Natural History articles from May 2006

Natural History archives from May 2006

Camargue cavalcade.(THE NATURAL MOMENT)(wild horses)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... Photographer Steve Bloom stood waist-deep in marsh water of the Camargue, swatting mosquitoes while he waited for a riderless cavalry to storm his camera. And, action! A local farmer herded a group of free-roaming horses toward Bloom. A few...

Playing with fire.(UP FRONT)
May 1, 2006... Anyone, paying attention to the news knows that many of the world's flashpoints--the war in Iraq, the politics of the Middle East, terrorism and its consequences--have grown largely out of just one issue: energy. Of course, every major effort...

Warning scents?(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2006... Uldis Roze ["Smart Weapons" 3/06] and his colleagues identified R-delta-decalactone as the chemical behind the scent of an angry porcupine. But how can they be sure that the other components of the scent were unimportant? Perhaps nonhuman...

Ancestral disputes.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2006... Russell L. Ciochon and Gregg F. Gunnell ["Our Anthropoid Roots," 03/06] claim that recently discovered fossils contradict the longstanding view that amphipithecid primates lie near the base of the anthropoid lineage. Actually, improved...

Signs of life.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2006... Neil deGrasse Tyson's article, "Exoplanet Earth" [2/06], reminded me of a few questions I have had for decades: What would atomic explosions in the atmosphere look like to an observer far from Earth? Could they be seen from nearby stars? If so,...

Sink in the sea.(SAMPLINGS)(carbon sinks)
May 1, 2006... When fossil fuels burn, carbon compounds, once sequestered deep in the ground, turn into carbon dioxide and ascend into the atmosphere. There, they contribute to global warming. Scientists want to know more about any natural systems---called...

Follow my eyes.(SAMPLINGS)(monkey behavior)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... Following someone else's gaze is irresistible, isn't it? And people aren't the only ones who do it. Many monkey species are known to follow other monkeys' glances. It's no mystery why this behavior evolved; after all, a fellow monkey's gaze...

Ear to the ground.(SAMPLINGS)(elephant warning signals)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... When elephants bellow warnings of danger, their low-frequency calls resound in the air and rumble through the ground. Of course, no one has ever doubted that elephants hear and respond to the airborne sounds--their ears are not exactly hidden....

Typhoid Athena.(SAMPLINGS)(Plague of Athens)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... The Plague of Athens broke out in 430 B.C. Four years later it had killed about a third of the Athenian population, contributing to the great city-state's downfall. The historian Thucydides, who himself suffered and recovered from the plague,...

Dogs gone mild.(SAMPLINGS)(dog breeds)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... Of all domestic animals, dogs have been with people the longest--archaeology says 14,000 years, though DNA hints at 40,000 years. Artificial selection has led to a multitude of breeds with physical and behavioral characteristics suited to...

Goat-getters.(SAMPLINGS)(Neanderthal hunters)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... If Neanderthals still walked the earth, they could be excused for developing an inferiority complex. Pop culture, as well as serious anthropology, has saddled them with all kinds of second-rate traits, from clumsiness to sheer stupidity. But...

Green repellent.(SAMPLINGS)(frog skin)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... Frogs' skins are veritable laboratories for synthesizing biologically active compounds, including antibiotics, glues, hallucinogens, lubricants, painkillers, and a stunning array of poisons. Now, yet another active--and potentially...

Hot rocks.(SAMPLINGS)(Earth's crust warming)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... As our planet warms, rising air and ocean temperatures make frequent headlines. Of course, the land is warming, too--yet remarkably, until recently, no one had quantified just how much the continental landmasses have warmed. Now Shaopeng Huang,...

Long dig.(SAMPLINGS)(qanat construction)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... Unless you're a Scrabble player, you may never have heard of qanats. They are gently inclined underground channels that bear water from an upslope aquifer to a village in the valley below. The first qanats were built in Iran as early as 3,000...

Golden tomb fit for a queen: ancient ants preserved in amber show that the insects have farmed mealybug "cattle" for at least 15 million years.(NATURALIST AT LARGE)
May 1, 2006... Let's travel far back in time to a clear, sunny morning between 15 and 20 million years ago in a tropical Caribbean forest. A gentle rain the night before has softened and moistened the ground. Out through the warm, loose earth a small worker...

Announcing the Franklin Institute Awards.
May 1, 2006... Dating back to 1824, The Franklin Institute Awards Program seeks to provide public recognition and encouragement of excellence in science and technology. Since 1874, recipients have been selected by the Institute's Committee on Science and the...

Cooking the climate with coal: in the U.S., China, and elsewhere coal is booming. But the boom may lead to environmental disaster.(COMMENTARY)(Cover story)
May 1, 2006... On a cold morning in February 2005, the school gym at Nashville Community High School in southern Illinois was jammed to the rafters with local residents and kids. More than 2,300 students had been dismissed from morning classes and bused in...

Decoding the tribe: Carl Schuster's remarkable quest to trace humanity's ancient iconography.(Biography)
May 1, 2006... I first met Carl Schuster in the late 1950s. I was living in desert California, with no phone and few visitors. He simply appeared at my door: "I understand you're just back from Irkutsk." Archaeology--nothing else--had taken me to Siberia. But...

Home above the range: pairs of aplomado falcons are nesting in the Southwest again, showing off their incredible hunting and flying skills.
May 1, 2006... A small flock of red-winged blackbirds is flying East, with tile wind, when a larger bird launches upward and picks out a target from the moving group. Bird chases bird, one hunter, one prey. In level flight the hunter turns on a burst of...

Virginia is for hikers: Massanutten mountain has forest trails, streams, shale barrens, a muskeg, and spectacular views.(THIS LAND)
May 1, 2006... The Appalachian Mountains, which extend 1,600 miles from Quebec's Gaspe Peninsula to the coastal plain of Alabama, embrace several ranges that roughly parallel the Atlantic coast of North America. In Virginia three main swaths of mountains are...

Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change.(Book review)
May 1, 2006... Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006; $22.95 From a scientific standpoint, one might argue, we don't need another book on global warming. Everyone, it seems, knows...

Wave-Swept Shore: The Rigors of Life on a Rocky Coast.(Book review)
May 1, 2006... Wave-Swept Shore: The Rigors of Life on a Rocky Coast by Mimi Koehl; photographs by Anne Wertheim Rosenfeld University of California Press 2006; $39.95 Successful symbiosis--the kind that makes green algae and sea anemones flourish in the...

Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting, and the Discovery of the New World.(Book review)
May 1, 2006... Fish on Friday: Feasting, Fasting and the Discovery of the New World by Brian Fagan Basic Books, 2006; $26.95 Fish have been a culinary delicacy in most cultures, yet oddly, in most of medieval Europe, they were regarded as something of an...

Gas trap.(nature.net)(methane)
May 1, 2006... The steady blue flame glowing beneath my pancake griddle is, for the most part, burning methane. A simple molecule with four hydrogen atoms bonded to a central carbon (C[H.sub.4]), methane is a clear, odorless gas. Although it cooks our comfort...

Sizing up Pluto: the runt of the solar system turns out to have three moons.(OUT THERE)
May 1, 2006... If you believed half the spam you got in your e-mail, you'd think size is everything. So pity poor Pluto. When the American astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh discovered it back in 1930, it was immediately dubbed the ninth planet of our solar system....

The sky in May.
May 1, 2006... Mercury reaches superior conjunction, passing behind the Sun's disk, on May 18, one day after the planet crosses the ecliptic and begins to move north against the sky. Because it will also be at perihelion (the planet's closest approach to the...

Extremely long-necked sauropod named by AMNH paleontologists.(At the Museum: AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY)
May 1, 2006... Two American Museum of Natural History paleontologists have described a new species of sauropod, Erketu ellisoni, that had an extremely elongated neck, one of the longest necks proportional to trunk height of all known sauropods. The truly...

Raymond Salva: Assistant Director, Traveling Exhibitions and Planetarium Shows.(PEOPLE AT THE AMNH)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... When Ray Salva joined the Museum in September 2003, he was looking for a career change, seeking rewards of a more personal nature. After years of working in the corporate sector, he hoped to apply his skills to a meaningful role in a...

Museum events: American Museum of Natural History.(Calendar)
May 1, 2006... EXHIBITIONS 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...

My Kingdom for a crown.(ENDPAPER)(ocelots)
May 1, 2006... The first time my colleagues and I captured Bobby, an oversize ocelot, I knew he was the local king. At thirty-four pounds, he was the largest ocelot we had ever seen--and certainly the largest on Panama's Barro Colorado Island (BCI). It was...