Natural History articles from July 2002

Natural History archives from July 2002

Hong Kong: the experience of a lifetime.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... ITS FLAG HAS CHANGED from the crossed blue-and-red stripes of Great Britain's Union Jack to the bauhinia, a five-petaled, magenta native flower, a symbol, at once gentle yet historic, of Hong Kong's unruffled transition from colony to...

This view of Steve. (Up Front).(Brief Article)(Obituary)
July 1, 2002... I write this editorial on the day after the untimely death of Natural History's longtime columnist Stephen Jay Gould. Phone calls and e-mails of condolence have been coming in to the magazine all day. Most are from readers who never met Steve...

Carrie Buck's daughter: a popular, quasi-scientific idea can be a powerful tool for injustice. (This View Of Life).
July 1, 2002... The Lord really put it on the line in his preface to that prototype of all prescription, the Ten Commandments: for I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and...

Spurred on to greater depths: large barbs on her hind legs turn a female cicada killer into a soil-moving machine. (Findings).
July 1, 2002... Its translucent orange wings buzzing, a giant wasp dragged a large green cicada along the ground toward a redbud tree. The hymenopteran's size, markings, and behavior easily identified it as a cicada killer. Only moments before, my wife had...

Making mountains out of molecules: with so many sperm in the sea, how does an urchin egg find Mr. Right? (In The Field).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Christiane Biermann stretched as far over the edge of the boat dock as she dared, reached into the cold water of Friday Harbor on San Juan Island in Washington State, and gently plucked a sea urchin from atop a submerged pipeline. Rolling over...

Hidden to all. (Samplings).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Nymphs of the West African assassin bug Paredocla commonly wear two disguises at the same time. The first is a full coat of dust; the second is a "backpack" of plant material and insect remains, held in place by specialty secreted threads....

Antsy home buyers. (Samplings).(effects of ant housing in rain forest plants)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... In many parts of the world, ants set up house in hollow (or excavatable) swellings that form on tree twigs or leaves. The trees and ants live in partnership: the ants attack and feed on insects that eat the trees' leaves, and in return, the...

Drooling is good. (Samplings).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Browsing herbivores often leave behind gifts in their saliva: substances that promote the regrowth of grass. Margareta Bergman, of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, wondered if woody plants, too, might be stimulated by saliva....

Experiment of the month. (Samplings).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... As one might expect, given its common name, the Australian jumping spider Portia fimbriata can leap. But somewhat surprisingly, this terrestrial arachnid doesn't mind swimming, either. Robert R. Jackson, of the University of Canterbury in New...

Guppy love. (Samplings).(relationship between color and mate selection)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... During courtship, female guppies are attracted to green, black, and especially orange spots on the flanks of mates. F. Helen Rodd, of the University of Toronto, and colleagues suggest that this color preference may have arisen from a taste for...

Cracking a mystery. (Samplings).(prehistoric nut crackers discovered)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Stones whose surfaces have shallow pits about the size of a quarter are often unearthed at archaeological sites, but nobody is sure what their function was. One Pleistocene site, located in the Middle East near the Jordan River, recently...

Museum events in July and August.
July 1, 2002... "BASEBALL AS AMERICA" Film 7/20 (Spanish-Language Baseball Weekend series): !Viva Cepeda! Mario Diaz's profile of slugger Orlando Cepeda (with English subtitles). Kaufmann Theater, 1:00-2:00 P.M. Panel 7/20 (in Spanish only): "Beisbol:...

On the Flyways: birds, butterflies, and plants have a sanctuary in Canada's smallest national park. (This Land).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Point Pelee, the tip of a ten-mile-long peninsula that juts south into Lake Erie, is the southernmost extent of mainland Canada (the truly southernmost bits of Canadian territory are nearby Pelee and Middle Islands). Together with the latitude,...

Cosmos on the table: an astrophysicist looks at chemistry's most famous chart. (Universe).
July 1, 2002... For many people, the periodic table is a forgotten oddity--a chart full of squares and cryptic letters last encountered on the wall in a high-school chemistry class. As a way of organizing the chemical behavior of all known and yet-to-be-known...

Psst! Sounds like a meteor: in the debate about whether or not meteors make noise, skeptics have had the upper hand until now. (Now Hear This).
July 1, 2002... In the wee hours of November 18, 2001, while meteor gazers sat outdoors enjoying a dazzling Leonid shower, a puzzled few sat indoors typing e-mails to NASA. "Do meteors make noise?" two perplexed viewers in North Carolina wanted to know....

Ground breakers of Patagonia: paleontologists rarely have the chance to document dinosaur behavior. In Argentina, the authors found rock-solid evidence of a sauropod's private life.(fossilized eggs and nests discovered)
July 1, 2002... On the day when the first of the herds arrived, the sun was hot. Dozens of huge beasts crossed a silt-laden river and trekked across the vast mudflats. From other directions, more of their kind made their stately way across dry streambeds onto...

Trading places: Muslim merchants from West Africa expand their markets to New York City.
July 1, 2002... Born in Niger, Issifi Mayaki learned his father's trade: selling indigenous African cloth, including antique textiles. With his impeccable French, he developed a clientele among French expatriates in the city of Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, and...

Reborn free: a new generation of Przewalski's horses inhabits the Mongolian steppe.(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... When I first saw the hills surrounding Ulaanbaatar in 1994, I experienced the oddest sense that I was coming home. I had arrived to assist Mongolian and Dutch conservation groups with the reintroduction of endangered Przewalski's horses (Equus...

A superorganism's fuzzy boundaries: the breathing termite mounds of southern Africa raise the question, Where does "animate" end and "inanimate" begin?
July 1, 2002... They look like the curlicue-topped mountain that overlooks the Grinch's Whoville: cones of soil and sand, up to thirty feet tall, topped with earthen spires pointing toward the noon sun. Common on the savannas of southern Africa, they are...

Sex is in the air: birds do it. Bees do it. Sometimes even gentle breezes do it. (Biomechanics).(plant pollination and reproduction)
July 1, 2002... The rugged volcanic cliffs of the Hawaiian Islands are the first obstacles encountered by the northeasterly tradewinds roaring across the Pacific Ocean. Stephen Weller, gingerly feeling his way down the steep face of a cliff, is glued to the...

Good morning, starshine: astronomers are closing in on cosmic dawn. (Out There).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... All of us have looked up at the clouds on an overcast morning, wondering when the skies will clear. Astronomers have long looked up, wondering a similar thing about the cosmos: when, after the birth of the universe, did things clear up,...

The sky in July and August. (Out There).(planetary observations)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Mercury shines at dawn just above the east-northeastern horizon, close by Saturn, as July begins. It plunges in the direction of the Sun several days later, reaching superior conjunction on the 20th. By July 31 it returns to the evening sky,...

"The whole Mass a Paradice": is religion an adaptation that enables groups to function as single units?
July 1, 2002... While many people have begun to worry about religious fanaticism and the violence it injects into the world, a biologist has decided to probe the evolution of religion. In doing so, David Sloan Wilson (no relation to entomologist Edward O....

Bookshelf.(Bibliography)
July 1, 2002... Catapults, trebuchets, and gunpowder, according to environmental historian Alfred W. Crosby in Throwing Fire: Projectile Technology Through History (Cambridge University Press), can be traced back to our ancestors' aptitude for hurling stones...

In search of another Earth. (nature.net).(space sciences web site)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... One of the enduring themes of science fiction is the discovery of a distant Earth-like planet. You know, a hospitable place where humanity could get a fresh start and perhaps even create a utopia. Such fantasies may soon have a grounding in...

Maybe it's Maybelline. (The Natural Moment).(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... Varied and wonderful, the successful life-forms of our planet are exquisitely shaped by evolutionary forces, honed by competition, physically fine-tuned to their environment, and so on. What, then, can one make of a creature that looks tike it...

No fly zone. (Endpaper).(water striders walk on water)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2002... One summer day, I spent several idle moments beside a still, shallow creek near my home, trying to goad the water striders there into flying. I had never seen them fly, but I believed they could do it. When fully grown, these insects all have...