Natural History articles from July 2001

Natural History archives from July 2001

The Dark Side of the Sun.(health risks related to overexposure to sun)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... At some point in the recent history of our species, people of European descent began to cultivate the suntanned look. (Notions of physical beauty are often tied to symbols of prosperity and leisure. A suntan--which once signaled long hours of...

LETTERS.(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2001... Theories of Relativity Regarding Jared Diamond's interesting article "Deaths of Languages" ("Nature's Infinite Book," 4/01): the Crimean word marzus (wedding) sounds Turkic to me. And indeed, a phrase for "wedding" in modern Turkish is...

Following the Silver Trail.(Alaska highways)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... Vestiges of mining towns line a route into the central Yukon. Canada's northwesternmost territory, the Yukon, has just two major highways--the Alaska Highway, which runs east to west across the southern part of the region, and the Klondike...

HABITATS.(Alaska's Klondike territory)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... White spruce forest also includes paper birch and balsam poplar. The shrub layer has western rose, buffaloberry, northern comandra, and shrubby cinquefoil, while the ground is carpeted with both soft mosses and crunchy reindeer moss (actually a...

Anatomy of a Ritual.(ingestion of hallucinogens via enema)
July 1, 2001... In several New World cultures, the enema was the technique of choice for taking hallucinogenic drugs. The practice was based on sound physiological principles. Ritual intake of alcohol and hallucinogens by enema used to be widespread among...

By Any Other Name.(terminology of sciences)
July 1, 2001... When it comes to plain speaking, astrophysicists claim bragging rights. The chief merit of language is clearness, and we know that nothing detracts so much from this as do unfamiliar terms. --Galen (A.D. 129-ca. 216) Do you know...

Blue Light Specials.(Neptune and Uranus)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... Uranus and Neptune are ready for their close-ups--again. In January 1986, Voyager 2 flew near Uranus and found it to be big and blue and featureless. In August 1989, Voyager 2 swept past Neptune and found it to be big and blue and...

THE SKY IN JULY AND AUGUST.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... Mercury is above the east-northeastern horizon at dawn during the first weeks in July. On the 9th, it will reach its greatest western elongation from the Sun, rising about one and a half hours before sunrise. Shining at magnitude +0.5, the...

Chemical Talk.(methods of communication among insects)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... New findings expand our understanding of communication in the animal kingdom. BEE BOUQUET When a bumblebee finds a nectar-rich flower, it tags the blossom with a scent mark, identifying the flower as being worth a return visit. Since...

Mussel-Bound Crab.(pea crab)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... A naturalist plays hide-and-seek with a tiny crustacean. My search for the elusive pea crab began almost a year ago on the rocky coast of northern California. It was a matter of simple curiosity at first--chasing down yet another...

Whispers in the Canyon.(blue-throated hummingbird of Arizona)
July 1, 2001... Singing softly, Arizona's blue-throated hummingbirds go on the record. In the mountains of southern Arizona, a creek bubbles down a wooded canyon, heading to the desert a mile below. Painted redstarts hop along the water's edge calling to...

FEELING the BURN.(increased exposure to UV rays resulting from thinning of ozone layer)
July 1, 2001... Can plants and animals (including human beings) cope with increased exposure to the sun's ultraviolet rays? A shaft of sunlight is a double-edged sword. The sun powers life on earth, but its ultraviolet radiation--capable of bending DNA,...

BUTTERFLY BUFFET.(sources of nutrition for butterflies)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... Besides sipping flower nectar, these flighty insects dine on sweat, tears, and slug slime. Most people associate butterflies with flowers. Flight requires a great expenditure of energy, and these insects get most of the calories they need...

The CONDOR and the BULL.(ritual use of animals in Peruvian holiday)
July 1, 2001... An Andean spectacle is less--and more--than meets the eye. "We did not get the pay we were promised," complains Jose Quispe. He and twenty other men endured two weeks without shelter in the cold, arid Peruvian plateau, subsisting on meager...

The Proof Is in the Plumage.(evidence for existence of feathered dinosaurs)
July 1, 2001... A new fossil from northeastern China's Liaoning Province offers the best evidence yet of feathered dinosaurs. Over the past ten years, discoveries from China's Liaoning Province have been giving us rare glimpses of a fossil community near...

Got Silk?(strength of spider silk)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... Whether catching a fly or a bullet, few materials can match the toughness of silk. In 1887 an obscure California medical journal published a frontier physician's observations on the remarkable properties of silk. The doctor, George...

Young Naturalist Awards 2001.(student contest sponsored by American Museum of Natural History)
July 1, 2001... For the American Museum of Natural History's fourth annual Young Naturalist Awards, students in grades 7 through 12 were invited to embark on an expedition that focused on a topic in biology, earth science, or astronomy and to document their...

The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples.(Review)
July 1, 2001... The Eternal Frontier: An Ecological History of North America and Its Peoples, by Tim Flannery (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2001; $27.50) What if we returned not just mustangs and burros but also elephants and lions to our continent's wilds? ...

Bad Astronomy.(Web site devoted to debunking science myths)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... It's a sobering experience to examine common myths that are perpetuated as scientific fact by supposedly educated people. With so much bad science floating about, how is the average person to know what's true and what's not? A few crusaders...

Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics.(Review)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... Encyclopedia of Astronomy and Astrophysics edited by Paul Murdin (Nature Publishing Group/Institute of Physics Publishing, 4 vols., 2001; $650) A single entry in this encyclopedia concentrates more physics into a few paragraphs than the...

Handbook of the Birds of the World, vol. 6: Mousebirds to Hornbills.(Review)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... Handbook of the Birds of the World, vol. 6: Mousebirds to Hornbills, edited by Josep del Hoyo, Andrew Elliott, and Jordi Sargatal (Lynx Edicions/Bird Life International, 2001; $185) This gorgeous sixth volume in a projected twelve-volume,...

Encyclopedia of Biodiversity.(Review)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... Encyclopedia of Biodiversity, edited by Simon Asher Levin (Academic Press, 5 vols., 2001; $695) The "story of a complex, self-organizing system--the biosphere--whose pieces can be examined individually, but cannot be understood outside the...

The Oxford Companion to the Earth.(Review)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... The Oxford Companion to the Earth, edited by Paul L. Hancock and Brian J. Skinner (Oxford University Press, 2000; $60) Concise discussions of our planet's myriad habitats--from deserts and wetlands to mountains, caves, glaciers, and coral...

Spray It Again.(pelican behavior)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... Pelicans are well known for the elastic pouches in their tower jaws that sometimes serve as scoops for capturing fish and at other times become three-gallon buckets from which their young feed on regurgitated chowder. Despite this massive...

Slow & Barefoot.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2001... How to walk on the wild side My mother was the slowest kind of person. When my two sisters got divorced (both at about the same time), they got into the habit of walking for miles around our old home place in Georgia for exercise. Momma...