Natural History articles from June 2003

Natural History archives from June 2003

Pretty in pink. (The Natural Moment).(katydid)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... Like most other katydid species, the western round-winged katydid (Amblycorypha parvipennis) is normally green. But throughout its range, from South Dakota to central Texas, both pink and yellow variants occasionally pop up. My pink lady--for...

Front-page news. (Up Front).
June 1, 2003... For more than a decade I've been pointing out to anyone who would listen that science and nature are big news. Disease organisms are news--think of AIDS, or anthrax, or SARS. Space exploration is news. The crisis in biodiversity is news....

A long jump. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2003... The first literary mention of the ancient Greek athletic event known as the long jump, whose biomechanics are discussed in Adam Summers's column "Throwing Yourself into It" [4/03], is in book VIII of the Odyssey. Homer presents it as an...

Entomophilia. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2003... I enjoyed Le Anh Tu Packard's article about the giant water bug known in Vietnam as the ca cuong ["Bug Juice" 3/03]. The insect is a food delicacy not only in Vietnam but also throughout Southeast Asia. In Thailand--where, according to the...

Surf and turf. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2003... I read with great interest Robert S. Semeniuk's article "How Bears Feed Salmon to the Forest" [4/03], on the work of Thomas E. Reimchen in investigating marine-derived nutrients in forest ecosystems. Fisheries biologists have long regarded...

Democracy in space. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2003... Neil deGrasse Tyson's cogent essay "Reaching for the Stars" [4/03] correctly identifies what might be called the "categorical imperatives" that have universally governed human forays into the immense and the unknown: defense, commerce, and...

Picture imperfect. (Letters).(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2003... On page 58 of the article "Vietnam's Secret Life," by Eleanor J. Sterling, Martha M. Hurley, and Raoul H. Bain [3/03], is a photograph of a single branch of the golden Vietnamese cypress, showing both needles and scales. The caption says that...

Un-solid ground.(Tides.)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... Most people probably don't give much thought to the two faint, ever-shifting double bulges that are continuously sliding across the surface of our planet. Those bulges are called solid-body tides; the larger of the two is caused by the Moon...

Cold passage.(Discovery of a Patagonian toothfish off the coast of Greenland.)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... Several Novembers ago, off the coast of Greenland, the captain of a fishing vessel was puzzled by one of the fish caught in the boat's gill nets. He decided to put it on ice and ask experts to identify it. Peter Rask Moller, a zoologist at the...

Home, sweet home. .(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... On Earth, where there's water, there's usually life. But few people would expect to find life in an isolated reservoir of 4,300-year-old seawater locked inside the basalt crust that forms the bottom of the world's oceans. The water is hot--a...

In the same vein. .(Blood vessels.)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2003... The network of blood vessels in a human being is not only extensive, it's also finely engineered. Some anatomists say that, placed end to end, the vessels would stretch 60,000 miles. As for the engineering, the British biologist Cecil D. Murray...

Experiment of the month. .(Bone density research.)
June 1, 2003... Use it or lose it: that's a rule that governs employee vacation days--and bones. In every bone there's a steady turnover of material, a continuous balancing act between bone formation and the resorption of bone tissue into the bloodstream....

The rise and fall of Planet X: Neptune and Pluto were supposed to "fix" the weird orbit of Uranus. Now, it seems, the orbit wasn't "broke." .
June 1, 2003... Heard about Planet X lately? Probably not. It's dead--no matter what anybody has told you. Astrophysicists no longer need to postulate the existence of an "undiscovered" planet to explain the motions of the other planets in our solar system....

Impostor in the nest: a beetle disguised as an army ant eludes capture by ants as well as entomologists. .(Column)
June 1, 2003... When most people think about the explorers and adventurers of the past, figures such as Captain James Cook or Sir Edmund Hillary come to mind: heroic individuals who explored the world's greatest oceans or climbed the world's highest mountains....

The owl that hunts by light: after years of observing in the Yukon, the author has shown that the North American hawk owl is a more versatile predator than its better known European cousin. .(Column)
June 1, 2003... My first encounter with a northern hawk owl came early in my career, on a cold day in mid-May. Fresh, wet snow weighed down the tree branches, reminding even optimistic souls that spring in the North can be tardy, almost shy. I had arrived that...

Monitor marathons: how one group of lizards turns a gasp into a gulp.
June 1, 2003... Making my way down a trail through rosemary scrub in Florida's central sandhills, I surprised a six-lined racerunner (Cnemidophorus sexlineatus, so named for the lines that run the length of its body) basking in a wheel rut. I gave chase and...

Patterns in nature: the new focus on self-organizing processes links such diverse natural phenomena as a zebra's stripes and a mound of termites.
June 1, 2003... The natural world abounds in eye-catching patterns. Consider the synchronized movements of a school of fish gliding through deep ocean waters; or the coordinated turns and swoops of a flock of starlings whirling among tall trees before coming...

Lost time: damage control in Iraq.(Editorial)
June 1, 2003... EDITOR'S NOTE: The looting and destruction that have befallen ancient artifacts from the museums and archaeological sites of Iraq are a calamity for civilization. The photographs on these four pages depict only a handful of the glories that had...

Close encounters: mountain gorillas and chimpanzees share the wealth of Uganda's "impenetrable forest," perhaps offering a window onto the early history of hominids.
June 1, 2003... It's a rare sunny morning in the Bwindi Impenetrable National Park of southwestern Uganda, and a party of chimpanzees is feeding noisily in an enormous fig tree. My colleague John Bosco Nkurunungi and I sit fifty yards away on the other side of...

Ages of Aquarius: in an Idaho canyon, temperate rainforest plants found refuge from ancient climate change. .
June 1, 2003... In 1968, when Robert Steele and Frederic D. Johnson, both forest ecologists at the University of Idaho in Moscow, explored a remote region along Idaho's North Fork Clearwater River, they found warm, south-facing slopes, cool north-facing...

Voyage of the barnacle: Darwin paid his dues as a scientist by exploring a miniature universe of marine animals.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... Darwin and the Barnacle: The Story of One Tiny Creature and History's Most Spectacular Scientific Breakthrough by Rebecca Stott W.W. Norton & Company, 2003; $24.95 As a city boy, I once supposed that fossils were as rare as large...

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... by Mary Roach W.W. Norton & Company, 2003; $23.95 Warning: Do not read Stiff lying down. First of all, it's a trifle unsettling to eyeball its dust jacket while supine; the toe-tagged soles on the cover make you feel as if you are the body...

The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... by Christopher Benfey Random House, 2003; $25.95 Many of my college friends spent the early 1960s dreaming of smoke-filled San Francisco cafes where poets such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder would intone the deep...

The Seashell on the Mountaintop: A Story of Science, Sainthood, and the Humble Genius Who Discovered a New History of the Earth.(Book Review)
June 1, 2003... by Alan Cutler Dutton, 2003; $23.95 Nicolaus Steno died in 1686, at the age of forty-eight, with scarcely a penny to his name. Ten years earlier, before abruptly renouncing the pleasures of the world to become a priest and a religious...

SARS.(www.who.int/en, www.cdc.gov/ncidod/sars, www.rkm.com.au/VIRUS/CORONAVIRUS/index.html, www.micro.msb.le.ac.uk/3035/coronaviruses.html, virology.wisc.edu/IMV, www.college.ucla.edu/webproject/micro12/m12webnotes/viralevolution.htm)
June 1, 2003... On February 11 authorities in China's Guangdong Province issued their first report of what they called an "atypical pneumonia." A global network of scientists began urgently exchanging news and findings via the Internet. Just two months later,...

Ironing out the solar system: a long-extinct radioactive species sheds light on Earth origins. .
June 1, 2003... Our Sun formed a little more than four and a half billion years ago. Like every other star in the universe, it was born swaddled in a cloud of gas made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium. But the scattered debris of exploded stars--a fine...

The sky in June. .
June 1, 2003... Mercury reaches its greatest western elongation on the 3rd--24 degrees from the Sun on the dome of the sky-but skywatchers will still have to struggle to glimpse the reticent planet. In the first three weeks of the month, Mercury scarcely...

The lure of chocolate. .
June 1, 2003... Chocolate has enchanted humanity for centuries with its tempting taste. The Maya had a glyph for it and at one time there were nearly 2,000 chocolate cafes in London alone. Now here is a chance to look at the science behind the seduction....

Art(ifacts) and science of chocolate. .
June 1, 2003... Ten celebrated chocolatiers and pastry chefs have been invited to sculpt signature pieces in chocolate respired by the Museum's collections. Several of the pieces will be on exhibit at the Museum in early June and the remaining pieces will be...

Museum events.
June 1, 2003... EXHIBITIONS Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind & Spirit Through January 4, 2004 Gallery 77, first floor This comprehensive exhibition presents Vietnamese culture in the early 21 st century. The visitor is invited to "walk in...

Damsels cause distress.(Damselfish.)(Column)
June 1, 2003... After waffling for years, my husband took the plunge and purchased a large saltwater aquarium for his office. That he did so while I was out of town at a conference may have shown a certain lack of confidence that I would react favorably, but...