Natural History articles from June 2007

Natural History archives from June 2007

Toe hold.(THE NATURAL MOMENT)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... When the first heavy rains of spring drench Costa Rica, a certain league of suitors begins fighting. Think WWF, as in Wild Wrestling Frogs. Here, two male red-eyed tree frogs (Agalychnis callidryas) put a hold on each other unmatched even by...

Tales from the Tar Pits.(UP FRONT)(Editorial)
June 1, 2007... The George C. Page Museum in Los Angeles is one of the few museums whose main subject matter is a natural phenomenon that lies virtually underfoot. The Page, a branch of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, was opened in 1977 on...

The play's the thing.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2007... Lynda L. Sharpe's article ["Meerkats At Play," 4/07] was a treat. But I wonder, could play simply be the product of mammalian brainpower? Does one need to play to maintain a more highly developed brain? As a kid, I'd say "I'm bored," and the...

Long life.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2007... In "Pregnancy Reconceived" [5/07], Gil Mor notes that fetal cells reside in the mother decades after her pregnancy, and that those cells can repair maternal tissue. Could that phenomenon help explain why, on average, women live longer than men?...

No left turn.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... With their slender, drab-colored bodies, snakes of the genus Pareas seem quite ordinary--until you look them in the mouth. When they open wide, many Pareas species display a remarkable asymmetry: in P. iwasakii, for example, about twenty-five...

What do you know?(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... "Is that your final answer?" With such signature lines, TV quiz-show hosts inject drama into their proceedings even as they question the confidence of their contestants. Two investigators at the University of Georgia in Athens recently posed a...

Dental carries.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... During their prolonged migration out of Africa, our ancestors were not alone. The cavity-causing bacterium Streptococcus mutans went along for the ride, clinging to their teeth. S. mutans is transmitted mainly from mother to infant, and so its...

Virtual hitchhikers.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... You can get just about anything online, from a stuffed moose to an acre of the moon. So it goes without saying that seemingly harmless plants can also be added to your e-shopping cart. Online retailers sell them, of course, and enthusiastic...

Follow your beak.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... Homing pigeons and other birds can sense the Earth's magnetic field, an ability that helps them find their way home, even when home is hundreds of miles away. But how this magnetic sense works remains one of the most puzzling questions in...

Whence the beef?(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... Beginning around 800 B.C., the Etruscan civilization developed in what is now Tuscany, in Italy. Its people influenced the founding of Rome at the edge of their territory. Eventually Rome grew, swallowed up its Etruscan neighbor, and went on to...

Great lake bake.(SAMPLINGS: THE WARMING EARTH)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... With so much evidence that global warming is real, it's no surprise to learn that summer temperatures on Lake Superior have been rising for twenty-seven years. More puzzling, however, is that the water temperature is increasing faster than the...

Cereal killer.(SAMPLINGS: THE WARMING EARTH)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... The consequences of global warming loom far in the future, or so most people think. But farmers are already feeling the heat--in fact, they've been losing crops to rising temperatures for more than twenty-five years. Many factors affect...

Let the sunshine in (or maybe not).(SAMPLINGS: THE WARMING EARTH)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... Haze--made up of dust, soot, and other airborne aerosol particles--seems to have been on a steady, worldwide decline during the past decade and a half, according to new research. That's cause for a round of pats on the back, since it could...

Bones from the tar pits: La Brea continues to bubble over with new clues about life that flourished 40,000 years ago, where Los Angeles is today.(Cover story)
June 1, 2007... We have dredged and scraped, on hands and knees, to a depth of fourteen feet, where the air is redolent with sulfurous hydrocarbons. Our excitement mounts as we expose the skull of a saber-toothed cat, entombed in the asphalt. This site, Pit...

Survival of the Rarest: the forests of southern Bahia, Brazil, threatened by development, shelter numerous rare plants, which botanists are racing to document before they disappear.(Photograph)
June 1, 2007... Come on, it's right up here, at the edge of the forest," Jomar shouted as he bounded through the sun-dappled plantation. Theobroma cacao trees, the source of cocoa and chocolate, grew all around us, partly shaded by a high overstory of native...

Darwin in court: eighteen months after the "monkey trial" in Dover, Pennsylvania, a bumper crop of books puts the battle in perspective and asks, What's next?(Bibliography)
June 1, 2007... I am inclined to believe The story of Adam and Eve. There's no chimpanzee In my pedigree And you can't make a monkey of me. --From the song "You Can't Make a Monkey Out of Me," popular during the...

The sky in June.
June 1, 2007... Mercury is easy to find at dusk as June begins. Look for it about twenty-two degrees to the lower right of Venus (the width of your fist held at arm's length is roughly ten degrees across the sky). Mercury appears at magnitude +0.5 and sets...

A cool young star: a distant nova dazzles with its beauty. But where's the missing white dwarf?(OUT THERE)
June 1, 2007... In January 2002, a previously unremarkable star--one of the distant stars forming the hazy band known as the Milky Way--suddenly flared up. The star, in the direction of the constellation Monoceros, the unicorn, became hundreds of thousands of...

Free lunch.(nature.net)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... My Los Angeles neighborhood teems with scavengers: coyotes, crows, raccoons, and rodents. Recently I watched as several dozen vultures, those icons of the ilk, circled lazily overhead. Eyeing them suspiciously, I wondered if their Hollywood...

The eyes have it.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
June 1, 2007... A caption that accompanies Jennifer A. Mather's article on octopuses ["Eight Arms, with Attitude," 2/07] states that the octopus eye "is a remarkable example of convergent evolution [with the vertebrate eye] despite more than 1.2 billion years...

Sniffing out polar bears.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)
June 1, 2007... Dogs may be (hu)man's best friend, but at least one canine is the best friend a polar bear could ever have. Quinoa, a two-year-old Dutch shepherd trained by graduate student Linda Gormezano to sniff out polar bear scat, is helping obtain...

Everyone wants to know something.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)(Ology website)(Brief article)
June 1, 2007... www.amnh.org No matter how many hours children spend at the American Museum of Natural History, they often leave hungry for more. Frankly, that's our goal, to spark their curiosity and inspire a lifetime habit of learning. So, to extend...

Food for thought.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)
June 1, 2007... As with all new endeavors, when the Museum started its "Adventures in the Global Kitchen" series highlighting cultures through cuisine, there were a few bugs to work out--literally! The exciting first program offered up such delights as...

Mick Ellison: senior principal artist division of paleontology.(PEOPLE AT THE AMNH)(Brief biography)
June 1, 2007... It takes imagination--and dogged attention to detail--to draw a fleshed-out prehistoric creature, something no one has ever seen. Before Mick Ellison even attempts to render a particular specimen, he sculpts a clay model, working with the...

Museums events: American Museum of Natural History.(Calendar)
June 1, 2007... EXHIBITIONS Mythic Creatures: Dragons, Unicorns, and Mermaids Through January 6, 2008 Tracing the natural history roots of some of the world's most enduring mythological creatures, Mythic Creatures highlights legendary beings of...

Eye of the dragon.(ENDPAPER)
June 1, 2007... In the days before the Vietnamese Mid-Autumn Festival (Tet Trung Thu), the market along Hanoi's Hang Ma Street is resplendent with brightly colored toys, masks, and paper and plastic lanterns. Struggling to keep my balance in the press of the...