Natural History articles from December 2008

Natural History archives from December 2008

Critical masses: the natural explanation.(snow geese's numbers rise)
December 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] Aldo Leopold, staunch conservationist and gifted forester, wrote What if there be no more goose music?" in one of his most moving essays, published posthumously in 1953. Looking to the future, he worried about the...

Acid indigestion.(WORD EXCHANGE)(Letter to the editor)
December 1, 2008... In one of his "Samplings" ("Arm Wrestling," 9/08), Stephan Reebs refers to "seawater that was either normal (pH 8.0) or acidified (pH 7.7)." As a high school science teacher, I tell my students that anything above 7.0 is basic, and anything...

Desert menu.(natural history Sahara Desert, and the way it looks at space)(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] LOOK AT AFRICA FROM SPACE, and you'll notice a belt of dark green across the continent's midsection. A friend studying a poster of Earth once asked me what caused that "shadow." It's vegetation, of course, and what...

How to harvest a harvester.(how horned lizards are able to prey on harvester ants)(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... Harvester ants are among the most aggressive and venomous stinging insects known. Although their stings, in quantity, can kill, the horned lizard captures harvesters by the dozen--in a typical lizardlike manner. What comes next, however,...

Creative destruction.(plate tectonics' onfluence on ancient civilizations)(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The seats of ancient civilizations were great meeting places. Trade routes, ideas, and cultural currents converged there--as did tectonic plates, says archaeological geologist Eric R. Force of the University of...

Games fishes play.(sailfin silversides feeding behavior)
December 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] He's quite handsome and he's got all the right moves. He looks foreign, but his courtship is intoxicating. You decide to spawn with him--oh, yes, I forgot to mention, you're a female fish--and then, the horror!...

More before less.(molecular evolution of parasite genes)(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... Parasites typically don't have as many genes as their free-living relatives do. Life is simple because their hosts do the hard work of moving about, getting food, and avoiding predators. Consider the nematodes (aka roundworms). The common...

The power of ten.(wild dogs' optimal pack number)
December 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Packs of African wild dogs run down impalas and other fleet-footed prey for a living. But that lifestyle is energetically precarious: running takes a lot of work, and food must be divvied among pack members....

Andean high life.(Puca Glacier)(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... The Puca Glacier, perched above 16,000 feet in the Peruvian Andes, is retreating by seventy feet per year. Its withdrawal is exposing some of the driest, most barren terrain on Earth for the first time in at least 700 years. The soil, nearly...

Copepods cope with climate change.(THE WARMING EARTH)(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... A small zooplankton species, the copepod Ca/anus finmarchicus, is the dietary mainstay of many economically valuable fishes in the North Atlantic Ocean. Climate change is shifting the region's cool waters northward, and some of the copepods...

Picky mouse club.(brush mice on choosing cest sites)(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... Some mice shop for a new home much the way people do: they repeatedly visit several nest sites before deciding on one. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] After being weaned, brush mice (Peromyscus boylii), which live throughout western North...

Holy ground.(Greek temples and the influence of soil)(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] To honor their gods and goddesses, ancient Greeks often poured blood or wine on the ground as offerings. Now a new study suggests that the soil itself might have had a prominent role in Greek worship, strongly...

Sticky fingers: fingerprints are one of the oldest biometric measures of identity. What do we actually know about them?(LIFE ZONE)
December 1, 2008... In 1905, two brothers, Alfred and Albert Stratton, were found guilty of murdering a shopkeeper and his wife in Deptford, a town outside London. The evidence? A thumbprint at the scene of the crime. The brothers were hanged. The Stratton...

The art of bones: British artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, who sparked dinosaur mania in the nineteenth century, still influences how natural history museums represent prehistoric life today.
December 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Reconstructed skeletons of dinosaurs and life-size models of how they may once have appeared are now commonplace. But until the British artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins created such things in the second half of the...

Dark energy crisis: a new NASA mission may shed light on dark energy, but at the cost of Einstein's theory of general relativity.(National Aeronautics and Space Administration)
December 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Einstein's famously called it "his greatest blunder." In 1917, to reconcile his equations for general relativity with the then-prevailing notion of a static universe, he added a fudge factor, later named the...

Rain bird: dispersing seeds and drawing tourists, a sought-after bird helps preserve a forest in Honduras.(cotinga)
December 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I sense the rain first as a breath of air that brushes the leaves at the top of the forest. The breeze strengthens, lifting branch tips in a gentle dance and then, as a distant roar grows louder, snapping them off...

For the Coffee Table.(Natural Fashion: Tribal Decoration from Africa)(Brief article)(Book review)
December 1, 2008... Natural Fashion: Tribal Decoration from Africa by Hans Silvester Thames & Hudson, 2008: $45.00 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Young boys and girls of the Surma and Mursi tribes, in the Omo Valley at the juncture of Ethiopia, Kenya,...

Disappearing World: 101 of the Earth's Most Extraordinary and Endangered Places.(Book review)
December 1, 2008... Disappearing World: 101 of the Earth's Most Extraordinary and Endangered Places by Alonzo C. Addison Collins, 2008; $34.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It is impossible to leaf through this lavishly illustrated album of selected...

Owls of North America.(Brief article)(Book review)
December 1, 2008... Owls of North America by Frances Backhouse Firefly Books, 2008; $34.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Scientifically speaking, owls are members of the order Strigiformes, which takes its name from the Latin word for witch. The...

Egypt's Sunken Treasures.(Brief article)(Book review)
December 1, 2008... Egypt's Sunken Treasures edited by Franck Goddio with David Fabre; photography by Christoph Gerigk Presetel, 2008; $49.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Sometime in the eighth century A.D. a series of great earthquakes and floods...

A Fragile Balance: The Extraordinary Story of Australian Marsupials.(Book review)
December 1, 2008... A Fragile Balance: The Extraordinary Story of Australian Marsupials by Christopher Dickman; illustrated by Rosemary Woodford Ganf University of Chicago Press, 2007; $65.00 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This is one of those rare...

Feathered Dinosaurs: The Origin of Birds.(Brief article)(Book review)
December 1, 2008... Feathered Dinosaurs: The Origin of Birds by John Long and Peter Schouten Oxford University Press, 2008; $39.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Had humans lived in the Late Cretaceous epoch, about 75 million years ago, they might have...

Skylog.(December schedule of astronomical sightings)(Calendar)
December 1, 2008... On December 5 Mars arrives at conjunction with the Sun (whenever the two conjoin, Mars is behind the Sun from our viewpoint--only Mercury and Venus can also pass in front of the Sun). The Red Planet got increasingly lost in the solar glare...

Germ fanfare: new OLogy toy line from AMNH wins Dr. Toy awards.(Germ Soap Kit)
December 1, 2008... It's not often that one earns bragging rights for spreading germs, but AMNH has done just that--by taking two top toy awards for fun kits in which children make glycerine-soap models of bacteria and viruses to learn about good microbes (think...

A stone diary.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)
December 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Visitors entering the Museum's 77th Street Grand Gallery may find themselves doing a double-take at what appears to be a cross-section of a huge creme de menthe parfait. But the recently installed polished jade slab...

Local forecast or long-term trend?(exhibitions about climate change and global warming)(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... Eavesdrop on a typical conversation about the weather these days, and you're likely to hear someone idly attribute an unseasonably warm winter or the latest severe flood to "global warming" or "climate change." It's an understandable impulse,...

At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History.(exhibitions)
December 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] EXHIBITIONS Climate Change: The Threat to Life and A New Energy Future Through August 16, 2009 This timely exhibition explores the science, history, and impact of climate change on a global scale,...

Killer snowballs.(McMurdo killer whale behavior and genetics)
December 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Pamplona has the Running of the Bulls, but McMurdo Sound, in the southern Ross Sea, Antarctica, has something even more spectacular: the Stampeding of the Orcas. Each summer (December through February) an icebreaker...