Natural History articles from November 2002

Natural History archives from November 2002

It's all about you. (Up Front).
November 1, 2002... People in magazine publishing often get exercised about what are known in the business as demos. Not demos, as the dictionaries have it, for "demonstrations" or "Democrats," but demos for "demographics." Are you, good reader, male or female?...

Color guard. (The Natural Moment).
November 1, 2002... Squid--the bright-eyed James Deans of the ocean--are said to "live fast and die young." Born ready to jet at high speeds, and able to shoot ink at predators after just four to five weeks in untended egg sacs, big-fin reef squid (Sepioteuthis...

Y and Y not. (Letters).
November 1, 2002... Carl Zimmer's intriguing article "The Once and Future Male" (9/02) states that reptiles do not have Y chromosomes and that the Y occurs only in mammals. Actually, whenever the males of any species--mammalian, reptilian, or, for that matter,...

Crossing contributions. (Letters).
November 1, 2002... In his article on hybridization ("Caution: Species Crossing," 9/02), Menno Schilthuizen mentions Marion Ownbey's discovery of goatsbeard (Tragopogon) hybrids along a stretch of railroad track. Ownbey received his Ph.D. in 1939 for studies done...

Jelly vision. (Letters).
November 1, 2002... How does Chironex fleckeri, the Australian box jellyfish described in Jamie Seymour's article "One Touch of Venom" (9/02), see the fish it is pursuing? Martin Hammond Cupertino, California JAMIE SEYMOUR REPLIES: Unlike other...

Elemental facts. (Letters).
November 1, 2002... Contrary to what Neil deGrasse Tyson wrote in "Cosmos on the Table" (7/02-8/02), iron atoms have the most binding energy per nuclear particle, not the least. Thus iron is the most stable of all the elements. Rather than being the prime cause of...

Of babies and bathwater. (Letters).
November 1, 2002... I just read Natural History for the first time. All in all, it's very nice and informative, with lovely pictures. Now if you could just get rid of the Darwinism and evolution garbage, your magazine would be about 100 percent. I might even...

Mislabeled milkweed. (Letters).
November 1, 2002... In Anurag A. Agrawal and Stephen B. Malcolm's article "Once Upon a Milkweed" (9/02), the plant in the photograph identified as a butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa) (page 52, top right) is actually a swamp milkweed (A. incarnata). Douglas...

Grief on the reef. (Samplings).
November 1, 2002... Mysterious diseases have been striking reef-building corals worldwide. One of the most serious is white pox, an ailment that kills coral tissue, leaving behind the irregular white lesions for which the disease is named. Its victim is the...

Green party. (Samplings).
November 1, 2002... How's this for international scientific cooperation? Thirteen biologists from seven countries monitor 115 plant species at eleven mountain sites in North America, South America, and Europe. Aptly enough, the goal of this display of...

Fish dip. (Samplings).
November 1, 2002... Many species of those odd-looking flying reptiles called pterodactyls have been identified from the fossil record, and some are quite large (the man-size ones depicted in the movie Jurassic Park III were well within the realm of the possible)....

Manna for the sea. (Samplings).
November 1, 2002... The southeastern Mediterranean is a peculiar sea. The rivers that feed it drain dry and desert regions, so they deliver only a trickle, instead of the usual flood, of the inorganic nutrients that rivers usually discharge into seas and oceans....

Winter's blast. (Samplings).
November 1, 2002... The onset of cold weather used to bring the serenity of "easy wind and downy flake," but these days it's just as likely to herald the sights and sounds of snowmobiles roaring through the countryside. The agitation the vehicles cause to deer,...

Experiment of the month. (Samplings).
November 1, 2002... Anyone who has ever taken a walk in the woods knows that songbirds, despite their size, can make themselves heard a long way off. But that raises an intriguing question. Do the birds, like opera stars trying to project to the nosebleed seats at...

Distinctive destination: a connoisseur's guide to exquisite and exotic locales. (Special Advertising Section).
November 1, 2002... MEXICO For the tranquility of solitary beaches or the excitement of eco-adventure sports, come to the Riviera Maya THE RIVIERA MAYA--a seventy-five-mile stretch of the Yucatan Peninsula on the Mexican Caribbean--boasts tranquil and...

The slippery slope of leech-seeking: a museum curator takes to the field to solve some mysteries of leech evolution. (At The Museum).
November 1, 2002... Leeches, those wriggling organic syringes that can painlessly suck your blood, were employed medicinally all over the ancient world. Their first recorded use was by Nicander of Colophon, followed closely by Galen, both in the second century...

Museum events.
November 1, 2002... EXHIBITIONS The Butterfly Conservatory: Tropical Butterflies Alive in Winter Through May 26, 2003 The butterflies are back! A return engagement of this popular exhibition includes more than 500 live, free-flying tropical butterflies...

Einstein. (Special Exhibition).
November 1, 2002... November 15, 2002-August 10, 2003 This unprecedented exhibition will profile this extraordinary scientific genius, whose achievements were so substantial and groundbreaking that his name is virtually synonymous with science in the public mind....

Going ballistic: the many varieties of free fall. (Universe).
November 1, 2002... In nearly all sports that use balls, the balls go ballistic at one time or another. Whether you're playing baseball, cricket, football, golf, jai alai, soccer, tennis, or water polo, a ball gets thrown, smacked, or kicked and then briefly...

Anybody out there? Or is life, instead, "a glorious accident"? (Reflections).
November 1, 2002... One of the first books I read as a boy was H. G. Wells's 1901 fable, The First Men in the Moon. The two men, Cavor and Bedford, land in a crater, apparently barren and lifeless, just before the lunar dawn; then, as the Sun rises, they realize...

Head turner: what's the point of the hammerhead's head if the hammerhead doesn't hammer? (Boimechanics).
November 1, 2002... Illustrations by Shawn Gould Thirty feet underwater, over a sandy patch next to the Great Barrier Reef, is a perfectly ordinary place for a shark to swim. But the student divers I was leading made a din that should have kept a cautious...

And then there was light: Einstein's universe is subtle, but no longer beyond the reach of ordinary common sense. (Cover Story).
November 1, 2002... We live in Einstein's universe. So what else is new? That Albert Einstein changed your fundamental understanding of the cosmos is common knowledge--unprecedentedly so for a piece of scientific history. Forty-seven years after Einstein's...

All the right curves: in an island hummingbird, the shape of the female's bill enables her to feast on local flora inaccessible to the male.
November 1, 2002... On what has become an annual expedition, each May and June I lead a group of my students to Saint Lucia, one of the eastern Caribbean islands that make up the Lesser Antilles. Our destination is the Quilesse Reserve, the largest of the four...

Pirates of the Barcadares: early mariners in Belize left archaeologists tantalizing traces of their lives but no buried treasure.
November 1, 2002... In Bucaniers of America: Or, a true account of the most remarkable assaults committed of late years upon the coasts of the West-Indies, John Esquemeling relates how the seventeenth-century pirate Pierre le Grand "alone with one only boat;...

Through the stone door: rugged canyons pierce Tennessee's tableland. (This Land).
November 1, 2002... A vast sea once covered much of what is now the southeastern United States. For millions of years, sediments accumulated on the seabed and became compressed into layers of sandstone, limestone, shale, and siltstone. Then, between 310 and 275...

The Selfish meme: do ideas replicate themselves like genes?
November 1, 2002... According to one popular account of evolution, genes are self-replicating entities that compete with each other through adaptations that enhance their own replication. They live "safe inside gigantic lumbering robots," wrote Richard Dawkins of...

Valley of the Kings. (nature.net).
November 1, 2002... When I visited the Theban Mapping Project's new Web site, launched this year on the Internet (www.thebanmappingproject.com), it wasn't long before I had the odd sensation of really being in Egypt's Valley of the Kings. I explored dozens of...

Bookshelf.
November 1, 2002... Remember the fad for "The End of" books? Their basic thesis was that anomalous, one-time events would soon be reduced to routines. In this month's crop of books, nothing is routine. Bill McGuire's A Guide to the End of the World (Oxford...

Black-hole cannibals: if one gobbles another, stand by for a space-quake! (Out Here).
November 1, 2002... For the astronomically curious, black holes probably inspire more wonder than anything else in the universe. But what are they? Picture a bowling ball on a mattress; it makes a dimple. Massive objects--from peas to people to planets--bend space...

The sky in November.
November 1, 2002... Mercury reaches superior conjunction November 14 and is thus hidden by the Sun all month. Venus makes a rapid leap into the dawn sky this month. You might spot it as early as November 7, low along the east-southeastern horizon about forty...

Along came a spider ... (Endpaper).
November 1, 2002... Almost every night of her life, my mother, compelled by an aversion to spiders, circled her bedroom with a long-handled brush. Sweeping it into corners, she dislodged all intruders and flicked them deftly out of the window. Spiders belonged...