Natural History articles from September 2003

Natural History archives from September 2003

Cold fire of the night.(The Natural Moment)(photographing aurora borealis)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Aurora was the radiant Roman goddess of dawn, a charioteer who could light up the night sky. Her namesakes, the aurora borealis and aurora australis, are similarly un-Earthly: electrons and protons pour out of the Sun and speed through space...

Hard rain.(Up Front)(Editorial)
September 1, 2003... Every year about this time, when the night skies are clear, and when standing still under the stars for half an hour doesn't call for a parka, I like to go outside and take in the show. It's pretty simple astronomy: orient to a few...

Who minds the store?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2003... The two discussions of the looting and destruction of Iraq's precious ancient artifacts--"Lost Time," by John Malcolm Russell, and "Aftershocks". by David Keys [6/03]--are a wakeup call about the folly of retaining world-class antiquities in...

Strategic waters.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2003... I found the review by Sandra Postel ["Hydro Dynamics" 5/03] of Robert Kandel's and Diana Raines Ward's books on the nature and scarcity of freshwater to be extremely poignant. At the moment I am sitting beside the Shatt al Hillah, a river...

Ode to the earth.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2003... Gabrielle Walker's article on the geological epoch known as "snowball Earth" ["The-Longest Winter," 4/03] shows not only her impressive knowledge of the subject but also her masterful writing style--referring to Earth's earliest organisms as...

The joys of fieldwork.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2003... Robert Dunn's story about army ants and their beetle "guests" ["Impostor in the Nest," 6/03] brought forth personal waves of nostalgia. As a field entomologist, I have vivid memories of pursuing butterflies in southern Mexico while dining on...

Amendment.(Letters)(Correction Notice)
September 1, 2003... AMENDMENT: The first paragraph of Martha Hurley's reply to an enquiry concerning a photograph of the golden Vietnamese cypress ["Letters," 6/03] was intended to refer to cypresses in general. Preferable wording would have been: "The caption...

Blowin' in the wind.(Samplings)(influence of plankton on cloud formation)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Imagine finding marine plankton drifting through thin air at 30,000 feet. That's the surprise that greeted Kenneth Sassen of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and his colleagues when they examined ice crystals collected by a research...

Drugs from seaweed?(Samplings)
September 1, 2003... Plants have no immune systems. Chemical warfare is their way of fighting pathogens and parasites: they manufacture compounds that prevent the growth of specific disease-causing microorganisms. And sometimes those compounds are effective against...

The fruits of prehistory.(Samplings)(agricultural archaeology in New Guinea)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Agriculture began in Mesopotamia, the "cradle of civilization," right? True, but it also seems to have arisen independently in several other places as well, including China and Mesoamerica. In the 1970s some archaeologists asserted that New...

Experiment of the month.(Samplings)(archaeologists test effects of burrowing animals on site strata)
September 1, 2003... It isn't easy being an archaeologist. The ancient artifacts you work with are often battered and fragmentary, and you have to base a lot of your interpretations on the stratum where you find the artifacts. Given the many species of burrowing...

Love and death.(Samplings)(mating habits of argiope aurantia)
September 1, 2003... In North America, if you see a classic spiderweb with a dense, zigzag thread through its center, the web could well have been spun by Argiope aurantia. Even more striking than the web, though, is the species' sexual politics: for the male,...

In the beginning: back in the olden days--the first trillionth of a second after the big bang--energy was matter, matter was energy, and E=[mc.sup.2] ruled.(Universe)
September 1, 2003... Physics describes the behavior of matter, energy, space, and time, and how the forces of nature enable their interplay. From what scientists have been able to determine, all biological, chemical, and physical phenomena emerge from how four, and...

The pleasure (and pain) of "maybe": both tease and terrorist exert control by fostering uncertainty in their targets.(Findings)
September 1, 2003... Then there was the summer Jonathan spent unsuccessfully wooing Rebecca. Both were savanna baboons living in the Serengeti Plains in East Africa, part of a troop I've been studying intermittently for twenty-five years. Jonathan was a gangly...

Squeeze play: brobdingnagian earthmoving "worms" dig their tunnels with a hydraulic ram.(Biomechanics)
September 1, 2003... When I first saw a live caecilian, I was convinced that I was looking at an earthworm large enough to strike fear in the heart of an Alabama large-mouth bass. The animal squirming through the sphagnum moss was Dermophis mexicanus, a Central...

Bolts from beyond: some "shooting stars" come to Earth bearing secrets from other planets, as well as clues about the makeup of the solar system before the planets formed.
September 1, 2003... For two centuries, astronomers and geologists have recognized that the Earth is continually bombarded by small extraterrestrial objects called meteoroids. Each piece of this cosmic debris has its own orbit around the Sun. Because some of those...

Moonstruck: giant impacts, cataclysmic bombardments, oceans of magma hundreds of miles deep: no wonder the lunar landscape inspires such fascination.
September 1, 2003... The lunar surface is gray, powdery, and lifeless. There, no grassy meadows or forests grow; there, no microorganisms abide to break down the nonexistent traces of any former life. No brooks babble or rivers rage, no lakes or oceans are swayed...

The varieties of mathematical experience: ethnomathematics is a powerful tool for understanding other cultures.(Mathematics Elsewhere: An Exploration of Ideas across Cultures)(Book Review)
September 1, 2003... Mathematics Elsewhere: An Exploration of Ideas across Cultures by Marcia Ascher Princeton University Press, 2002; $24.95 The Incan quipu is an unusual object, an assemblage of slender, knotted cords tied along a thicker, main cord. The...

Monster of God: the Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind.(Book Review)
September 1, 2003... by David Quammen W.W. Norton & Company, 2003; $25.95 David Quammen likes to visit places on the wave crests of ecological change. One of his previous books on natural history, The Song of the Dodo, dealt with island biogeography and...

Meteorites, Ice, and Antarctica: a Personal Account.(Book Review)
September 1, 2003... by William A. Cassidy Cambridge University Press, 2003; $30.00 Like a cruising car on a buggy summer night, the Earth, as it orbits the Sun, continually collides with small flying objects. The interplanetary debris is made up of fragments...

The Land of Naked People: Encounters with Stone Age Islanders.(Book Review)
September 1, 2003... by Madhusree Mukerjee Houghton Mifflin Company, 2003; $24.00 Global technology, for better or for worse, has made it possible for Lapland caribou herders and Amazon hunter-gatherers to watch reruns of The Simpsons with the cultural savoir...

Hit parade.(nature.net)
September 1, 2003... Meteorites are no longer the rare objects I once imagined them to be. The realization came to me soon after I began searching the Internet for information about them, and found Bill Arnett's "The Nine Planets" (www.nineplanets. org). Under the...

The quest for the golden lens: a perfect alignment of massive objects would offer clues to the rate of cosmic expansion.(Out There)
September 1, 2003... Long ago, Greek bards sang of Jason, a prince denied his throne unless he could provide his usurper with the Golden Fleece. Accompanied by a crew of young heroes, Jason set off on the great ship Argo to find this mysterious treasure, known to...

The sky in September.(Out There)(locations of planets in the night sky)
September 1, 2003... Often elusive, fleet Mercury appears low in the eastern sky at dawn beginning around September 20. Rising about ninety minutes before sunup, it reaches its greatest elongation, or angular separation from the Sun (18 degrees west of our star),...

Arthur Ross Hall of Meteorites reopens September 20: interview with Curator Denton Ebel.(At The Museum)(Interview)
September 1, 2003... Denton Ebel is curator of meteorites in the Museum's Division of Physical Sciences and curator of the reconceptualization and rebuilding of the Arthur Ross Hall of Meteorites, which reopens September 20, 2003. He spoke with us about meteorites,...

Museum events.
September 1, 2003... EXHIBITIONS Vietnam: Journeys of Body, Mind & Spirit Through January 4, 2004 Gallery 77, first floor This comprehensive exhibition presents Vietnamese culture in the early 21st century. The visitor is invited to "walk in Vietnamese shoes"...

Private choices.(Endpaper)(tenacity of a freshwater leech)
September 1, 2003... The kick screen was weighed down with a slime of wet, fallen leaves and hairy algae. The children hauled it from the creek bed onto a level place along the bank. There they eagerly knelt beside it and, with forceps, began to grasp anything that...