Natural History articles from July 2007

Natural History archives from July 2007

Laid-back in the outback.(The Natural Moment)(Brief article)(Photograph)
July 1, 2007... Dry, scorching days of summer call for long hours of lounging on both sides of noon. And in parts of central Australia, where the average rainfall is less than nine inches a year, warm-blooded animals must heed that call. Photographer Mitsuaki...

Long ago and far away.(Up Front)(Timbuktu)
July 1, 2007... If you had to name a town, a landscape, a place so remote that getting there would take you to the ends of the earth, few would quarrel if you answered, "Timbuktu." To many people, at least in the West, Timbuktu is the stuff of legend, far more...

Thanking the stars.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
July 1, 2007... I am a single mother and as such, I often struggle with daily life in a big city where, as Langston Hughes once said, a nickel costs a dime. But tonight, for just a few minutes while I read Neil deGrasse Tyson's "The Cosmic Perspective" (4/07),...

Smelting gun.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... The abundance of pre-Columbian bronze, copper, and silver artifacts in Peru indicates that the region was a center for metallurgy in the New World. But archaeologists have long been puzzled because they have never found remnants of smelting...

Escape from the Vortex.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... Black holes draw matter in, but they can also send a little of it flying out through space, borne on winds of hot gas that develop when matter is superheated by the black hole's own radiation. Some astronomers have proposed that those winds...

In the swing of things.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... Orangutans are the heaviest of all chiefly arboreal animals: males can weigh 200 pounds. But bulkiness can hinder a tree dweller, particularly when it has to cross from tree to tree; many branches are too thin and flexible to support an...

Phytoplankton to the rescue?(SAMPLINGS: THE WARMING EARTH)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... The Southern Ocean, surrounding Antarctica, is rich in nutrients, yet relatively little phytoplankton lives there. That's largely because the seawater is poor in dissolved iron, an element essential for phytoplankton growth. So some...

Past gas.(SAMPLINGS: THE WARMING EARTH)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... People are to blame for much of today's climate change, but when the Earth warmed 55 million years ago, it wasn't our fault. At the time, a massive release of greenhouse gases caused global temperatures to rise more than nine Fahrenheit degrees...

Neptune's farms.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... Most of the terrestrial plants and animals farmed today were domesticated between 11,000 and 2,000 years ago; after that, domestication rates stagnated until the twentieth century. Yet since around 1900, according to a new analysis,...

Humongous fungus (no longer among us).(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... What's twenty feet tall and dines on detritus? Prototaxites fossils reminiscent of branchless tree trunks have been unearthed all over the world. In their day--between 420 million and 350 million years ago--they were by far the biggest things...

Talk is toxic.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... When your cell phone dies or succumbs to obsolescence, it probably follows the path of most other unwanted electronics: it becomes e-waste and heads for a landfill. After that, it's only a matter of time before its contents, which include toxic...

A human cell in sheep's clothing: biologists in Nevada are gambling that sheep can grow spare body parts for people.(LIFE ZONE)
July 1, 2007... I'm about to see something odd. I'm about to see the creation of a sheep with a partly human liver. I'm visiting the University of Nevada at its campus in Reno--a town with all the vice of Vegas but none of the charm. I've come to take...

Cold squirts: Antarctic scallops have lighter shells, less muscle mass, and more resilient hinge rubber than their tropical cousins.(BIOMECHANICS)
July 1, 2007... Squids and octopuses are well known for their jet-propelled locomotion, scooting along by squirting water out of their mantles. But bivalves? Not many people have seen the ungainly, clapping flight of the scallop, but its motion is likewise...

Space, time, and Timbuktu: the legendary city on the Sahara's southern fringe can look back on a history of commercial, intellectual, and religious wealth. Today as in the past, however, political power eludes it.
July 1, 2007... The Well of Buktu, so-called, is a paltry thing, about three feet across and not much deeper, and contains no water at all. A goatskin bag hangs over the opening, suspended from three slender wooden poles poked into the ground, a show-and-tell...

How now, little cow? The vaquita, the world's smallest porpoise, lives only in the northern Gulf of California. It often drowns in fishing nets as bycatch, and just 200 individuals remain. Can the species survive?
July 1, 2007... Vaquita!" Two on, duty and three dozing off-duty observers, spring to attention on the flying bride of our research vessel under the suffocating heat of the Mexican sun. The shouting observer checks the readings on her binoculars, but she can...

And the reading is easy.(BOOKSHELF: AT THE BEACH)(Book review)
July 1, 2007... Summer has come around again (at least for readers north of the equator), and it's time to catch up on those books that have been piling up by the bedside. In anticipation of my vacation, I have relocated the accumulated pile to a spot near the...

The sky in July and August.
July 1, 2007... Mercury gradually emerges into view as a morning object in July. Beginning around the 14th, look for it with binoculars low in the east-northeast sky about thirty or forty minutes before sunrise. From the 15th through the 28th, the planet rises...

New jewel in our crown.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)(stibnite)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... One can only imagine the state of mind of the antimony miners in the Jiangxi Province of southeastern China as they carefully unearthed the spectacular stibnite now on view in the Museum's Grand Gallery, sparing it from destruction. The...

One step beyond.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)(Brief article)(Calendar)
July 1, 2007... This is definitely not your parents'--or even your grandparents'-American Bandstand! One Step Beyond is a spectacular new multimedia program, teeming with live performances and world-class DJs and VJs spinning the latest music and projecting...

Frog spotting: www.amnh.org.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... Frogs may be elusive in the wild, but that's part of why they've thrived for more than 200 million years. The return of the delightful exhibition Frogs: A Chorus of Colors, with more than 200 frogs of more than 20 species spending their summer...

Beverly Heimberg: assistant director Volunteer Services Department.(PEOPLE AT THE AMNH)(Brief article)
July 1, 2007... Beverly Heimberg oversees the more than 1,000 volunteers who contribute some 120,000 hours of invaluable service to the Museum every year, entering data, doing library searches for curators, staffing information desks, serving as tour guides...

Museum events: American Museum of Natural History.(Calendar)
July 1, 2007... EXHIBITIONS Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns, and Mermaids Through January 6, 2008 Mythic Creatures traces the origins of legendary beings of land, sea, and air. Cultural artifacts bring to light surprising similarities--and...