Natural History articles from October 2005

Natural History archives from October 2005

Fall masquerade.(frogs and seasonal adaptations)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... If spring in the Minnesota woods sings, autumn exhales softly. Take the inch-long spring peeper, Pseudacris crucifer, a chorus frog that lives among leaf litter and logs, near freshwater ponds. Its size and coloring make it easy to miss. The...

Disciplined change.(science)
October 1, 2005... What kind of world do we live in? Like everyone else, I learned about the universe from my parents and teachers, and I got used to it. A hundred elements, give or take. Nine planets. Three kinds of elementary particles. Two kingdoms of life....

Going green.(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2005... In his excellent article on the future of space travel, ["Heading Out" (7-8/05)], Neil deGrasse Tyson described some, but not all, of the new "green" space-propulsion technologies. One further possibility is the electrodynamic tether (ET), a...

Leidy's legacy.(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2005... In "Jointed Threads" [6/05], Lynn Margulis implies that Bacillus anthracis--the bacterium that causes anthrax--violates some law of symbiosis because it is a pathogen. She calls it % freak of nature"; I disagree. The ecological role of B....

Steps back in time.(human footprints discovered in Mexico)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... The announcement that some 160 human footprints have been discovered embedded in an ancient layer of volcanic ash near Puebla, Mexico, has stirred the continuing debate about how, and when, people first arrived in the Americas. In spite of...

Know thine anemone.(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... Sea anemones don't come across as particularly complicated social creatures. Who would have guessed they organize themselves into armies, with tentacled soldiers at the front fighting violent underwater battles? Yet that's the conclusion...

The great neon sign in the sky.(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... What do Las Vegas and the Sun have in common? Answer: an apparent abundance of neon. A new study suggests that neon, the fifth-most-common element in the cosmos, is as much as three times more abundant in the Sun than astrophysicists had...

Shades of green.(coffee plantation)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... Coffee is grown in one of two ways: in open fields, an intensive enterprise that relies on fertilizers and pesticides, or in small, shaded plantations, where coffee plants often replace the bushes of a tropical-forest understory. Such shaded...

Fly long, live longer.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... In a laboratory in Atlanta, Catherine A. Bradley and Sonia M. Altizer, both ecologists at Emory University, put monarch butterflies through their paces on "flight mills." An insect is glued to the end of a horizontal rod that is free to rotate...

Unfrozen north.(Arctic Circle)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... For at least a million years, summertime north of the Arctic Circle has meant two months of partial melt. Unbroken expanses of sea ice fracture into ice floes. Polar bears dive off the sturdy floes into the temporarily open seawater. Myriad...

Amuse me or lose me.(farm grown fishes learn new skills)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... Fish populations are declining throughout the world. One way to buck the trend is to raise large numbers of fish in hatcheries and release them into the wild. Alas, it's a tough world out there, and artificially raised fish usually grow up...

Secret forays.(young songbirds stay up late to learn geography)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... Many migrating songbirds are on the wing in the middle of the night, a flight risk for birds not accustomed to the dark. So how does a bird develop its "stellar compass"--long suspected as the main navigational tool of long-distance...

Nature's little power plants.(Desulfitobacterium, eat pollutants)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... As if gobbling up some of humankind's worst pollutants--solvents, dry-cleaning chemicals, pesticides, and the like--weren't helpful enough, a certain microorganism has revealed yet another useful talent. Harold D. May, a microbiologist at...

Energy to burn: conserved, consumed, or converted, it's the engine that drives every event.(UNIVERSE)
October 1, 2005... The word "energy" pops up everywhere nowadays. Did you have enough energy to get out of bed on time this morning? Does that vitamin-charged, candy-colored sports drink deliver the energy promised in the ads? How much energy do you spend chasing...

Kahuna chronicles: an archaeologist traces a sacred Hawaiian valley from myth to modern times.
October 1, 2005... The Waimea River flows westward into the Pacific, on the northwest coast of the island of O'ahu. About 900 years ago, according to Hawaiian lore, a chief named Kamapua'a (the breath mark is pronounced as a glottal stop) recognized the rugged...

The great outdoors.(Advertisement)
October 1, 2005... India INDIA--STRETCHING 2,300 MILES FROM north to south--is so vast it has almost every kind of landscape imaginable. It has the stunning Himalayas, the world's highest and youngest mountains. In the far north, you'll find arid mountains,...

Boxed up to go: the seemingly unwieldy shape of a fish is anything but a drag.
October 1, 2005... Until recently I would have bet I could tell a fast fish from a slow one by looking at the placement of its fins and the shape of its body. Boxfishes, with their fins at the corners of their "boxy" bodies, would not have made my list of...

Toxic treasure: poisons and venoms from deadly animals could become tomorrow's miracle drugs. And few places on Earth harbor so many deadly animals as Australia's Great Barrier Reef.(Cover Story)
October 1, 2005... [Australia] has more things that will kill you than anywhere else.... This is a country where even the fluffiest of caterpillars can lay you out with a toxic nip, where seashells will not just sting you but actually sometimes gofer you.... It's...

Blown away: since the wakeup call at Mount St. Helens, geoloogists have realized that collapsing volcanoes are far commoner than ever imagined.
October 1, 2005... A priest by the name of Tsurumaki was relaxing with friends at an enclosed hot spring in central Japan on a clear morning, July 15, 1888. The hot spring was high on the flank of Mount Bandai, a volcano that had undergone a series of earthquakes...

FYI reader service.(travel)(Advertisement)
October 1, 2005... 1. ADVENTURE LIFE JOURNEYS Small group travel in the Andes, Amazon, Galapagos, Patagonia, Antarctica, and Central America. Expert local guides lead our cultural and ecological explorations and naturalist cruises. 2. ADVENTURESMITH...

Where glaciers did not tread; ice now lodges in crevices, creating miniature ice age habitats in North America's Driftless Area.(Driftless Area National Wildlife Refuge)
October 1, 2005... During the Pleistocene epoch, between about 1.8 million and 10,000 years ago, a series of ice ages swept over the Earth. The glaciers of each ice age covered large regions of the planet, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere. The geological...

Conflict in the Cosmos: Fred Hoyle's Life in Science.(Book Review)
October 1, 2005... Conflict in the Cosmos: Fred Hoyle's Life in Science by Simon Mitton Joseph Henry Press, 2005; $27.95 To those who came of age in the 1950s, the cosmologist Fred Hoyle (1915-2001), like Carl Sagan a generation later, was the popular voice...

Hunger: An Unnatural History.(Book Review)
October 1, 2005... Hunger: An Unnatural History by Sharman Apt Russell Basic Books, 2005; $23.95 At the risk of oversimplifying, you can think about the body as if it were a car. Ordinarily, about 2,000 calories a day are needed to keep it running, and most...

The Great Hurricane: 1938.(Book Review)
October 1, 2005... The Great Hurricane: 1938 by Cherie Burns Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005; $24.00 The devastation wrought by hurricane Katrina still feels like a punch in the belly of the Southeast, but surely, at least, the warning and evacuation saved many...

Maps take flight.(nature.net)
October 1, 2005... Recently I read Fatal Passage, Ken McGoogan s 2002 biography of a remarkable yet largely forgotten Arctic explorer, John Rae. Traveling by dogsled, in the style of the Inuit, Rae trekked thousands of miles along the northern coast of North...

Number ten? A new object, bigger and farther than Pluto, is orbiting the Sun. But is it a planet?(new planet )
October 1, 2005... Pluto--perhaps for reasons having as much to do with Walt Disney's animated dog as with either the Roman god of the underworld or the body's status as the "little guy" of the solar system--seems to be our sentimental favorite among the nine...

The sky in October.(star gazing)
October 1, 2005... Mercury, shining at magnitude zero, can be seen shortly after sunset all month, albeit with some difficulty. To find the planet, use binoculars to locate Venus in the southwestern sky. Mercury is twenty-nine degrees to the lower far right of...

Floridian melting pot.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2005... Christopher M. Stojanowski's article, "Unhappy Trails" [7-8/05], brings fresh perspective to the riddles of how, why, and when bands of historically and linguistically distinct southeastern Indians came to think of themselves as "Seminole."...

Token of thanks.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2005... The article by Delia and Mark Owens ["Comeback Kids" (7-8/05)] provides a haunting picture of what is happening to the elephant populations of Africa. We should all be grateful to them for their devotion to the preservation of wildlife and for...

You've gotta have heart.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2005... All endothermic vertebrates (mammals and birds) have four-chambered hearts, to satisfy the high oxygen demand imposed by maintaining a high body temperature. After reading the responses by John A. Ruben, Willem J. Hillenius, and Mary Higby...

Yunnan revealed.(American Museum of Natural History)
October 1, 2005... In preparation for this month's exciting Global Weekend series of programs, Yunnan Revealed (see p. 70), Teddy Yoshikami, Manager of Public Programs, Department of Education, traveled to China's Yunnan Province. To reach the village of...

The Museum's Halloween celebration offers a safe, warm, and dry evening of ferocious fun!(American Museum of Natural History)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Caption: The Museum's Halloween celebration offers a safe, warm, and dry evening of ferocious fun! Costumed trick-or-treaters of all ages can wander among the eerie elephants, the unearthly universe, or the dinosaurs...

Discovery returns Space Station experiments for AMNH students.(American Museum of Natural History, International Space Station)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... When the crew of the Space Shuttle Discovery returned this summer from its historic mission, the astronauts brought back camera film, tadpole shrimp eggs, and a single pea eagerly anticipated by some 20 high-school interns at the American...

Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2005... Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries, which opened this past May, continues to draw crowds, with something for dino-crazy children as well as for their parents. This spectacular exhibition on the latest in paleontology features real...

Hazel Davies.(American Museum of Natural History )(Brief Article)(Biography)
October 1, 2005... Hazel Davies Living Exhibits Coordinator Department of Exhibition In 1995, Hazel Davies moved from London to New York armed with degrees in geology and education and a keen interest in natural science. "On my very first day here,...

Museum events: American Museum of Natural History.(Calendar)
October 1, 2005... EXHIBITIONS The Butterfly Conservatory: Tropical Butterflies Alive in Winter Opens October 8, 2005 Experience more than 500 live, free-flying tropical butterflies in an enclosed habitat that approximates their natural environment....

Wise guys.(zebra longwing butterflies)
October 1, 2005... I garden for butterflies. My Eden in central Louisiana sprawls in wild profusion across my front yard to the sidewalk, giving me and passersby an ever-changing tableau of color and activity. In the late 1990s the garden became a staging...