Natural History articles from November 2004

Natural History archives from November 2004

Jaws of life.(The Natural Moment)(giant pandas)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Newborn giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) emerge blind and achingly pink, looking as if they could use a few more weeks in the womb. One baby cub, named Ya Ao, is pictured on the preceding two pages with his mother, Gongzhu. Ya Ao was born...

Talking points.(Up Front)
November 1, 2004... With two children, two cats, and a dog living in a small apartment, all yammering for our attention, my wife and I don't have any trouble believing that animals can communicate. "Scratch my neck," is hard to miss when your cat nuzzles his head...

Seeing red.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2004... In their article "How Plants 'See'" (9/04), Marcelo J. Yanovskv and Jorge J. Casal report that grass plants can sense and respond to varying ratios of red to and red light. To a plant, higher ratios signal that tow other plants grow in the...

Round about.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
November 1, 2004... The numerous craters on asteroids Eros and 243 Ida, shown in the photographs illustrating Neil deGrasse Tyson's recent "Universe" cohere ("Vagabonds in Space," 7-8/04), point to a tremendous bombardment in the remote past. As a geologist, I am...

Blackout is beautiful.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Remember the blackout of August 2003. which shut down power plants across much of the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada? For one group of chemists and meteorologists, that was a matchless opportunity to directly measure, not...

Whence the dingo.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... The first Europeans to set foot in Australia found scads of odd-looking marsupials, but no placental mammals other than rodents, bars, and the dingo. An independent-minded, wild living canid, the dingo physically resembles the pariah dog of...

Hey there, big boy ...(Samplings)(cleaner wrasse)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Imagine having to stick your head Into the mouth of a lion in order to earn e living. Doubtless the first question that would spring to mind is, "When did this lion have its last meal?" Well, a small fish called the cleaner wrasse has much the...

Lost planets on the moon.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Since the mid-1960s, geologists have known that lunar chemistry is controlled, in part, by the Sun. Our star constantly spews streams of ionized elements, known as solar wind, which bombard the surface of the Moon. Those bombardments explain...

The prehistory of housekeeping.(Samplings)(Wadi Hammeh, Jordan)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Future archaeologists, we're often told, will be able to deduce a lot about us by looking at the contents of our garbage dumps. Con temporary investigators have taken almost the same approach to Wadi Hammeh 27, a 12,000-year-old site in the...

Cryptic creatures.(Samplings)
November 1, 2004... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Let the germs in.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... If a pregnant woman could wave a magic wand to ensure that her soon-to-be-born child would never have contact with bacteria, should she do it? Probably not. Ted Brummel, a biologist at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, and...

Ups and downs.(Samplings)(solar cycle affects feeding patterns of porcupines)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... It's amazing how much information you can get from the inside of an old tree. When porcupines eat the inner bark of jack pine trees during the harsh Quebec winter, they leave long-lasting, oval "feeding scars" in the trees' growth rings. Ilya...

Cold fission.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Zoologists of late have been debating whether many new vertebrate species evolved at the time of the last ice age--the Pleistocene epoch, between 2 million and 10,000 years ago. According to the standard view, the advances and retreats of the...

The importance of being constant: the fundamental things apply ... as time goes by.(Universe)
November 1, 2004... Mention the word "constant," and your listeners may think of matrimonial fidelity or financial stability--or maybe they'll declare that change is the only constant in life. As it happens, the universe has its own constants, in the form of...

The biomechanist went over the mountain: the best way up a hill is steeper than the best way down.(Biomechanics)
November 1, 2004... I turned forty recently. Of all the gifts I received, the most surprising and rewarding birthday present tame from my wife: a three-day hike in the Sierra Nevada. My declaration of midlife vigor included a scamper up to 11,000 feet-a chance to...

Ties that bind: Hopi gift culture and its first encounter with the United States.(Cover Story)
November 1, 2004... In 1852, shortly after the United States had nominally annexed Hopi country, in northern Arizona, the Hopi people arranged for a diplomatic packet to reach President Millard Fillmore at the White House. Part message and part magical gift, the...

Mouth to mouth: saliva transfer can help animals communicate, medicate, or even kill. Evolution has given rise to a variety of salivary mixtures that are being mined for ways to help save human lives.
November 1, 2004... That familiar refrain in country-and-western songs, "You don't miss it 'til it's gone," is a good way to describe saliva. It's taken for granted, sometimes mocked, and often shunned in polite conversation. But in scientific circles there is...

Peruvian dry life: between the Andes and the Pacific, an arid landscape harbors abundant life.(This Land)
November 1, 2004... This November 21, PBS will air director Kevin Macdonald's film Touching, the Void, shot on location in the Peruvian Andes. It recounts the famous mountaineering story of a climber who falls, shatters his leg, and barely escapes with his life....

American spirits: the Neopagan and New Age movements have now been put under the microscope of anthropology.(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... Witching Culture: Folklore and Neo-Paganism in America by Sabina Magliocco University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004: $55.00 cloth, $19.95 paper New Age and Neopagan Religions in America by Sarah M. Pike Columbia University Press, 2004:...

Defining the Wind: the Beaufort Scale, and How a Nineteenth-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry.(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... Defining the Wind: The Beaufort Scale, and How a Nineteenth-Century Admiral Turned Science into Poetry by Scott Huler Crown Publishers, 2004; $23.00 The remarkable life of Sir Francis Beaufort (1774-1857), one of the generation of...

!Tequila! A Natural and Cultural History.(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... !Tequila! A Natural and Cultural History by Ana G. Valenzuela-Zapata and Gary Paul Nabhan University of Arizona Press, 2004; $29.95 cloth, $14.95 paper Agave, a genus of hardy succulent plants that dot the landscape from the Grand Canyon...

The Geese of Beaver Bog.(Book Review)
November 1, 2004... The Geese of Beaver Bog by Bernd Heinrich Ecco, 2004; $24.95 Just before dawn on September 2, 2002, a dozen Canada geese (Branta canadensis) landed on a beaver bog not far from the home of Bernd Heinrich, a biologist at the University of...

Full spectrum.(nature.net)
November 1, 2004... The English astronomer William Herschel is best remembered for his hand-built telescopes and his discovery of Uranus in 1781. But to my mind the simple experiments he performed with glass prisms and thermometers in 1800, with which he detected...

The sky in November.(Calendar)
November 1, 2004... Mercury sets in the southwest soon after the Sun does throughout the month, which gives it a poor evening apparition--though you can view it easily enough with binoculars. The farther south you are, the easier time you'll have seeing the...

Giant squid lived fast, died young.(At the Museum)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... It's hard to study an animal that no one has seen alive. But that's what Neil Landman, Curator in the Museum's Division of Invertebrate Zoology, and his colleagues did with the giant squid. Their latest findings show that giant squids, the...

This NASA Mars Exploration Rover is on display in the Museum's Cullman Hall of the Universe; it is a full-scale replica of the ones currently on Mars.
November 1, 2004... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Caption: This NASA Mars Exploration Rover is on display in the Museum's Cullman Hall of the Universe; it is a full-scale replica of the ones currently on Mars. Here, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Frederick P. Rose Director of...

On August 4, 2004, New York City Council member Jose M. Serrano of the Bronx joined a group of kids from Blondell Joyner Day Care.
November 1, 2004... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Caption: On August 4, 2004, New York City Council member Jose M. Serrano of the Bronx joined a group of kids from Blondell Joyner Day Care as they became junior anthropologists for a day when the Structures & Culture...

Kids' favorite cartoon characters such as Liz from the Magic School Bus[TM], Spot, and Clifford the Big Red Dog[R] help celebrate at the Museum's annual Halloween party.(American Museum of Natural History)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Kids' favorite cartoon characters such as Liz from the Magic School Bus[TM], Spot, and Clifford the Big Red Dog[R] help celebrate at the Museum's annual Halloween party. Kids can trick-or treat throughout the...

The Museum's annual Origami Tree has welcomed the holiday season for over 30 years.(American Museum of Natural History)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Museum's annual Origami Tree has welcomed the holiday season for over 30 years. Located in the first-floor Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall, each year the tree is lavishly decorated with several thousands...

Summer interns study environmental biology at the Museum.(American Museum of Natural History)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... In just one of the many intensive educational programs at the American Museum of Natural History, college students this summer studied such creatures as Alabama coral snakes and Brazilian sea turtles. Candice Fraser, for example, who...

Museum events.(American Museum of Natural History)(Calendar)
November 1, 2004... EXHIBITIONS Totems to Turquoise: Native North American Jewelry Arts of the Northwest and Southwest Through July 10, 2005 This groundbreaking exhibition celebrates the beauty, power, and symbolism of the magnificent tradition of Native...

Sultans of rot.(Endpaper)(decaying jack-o'lanterns)
November 1, 2004... A few years ago, I was walking the streets of Mission Texas, after attending the city's annual Texas Butterfly Festival. I passed several jack-o'-lanterns discarded at the base of a dumpster. It was two days after Halloween, and they were in an...