Natural History articles from June 2005

Natural History archives from June 2005

What the cat dragged up.(THE NATURAL MOMENT)(Panthera pardus leopard)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... Cats have a knack for looking coolly graceful, whether hunting, killing, or absently tearing flesh from a fresh catch. Photographer Tracey J. Rich first spied this leopard in southern Namibia, as it was nimbly dragging a springbok antelope...

Observing, skeptically.(UP FRONT)(cave animals)
June 1, 2005... The first time I ever visited a "wild" cave was decades ago, in the karst-rich country of the southern Appalachians. Caves in their natural state bear little resemblance to commercial caverns: no freight elevators or tastefully lighted...

Pushing capacity.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2005... In his article "Collapse" [4/05], Jared Diamond chooses the population that inhabits the highlands of New Guinea as an example of a society that has solved its environmental problems. Unfortunately, the pioneering work of James B. Watson, an...

Pick of the crop.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2005... The book Mendel in the Kitchen: A Scientist's View of Genetically Modified Foods, reviewed by Laurence A. Marschall ["Bookshelf," 3/05], suggests that if only people understood the science behind genetically modified (GM) food crops, they would...

In the sticks.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
June 1, 2005... J. David Henry's article on the boreal forest ["Northern Exposure," 2/05] perpetrates the misconception that taiga and boreal forest are one and the same. In fact, however, not all boreal forest is taiga, and not all taiga occurs in the boreal...

Report card.(SAMPLINGS)(Endangered Species Act of 1973)
June 1, 2005... The Endangered Species Act of 1973 is dear to the hearts of most American environmentalists. Vital to its framework is the listing of animal and plant species whose numbers are so depleted that the survival of the species itself is put at risk....

Rock of ages.(SAMPLINGS)(neon 21 observations to identify rock age)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... If you want to know how long a rock has been exposed to the sky, measure its neon-21. Cosmic rays--energetic particles that originate in distant stars and galaxies--are constantly smashing into the atoms that make up various minerals in exposed...

Preservation halls.(SAMPLINGS)(wooden buildings preservation techniques)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... Wood rots readily, and so even though it's been used for construction around the world and through the ages, almost every wooden building ever made has eventually disappeared. But Heather McKillop, an anthropologist at Louisiana State...

Soup's on.(SAMPLINGS)(eating habits and gut intuition)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... Knowing whether you're hungry or sated should be a classic case of gut intuition. Yet a recent study of eating habits showed that people don't pay much attention to the gut: they rely instead on their eyes to assess whether they've eaten...

Beyond DNA?(SAMPLINGS)(Arabidopsis thaliana genes mutation results)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... A basic tenet of modern biology is that only genes--long sequences of DNA--carry the information needed for building an organism. Henceforth, however, that tenet may have to appear with an asterisk. Susan J. Lolle, Robert E. Pruitt, and two...

Wave in the water.(SAMPLINGS)(ultrapurified water supplies nutrients for microbial growth)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... Here's a conundrum: even in the purest of ultrapurified water, microorganisms live and even multiply. Does the water retain trace amounts of nutrients? Do the microorganisms somehow manufacture their own food? Do they cannibalize one another?...

An ounce of prevention.(SAMPLINGS)(Beewolf wasp )(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... Beewolf wasp mothers leave little to chance. They build a separate underground protective cell for each of their eggs and provision each cell with a few paralyzed live honeybees so that the larvae will find dinner ready when they hatch. Martin...

Strike, counterstrike.(SAMPLINGS)(Tetrodotoxin a poisonous substance of pufferfish )(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... Poison can be a formidable weapon--particularly if it's 10,000 times more lethal than cyanide. Tetrodotoxin, the substance in pufferfish organs that may be Japanese cuisine's biggest thrill, turns up in other animals, too--among them the...

Fueling up: to travel from the Earth to the sky requires propulsion. Propulsion requires energy. Energy requires fuel.(UNIVERSE)
June 1, 2005... In daily life you rarely need to think about propulsion, at least the kind that gets you off the ground and keeps you aloft. You can get around just fine without booster rockets--simply by walking, running, rollerblading, taking a bus, or...

Life in death valley: a tide of blossoms, in the wake of heavy storms, has grown into a big attraction.(FIELD NOTES)(Brief Article)
June 1, 2005... Deadly rains brought floods and mudslides to Southern California this past year, but the rains have offered amends: a profusion of spring wildflowers. In Death Valley National Park the bloom has been particularly spectacular. The predominant...

Snap! How can the Venus flytrap indulge its taste for insect flesh? The secret is the cunning construction of its leaves.(BIOMECHANICS)
June 1, 2005... Although plants are firmly rooted in the ground, they do move: sunflowers track the Sun across the sky; daffodils turn their floral faces away from the wind as it blows. Most plant motion is either quite slow (the sunflower), or driven by...

Jointed threads: Joseph Leidy was the first to describe symbiotic bacteria growing together in long strings in animal intestines. Microbiological analyses now link the bacteria with anthrax.(NATURALIST AT LARGE)
June 1, 2005... Anthrax, once upon a time, was a marginal disease in people, afflicting sheepshearers and few others. Most people who contracted it at all got the cutaneous form of the disease, which forms black scabs on the skin that look like anthracite coal...

Dance of the sexes: a lemur needs some unusual traits to survive in Madagascar's unpredictable environment.(Cover Story)
June 1, 2005... The group of lemurs, known as Milne-Edwards's sifakas, was small--an adult male, an adult female, and two large offspring. With only four animals, distinguishing them should have been easy. "That's the male," said Georges Rakotonirina,...

Behind closed doors: wielding a vintage camera, a photographer explores the storerooms and back-room cabinets of a great natural history museum.(American Museum of Natural History)
June 1, 2005... Many of us have gleefully rummaged through a grandparent's attic with an eye for lost treasure. The objects we found often brought the past to life. Now imagine an attic with more than five acres of floor space, crammed with treasures dating to...

Why do cave fish lose their eyes? A Darwinian mystery unfolds in the dark.(cave fauna)
June 1, 2005... Sometimes, when we lead students or beginning cave explorers into their first "wild" cave, we turn out all our lights at our first rest stop. For many people, the experience of total darkness is stunning, and even a bit overwhelming. Wave a...

The Fly in the Cathedral: How a Group of Cambridge Scientists Won the International Race to Split the Atom.(book by Brian Cathcart Farrar)(Book Review)
June 1, 2005... The Fly in the Cathedral: How a Group of Cambridge Scientists Won the International Race to Split the Atom by Brian Cathcart Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005; $25.00 For a man who admits he never took a class in physics, Brian Cathcart...

Earthquakes in Human History: The Far-Reaching Effects of Seismic Disruptions.(book by Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and Donald Theodore Sanders )(Book Review)
June 1, 2005... Earthquakes in Human History: The Far-Reaching Effects of Seismic Disruptions by Jelle Zeilinga de Boer and Donald Theodore Sanders Princeton University Press, 2005; $24.95 What's shakin'? The question might have made a snappy title for...

Birdsong: A Natural History.(book by Don Stap Scribner)(Book Review)
June 1, 2005... Birdsong: A Natural History by Don Stap Scribner, 2005; $24.00 Among some birds, life is an opera; among others, life is a cabaret. Eastern towhees, with a repertoire of fewer than a dozen songs, present daytime recitals of well-practiced...

The talking Web.(nature.net)(online information services about quantum theory)
June 1, 2005... Recently I read aloud to my children from "Surely, You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!," recorded and edited by Ralph Leighton, a friend of the Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman. The kids' favorite part (and, I suspect, everyone else's,...

Peekaboo planet: a decade after first finding exoplanets, astronomers may now be seeing them.(OUT THERE)
June 1, 2005... In little more than a decade, the number of planets discovered outside our solar system has grown from zero to nearly 200. Ask what an individual "exoplanet" looks like, though, and we astronomers still can't tell you for sure. That's because...

The sky in June.(Summer solstice)
June 1, 2005... June saves some of the best for last: three planets converge in the sky to form a planetary trio, a dazzler for sky gazers late in the month. A trio is a conjunction so close that the three planets fit inside a circle no more than five degrees...

Dinosaurs: ancient fossils, new discoveries.(At the Museum)
June 1, 2005... Now through January 8, 2006 This groundbreaking exhibition presents the most up-to-date look at how scientists are reinterpreting many of the most persistent and puzzling mysteries of the dinosaurs: what they looked like, how they behaved,...

Museum events.(Calendar)
June 1, 2005... EXHIBITIONS Totems to Turquoise: Native North American Jewelry Arts of the Northwest and Southwest Through July 10, 2005 This groundbreaking exhibition celebrates the beauty, power, and symbolism of the magnificent tradition of...

Balanophagy.(ENDPAPER)(Oaks culinary adventures)
June 1, 2005... [Balanophagy, "acorn eating, from the Greek balanos, "acorn" + phagein, "to eat"] Oaks have been cut down without a thought around the world for the past 3,000 years, but they are not forgotten as a source of foodstuff everywhere, or by...