Natural History articles from February 2004

Natural History archives from February 2004

A garden of benthic delights.(The Natural Moment; filmmaker Stephen Low films in Gulf of Mexico)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... An underwater rumble strip of volcanic vents, continually repaved with flesh magma, win& around the Earth for some 40,000 miles, creating a rough roadway along the boundaries of the planet-wide system of oceanic plates. Among the vents,...

Nasty, brutish, and short.(Up Front)
February 1, 2004... Those who dig into the human past are finding hard knocks and dirty little secrets that give new substance to Thomas Hobbes's famous description of life (quoted in my title, from Leviathan). Fossils of Java man and Peking man (a.k.a. Homo...

Talking trash.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2004... The picture of the dead albatross in Charles Moore's article ["Trashed," 11/03] has affected me beyond description. If there ever was a need to do something about our wasteful lifestyles, now is the time. We have given lip service to recycling,...

A better mouse trap?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2004... I was astounded to read in "Desert Dreams" [11/03] that the author, Michael A. Mares, used kill traps to find rare and elusive salt-pan mammals. He would do well to add his name to the list of reasons that these mammals may soon become extinct....

Nursing wounds.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2004... As Terrie M. Williams reports in her article "Sunbathing Seals of Antarctica" [10/03], Antarctic seals apparently appreciate the causal connection between warmth and healing. That same connection has taken centuries to be applied systematically...

Ties that bind.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2004... In his "Biomechanics" column on the mutable collagenous tissue (MCT) of sea cucumbers and other echinoderms ["Catch and Release," 11/03], Adam Summers remarks that the molecules thought to be responsible for rapidly changing the mechanical...

Cramped quarters.(Samplings; study of zoo animal behavior)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Anyone who visits a zoo has witnessed the sad sight of animals pacing back and forth. According to Ros E. Clubb and Georgia J. Mason, animal behaviorists at the University of Oxford, this effect is linked to an animal's propensity to roam...

Deep down under.(Samplings; reservoirs of nitrogen discovered beneath western United States)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Hydrologists have recently discovered that immense reservoirs of nitrogen have been accumulating for millennia beneath the western deserts of the United States. Michelle A. Walvoord of the U.S. Geological Survey in Lakewood, Colorado, and her...

Death by gluttony.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Next time you spot a mosquito flying away engorged with blood from your arm, cheer up: she may soon pay the ultimate price for her ill-gotten gains. New research by Bernard D. Roitberg, a behavioral ecologist, and his colleagues at Simon Fraser...

Save a wolf, save a tree.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Something is amiss in the cottonwood groves of Yellowstone National Park. Seedlings grow in abundance on the riverbanks, along with a fair number of old trees. But young trees are nowhere in sight. Robert L. Beschta, a forester at Oregon State...

The sunspot chronicles.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... All those splendid auroras streaking across the sky at mid to high latitudes lately signal that the Sun has been magnetically hyperactive, breaking out in a bad case of sunspots [see "Our Stormy Sun," by Charles Liu, page 64]. But how often...

Watered-down fish.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Aquaculture has brought down the price of salmon considerably, but it's also raised concerns. An estimated 2 million farm-raised salmon escape each year in the North Atlantic alone. The worry has been that farm fish strains may have lost...

Frog find.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis is one weird-looking frog. Known from a single female collected in 2000 near a cardamom plantation in India, the species has a round body nearly three inches long, unusually short limbs, very small eyes, and a small...

"You gotta have skin".(Samplings)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... For life to develop on Earth, two components had to get together: chains of nucleic acids (RNA), and membranes that could form a protective cell boundary around the nucleic acids. There needed to be a kind of skin--"the thing that if you've got...

Swift lift.(Samplings; central Andes)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Why are the central Andes so high, and how did they get that way so quickly? Geologists Simon Lamb of the University of Oxford and Paul Davis of the University of California, Los Angeles, think they have the explanation. It's the lack of...

Cornshine.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2004... Here's a conundrum for you: The bone chemistry of Amerindian remains makes clear that maize (the vegetable most Americans call corn) became a dietary staple in the New World no earlier than 3,000 years ago in some areas and as recently as 500...

Great masses from little ripples grew: the organization of matter into superclusters and voids began with subatomic variations in density during the earliest moments after the big bang.(Universe)
February 1, 2004... Of the many unknowns that perturb the modern cosmologist, the absence of a theory that seamlessly blends quantum mechanics and general relativity nags the most. Those two streams of thought--the study of the very small and of the very...

The wild man of Samoa: a tale from the graveyard of strangers.(Field Notes)
February 1, 2004... This past summer an e-mail message reached my office in Honolulu from a friend in Pago Pago, on Tutuila Island, American Samoa. A relentless rainstorm, he informed me, had washed out the pile of stones that marked Malua's grave. He thought I'd...

Like water off a beetle's back: an African insect could show how to wring moisture from the fog--and let the sun shine on cloudy airports.(Biomechanics)
February 1, 2004... Follow the southwestern coast of Africa north from Cape Horn toward Namibia's gemstone-rich Skeleton Coast, and you come to the Namib Desert. Home to the world's highest sand dunes, the Namib is also a cornucopia of biomechanical marvels: a...

Blossoms of ice: these delicate "flowers" sprout only in winter, but you won't find them catalogued in any herbal.(Excerpt)
February 1, 2004... Scientific discoveries don't always burst into bloom overnight, accompanied by shouts of "eureka!" Some take years to crystallize in one's slumbering consciousness, before they finally flower. Passing through a rich hardwood bottomland one cold...

Fighting HIV with HIV: in its zeal to keep competing viruses out of a cell it controls, the AIDS virus may have exposed its own vulnerability.(Excerpt)
February 1, 2004... The acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, AIDS, has proved a challenging foe for medicine since it first became widely known almost a quarter century ago. Unlike most viral diseases, AIDS attacks more by stealth and by subverting the human immune...

Something fishy in the nest: in many fish species, dad does the caregiving. But some sneaky bluegill males have ways of avoiding the responsibilities of fatherhood.(Excerpt)
February 1, 2004... Questions of fatherhood are a staple of dramatic conflict, whether in Greek tragedy, soap opera, or divorce court. In the natural world, too, conflicts brought on by uncertain paternity have opened up rich veins of phenomena for scientific...

Why must the poor be sick? Paul Farmer's exhortations sound familiar, and hopelessly idealistic, until you realize they are backed up by evidence and practical action.(Book Review)
February 1, 2004... Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor by Paul Farmer University of California Press, 2003; $27.50 Paul Farmer is a superb physician, a penetrating anthropologist, and a prophet of social justice. He...

A Brand-New Bird: How Two Amateur Scientists Created the First Genetically Engineered Animal.(Book Review)
February 1, 2004... by Tim Birkhead Basic Books, 2003; $26.00 Canary yellow, strange to relate, is not the natural color of canaries. In its native habitat, the Canary Islands, the bird is a nondescript greenish songster with a melodious warble. First brought...

Surviving the Extremes: a Doctor's Journey to the Limits of Human Endurance.(Book Review)
February 1, 2004... by Kenneth Kamler Saint Martin's Press, 2004; $24.95 For me, and I imagine for most readers of this magazine, just about the only circumstances that require survival skills are those awful weeks in the year when public radio stations hold...

The Land That Never Was: Sir Gregor MacGregor and the Most Audacious Fraud in History.(Book Review)
February 1, 2004... by David Sinclair Da Capo Press, 2004; $23.00 Before there was a bridge for sale in Brooklyn, there was land for the gullible in Poyais. Poyais? Ah... yes, that new republic on the Caribbean coast of Central America, the talk of the town....

Clicks are for kids.(nature.net)
February 1, 2004... Hundreds of interactive science Web sites for young people are just a click away via the Internet, in disciplines from astronomy to zoology. Finding good ones, though, on topics that really interest children, isn't easy. I wasted a lot of time...

Our stormy sun: what do refrigerator magnets, northern lights, and solar flares have in common?(Out There)
February 1, 2004... Late last year a huge solar flare erupted from a massive sunspot, with a blast of X rays so intense that detectors aboard the Earth-orbiting Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) went off scale for more than eleven minutes....

The sky in February.
February 1, 2004... Mercury is unfavorably placed this month for observers in midnorthern latitudes. It is a "morning star" in February, rising in the southeastern part of the sky an hour before the Sun as the month begins. By the 13th, though, it rises only half...

Living with nature: everyday actions to sustain our planet.(At the museum: American Museum of Natural History)
February 1, 2004... We spoke with Dr. Eleanor Sterling, Director of the American Museum of Natural History's Center for Biodiversity and Conservation (CBC), about Living with Nature, the upcoming special program celebrating the CBC' s tenth anniversary. Why...

Exploratorium/AMNH: play and learn.(At the museum: American Museum of Natural History)
February 1, 2004... The American Museum of Natural History is pleased to announce a special exhibition that will add an exciting and creative dimension to the way visitors learn science at the Museum. Opening January 31,2004, Exploratorium/AMNH will feature a...

Museum events: American Museum of Natural History.(Calendar)
February 1, 2004... 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,...