Natural History articles from June 2001

Natural History archives from June 2001

Lifestyles of the Small and Obscure.
June 1, 2001... Science, a product of the human mind, has delivered repeated blows to the human ego. Copernicus removed us from the center of the solar system. Darwin displaced us from near-angelic status by sticking us on a quite ordinary, though relatively...

LETTERS.
June 1, 2001... O Pioneers! "The Scavenging of `Peking Man,'" by Noel T. Boaz and Russell L. Ciochon (3/01), was fascinating. However, Helmuth Zapfe's studies on cow bones fed to captive hyenas were not, as the article states, pioneering. William...

THE CHIMERIC SELF.(why women's bodies do not reject fetal tissue)
June 1, 2001... Cellular traffic between mother and fetus raises questions about the causes of autoimmune disease. One of the unsolved mysteries of immunology is why the body of a pregnant woman doesn't reject her fetus. After all, our immune system...

SNAKY FAKERY.(king snakes disguising as coral snakes)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2001... SNAKY FAKERY According to a theory of mimicry promulgated by English Victorian naturalist Henry Walter Bates, some harmless creatures warn away predators by evolving a strong resemblance to poisonous ones. Thus, several kinds of king snakes...

EAU DE GENES.(humans prefer perfumes that amplify natural body odor)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2001... EAU DE GENES Scientists and Lovers alike have long known that fragrance plays a role in sexual communication. Now, research done by Manfred Milinski and Claus Wedekind while they were at the Universitat Bern in Switzerland suggests some...

PLAY OR PREY.(chimpanzees observed to kill hyraxes for play)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2001... PLAY OR PREY If there's one fact emerging from all the field studies of chimpanzees, it is that chimp behavior and customs ("cultures") differ widely from place to place. Communities vary in their greeting behavior, use of tools, and food...

There Goes the Sun.(impressive total solar eclipse)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2001... Witnessing an eclipse today may not be the mystical experience it once was, but it's no less impressive. What you'll see," one of the cruise ship's official guides was saying, "you won't be able to describe to your family. People cry....

THE SKY IN JUNE.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2001... Mercury swings between Earth and the Sun this month, reaching inferior conjunction on June 16. This is not the best month for Mercury hunters, as their target will be cloaked by the blinding solar glare. Venus, by far the brightest of the...

How the West Was Swum.(giant fish fossils at Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park, Nevada)
June 1, 2001... At Nevada's Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park, fossils of giant marine predators point to the region's watery past. Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park sits on the western flank of Nevada's Shoshone Mountains, about 7,000 feet above sea level. Today...

The Lobster's Violin.(spiny lobster makes interesting sounds)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2001... It's enough to give a predator pause. Some lobsters and many eight-year-old violinists have a knack for making unpleasant noises; amazingly, crustaceans and humans use much the same mechanism to produce these awful sounds. The lobsters in...

Are Genes Real?(history of attitudes about genetic science)
June 1, 2001... Our understanding of heredity has been propelled by the oscillations of a conceptual-pendulum, arcing between the gene as a real entity and the gene as an abstraction. At the entrance to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco,...

THE BEAST WITH FIVE GENOMES.(most organisms contain multitudes of other organisms)
June 1, 2001... Inside a termite's gut lives Mixotricha paradoxa, a microscopic organism comprising hundreds of thousands of smaller life-forms. M. paradoxa is an extreme example of how all plants and animals--including ourselves--have evolved to contain...

SEX, ERRORS, AND THE GENOME.(errors in DNA replication)
June 1, 2001... Can human beings keep evolving? Or does the error-ridden process of reproduction prevent us from getting more complex than we already are? When extraterrestrial visitors land on Earth in their space saucer, they will be excited to see that...

BACTERIAL REVELATIONS.(bacteria genomics)
June 1, 2001... Genomics is providing a wealth of information about some of Earth's littlest, oldest, and most abundant living things. Pumping Metal How do certain bacteria subsist amid heavy metals, oils, and rank toxic sludge--substances that kill...

Born To Be Tame.(Asiatic houbara bustards)
June 1, 2001... To survive in the desert of Saudi Arabia, captive-bred bustards have to learn to go wild. Imagine you're living on your own for the first time. Away from the comforts of home and in a strange town, you're preoccupied with looking for a...

A NOSE FOR ALL REASONS.(how noses on certain species have evolved for various uses)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2001... From courtship to camouflage, sinking to swimming, there's a nose for the job. Noses are for more than just smelling--or for holding up spectacles, as Pan-gloss remarks in Voltaire's Candide. Olfaction is certainly the nose's ancestral...

Arctic Fires.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2001... Tundra flowers wait for lightning to strike. For eons, wildfire has played a fundamental role in the evolution of plant traits. Around the world--in grasslands, coniferous forests, chaparral--fire influences the makeup of plant communities,...

Adventures in the Bone Trade: The Race to Discover Human Ancestors in Ethiopia's Afar Depression.(Review)
June 1, 2001... Adventures in the Bone Trade: The Race to Discover Human Ancestors in Ethiopia's Afar Depression, by Jon Kalb (Copernicus Books, 2001; $29) History, they say, is written by the winners. If so, we may have been missing some good books. Jon...

Biology's Giant Leap.(genetics information sources)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2001... The preliminary map of the human genome is complete, but as the scientists who worked on the project readily admit, the hard work is just beginning. Researchers will be trying to figure out the role that each gene plays in our complex...

BOOKSHELF.(books on genetics)(Bibliography)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2001... Brave New Brain: Conquering Mental Illness in the Era of the Genome, by Nancy C. Andreasen (Oxford University Press, 2001; $29.95) Neuroimaging of the thalamus reveals that it is smaller in schizophrenics. According to Andreasen, a...

Woodworks.(Brief Article)
June 1, 2001... Charles Darwin admired the special adaptations of woodpeckers, citing their stiff tail spines, hard-pointed bills, and shock-absorbent necks. While most of these birds are small and forage by drilling holes in tree bark to extract one grub at a...

Would Darwin Get a Grant Today?(Brief Article)
June 1, 2001... For the first half of the twentieth century, biological research was dominated by scientists who studied whole organisms in their natural settings. In recent decades, this approach to the study of life has increasingly been perceived as a poor...