Natural History articles from June 2002

Natural History archives from June 2002

Fast forward. (Up Front).(house finch)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... HOUSE FINCH. Abundant in bottomlands, canyons, suburbs, and ranches in the West; uncommon but increasing and spreading in the East. --Chandler S. Robbins et al., Birds of North America (1966) Field guides get such rough treatment in my...

Of mice and men. (Letters).
June 1, 2002... In "A Mouse's Tale" (4/02), Steven N. Austad writes: "It is more than a simple oddity that laboratory mice have smaller eyes and brains... larger bodies... weaker muscles and chromosomes, and longer telomeres than their wild relatives." ...

Joist gigantism. (Letters).
June 1, 2002... That's one helluva floor joist described in "Twister!" ("Biomechanics" 4/02). Two-foot by eight-foot? It would take quite a forest of redwoods to frame a house like that. I use joists with a two-inch-by-eight-inch cross section--that is, the...

Picture imperfect. (Letters).
June 1, 2002... Nell deGrasse Tyson ("Universe" 4/02) writes: "The second and third Lagrangian points (L2 and L3) also lie on the Earth-Moon line, but L2 lies far beyond the Moon, while L3 lies far beyond Earth in the opposite direction." But in the...

ID vs. evolution, continued. (Letters).
June 1, 2002... I am surprised that Michael J. Behe ("Intelligent Design?" 4/02) cited the blood-clotting system as an example of intelligent design. I see it as a prime counterexample. First, clotting is not irreducibly complex. People lacking one of...

Cold storage: the Ambrose Monell Collection of tissue samples--held in nitrogen-cooled freezer vats in the Museum's basement--promises to be a world-class library of molecular biodiversity. (At The Museum).
June 1, 2002... For years, thousands of samples of organic tissue--bits of beetles, liver cells of birds, vials of elephant blood, skins of snakes, various other ingredients for a sorcerer's brew--were stashed away in freezers all over the Museum. Only a few...

Museum events in June.
June 1, 2002... "BASEBALL AS AMERICA" Lecture 6/4: "Baseball on the Moon." Physicist Peter Brancazio, Brooklyn College. Kaufmann Theater, 7:00 P.M. Panel 6/11: "New York Stories: Willie, Mickey, or Duke?" Moderator: Marty Appel, author of Now Pitching for...

Woolly ancestry. (Samplings).(llamas and alpacas)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Few animals are better emblems of South America than the quartet formed by the llama, the alpaca, the vicuna, and the guanaco. Both the llama and the alpaca are domesticated forms long believed to be descended from the guanaco, a wild camelid....

Sticky situation. (Samplings).(spix bat research)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... When sleeping, Spix's disk-winged bat does not hang upside down by its toes, as do many other bats. Instead, this inhabitant of lowland forests from Mexico to Brazil tucks itself inside a furled young Heliconia leaf. In addition to being...

Old partners. (Samplings).(organisms preserved in amber)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Organisms preserved in amber (hardened resin from trees) are prized by paleontologists because of the fine details they retain. Such specimens are not rare, but gaining access to them without damaging them can be tricky. It was therefore with...

Delayed action. (Samplings).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Some years, the number of long-legged wading birds nesting in Florida's Everglades--white ibis, snowy egret, tricolored heron, and the like--shoots up to about four times its normal level. Peter C. Frederick, of the University of Florida, and...

Experiment of the month. (Samplings).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... In a study of how the terrestrial salamander Plethodon jordani detects and evaluates prey, German researchers Niklas Schulert and Ursula Dicke, of the University of Bremen, placed several of the amphibians in front of a monitor and presented...

Cheaters and chumps: game theorists offer a surprising insight into the evolution of fair play. (Findings).
June 1, 2002... Since well before the time of Dostoyevsky, people have thought about crime, punishment, and their interconnections. Why punish society's miscreants? To change, reform, or rehabilitate them? To deter potential wrongdoers? To make the victims and...

Hollywood nights: when it comes to astronomical accuracy in the movies, nobody's getting any Oscars. (Universe).(Industry Overview)
June 1, 2002... Few things are more annoying to avid moviegoers than seeing a film with rude hyperliterate friends who can't resist making comments about why the book was better. These people babble on about how the characters in the novel were more fully...

Jamming cicadas: after years underground, these insects emerge on cue and sing in concert. (In The Field).(periodical cicada)
June 1, 2002... Folklore has it that cicadas singing on a summer morning portend a hot day. If true, then this particular June day had the makings of a scorcher. When I first stepped out of my house in Arizona's White Mountains, only a single cicada was...

Where forests meet: the Black Hills are a crossroads of vegetation. (This Land).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Home to such well-known landmarks as Mount Rushmore, Devils Tower, and the Crazy Horse Memorial, the Black Hills straddle the border between South Dakota and Wyoming. The modern name for these mountains reflects one bestowed by the native...

The ice above, the fire below: Iceland is still being shaped by the geological interaction of opposites.
June 1, 2002... In southeastern Iceland, some 4,500 feet above sea level, lies Vatnajokull--the largest temperate-zone ice cap in Europe. On the last day of September 1996, the ground beneath the glacier began to shake. The trembling indicated that a volcanic...

A beautiful hand: throug his scientifically detailed canvases, Frederic E. Church transported the Tropics to the temperate zone.
June 1, 2002... We know intuitively when an artist has rendered a human body poorly, when the proportions are wrong or a line is off. But few people are perturbed by an improperly painted plant or tree (which is why vegetation is a great confidence builder for...

Avian quick-change artists: exemplars of rapid adaptation, house finches show that mothers know best.
June 1, 2002... Adaptation to the environment is the cornerstone of Darwinian natural selection. Among the most conspicuous consequences of this process are changes in the size and shape of animals in response to climate. Nearly 200 years ago, long before the...

Hitchin' a ride: scuds, shrimps, and sponges are among the creatures that cling to the horseshoe crab. (Naturalist At Large).
June 1, 2002... From a bayside beach named for its most famous inhabitant, my dive partners and I stagger into the murky waters of New Jersey's Horseshoe Cove with scuba tanks strapped to our backs. Young, olive-colored horseshoe crabs glide away effortlessly...

A pulsar on the move: astronomers resolve a long-standing mystery--only to reveal a new puzzle. (Out There).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... About once a century, somewhere in our galaxy, a star destroys itself in an explosion called a supernova. Within ten seconds, this titanic blast releases more energy than our Sun will produce in its entire 10-billion-year lifetime. Then, during...

The sky in June. (Out There).(planet positions and other information)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Mercury appears at dawn at about midmonth, just above the east-northeastern horizon, but alas, never climbs much higher. The planet is at greatest elongation on June 21 (23 [degrees] west of the Sun). It steadily brightens for the rest of the...

A weighty matter: at nearly seven tons, Tyrannosaurus rex would have simply been too heavy to run fast. (Biomechanics).(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Oblong, milk-chocolate slabs of rock, dappled with darker footprints, hang from the walls and cover trestle tables in the Pratt Museum at Amherst College. While assembling and cataloging this collection of rocks about a century and a half ago,...

So near and yet so far: yes, we're primates. But how much does that tell us about our behavior?('The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit' and 'What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes')
June 1, 2002... The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit, by Melvin Konner (Times Books) What It Means to Be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People, and Their Genes, by Jonathan Marks (University of California Press) Philosophers have always...

All ears and eyes. (nature.net).(web sites about sense of smell)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... The senses that allow us to perceive our world are remarkably complex. But in the past decade, biologists have begun to understand how we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. Some of the advances are highlighted (in English and Spanish) by the...

Bookshelf.(new books about nature topics)(Brief Article)(Bibliography)
June 1, 2002... Join naturalist Scott Weidensaul on his travels to find the Tasmanian wolf, the black-footed ferret, and the Indian forest owlet in The Ghost With Trembling Wings: Science, Wishful Thinking, and the Search for Lost Species (North Point Press)....

Trained eye. (The Natural Moment).(arctic fox)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... At summer's end, a young arctic fox is learning to hunt on its own. Photographers John Eastcott and Yva Momatiuk first spied this pup as it crouched on a gravel bar at the mouth of Alaska's Sagavanirktok River, near the Beaufort Sea. It was...

Cultivated wilderness. (Endpaper).(creating a wild garden)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2002... Beside an old ice pond in the suburbs of Boston, I made a wild garden. It began as a vaguely naturalistic sprinkling of spring ephemerals among the ferns, blueberries, tupelos, oaks, and white pines spontaneously flourishing on abandoned...