Natural History articles from May 2008

Natural History archives from May 2008

The natural explanation.(sperm whales)
May 1, 2008... Meet Tramtracks (also known as #5727, or "Scar"). He's a nine-year-old sperm whale that still lives with his mother in the calm waters where he was born, in the Caribbean West Indies a few miles off the western coast of Dominica. In cetology...

Stormy weather.(nature.net)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] ONE THING I MISS, living in southern California, is weather. Sure, it rains a little in the winter, but I have yet to see anything like the spectacular lightning shows that would roll across New York City, where I...

Too good to be true?(WORD EXCHANGE)(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2008... Convinced that the butterflies in the images were dead specimens, two readers wrote to lament our publication of the photographs by Gary Noel Ross that accompanied his article "Diana's Mountain Retreat" [3/08]. In fact, none of the insects were...

If the glove fits.(WORD EXCHANGE)(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2008... In his otherwise delightful article on the history of the use of digitalis derived from foxglove, Druin Burch ["Hearts and Flowers," 2/08] has overlooked what has been demonstrated to be possibly the most beneficial effect of this remarkable...

Shivering flirts.(SAMPLINGSz)(peafowls' sexual behavior)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Show-off males are common among birds, but peacocks stand out for their extravagantly long tail feathers adorned with dramatic spots (let's not call them "eyespots"). There is general agreement that long and...

Eye-spotting.(SAMPLINGS)(wing marks of moths and butterflies)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... Some moths and butterflies bear circular, high-contrast marks on their wings that have long been thought to scare off predators by mimicking the eyes of the predators' own enemies. Not so, say Martin Stevens and two colleagues at the...

Masters of disguise or display?(SAMPLINGS)(chameleons)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... In popular culture, chameleons are considered masters of disguise. They can swiftly change their body coloration and thus blend in with their environment. But chameleons can also alter their appearance when expressing aggression and, in the...

Preflight packaging.(SAMPLINGS)(fossil feathers)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... A two-inch piece of amber discovered among thousands of others at the muddy bottom of a French quarry is helping scientists bridge a gap in their knowledge of the early development of feathers. The fossil dates to the Middle Cretaceous, around...

Rainy workdays.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This summer, storm chasers looking for the heaviest average rainstorms in the southeastern United States should venture out midweek in the afternoons. So suggests a study by NASA meteorologist Thomas L. Bell and...

Building their own beds.(SAMPLINGS)(sockeye salmons)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... When a female sockeye salmon is ready to spawn, she finds a spot in stream gravel and sets about digging with her tail. The result is a shallow but large depression, about ten inches deep and three feet in diameter, wherein the female deposits...

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!(SAMPLINGS)(pirate crews in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... Pirates may not come across as the most civic-minded folk, but a new study shows that pirate crews operating in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries adopted a democratic constitution and a sophisticated system of checks and...

Sulfur spritzer.(THE WARMING EARTH)(Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... In June 1991, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted and spewed out an estimated 17 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, creating a global layer of sulfuric acid haze that veiled sunlight and temporarily dropped worldwide...

Scraping bottom for blue.(SAMPLINGS)(pigment Maya blue)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Almost 2,000 years ago the Maya concocted a pigment, since dubbed Maya blue, which has endured the harsh climate of southern Mexico on murals, pottery, and sculptures. Archaeologists, however, never determined how or...

A desert Galapagos: some animals inhabiting the white gypsum sand dunes of New Mexico shed their colors in less than 7,000 years.(FIELD NOTES)
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A flash of movement caught my eye. If the lizard had stayed still, I might have stepped on it: its color perfectly matched the dazzling expanse of white sand. Good thing, I thought, that rattlesnakes here in...

Hoofprints: since their domestication, horses have transformed people's lives--leaving a subtle trail of clues along the way.
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] NAZAR AND I WERE PERCHED ON THE EDGE OF A THIRTY-FOOT RIVER TERRACE, GAZING DOWN AT HIS HERD OF HORSES ON THE OPPOSITE BANK of a shallow river. They were drinking and grazing in total harmony, heads bobbing and tails...

Ecce Equus.
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Modern horses, zebras, and asses belong to the genus Equus, the only surviving genus in a once diverse family, the Equidae. Based on fossil records, the genus appears to have originated in North America about 4...

Mental mirrors: special cells in the brain mimic the actions and intentions of others, forming the basis of empathy and social connections.(Reprint)
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] What do people really do all day, every day. We read the world. And much of the world consists of other people. When a tennis player raises his racquet, for example, you know instantly whether he's going to take a...

Garden on the rocks: poor nutrients, thin soils, and a helping of heavy metals make for rich, yet vulnerable plant communities.
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] In 1872 a journalist from the Napa Reporter ventured to a remote mine at the northern tip of Napa County, California, far from the area's fertile wine-growing valley. At the time, the so-called Knoxville Mine was a...

Cool scene: a bog in Ohio is a reminder of the last ice age.(THIS LAND)
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Northern white cedar bogs are common in Canada and in the northern parts of some adjacent states, notably Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, but they rarely turn up farther south. One outlier of this boreal...

The Mystery of the Missing Antimatter.(Book review)
May 1, 2008... The Mystery of the Missing Antimatter By Helen R. Quinn and Yossi Nir Princeton University Press, 2008; $29.95 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] There was a time, around the 1960s and 1970s, when it was easy to tell a particle physicist...

Amazon Expeditions: My Quest for the Ice-Age Equator.(Book review)
May 1, 2008... Amazon Expeditions My Quest for the Ice-Age Equator by Paul Colinvaux Yale University Press, 2007; $32.50 Paul Colinvaux may be in his seventies, but he still has the spirit of a young Turk. Throughout this feisty and often...

Hard Work and a Good Deal: The Civilian Conservation Corps in Minnesota.(Book review)
May 1, 2008... Hard Work and a Good Deal The Civilian Conservation Corps in Minnesota by Barbara W, Sommer Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2008:$27.95 The Emergency Conservation Work Program, popularly known as the Civilian Conservation...

Skylog.(astronomical bodies)(Calendar)
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It's not very often that Mercury is easier to see than dazzling Venus. But Mercury begins May in the midst of its best evening apparition of the year for northern observers. It's an easy to see naked-eye object,...

The Horse.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Entering the new exhibition The Horse, visitors come upon a striking diorama in which models of three extinct horse species, based on fossils from the Museum's vast collection, graze against a glorious painted...

Darwin's legacy: looking back, going forward.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)(Charles Darwin)
May 1, 2008... Just as Charles Darwin suspected when he held off publishing On the Origin of the Species for nearly 20 years, his theory of natural selection as the engine of evolution would shatter basic assumptions about science and the world. His impact is...

They're back! Lizards & Snakes: Alive!(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)(Brief article)
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Opens May 24, 2008 www.amnh.org/lizards Squeamish about squamates? Or the opposite--loopy for lizards and smitten with snakes? Either way, the remedy is the same: total immersion in Lizards & Snakes: Alive!...

At the museum: American Museum of Natural History.
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] EXHIBITIONS LAST CHANCE! 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 essential nature of water and reveal...

Aqua-rock climbers.(ENDPAPER)(caddisflies)
May 1, 2008... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A fear of falling limits most people to Earth's gentler slopes. Yet there are those among us who venture onto cliff faces and stone spires, armed with ropes, harnesses, and anchoring devices, to challenge the...