Natural History articles from March 2007

Natural History archives from March 2007

Exit strategies.(THE NATURAL MOVEMENT)(Weddell seal)
March 1, 2007... Even from across a field of sea ice crowded with emperor penguins, Tony Martin was startled when he spotted a lone Weddell seal shoot through what looked like solid ice. Martin, a zoologist with the British Antarctic Survey, began walking...

Killer app.(UP FRONT)
March 1, 2007... Kenneth M. Cameron ("Bar Coding for Botany," page 52) imagines that one day soon, "global flora scanners" will catch bad guys who smuggle endangered plants across international borders. My vision is more benign: You've taken the day off to hike...

Stars and monuments.(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2007... Donald Goldsmith's article on the "wandering" of the North Star ["Turn, Turn, Turn," 12/06-1/07] led me wonder, how did that wandering affect the orientation of ancient monuments, such as the Egyptian pyramids and England's Stonehenge, to...

Soils: alive!(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2007... One statement in Robert R. Dunn's delightful article "Dig it!" (12/06-1/07) deserves clarification. He writes: "When tunnels cave in, animals that are effective diggers can escape. Those that aren't, become part of the soil." Taken literally,...

Happy Birthday, Theophrastus.(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2007... In his article, "Happy Birthday, Linnaeus" [12/06-1/07], Richard Conniff credits Linnaeus with being "the inventor of the system by which every living species gets its two-part scientific name." The actual origin of this binomial shorthand goes...

Shark etiquette.(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2007... R. Aidan and Anne Martin's amazing article on white sharks ["Sociable Killers," 10/06] prompts me to ask about shark behavior I witnessed on a scuba diving trip in Palau. At a seamount, one shark was hanging vertically in the water over the...

Froggy went a-hikin'.(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2007... In "Living the High Life" [9/06], Kevin Krajick describes the discovery of tadpoles in ponds as high as 17,700 feet in Peru's Cordillera Vilcanota. Assuming they came from lower-elevation ponds, what could have led at least one reproducing pair...

400-yard dash.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... The Dead Sea Scrolls, biblical texts written sometime before A.D. 68, were discovered in 1947 in caves near the ruined settlement of Qumran on the Dead Sea. But who were the scrolls' scribes? Most scholars think at least some of them were...

The chemistry of b.o.(body odor)(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... Everyone has a special smell, often recognizable to other people and to dogs. New research, the most comprehensive study of human odor to date, shows that body odor is made Up of a diverse array of volatile compounds. One's own distinctive...

Scent of a moth.(SAMPLINGS)(sexual communication)(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... Female moths of the species Utetheisa ornatrix boost their chances of attracting a mate by pumping out sex pheromones in unison--the olfactory equivalent of chorusing frogs--according to new research. Hangkyo Lim and Michael D. Greenfield, both...

Cosmic rain.(SAMPLINGS)(Henrik Svensmark's research)(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... Cosmic rays--charged particles emitted by supernovas and other highly energetic sources in space--continually strike the Earth's atmosphere. Most scientists, however, had assumed they could have little effect on terrestrial life. Then last...

Double trouble.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... Small fish on the coral reefs of the Red Sea face danger from all directions. Swimming in open water increases their chances of lethal encounters with hungry groupers, but hiding in a crevice exposes them to giant moray eels. It gets worse: a...

Basso profundo.(blue whales)(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... Blue whales, the biggest creatures on Earth, have the deepest voices: most of their vocalizations are pitched far too low for people to hear. Their songs repeat a series of eerie tones, blips, and creaks and may carry on for hours or even days....

Warm down, cool up.(SAMPLINGS: THE WARMING EARTH)(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... Many satellites orbit Earth in the thermosphere, between sixty and 500 miles above the surface. Air is pretty thin up there, of course, but in the long run it's enough to make satellites slow down and fall to a lower orbit, a phenomenon known...

Northward bound.(SAMPLINGS: THE WARMING EARTH)(bird surveys)(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... Many bird species in the United States are shifting their breeding ranges northward, a new study shows. Similar northward shifts have been observed in Great Britain, so the cause of both is probably the same. Global warming is the likeliest...

Concrete evidence.(SAMPLINGS: THE WARMING EARTH)(Pyramids (Giza, Egypt))(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... How the ancient Egyptians built the Great Pyramids of Giza nearly 5,000 years ago, using only manpower and copper tools, is one of Egypt's enduring mysteries. Their most impressive creation, the pyramid of Khufu, stands forty-five stories tall...

Ice cycles: long-term fluctuations in ocean temperature lend support to Milutin Milankovitch's theory of climate change. But can his theory account for the ice ages?(PERSPECTIVE)
March 1, 2007... People at war rarely focus on theories of climate change. During the first half of 1941, while the Second World War was raging in Europe, a little-known Serbian engineer and mathematician published a book about ice ages. Milutin Milankovitch...

No bones about 'em: the biggest fishes in the ocean may have opted for cartilage over bone to bulk up without getting weighed down.(BIOMECHANICS)
March 1, 2007... Cartilage, the stuff most people associate with bendable ears and noses--or with career-ending injuries in professional athletes--seems a poor choice of material for the skeletons of the world's most formidable fishes. Nevertheless, sharks,...

Bad news for bears: for thirty years the wild Alaskan bears that visit McNeil sanctuary have learned to trust the people who watch them. But this fall, despite a public outcry, those bears may be hunted.(McNeil River State Game Sanctuary, Alaska)(Column)
March 1, 2007... On a bright August morning, with gulls screeching and bald eagles picking at spawned--out salmon, I'm standing with ten other people in the shadows of an alder-topped bluff. Our backs are pressed tightly against a dank rock wall. Everyone's...

Bar coding for botany: a system modeled on commercial bar codes may soon enable anyone to identify any plant from a small fragment of its DNA.
March 1, 2007... What the heck are these? The documents for this crate say the contents are Polypodium ferns. Those are perfectly legal to import, but all the leaves have been hacked off these plants. I can't identify them from the stems alone. Jim, can you get...

On the trail of the ancestors: Anasazi pueblos lie in ruins across the American Southwest. What became of their inhabitants?(Cover story)
March 1, 2007... The Colorado Plateau is a 130,000-square-mile blister of land roughly centered on the Four Corners area, the dry confluence of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico. Its surface is incised with countless canyons and wrinkled into isolated...

Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis.(Book review)
March 1, 2007... Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis by Kim Todd Harcourt, Inc.; $27.00 Surinam, a steamy wedge of land on the northeast edge of South America, is no destination for the casual traveler even today. Imagine,...

Aldo Leopold's Odyssey: Rediscovering the Author of A Sand County Almanac.(Book review)
March 1, 2007... Aldo Leopold's Odyssey: Rediscovering the Author of A Sand County Almanac by Julianne Lutz Newton Island Press; $32.95 Aldo Leopold's career began at a critical time in the environmental history of the United States. In 1909, as a young man...

The First Copernican: Georg Joachim Rheticus and the Rise of the Copernican Revolution.(Book review)
March 1, 2007... The First Copernican: Georg Joachim Rheticus and the Rise of the Copernican Revolution by Dennis Danielson Walker & Company; $25.95 Without the prodding of others, two of the greatest works of Western science--Newton's Principia and...

Spin control: how does swirling interstellar gas slow down enough to drain into a cosmic sink?(OUT THERE)
March 1, 2007... If our Sun turned into a black hole tomorrow, would Earth and the other planets suddenly fall into it? Nope, no way. Black holes, weird as they are, don't "suck" matter. They're gravitational sinkholes, like any other object with mass, so from...

New Tubes.(nature.net)(websites)
March 1, 2007... For anyone interested in geology, what could be more exciting than hiking inside a volcano, along tunnels that, until fairly recently, flowed with torrents of molten rock glowing yellow at about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit? Around the world, there...

The sky in March.(planetary positions)
March 1, 2007... Mercury becomes a morning object in March. It rises about an hour before the Sun and shines near the east-southeast horizon, well below and to the left of dimmer Mars. The Winged Messenger appears highest during the week of the 9th through the...

Human evolution, evolved.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)
March 1, 2007... What makes us human? In the exciting new Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins at the American Museum of Natural History, visitors learn that the answer lies, in large part, in our ability to think symbolically. Here, through the vivid...

2007 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate Pioneer Anomaly: Monday, March 26, 7:30 P.M.(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... The Pioneer spacecrafts were launched in the 1970s on trajectories that would send them past the outer planets and onward with enough speed to leave the solar system entirely. Now, however, their telemetry, does not match where our laws of...

Dinosaurs alive! Coming soon to our LeFrak imax theater.
March 1, 2007... This large-screen adventure traces the steps of AMNH paleontologists, showcasing their remarkable findings about dinosaurs past--and present!

Feel the impact of Cosmic Collisions: vwww.amnh.org.(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... Get ready for amazing armchair adventures when you click on "Space Show" on the Museum's home page, www.amnh.org. First, take in a tantalizing trailer for Cosmic Collisions, now playing at the Hayden Planetarium. From the crash of a meteorite...

Liz Borda: doctoral candidate division of invertebrate zoology.(American Museum of Natural History)(Brief article)
March 1, 2007... A woman who devotes her life to leeches inevitably has some explaining to do. "What's not to love?" says Liz Borda, who for six years has studied freshwater and terrestrial leeches with Mark Siddall, AMNH Associate Curator of Annelida,...

Museum events: American Museum of Natural History.
March 1, 2007... EXHIBITIONS Gold Through August 19, 2007 This glittering exhibition explores the captivating story of the world's most desired metal. Extraordinary geological specimens, cultural objects, and interactive exhibits illuminate gold's...

Notes from the Edge.(ENDPAPER)(wasps of forest's edge)
March 1, 2007... The first reports home from early European explorers in the tropics told of impenetrable jungles ("we hacked through a dense, green hell..."). But truth be told, the average tropical forest is fairly open. Large trees darken the forest floor,...