Natural History articles from February 2009

Natural History archives from February 2009

Beetle juice.(THE NATURAL MOMENT)
February 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Before fireflies took up "flash-dancing," their ancestors likely relied on pheromones to find a partner, as many insects do. Light first appeared in the larvae--probably to advertise their toxicity and so warn away...

Hebrew lesson.(WORD EXCHANGE)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... A little more than a year ago, linguist Sarah Grey Thomason reported on a Native American language that is on the brink of disappearing ["At a Loss for Words," 12/07-1/08]. Subsequently, Allen Tobias, a writer and producer for print, film, and...

Honorable mention.(WORD EXCHANGE)(Letter to the editor)
February 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I was amazed that Druin Burch could write "Death Beds" [11/08] on puerperal, or childbed, fever without once mentioning the Hungarian physician Ignaz Semmelweis. In 1847 Semmelweis recognized independently that the...

Superorganisms.(nature.net)( www. eowilson.org )(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] I have a love/hate relationship with the ants, termites, bees, and wasps that organize into miniature societies. Their castes and capacity for intricate group behavior create alien worlds as enthralling as any in...

Mystery leaf.(SAMPLINGS)(leaves of sissoo trees )(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... When a high-ranking Mesopotamian woman named Pu-Abi was laid to rest in the Royal Cemetery of Ur some 4,500 years ago, she wore a spectacular headdress. The adornment, disinterred in the 1920s, in what is now Iraq, sports numerous gold leaves...

In or Out?(SAMPLINGS)(turtle's shell)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... Newly discovered fossils from New Mexico and China are providing contradictory clues to the origin of the turtle's shell. Two hypotheses have long competed as the evolutionary explanation. One proposes that ancestral turtles grew bony plates on...

DNA hopscotch.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Genes are normally inherited from parents, but they can also be inserted into a genome by viruses, plasmids, and other foreign agents--a phenomenon called horizontal transfer. Bacteria are promiscuous gene swappers,...

Queen of her castle.(SAMPLINGS)(fiddler-crab architecture)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... In fiddler-crab architecture, chimneys-cylindrical mud walls the crabs build around their burrow entrance--have various functions. Depending on the crab species, they hide the hideout from wandering males looking for lodging, shield mating...

Onboard computer.(SAMPLINGS)(Maung Nyan Win and Christina D. Smolke's cellular computer)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... Two chemists at the California Institute of Technology have engineered a cellular "computer" within the genetic material of living yeast cells. The cells can signal the presence or absence of two drugs in their environment--theophylline, a...

Red-hot cones.(SAMPLINGS)(western conifer-seed bug)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... The western conifer-seed bug, Leptoglossus occidentalis, has a peculiar world view. Objects stand out against the background as a result not of their color, but of their temperature--and the infrared radiation that comes with it. Trees, warmed...

Hog haven.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Think "burrow dweller," and the animal that springs to mind might be a gopher, maybe an owl--but certainly not a pig. Yet each night African warthogs hunker down inside burrows, usually choosing the abandoned digs of...

Let there be light.(THE WARMING EARTH)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... In thirty years of satellite surveillance, never has there been so little ice covering the Arctic Ocean as in the summer of 2007. (And 2008 was a close second.) Images show a 39 percent loss compared with the 1979-2000 average, a dramatic...

Rocky road.(SAMPLINGS)(mineral evolution)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Diamonds may be forever, but that's not true of most minerals. In fact, about two-thirds of the 4,300 known minerals on Earth today owe their existence to biological processes, and thus evolved fairly recently in...

Learning lizards.(NATURALIST AT LARGE)
February 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] Several years after my retirement from the University of Missouri--St. Louis, my wife, Hulda, and I settled on Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands. As a biologist, I developed an interest in the native fauna....

Seeing corals with the eye of reason: a rediscovered painting celebrates Charles Darwin's view of life.(Cover story)
February 1, 2009... The sweetest words to a scientist, paraphrase Isaac Asimov, may be not Eureka! I've found it! but "Hmm... that's funny. What's that doing there?" A historian of science often has the same experience: a bit of data pops up that just doesn't...

Flowers have no names: the revival of Hebrew as a living language after two thousand years was no miracle.
February 1, 2009... [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] To forge a national identity in the modern age, a group of people required a common history, with a common mythology and treasure trove of memories, culture, and literature; a traditional territory; and a national...

Could an ant colony read this book?(The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strageness of Insect Societies)(Book review)
February 1, 2009... The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strageness of Insect Societies By Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson W.W. Norton, 2008; $55.00 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In biology one can spend a lifetime studying an obscure...

Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War.(Book review)
February 1, 2009... Six-Legged Soldier: Using Insects as Weapons of War by Jeffrey A. Lockwood Oxford University Press, 2009; $27.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Humans, according to Aristotle, are the only political animals, but that hasn't stopped...

Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet.(Book review)
February 1, 2009... Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet by Oliver Morton Harper Collins, 2008; $28.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] All hail the chloroplasts! Oliver Morton loves those tiny organelles, and so should we, for our lives and our...

Rocket land: wildlife finds a haven where space shuttles fly.(THIS LAND)
February 1, 2009... Along Florida's eastern coastline a string of peninsulas and islands intercedes between the Atlantic Ocean and a succession of lagoons, estuaries, and waterways. Among those barrier lands is a fifty-mile-long peninsula that extends from the...

Salt marsh.(Habitats)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... Open water harbors fish and shrimp preyed upon by long-legged wading birds, belted kingfishers, and other avian species. Shorebirds find ample meals buried in mudflats: worms, crabs, clams, and snails. Vegetation must tolerate salt water to...

Palm and oak hammock.(Habitats)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... Hammocks are forested areas that occur on slightly raised land adjacent to salt marshes. Palm hammock, lower than the oak in elevation, with a wetter understory, is dominated by cabbage palmetto. Among the other trees are American elm, laurel...

Pine flatwoods.(Habitats)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... Slash pines dominate this flat terrain, with Chapman oak present where flatwoods transition to scrub. The understory includes fetterbush, gallberry holly, saw palmetto, wax myrtle, and other shrubs and herbs. If hiking here, watch out for...

Florida scrub.(Habitats)
February 1, 2009... Saw palmetto, wax myrtle, and bush-size myrtle oak and sand live oak dominate this drier, open habitat. Prickly vines of several species known as greenbriers abound.

Skylog.(stars of Gemini)
February 1, 2009... For those of us who live in the northern latitudes, Castor and Pollux, the brightest stars of Gemini--the Twins--are nearly overhead around 10 P.M. local time on February 1, and around 8 P.M. by month's end. The two stars were named in...

February nights out.(SKYLOG)(Brief article)(Calendar)
February 1, 2009... 2 The Moon waxes to first quarter at 6:13 P.M. eastern standard time (EST). 9 The Moon becomes full at 9:49 A.M. EST. Viewers in the far west can see it undergo a penumbral eclipse: at 6:38 A.M. Pacific Standard Time the Moon's upper rim...

Of poets and presidents: AMNH celebrates African-American heritage month.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)(Barack Obama and Langston Hughes)
February 1, 2009... When Barack Obama accepted the Democratic nomination last August, he recalled an event 45 years earlier on the Mall before the Lincoln Memorial, when people came "to hear a young preacher from Georgia." It was August 1963, and the Rev. Dr....

The changing poles.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)(North and South Poles)
February 1, 2009... In the late 1950s, the early 1930s, and the early 1880s, scientists and explorers pooled their efforts to understand the Earth at its edges, the Arctic and Antarctic, the North and South Poles. Next month, the fourth and largest such...

Small fish, big ocean.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)(Wild Ocean)(Movie review)(Brief article)
February 1, 2009... Every year, an amazing migration brings billions of sardines to the KwaZulu-Natal Coast of Africa, setting off a feeding frenzy among gannets, seals, dolphins, whales, sharks, and other fish. Wild Ocean, the exciting film now showing in the...

Save the date.(Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate From Planets to Plutoids: The New Solar System)(Brief article)(Calendar)
February 1, 2009... Tuesday, March 10 2009 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate From Planets to Plutoids: The New Solar System Pluto may be gone from the list of planets in our solar system, but it is not forgotten. Last summer in Oslo, the International...

At the museum: American Museum of Natural History.(Calendar)
February 1, 2009... 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, providing a context for today's...