Natural History articles from June 2006

Natural History archives from June 2006

Mantle in blue.(THE NATURAL MOMENT)
June 1, 2006... Hover over the maw of a giant clam and you'll be mesmerized by the life between its shells--far more stunning than any bubbling mermaid. Intense, kaleidoscopic colors are swirled and stippled into patterns that recall the adage about...

Say it with flowers.(UP FRONT)(Editorial)
June 1, 2006... Nature has been perfecting the sensual attractions of flowers for millions of years. Yet what blossoms so poignantly express to us is not longevity, but transience: enjoy them today, for tomorrow their petals will litter the ground. How apt...

Swimming with sharks.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2006... Steven G. Wilson's informative overview of the whale shark ["The Biggest Fish, 4/06] points out the little we know, and the lot we don't know, about the largest of all fishes. Mr. Wilson notes that the animal is threatened by fishing and boat...

Love those dioramas!(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2006... Although the panorama, diorama, and cyclorama were critical to the development of the museum-habitat diorama, as described by Stephen Christopher Quinn in his article, "The Worlds Behind the Glass" [4/06], emphasis needs be put on the cyclorama...

Worse than fallout?(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2006... Mary Mycio's Endpaper "Chernobyl Paradox" [4/06] should have been your lead article. People have been destroying the natural world for eons, but showing so clearly and on such a grand scale that the human presence is so much worse than even the...

Underground heroes.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2006... Soil bacteria and fungi are the mechanistic workhorses that drive nutrient cycling in diverse terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Christine Mlot's article ["Alaska's Underground Frontier," 4/06] is a fitting tribute to those often unsung...

Icequake.(SAMPLINGS)
June 1, 2006... A global network of seismometers constantly monitors the Earth's rumbles and grumbles. Three years ago Goran Ekstrom, a geophysicist at Harvard University, noticed some unusual, low-frequency seismic waves, which looked nothing like the signals...

Europe's first fashionistas.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
June 1, 2006... The first anatomically modern humans to colonize Europe forged what archaeologists now call the Aurignacian culture, which persisted throughout Europe between 37,000 and 28,000 years ago. Over such a long time and wide area, it seems plausible...

Gender bias.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
June 1, 2006... Hypoxia, or oxygen scarcity, is accelerating across vast reaches of the world's waters. The cause is often pollution, and by now as many as 400,000 square miles of ocean are permanently hypoxic. In such areas, fish populations plummet. Some...

One big toxic family.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
June 1, 2006... What makes the bite of the Komodo dragon a wound that can kill? Most biologists would point to the bacterial infection it causes. According to a new study, however, there may be a better explanation: venom. Fourteen scientists from six nations,...

Is there a doctor in the barn?(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
June 1, 2006... All animals get sick from time to time, but most of them can't just reach for the aspirin. Anecdotes of nonhuman species that seem to self-medicate abound, but few have been experimentally corroborated. Now a study of domestic sheep shows that...

Red means grow.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
June 1, 2006... Sunny but parched, or rainy but gloomy: only two seasons come and go in tropical rainforests, and which one might encourage more plant growth seems a toss-up. In the Amazon, it turns out, the dry season, roughly July through November, is the...

Genes well dropped.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
June 1, 2006... As a species evolves, its genome is constantly mutating, and some mutations can inactivate a gene. A disaster in the making? Not necessarily. Investigators have discovered that complete gene inactivation, or pseudogenization, can be...

A room with a few.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
June 1, 2006... Cockroaches, to the dismay of many apartment dwellers, prefer group living. Safety in numbers is one benefit of a gregarious lifestyle, but togetherness can also have its drawbacks--not the least of which is increased competition for resources,...

Harried by the mob.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
June 1, 2006... When predators are afoot, prey have two options: fight or flight. Defending one's corner might sound honorable, but in a world "red in tooth and claw," honor usually ranks somewhere below self-preservation. So why, asked Sharon Gursky, a...

Bushels of bots: Africa's largest fly is getting a reprieve from extinction.(NATURALIST AT LARGE)
June 1, 2006... In the past 125 years all five of the world's rhinoceros species--the Indian, Javan, and Sumatran rhinos in Asia, and the black and white rhinos in Africa--nearly went extinct. And some of the African rhinos were quite literally taking a large...

"Unfit for vision": much of the light gathered by today's telescopes is invisible.(UNIVERSE)
June 1, 2006... Before 1800 the word "light," apart from its use as a verb and an adjective, referred just to visible light. But early that year the English astronomer William Herschel observed some warming that could only have been caused by a form of light...

Tough as shells: a promising candidate for artificial bone.(BIOMECHANICS)
June 1, 2006... Biomimetics, the art and science of transferring biological designs into the realm of human use, is far from a straightforward process. The path from theory to product tends to be so convoluted that only a handful of biomimetic products are...

Origins of floral diversity: a quarter-million flowering plants attest to a highly flexible developmental recipe. Plant biologists have now proposed a genetic model that may account for the profusion of floral forms.(Cover story)
June 1, 2006... Colorful petals, sweet perfumes, and delicate shapes make flowers a delight to the senses. Each of the 250,000 species of flowering plants--the plant division known as angiosperms--makes a distinct flower, and the resultant diversity boggles...

This old house: at Catalhoyuk, a Neolithic site in Turkey, families packed their mud-brick houses close together and traipsed over roofs to climb into their rooms from above.
June 1, 2006... Every summer since 1993 I have returned to central Turkey to work on the archaeological excavation of a mound nearly seventy feet high. As I tread over its soil, I feel a tingling in my feet, knowing that buried beneath me are the abundant...

Good fences, good neighbors? Can Botswana simply cordon off the conflicts dividing ecotourism, cattle farming, and the interests of conservation?
June 1, 2006... A few months into the construction of the 240-mile-long Makgadikgadi fence, David Dugmore drove along the first stretch of cable wire slung between vertical wooden posts. It was the dry season in north central Botswana, and Makgadikgadi Pans...

Along the pothole trails: a river that runs between Minnesota and Wisconsin has left a legacy of its wild youth.(THIS LAND)
June 1, 2006... Potholes are saucer-shaped or cylindrical depressions scoured into hard rock surfaces by whirlpools of water carrying fine gravel. Such abrasive whirlpools can form in swift streams or in waters stirred by the wind; in either case the hollow...

Bluff top.(Habitats)(Brief article)
June 1, 2006... The dry bluff tops are home to plants and short trees that can survive on limited moisture. The most common tree is bur oak; others include eastern red cedar, hop hornbeam, jack pine, white ash, and white oak. Creeping juniper, a sprawling...

Moist woods.(Habitats)(Brief article)
June 1, 2006... The ravines harbor moist woods dominated by basswood, bitternut hickory, hop hornbeam, paper birch, sugar maple, white ash, and white oak. The shrub layer is sparse, though snowberry is fairly common. Most of the wildflowers in the under-story...

Upland woods.(Habitats)(Brief article)
June 1, 2006... On the upper slopes of the ravines are relatively dry woodlands dominated by northern red oak, slippery elm, white ash, and wild black cherry. The wildflowers of this habitat bloom mostly in summer and fall; they include American figwort,...

Seeps.(Habitats)(Brief article)
June 1, 2006... Water seeps from fissures in many of the cliffs, often draining into depressions where boglike conditions prevail. These low areas are often covered by masses of mosses, including sphagnum. Numerous species of sedge also grow here, some forming...

The Oracle: The Lost Secrets and Hidden Message of Ancient Delphi.(Book review)
June 1, 2006... The Oracle: The Lost Secrets and Hidden Message of Ancient Delphi by William J. Broad Penguin Press, 2006; $25.95 Long before focus groups and computer modeling came into vogue, a woman (actually a succession of women) known as the Oracle...

Voyage of the Turtle: In Pursuit of the Earth's Last Dinosaur.(Book review)
June 1, 2006... Voyage of the Turtle: In Pursuit of the Earth's Last Dinosaur by Carl Safina Henry Holt and Company, 2006; $27.50 The leatherback turtle, the heaviest of all wild reptiles, is a nautical jet-setter, a natural-born citizen of the world....

Sky in a Bottle.(Book review)
June 1, 2006... Sky in a Bottle by Peter Pesic MIT Press, 2006; $24.95 Why is the sky blue? That innocent question is the point of departure for Peter Pesic's magisterial history of light in the atmosphere. Its form recalls the encyclopedic monographs of a...

Minnie diva.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2006... Not all mice sing in an ultrasonic voice ["Samplings: Melodious Mice," 2/06]. In 1932, when I was about fifteen, my parents, my four siblings, and I saw a mouse that sang like a canary. When we first heard it, it was inside a wall space about...

Ben's 300th.(nature.net)(websites giving information on Benjamin Franklin are described)
June 1, 2006... Years ago, when I was walking through the Paris neighborhood of St.-Germain-des-Pres, a bronze plaque caught my attention. More precisely, it was the name that caught my eye: Benjamin Franklin. On September 3, 1783, the plaque noted, at 56 Rue...

Shades of the past: a clearer view of cosmic inflation, through the polarized light of the big bang.(OUT THERE)
June 1, 2006... It's late afternoon on a cloudless day at the beach, and the Sun is hanging just above the horizon. You want to watch the sunset, but you can't bear to look: not only is the Sun itself too bright to view, but the reflected glare from the waves...

The sky in June.
June 1, 2006... Mercury puts on a fine show for much of June, not setting for as long as an hour and forty-five minutes after sundown. Look for it low above the west-northwestern horizon as twilight darkens. Mercury begins June at magnitude -0.9 but fades...

Lizards & snakes: alive! Opens Saturday, July 1.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)
June 1, 2006... Snakes and their slithering and scurrying friends have always had, well, an image problem. But Lizards & Snakes: Alive! an engaging, family-friendly exhibition opening July 1, sheds new light on these magnificent, much-maligned...

Journey into Amazing Caves: in the LeFrak Theater.(Movie review)(Brief article)
June 1, 2006... Journey into Amazing Caves, a gripping IMAX film, follows cave explorer Nancy Aulenbach and microbiologist Hazel Barton as they search some of Earth's most extreme environments for micro-organisms with possible new medical applications....

Sandy Wright: administrative manager, Visitor Services.(PEOPLE AT THE AMNH)(Brief article)(Thumbnail biography)
June 1, 2006... Like many 4-year-olds, Sandy Wright's nephew chattered away the first time she took him through the Museum; that is, until they reached the fossils on the fourth floor. Sandy smiles as she describes the silence that came over him as he stared...

Museum events: American Museum of Natural History.(Calendar)
June 1, 2006... Darwin Through August 20, 2006 Featuring live animals, actual fossil specimens collected by Charles Darwin, and manuscripts, this magnificent exhibition offers visitors a comprehensive, engaging exploration of the life and times of Darwin,...

Stress and the City.(ENDPAPER)
June 1, 2006... As part of my research, I study the physiology of wild baboons in the Serengeti, which is where I am now. I share my camp with a guy named Soirowua, a member of the local Masai. The other morning, we were collecting firewood--not one of my...