia should probably not contemplate hopping a time machine back to Miocene-era Venezuela. It seems that not all rodents in those days were cute little balls of fur like your daughter's guinea pig....

Gravity in reverse: the tale of Albert Einstein's "greatest blunder".(Universe)
December 1, 2003... Sung to the tune of "The Times They Are A-Changin'": Come gather 'round, math phobes, Wherever you roam And admit that the cosmos Around you has grown And accept it that soon You won't know what's worth knowin' ...

Good whale hunting: two tantalizing Russian reports take the author on a quest to the Antarctic, in search of two previously unrecognized kinds of killer whale.(Naturalist At Large)
December 1, 2003... They always remind me of witch's hats--a little bit of Halloween in the winter wonderland. Looking across a flat plain of frozen Antarctic sea ice, I watch as a herd of killer whales swims along a lead--a long, narrow crack in the...

Get in the zone with the mattress topper that molds to your body's contours: the Memory Foam Ultra mattress topper is cut into a grid pattern combining six different zones for variable support and a better night's sleep.(Technology)(Advertisement)
December 1, 2003... It's 3 a.m. You have exactly two hours until you have to get up for work, and you still can 't seem to fall asleep. At this point, the phrase "tossing and turning" begins to take on a whole new meaning for people whose mattresses simply aren't...

Uphill flight: a partridge's ability to climb overhanging slopes might explain how dinosaurs took to the skies.(Biomechanics)(evolution and animal flight)
December 1, 2003... The debate over the origin of birds has raged through the paleontological community for more than a century. Fitting species into evolutionary family trees is painstaking and often contentious work, but truly amazing discoveries of feathered...

What became of the water on Mars? This January, a cluster of spacecraft will converge on the Red Planet, probing for clues to the mysterious but unmistakable role of water in its past.(Cover Story)
December 1, 2003... As this issue of Natural History, went to press, at least six spacecraft were already orbiting--or speeding toward a rendezvous with--the planet Mars. In the vanguard of this wave of martian exploration are two NASA orbiters, the Mars Global...

Underwater urbanites: sponge-dwelling snapping shrimps are the only known marine animals to live in colonies that resemble the societies of bees and wasps.
December 1, 2003... Diving the pellucid waters of the Caribbean Sea off the coast of central Belize, down past jewel-like transparent plankton, I see the ridge of the Belize Barrier Reef materializing out of the turquoise depths. Even before the reef becomes...

The breadfruit trail: the wild ancestors of a staple food illuminate human migrations in the Pacific islands.
December 1, 2003... Many years ago a god named Ku came to Hawai's and married a mortal woman. Together they had a large family but Ku never told her he was a god. One year, a terrible famine came to the islands, and Ku's family became weak with hunger. When Ku...

Giving cranes a lift: a Mississippi refuge preserves a bird and its habitat.(This Land)
December 1, 2003... With their stately stature, wingspreads as broad as eight feet, loud calls, and elaborate courtship dances, cranes are among the most impressive birds in the world. Two species are native to North America, the whooping crane (Grus americana)...

A Celebration of the World's Barrier Islands.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... by Orrin, H. Pilkey; batiks by Mat), Edna Fraser (Columbia University, Press, June 2003; $44.95) Some 2,200 barrier islands fringe the world's coastlines, but that number is constantly subject to revision. Nibbled at by storms and gobbled...

De Historia Stirpium Commentarii Insignes.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... (Notable commentaries on the history of plants), by Leonhart Fuchs (Basel, 1542: Octavo Editions, September 2003, CD-ROM ed.; $30.00) Few gift givers have the resources to purchase a sixteenth-century herbal for the book collector or...

For the coffee table.(Book Review)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... The holiday season is supposed to offer some rime for quiet reflection. Gift givers, well aware of the absence of-such occasions in their own lives, still imagine that the lives of their friends and family are hot so constrained by reality....

Mars on my mind.(nature.net)
December 1, 2003... As Mars was making its much-publicized close approach to Earth recently, I often looked up at the southern sky at night and, in my imagination, tracked the Red Planet's movements. No telescope needed: I could see the disk in my mind's eye. I...

Star baby: T Tauri shows that a stellar nursery can be a rough-and-tumble place to live.(Out There)(star formation)
December 1, 2003... In 1852 the English astronomer John Russell Hind, exploring the constellation Taurus through his telescope, round a dim star that wasn't noted on his charts. The new star, named T Tauri, has since become something of a minor celebrity among...

The sky in December and January.(Out There)
December 1, 2003... Mercury sets during twilight in December and is barely visible all month. It passes between the Sun and the Earth on the 26th. In January, however, the planet puts on an excellent show. Mercury is low in the east-southeastern sky at dawn;...

Dr. Sacha Spector on saving "the other 99 percent".(At The Museum)(invertebrate conservation)(Interview)
December 1, 2003... Sacha Spector is Invertebrate Conservation Program Manager with the Museum's Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (CBC). We caught up with Sacha in his invertebrate lab at the Museum, as he is busy gearing up for the CBC's March symposium,...

Museum events.(Calendar)
December 1, 2003... EXHIBITIONS Seasons of Life and Land: Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Through March 7, 2004 Over 40 large-format color photographs by conservationist Subhankar Banerjee focus on the interdependent relationship of land, water, wildlife,...

On thin ice.(Endpaper)(animal rescue)
December 1, 2003... I grew up in rural Michigan, in a house surrounded by woodlands, with a sparkling, springfed lake for a backyard. In the autumn the lake reflected the patchwork of reds and oranges from the maple trees that ringed it. In the spring the still...