Natural History articles from July 2004

Natural History archives from July 2004

Come on in, the water's fine.(The Natural Moment)(gentoo penguins' habitat)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2004... On sunny afternoons in the Falkland Islands, the South Atlantic Ocean turns into a roller coaster for gentoo penguins (Pygoscelis papua), as they ride the breakers home from a day of diving. For his photograph, Kevin Schafer camped out for a...

The whole world is watching.(Up Front)(Editorial)
July 1, 2004... What does Natural History have to do with the Olympics? Plenty. The modern Games, which return to Athens this August 13 for the first time in more than a century, have always made explicit appeal to their classical antecedents. And, in fact, a...

Egyptian riddles.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2004... Mary Knight ("Egypt's Young and Restless," 5/04) fails to mention in her bland article that Egypt gets $2 billion a year in aid from the United States. Where has that money gone? To a bloated military and security apparatus that enforces the...

Home alone.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2004... In his article "No Place to Call Home" (4/04), Takeyuki Tsuda brought out the painful realities of Japanese who choose to leave "home." Return migrants are distinguished from the native born to the point that even their names must be written in...

Here's mud in your eye.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2004... A toast to Douglas Fox's article on fiddler crabs ("Mud's Eye View," 4/04). Although I am a lepidopterist, not a visual ecologist, I am often asked just what colors in flowers best attract butterflies. On testing, most butterflies turn out to...

Science and politics.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2004... Peter Brown's unseemly wanderings in the political thicket of this election year was the real "unwelcome distraction" of his editorial ("Unwelcome Distraction," 6/04). The "debasement of the habits of mind on which scientific inquiry is...

Caustic comfort.(Samplings)(microorganisms in extreme caustic environment)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2004... Compared with a great many microorganisms, people live in fairly boring conditions. But imagine taking a turn as a hyperthermophile basking in an undersea thermal vent, or swapping spots with an acidophile lounging in the equivalent of battery...

Raising mountains.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2004... Even in the Himalaya, not all mountains are created equal. The Higher Himalaya, which form the northern part of the range, include the world's tallest peaks--Mount Everest, for instance, exceeds 29,000 feet. In contrast, the Lower Himalaya, to...

C[O.sub.2]: still guilty as charged.(Samplings)
July 1, 2004... In 1845 a forward-thinking French chemist and mining engineer named Jacques Joseph Ebelmen set forth in print the concept that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could bring about global warming. Yet today, after a century...

Trading floor.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2004... There's more going on in a chicken house than just the raising of chickens. Anne O. Summers and Sobhan Nandi, both microbiologists at the University of Georgia in Athens, and their colleagues decided to check out the bacterial residents of the...

As the whirl turns.(Samplings)(logarithmic spirals around poles of Mars)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2004... Liquid water apparently vanished long ago from the surface of Mars, but the planet still has lots of other water locked up in the ice at its poles. Oddly, that ice is riddled with a number of huge chasms that collectively form logarithmic...

Stuffed.(Samplings)(cardinalfish parenting)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2004... Few species of fish take care of their young, but the dedication among the ones that do can reach heroic levels. Consider the cardinalfish. Once the male has fertilized a clutch of eggs, he carries them in his mouth for one to two weeks, until...

The first Garfield.(Samplings)(domestication of cats )(Brief Article)
July 1, 2004... With the beginnings of farming in the Middle East and surrounding regions some 11,000 years ago came the need to store grain in quantity. With stored grain came the rodent, and with the rodent, most likely, came the domesticated cat. Sure...

Work incentive.(Samplings)(dominant behavior of paper wasps)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2004... Some bosses use pep talks to motivate their workers; others use threats. Wasps--at least paper wasps--apparently take a middle path. Native to North America, the paper wasp Polistes fuscatus lives in colonies of one or two queens, and...

Risk and reward.(Samplings)(research on physiological adaptations of plant organs to carry photosynthesis and defense)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2004... As plants have evolved, they have had to pick a lifestyle and marshal their resources accordingly: to grow woody or not, to live as annuals or perennials, to adapt to wet climates or dry. Another forced choice has been even more...

Vagabonds in space: asteroids, comets, and moons, oh my!(Universe)
July 1, 2004... For many centuries the inventory of our celestial neighborhood was quite stable. It included the Sun, the stars, the planets, a handful of planetary moons, and the comets. Even the addition of a planet or two to the roster didn't change the...

Knockout punch: a boxer who could jab like a mantis shrimp could win every match with a single blow.(Biomechanics)
July 1, 2004... A three-inch-wide reef crab, straying near the entrance of a mantis shrimp's burrow, has made its last mistake. The mantis shrimp comes boiling out of its home, its colorful, paddle-like appendages signaling hostile intent. Two arms, adapted...

Venomous lizards of the desert: studies of Gila monsters and beaded lizards have uncovered an array of surprising characteristics, from odd fighting rituals, to extreme energy efficiency, to a venom useful in treating diabetes.
July 1, 2004... In June 1986 my brother Jon and I pulled out of Tucson for a road trip to Chamela, Jalisco, in the heart of Mexico's searingly hot tropical dry forest. It was no tourist trip. I was a graduate student, eager to begin the first intensive field...

A most dangerous game.
July 1, 2004... chimera 1 a cap : a fire-breathing she-monster in Greek mythology having a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail b : an imaginary monster compounded of incongruous parts 2 : an illusion or fabrication of the mind... 3 : an...

The best of all possible worlds: the anthropic approach to cosmology asks, what makes the universe compatible with intelligent life? Was it just the luck of the draw?
July 1, 2004... Cogito ergo sum," wrote Rene Descartes in 1641: "I think, therefore I am." Anyone who has a thought, in other words, must actually exist--quite a relief for those who had their doubts. Three and a half centuries later scientists and...

Delta delights: glacial meltwater, tides, winds, and waves conspire to mold an Alaskan coastline.(This Land)
July 1, 2004... Two hundred fifty miles east of Anchorage, the glacier-fed waters of the Copper River spread across a fifty-mile-wide delta before emptying into the Gulf of Alaska. The surrounding landscape is alluvial fan and low-lying wetlands, which extend...

Dad's not lost: but his steadfast refusal to ask for directions--despite the jokes--need not be explained as an evolutionary trait of the human male.(Why Men Won't Ask for Directions: The Seductions of Sociobiology)(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Why Men Won't Ask for Directions: The Seductions of Sociobiology by Richard C. Francis Princeton University Press, 2003, $29.95 Here we are in our car We've been driving ever so far, We've been circling round and round, ...

Locust: the Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier.(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Locust: The Devastating Rise and Mysterious Disappearance of the Insect that Shaped the American Frontier by Jeffrey A. Lockwood Basic Books, 2004; $25.00 Among the more than 30 million items in the National Collections of Insects and...

Our Affair with El Nino.(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Our Affair with El Nino by S. George Philander Princeton University Press, 2004; $26.95 For centuries, residents of Peru's and coast have welcomed a warming of the normally frigid offshore waters, which comes every few years at...

Walden Pond: a History.(Book Review)
July 1, 2004... Walden Pond: a History by W. Barksdale Maynard Oxford University Press, 2004; $35.00 A sked to name the most important bodies of water in the U.S., an Australian schoolboy in the 1940s listed the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River--and...

Olympian sites.(nature.net)
July 1, 2004... The Olympic Games are rooted in something far more ancient than the first footraces held at Olympia in the eighth century B.C. Many people, it seems, are naturally drawn to physical superlatives--strongest, fastest, fittest. Independently,...

Animal magnetism.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2004... Robert Zimmerman's article "Deep Impressions" (3/04), regarding the interior of the Earth, got me wondering: How would a reversal of the Earth's magnetic field affect the behavior of birds and other animals with "natural compasses" in their...

Andromeda strain?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2004... As Charles Liu reported in his "Out There" column ("Gas Guzzlers," 4/04), the discovery of low-mass gas clouds around the Andromeda galaxy is truly groundbreaking work. Because Andromeda is so close to the Milky Way, however, it is exceedingly...

Amendment.(Letters)(Correction Notice)
July 1, 2004... Because of an editing error, the distance from the pitcher to home plate was misstated in Adam Summers's column "A Fly in the Curveball" (4/04). The prescribed distance--measured to the rear point of the plate--is sixty, feet, six inches. ...

Twinkle, twinkle, microlens: in trying to probe the dark matter surrounding, the Milky Way, astronomers have confirmed the identity of a nearby gravitational lens.(Out There)
July 1, 2004... In the early 1990s a team of astronomers led by Charles Alcock at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory began a pioneering, multiyear study of unseen matter in our Milky Way. They scanned millions of stars in the sky night after night,...

Young Naturalist Awards 2004: a research-based essay contest for students in grades 7-12 to promote participation and communication in science.(At the museum: American Museum of Natural History)
July 1, 2004... Each year American Museum of Natural History scientists endeavor to gain more knowledge about genetics, the accelerating expansion of the universe, plate tectonics that shapes Earth's surface, and the biodiversity of Earth's living things. They...

Museum events: American Museum of Natural History.(Calendar)
July 1, 2004... EXHIBITIONS Frogs: A Chorus of Colors Through October 3 This delightful exhibition of more than 200 live frogs from around the world explores the biology of these popular amphibians, their importance to ecosystems, and the threats...

The sky in July and August.
July 1, 2004... Mercury is tough to see in July. The period from the 6th until the 22nd offers observers the best chance to see the planet; binoculars make it much easier. On those evenings the planet shines above the west-northwestern horizon and sets about...

Birds of a feather ...(Endpaper)(Brief Article)
July 1, 2004... Right: they flock together. No question, animals live in groups, and people have been naming the groups for nearly as long as they've been naming the animals themselves: herd of elephants, pack of dogs, school of fish. That suggests a...