Natural History articles from December 2004

Natural History archives from December 2004

Delectable ornaments.(The Natural Moment)(honey pot ants)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... When it comes to finding such Australian sweetmeats as witchetty grubs and honey pot ants, Aboriginal women are masters at divining underground hideouts. Thanks to female guides in the state of South Australia, photographer Mitsuhiko Imamori...

Can-do spirit.(Up Front)(closest-ever look at Titan, Saturn's largest moon)
December 1, 2004... As we go to press, the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft has just swooped in for the closest-ever look at Titan, Saturn's largest moon and one of the most enigmatic bodies in the solar system. Until now thick clouds have kept the surface tantalizingly...

The art of discovery cruising.(Product/Service Evaluation)
December 1, 2004... With over 50 years of experience, Swan Hellenic has been committed to offering discovery cruises that visit the world's most inspirational destinations. Their planners seek to identify not only celebrated cities and beautiful bays, but to...

Mighty mites.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2004... In "The Sex Lives of Scales" [9/04], Benjamin B. Normark describes the bizarre sex lives of scale insects. Mites constitute another group of animals with an equally beguiling variety of genetic systems. In mites, arrhenotoky (in which...

Fern of yore.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2004... Robbin C. Moran's article, "Dispatches from the Fern Frontier" [10/04], includes a photograph of "Annularia, the fossil foliage of a giant calamite tree." What puzzles me is that the fossil seems to exhibit a three-dimensional perspective: the...

Job growth.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... The meerkat--a pint-size mammal that inhabits and southern Africa--lives in large social groups headed by one dominant female, or queen. She bears most of the babies, while the other members of the colony act as babysitters and sentinels....

Shipbuilders of medieval Malabar.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Since antiquity, mariners have sailed the Indian Ocean and dropped anchor along the southwest coast of Malabar, now the southern Indian state of Kerala, to buy pepper, cardamom, and timber. Archaeologists have long assumed that few of their...

The bathtub drain in the ocean.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Making the Earth's crust is violent business. Worldwide, along segments of seafloor called mid-ocean ridges, molten rock presses upward--breaking apart the ocean bottom, setting off earthquakes, creating jets of superheated seawater, and...

Cool characters.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Next time you're sweating over a hot stove, don't worry about getting cooked: heat shock proteins (Hsps) are protecting you. Plants and animals rapidly make Hsps when the thermometer hits a dozen or so degrees Fahrenheit above their favorite...

Convenience food.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... It's nine at night, a blizzard is blowing, your baby is crying, and there's no food in the house. Yikes! If you're a female mammal, though, help may already be at hand. Faced with having to feed newborns, animal parents either bring or...

Green Gone.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... In big cities, visiting the nearest park is one of the few ways you can commune with nature. But if you go to Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx--at more than 2,700 acres, the second largest park in New York City--you'll find a lot less nature than...

Lean and mean.(Samplings)(plague bacterium )(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... The terrible disease known as plague--the agent of the Black Death in fourteenth-century Europe--is caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. Yet Y. pseudotuberculosis, the most direct ancestor of the plague bacterium, merely triggers a...

Too many Princesses.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... Worker bees have it tough: they slave away to raise the queen's brood and forgo reproduction themselves. So it's not surprising that revolution is in the air, at least among the blue-collar ranks of the stingless bee Melipona beecheii. The...

Send in the clouds: the lives of molecules in space.(Universe)
December 1, 2004... For nearly all of the first 400 millennia after the birth of the universe, space was a hot stew of fast-moving, naked atomic nuclei with no electrons to call their own. The simplest chemical reactions were still just a distant dream, and the...

Destination: Titan: this January, a small space probe will parachute to the surface of Saturn's Largest Moon.
December 1, 2004... Around 4:30 A.M. eastern standard time oil the morning of January 14, 2005, a flyingsaucer-shaped object named Huygens will encounter an atmosphere for the first time since it left Earth, in 1997. In that atmosphere's thin, cold gas, the...

Sight for Sore eyes: a bright spot in an otherwise dismal prognosis for sub-Saharan Africa: Simple measures against trachoma, a bacterial infection that causes deformed eyelids, are saving the vision of millions.( )
December 1, 2004... News from the Republic of the Sudan seems to be relentlessly grim. Just one year ago, there was real hope that one of the world's longest-running civil wars was about to end. Negotiations between the Sudan People's Liberation Army and the...

The drunken monkey hypothesis: the study of fruit-eating animals could lead to an evolutionary understanding of human alcohol abuse.
December 1, 2004... What can a tipsy howler monkey tell science about humanity's fondness for--and problems with--alcohol? Possibly quite a lot. And that would be a good thing, considering how widespread our problems with alcohol are. In the United States alone,...

Florida high: now landlocked within the peninsula, an ancient dune preserves the stamp of its past.(This Land)
December 1, 2004... Last August, when Hurricane Charley swept across Florida, one place it struck was the Lake Wales Ridge, an elevated region that runs like a spine down the center of the peninsula. About a hundred miles long and ranging between four and ten...

Aristotle Leads the Way.(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... Aristotle Leads the Way, by Joy Hakim (Smithsonian Books; $21.95) Aristotle Leads the Way is the first in a projected series of six books by a "Virginia Beach grandmother," already famous for her ten-volume history of the United States. A...

Under Antarctic Ice: the Photographs of Norbert Wu.(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... Under Antarctic Ice: The Photographs of Norbert Wu, with text by Jim Mastro (University of California Press; $39.95) The frozen dunes, ice-covered landscapes, and wind-blown snow in the first few photographs of this book make you wonder why...

The Exploration of Africa.(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... The Exploration of Africa, by Jean de la Gueriviere (The Overlook Press; $60.00) Africa was the first continent outside Europe to be visited by Europeans (remember Odysseus). Enterprising traders sailed its coast for centuries, and...

Buzz: the Intimate Bond Between Humans and Insects.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... Buzz: The Intimate Bond Between Humans and Insects, text by Josie Glausiusz; photographs by Volker Steger (Chronicle Books; $24.95) Volker Steger, like the late Richard Avedon, is a master photographer of leggy models. Unlike Avedon,...

Earthsong.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... Earthsong, photography by Bernhard Edmaier; text by Angelika dung-Huttl (Phaidon Press; $59.95) The lofty perspective of the airplane-mounted camera never fails to inspire, hut Bernhard Edmaier raises the art of aerial photography to new...

Astonishing Animals: Extraordinary Creatures and the Fantastic Worlds They Inhabit.(The Encyclopedia of Animals: A Complete Visual Guide)(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... Astonishing Animals: Extraordinary Creatures and the Fantastic Worlds They Inhabit, by Tim Flannery and Peter Schouten (Atlantic Monthly Press; $29.95) The Encyclopedia of Animals: A Complete Visual Guide (University of California Press;...

The Seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... The Seventy Great Inventions of the Ancient World, edited by Brian M. Fagan (Thames & Hudson; $40.00) As a gift for the lover of antiquities, consider this anthology of illustrated essays by forty-two authorities on the ancient world. The...

Eyes on the sky.(nature.net)
December 1, 2004... Mount Wilson Observatory turns a hundred years old this December. It's one of my favorite places around Los Angeles, perched a mile above the sprawl on a granite ridge in the San Gabriel Mountains. I made my first trip there three years ago...

The sky in December and January.
December 1, 2004... Between December 16 and January 5 all five "naked eye" planets are visible in the early morning sky. Intriguingly, through December 28, about an hour before sunrise, they are stretched out across the sky in the "right" order: Mercury, Venus,...

Cabinet of curiosities.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2004... In "A Room Revisited" [9/04], Rosamond Purcell modestly told only part of the story about the recreation of Ole Worm's museum. Her painstaking recreation of Worm's cabinet of curiosities, which is now on view in Harvard's Collection of...

Moonlighting.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2004... I have read that the average "lunation" of the Moon (the time from one new Moon to the next) is 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, and 2.8 seconds. But I have noticed that in his "Sky" column, Joe Rao sometimes gives substantially different times...

Science Bulletins gets facelift.(At the museum: American Museum Of Natural History)
December 1, 2004... The American Museum of Natural History recently relaunched its Science Bulletins Web site, enabling virtual visitors around the world to log on to www.amnh.org and explore breaking news in astrophysics, Earth sciences, and biodiversity. The...

Living in America 2004: Native Americans of the Northeast.(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... While the landmark new exhibition Totems to Turquoise: Native North American Jewelry Arts of the Northwest and Southwest highlights the arts and artifacts of the Hopi, Navajo, Haida, and other western Native American tribes, the Museum's...

Museum events: American Museum of Natural History.
December 1, 2004... 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...

When will I see you again?(Endpaper)(Editorial)
December 1, 2004... On December 7, as Joe Rao reports in this issue (see "The Sky in December/January)," page 58), the Moon passes in front of the planet Jupiter, a relatively rare kind of eclipse known as an occultation. The event brings to mind a star date the...