Natural History articles from May 2004

Natural History archives from May 2004

Bloom on.(The Natural Moment)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2004... For a drought-ridden continent patched over with poor soil, Australia has a remarkable variety of flowering plants. Tough, resilient stalks, bedded in gravel and inured to the and climate, repeatedly bear exotic blossoms, such as the yellow...

Reality check.(Up Front)(travel to Egypt)
May 1, 2004... A couple of months ago, my friend Mary Knight, a visiting scholar at New York University and a consulting member of our staff, made a return trip to Cairo, Egypt, a city where she has lived on and off since 1994. What originally drew her to the...

Browbeaten ancestors.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2004... In "Headstrong Hominids" (2/04), Noel T. Boaz and Russell L. Ciochon propose that the prominent brow ridges of Homo erectus crania evolved to protect our contentious large male ancestors who were clubbing each other during combat. But large...

More trash talk.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2004... According to Charles Moore ("Trashed," 11/03), gyres have pulled our oceangoing plastic detritus into localized concentrations. Is there any reason the nations of the world couldn't organize a cleanup at appropriate intervals? Steve E....

To persist in error ...(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2004... I, too, noticed the substitution of Cape Horn for the Cape of Good Hope in Adam Summers's "Biomechanics" column ("Like Water Off a Beetle's Back," 2/04), and correctly guessed that people would write in to point it out. But I believe that your...

Cozy 1BR, Forest Vu.(Sampling)(bird breeding)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2004... Come springtime, birds everywhere are busy nesting and reproducing. But not every bird gets to breed--before you can raise a family you usually need a place to call home, and young adults are often edged out of the housing market. Those birds...

Aftermath of occupation.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2004... Scattered across the Canadian High Arctic are the remains of small groups of dwellings, sunken partway into the ground and built out of whale bones. Nearby, generally, stands a freshwater pond, along with piles of decomposing bones from whales...

Like mother, like son.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2004... Thirty years ago Robert L. Trivers, an evolutionary biologist, and Dan E. Willard, a mathematician, formulated a sage hypothesis: if strong, healthy mothers tend to bear strong sons, and it those sons monopolize matings and tend to produce more...

Prions make amends.(Sampling)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2004... Because one kind of prion causes "mad cow disease," prions in general get a lot of bad press. The very word "prion" may conjure horrific visions of saboteurs cascading through brain tissue. But not all prions are deadly. Kausik Si, a...

Role reversal.(Samplings)
May 1, 2004... MAN BITES DOG; FROG FENDS OFF LION; PLANET HEATS STARS: silly headlines from the tabloids, right? But stow your skepticism about that last story: planets aren't always passive recipients of heat and light. Evgenya Shkolnik, an astronomer at the...

Seeing red.(Samplings)(colors affect the animals )(Brief Article)
May 1, 2004... Stroll into a pet shop, and you'll find a host of colorful cages and toys for the rodent in your life. The colors, of course, are designed to appeal to (human) buyers, but it turns out that colors affect the animals as well. A recent study by...

Evidence of impact.(Samplings)
May 1, 2004... Few scientists will disagree if you say that 65 million years ago, something killed off a large fraction of Earth's inhabitants--including those most spectacular of creatures, the dinosaurs. But nowadays, if you contend that the ultimate killer...

Cryptic creatures.(Samplings)
May 1, 2004... Only three of these pictures are close-ups of the same animal. Which one doesn't belong? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Answer: b

Different stroke.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2004... In turbulent waters, fish tend to "go with the flow." They save energy by slaloming back and forth between the vortices, or whirlpools. Now biologists have determined that when they slalom, fish adopt a previously unknown swimming style that...

The planet parade: for millennia, planets were just mysterious, wandering points of light in the night sky. Now they are destinations.(Universe)
May 1, 2004... In the study of the cosmos, it's hard to come up with a better tale than the centuries-long history of attempts to understand the planets-those sky wanderers that make their rounds against the backdrop of stars. Of the eight objects in our...

Of mice, men, and genes: the best-laid plans o' DNA gang aft agley.(Findings)(Deoxyribonucleic acid)
May 1, 2004... Don't you love urban legends, those outrageous stories everyone believes? There are academicians who study urban legends for a living; they catalogue them, track their origins in Norse mythology, get into arguments at conferences about them....

New York State.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2004... From majestic mountains to shining seas, New York State is a world of scenic wonders. Its spectacular vistas include cascading waterfalls, mighty rivers, abundant lakes and streams, lush green forests, and sun-kissed vineyards. Stroll along a...

Nova Scotia.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2004... Nova Scotia is a coast of contrasts. Our 4,600 mile shore ranges from rugged and challenging to gentle and sandy, bustling to charming and quiet. You're never more than 35 minutes from the sea here. No wonder we're a touring enthusiast's...

Wyoming.(Brief Article)
May 1, 2004... A trek along Wyoming's scenic routes is the very antithesis of an urban commute. In the city, your time behind the wheel is basic transportation--getting from point A to B as quickly as possible with hopes of avoiding the glow of brake lights...

How a star avoids the limelight: some echinoderms have thousands of eyes on their backs. When the lights come on, they switch to wearing shades.(Biomechanics)
May 1, 2004... By day, gaudy reef fishes dominate the scene at a coral reef, but by night, invertebrates steal the show. Coral polyps--at least the ones that can't depend on nutrients provided by photosynthesizing symbiotic partners--extend their tentacles in...

Egypt's young and restless: through Islam and the Internet, a new generation seeks its fair share.
May 1, 2004... Osama 'Abd al-Raheem studies engineering at Helwan University, in the southern suburbs of Cairo. He is committed to his studies, and, like most young adults, he aspires to marry, to find a decent job that puts his hard-won skills to good use,...

A birthstone for earth: the oldest terrestrial material is a crystal of zircon, the sometime diamond substitute that can be a geologist's best friend.
May 1, 2004... With a wave, we bade good-bye to our helicopter and watched as it disappeared over the horizon. In the sudden stillness, the seven of us stood at the edge of Greenland's ice cap, in a remote corner of the world, cut off from the rest of...

Brains and the beast: can the behaviorist's insistence on distinguishing animal from human cognition be reconciled with evolutionary continuity?(Do Animals Think?)(Intelligence of Apes and Other Rational Beings)(Book Review)
May 1, 2004... Do Animals Think? by Clive D.L. Wynne Princeton University Press, 2004; $26.95 Intelligence of Apes and Other Rational Beings by Duane M. Rumbaugh and David A. Washburn Yale University Press, 2003; $35.000 If your dog drops a tennis...

Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants.(Book Review)
May 1, 2004... Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants by Robert Sullivan Bloomsbury, 2004; $23.95 In his memorable 1998 book The Meadowlands, about the New Jersey wetlands just west of the Lincoln Tunnel,...

Running with Reindeer: Encounters in Russian Lapland.(Book Review)
May 1, 2004... Running with Reindeer: Encounters in Russian Lapland by Roger Took Westview Press, 2004; $27.50 Few places in Europe areas far off the beaten track as the Kola Peninsula, a potato-shaped carbuncle of land at the top of the Scandinavian...

Sequoia: the Heralded Tree in American Art and Culture.
May 1, 2004... Just as Lebanon is famous for its cedars, so North America is known for its redwoods. Not only are they among the largest and most stately trees on earth, but they thrive in settings of surpassing scenic beauty. Strolling beneath a towering...

Moving Mountains.(nature.net)
May 1, 2004... California's Santa Monica Mountains, where I lave, are a mere 5 million years old. Like most mountains, they are comprised of rocks formed during complex and repeated sequences of uplift, sedimentation, and volcanism [see "A Birthstone for...

Too many X rays: in a sky visible only from outer space, astronomers may have found the first example of an intermediate-size black hole.(Out There)
May 1, 2004... Astronomers possess X-ray vision, even though none of my colleagues, to my knowledge, halls from the planet Krypton. Telescopes designed to collect and focus X rays from space provide that vision. X rays are highly energetic--that's why they so...

The sky in May.(Out There)
May 1, 2004... Mercury reaches its greatest western elongation, 26 degrees from the Sun, on May 14. The planet nonetheless presents a crummy apparition this month for viewers at mid-northern latitudes, because it rises less than an hour before the Sun. The...

Museum scientist takes on bugs of the Southern Hemisphere: leads team aiming to study 5,000 species of plant-eating bugs.(At the museum: American Museum of Natural History)
May 1, 2004... Bugs "down under" will take center stage in a new collaborative five-year project between scientists at the American Museum of Natural History and colleagues at other prominent research institutions. Funded by the National Science Foundation...

Museum events: American Museum of Natural History.
May 1, 2004... EXHIBITIONS Exploratorium/AMNH Through August 15 This exhibition invites visitors to explore fundamental concepts and phenomena in the natural sciences. Fun, hands-on displays clustered around four themes--Earth processes,...

The face of extinction.(Endpaper)
May 1, 2004... Until the middle of the nineteenth century, as documented by no less an eminence than John James Audubon, passenger pigeons by the billions turned day to night as they passed overhead in the American skies [see "Audubon in Kentucky," by William...