Natural History articles from March 2008

Natural History archives from March 2008

The natural explanation.(THE NATURAL MOMENT: HANDS UP!)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Sea otters are "aww"-inspiring creatures. Just ask the more than 9 million YouTubers who in the past year have watched an amateur video shot at the Vancouver Aquarium in Canada. In it, two sea otters clasp "hands" as...

River rifts.(WORD EXCHANGE)(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Sandra Postel's hopeful article on the water situation in Israel and Palestine "Sharing the River Out of Eden," [11/07] is, unfortunately, quite misleading. She notes that Palestinians use a quarter as much water per...

An old foe.(SAMPLINGS)(home erectus in africa)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... The first early human species to migrate out of Africa, nearly 2 million years ago, was probably Homo erectus. Moving northward into temperate latitudes forced our relative to adapt to reduced sunlight--but when and how? Fossilized H. erectus...

Good news for green turtles.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... Of the world's seven species of sea turtle, six are considered endangered or threatened due to humankind's exploitation of their meat, eggs, and habitat. But despite that gloomy statistic, all is not lost: a recent paper announces the happy...

Multiple personalities.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Most people have no problem assigning personalities to beloved pets, but they stop short of extending the courtesy to invertebrates. New research suggests we should be more generous. J. Chadwick Johnson, now at...

The great rope in the sky.(SAMPLINGS)(study of auroras)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Scandinavians of old thought northern lights were the reflection of giant schools of herring in the sea. Gone are those days: physicists now know that charged particles emitted by the Sun the solar wind--interact...

Mid-season switch.(SAMPLINGS)(study of fairy-wrens)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] At the start of each breeding season, male red-backed fairy-wrens high enough on the social ladder darken their bills and shed their lackluster brown feathers for a flashy black-and-red set sure to impress the...

Not-So-North Sea.(THE WARMING EARTH)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] European fishers might initially be pleased to hear the results of at least one global-warming study: a rise in water temperature at the bottom of the North Sea is boosting the diversity of fish species there. ...

Soup sandwich.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... Did life begin in a primordial "soup" or on the surfaces of minerals? There's no need to choose between those two leading theories, according to Helen Hansma of the University of California, Santa Barbara. She says the answer is both: the soup...

Blue in the feathers.(SAMPLINGSantenna)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Emperor penguins surface from some of their dives with almost no oxygen left in their bodies, a new study shows. Their blood-oxygen level--the lowest ever recorded in a healthy, conscious bird or mammal--is less than...

Sting operation.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... Two years ago a conservation worker in Peru found a rare beetle attracted to his light trap. As he grabbed it, the insect jerked back its antennae and pricked his finger, which swelled as if stung by a bee. Beetles don't usually go around...

Diana's mountain retreat: named for the Roman goddess of woodlands, a singular butterfly survives in a shrinking habitat.(NATURALIST AT LARGE)(Diana butterflies)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] July 4, 1992, 5:30 P.M.: My pickup truck is parked off a lonely Forest Service road that loops around the rim of Mount Magazine, a loaf-shaped peak in Arkansas. Peering over the steering wheel, I have a panoramic...

Inside the code: our DNA contains layers of "extra" information that constrains the direction evolution can take.(LIFE ZONE)
March 1, 2008... AUGCUGCUGCUGGCG... So begins the human version of the genetic instruction to make "sonic hedgehog," a protein essential for an embryo to grow properly. But how does that instruction work? The basic answer is that it codes for a string of amino...

On swift wings: what airplane designers could learn from the shape-changing wings of birds.(BIOMECHANICS)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In 2006 when the U.S. military retired the F-14 Tomcat--of Top Gun fame--the most successful experiment in "swing-wing" airplanes was also grounded. Such planes rely on an intuitively appealing design idea: change...

That great beast of a town: in the 1770s, London became the epicenter for a great intellectual quest: discovering the incredible diversity of life on Earth.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] In November 1774, a cask of rum arrived in London spiked with four dead electric eels, the largest of them three feet eight inches long and up to fourteen inches around. They had smooth, snaky bodies, flattened...

Art for the ages: new murals offer a glimpse of the Pacific Coast's extinct ecosystems.(Interview)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] Fossils of plants and animals offer clues to what extinct creatures looked like, how they survived in their surroundings, and what finally killed them off. In "Fossil Mysteries," a new permanent exhibition at the...

No taming the shrew: good thing for us it's small, because this predator gives no quarter to its quarry.(Cover story)
March 1, 2008... I've been trapping star-nosed moles for two decades to study their behavior and anatomy, so I am used to the disappointment of finding an empty trap. But one trap I set about twelve years ago disappointed me in another way. I had placed it in a...

Wetted bliss: in a Louisiana refuge, different degrees of moisture create distinctive woods.(THIS LAND)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Just about any which way you cross Louisiana, you will pass through or beside wetlands, from swamps and marshes to bayous and oxbow lakes. Interstate 10, the main highway that runs through the low-lying southern...

American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree.(Book review)
March 1, 2008... American Chestnut The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree By Susan Freinkel. University of California Press, 2007:$27.50 [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] Some folks claim a squirrel used to be able to travel from Georgia to Maine without...

Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth Century New York Court Case that Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature.(Book review)
March 1, 2008... Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth Century New York Court Case that Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature by D. Graham Burnett, Princeton University Press, 2007; $29.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] There are many lessons to...

Earth Then and Now: Amazing Images of Our Changing World.(Book review)
March 1, 2008... Earth Then and Now: Amazing Images of Our Changing World by Fred Pearce, Firefly Books. 2007; $39.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Several hundred beautifully reproduced pairs of photographs face each other across the pages of this glossy...

Strength in numbers: if you want to build a planet, you'd best begin with big bunches of boulders.(OUT THERE)
March 1, 2008... In November 2007, a team of California scientists announced yet another impressive milestone in the study of exoplanets, planets beyond our own solar system. The group, led for this particular study by Debra A. Fischer at San Francisco State...

Skylog.(Comet Holmes)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This past October, amateur astronomers were amazed by a weird transformation. For most of the month, Comet Holmes, more than 150 million miles from Earth, was no brighter than magnitude 17--about 25,000 times fainter...

March nights out.(SKYLOG)(Brief article)(Calendar)
March 1, 2008... 5 Mercury, Venus, and a narrow sliver of a waning crescent Moon will rise about an hour before sunup to form a broad triangle about five degrees wide in the east-southeast. Your best bet is to use binoculars. Jupiter is easier to spot at this...

Journey to the core.(nature.net)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... Eighteen hundred miles beneath our feet, the outer core, a Mars-size sphere of churning molten iron, generates Earth's magnetic field. Exactly how the process works, and why the core's dynamo switches polarity--causing the planet's magnetic...

Language matters.(WORD EXCHANGE)(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2008... In "At a Loss for Words" [12/071/08], Sarah Grey Thomason asks us to contemplate the value to humanity of a language that most of us will never hear, much less use. To the extent that humanity consists of a conversation among ethnic groups...

Fossil armored mammal found in Chile.(At the Museum: AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY)(Parapropalaehoplophorus septentrionalis)
March 1, 2008... You probably won't be able to pronounce it, which is fine, because you probably won t be seeing one anytime soon. Parapropalaehoplophorus septentrionalis was a lumbering, armadillo-like mammal that lived 18 million years ago in what is now the...

2008 Isaac Asimov memorial debate.
March 1, 2008... Mining the Sky: The Engineering, Economics, and Ethics of Exploring the Solar System's--Natural Resources THURSDAY, MARCH 13 7:30 p.m. Planets, moons, asteroids, and comets contain natural resources such as water, minerals, and trace...

Water: [H.sub.2]O = life.(Refresher Course)(Brief article)
March 1, 2008... All of Earth's creatures depend on water for survival, and, in order to meet their needs, many have fine-tuned their average water intake to accommodate the varying, often extreme, conditions in their habitats. For example, did you know: *...

At the museum: American Museum of Natural History.
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] EXHIBITIONS Water: [H.sub.2]O = Life Through May 26, 2008 Live animals, hands-on exhibits, and stunning dioramas invite the whole family to explore the beauty and wonder of water and reveal one of the most...

Silk city.(ENDPAPER)(discovery of massive spider webs in Lake Tawakoni State Park)
March 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A gigantic mass of spider webs spun in Lake Tawakoni State Park, about fifty miles east of Dallas, lent recent proof to the saying that "everything is bigger in Texas." Discovered early in August 2007, the webs...