Natural History articles from September 2004

Natural History archives from September 2004

Rest stop.(The Natural Moment)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... Flying long distances can take the wind out of almost any traveler. Even members of the hummingbird family, champions of the continuous wing beat, can tire on their long seasonal migrations. The female ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus...

It came from outer space.(Up Front)(Editorial)
September 1, 2004... Strange things are happening here, on this old, familiar planet. The age of terrestrial exploration, sometimes thought to have burned itself out for lack of the fuel of new frontiers, is still raging for those willing to probe. And the more you...

Little souls.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... In his review of Soul Made Flesh, by Carl Zimmer, and The Birth of the Mind, by Gary Marcus ("The Fate of the Soul," 6/04), William H. Calvin seems to have little appreciation of the complex history of religious institutions or of theological...

Artistic license.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... As a former high school track coach and biology teacher, I have been dismayed and somewhat amused by the trophies that often depict runners in motion with the right arm and right leg extended in the same direction. I see that the makers of...

Fitness test.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... Donald Goldsmith's article on the anthropic principle ("The Best of All Possible Worlds," 7-8/04) suggests that we must believe either that the one and only universe just happens to be finely tuned to produce life--an improbable coincidence--or...

Getting warmer.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... In his review of my book The Discovery of Global Warming ("Heat Exchange" 4/04), Robert Ehrlich asks why I did not mention satellite data on global temperatures, which "show a much smaller increase in global warming than do measurements at...

Breaking up is hard to time.(Samplings)(continental drift)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... Ever since plate tectonics began to gain acceptance in the 1960s, investigators have been trying to deduce the distribution of landmasses and life-forms in earlier eras. One persistent puzzle is the breakup of the southern supercontinent known...

Hunters and freeloaders.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... Puzzling over the whys and wherefores of wolf packs, evolutionary biologists have noted that they are often larger than they "should" be. Most carnivore species hunt alone, and so each individual gets to eat what it kills. Group hunting, by...

Fried rice.(Samplings)(influence of dry season on productivity of rice)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... To a vacationer in Southeast Asia, increasingly balmy March nights might mean more strolling and less clothing. But to a rice plant they mean hard times, say Shaobing Peng of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Manila,...

Hard-hat zone.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... You may never hear the sound of one hand clapping, but if you visit the western reaches of Amazonia, you will certainly hear one leaf falling. One of the most common Amazonian trees is the stilt-rooted palm Iriartea deltoidea, whose...

Cryptic creatures.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... Only three of these pictures are close-ups of the same animal Which one doesn't belong? Answer to "Cryptic Creatures" puzzle (page 18): c

Postcards from space.(Samplings)
September 1, 2004... Fifty years from now, the year 2004 may well be remembered as a high point in space and planetary science. Here are some late dispatches. Roving Intended primarily to find out if and where water once existed on the now-dry Martian...

Defying gravity.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... The next time you see an ant or a spider walking upside down, consider this: rope systems designed to hold rock climbers can support at least ten times the weight of an average adult, but the critter clinging to your ceiling has vastly more...

What is a picture worth?(Samplings)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... The average human brain has 100 billion neurons, and, contrary to myth, a person uses every one of them. But how many are needed at a given time for a simple task? Ifat Levy, a neuroscientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and her...

Grains of evidence.(Samplings)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... Exactly when did barley and wheat become staples of the human diet in the Mediterranean basin? The question has been hard to answer, in part because ancient plant remains are so scarce. But recent excavations at Ohalo It, a 23,000-year-old...

Flexible feeders: the lower bill of the hummingbird makes a nectar-drinking beak into one for catching insects.(Biomechanics)
September 1, 2004... Hummingbirds, those common visitors to bird feeders and honeysuckle vines, seem adapted for one primary task: gathering nectar from flowers. Consider the apparent singularity of purpose with which these animals are shaped. Their wing bones are...

The Information trap: tempted by the devil in the details.(Universe)
September 1, 2004... Most people assume that the more information you have about something, the better you understand it. Up to a point, that's usually true. When you look at this page from across the room, you can see it's in a magazine, but you can't make out the...

How plants "see": plants catch light for the information it carries as well as for its energy. The light helps plants determine when to germinate, when to flower, or how to respond to neighboring plants.(Cover Story)
September 1, 2004... Two dozen grass plants, each one surrounded by a title circle of red lights, stood in the stillness of the morning air. From a distance they looked just as they had when a team of investigators had left them a few weeks before. But in Fact,...

The sex lives of scales: scale insects have evolved one bizarre genetic system after another. The author argues that they are caught in a game of cat and mouse with internal, symbiotic bacteria, which has unleashed genetic bedlam.
September 1, 2004... If you were in the backyard this summer, watering your lilacs or checking your apple trees for pests, you may have noticed that the plants were afflicted with little bumps on the leaves or bark, coming down with what looks like nothing so much...

A room revisited: a contemporary artist is inspired by a "cabinet of curiosities" collected by a naturalist of another era.
September 1, 2004... In 1985, in a back room of the Museums of Natural History in Copenhagen, I came face to face with a wall-size reproduction of a familiar engraving. It depicted the interior of a museum--the Museum Wormianum--established by Ole Worm, a...

Secret survivor: "extinct" for 50 million years, an enigmatic fossil species may still live at the bottom of the sea--but it defies capture.
September 1, 2004... So little is known about the deep ocean, that those of us who explore it should expect surprises. Yet even I and my research team from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were dumbfounded in 1976, when we studied photographs of...

From water hole to rhino barn: twelve million years ago, a volcanic ashfall entombed prehistoric animals that roamed what is now Nebraska.(This Land)
September 1, 2004... If you drive across northeastern Nebraska on U.S. Highway 20, you see about what you'd expect: fields of corn and soybeans, rolling pastures with grazing cattle. But if you could travel in time, back to, say, 12 million years ago, you'd come...

"A paradox to everyone but himself": the naturalist who almost scooped Darwin about natural selection was also an ardent mystic.(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... The Heretic in Darwin's Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace by Ross A. Slotten Columbia University Press, 2004; $39.50 An Elusive Victorian: The Evolution of Alfred Russel Wallace by Martin Fichman University of Chicago Press, 2004;...

The Big One: the Earthquake that Rocked Early America and Helped Create a Science.(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... The Big One: The Earthquake that Rocked Early America and Helped Create a Science by Jake Page and Charles Officer Houghton Mifflin, 2004; $24.00 Which of the lower forty-eight states has survived the most powerful earthquake ever recorded...

Sunken Cities, Sacred Cenotes, and Golden Sharks: Travels of a Water-Bound Adventurer.(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... Sunken Cities, Sacred Cenotes, and Golden Sharks: Travels of a Water-Bound Adventurer. by, Bill Belleville University of Georgia Press, 2004; $29.95 Just about the time that you, dear reader, are pulling out of your driveway, beading for...

Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid.(Book Review)
September 1, 2004... Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid by Tim Ecott Grove Press, 2004; $22.00 What may be the first American recipe for vanilla ice cream, written in the same hand that penned the Declaration of Independence, is among Thomas...

Slip-sliding away.(nature.net)
September 1, 2004... I'm predicting a landslide in November, but not the political kind. I'm talking about the sudden shift of hundreds or thousands of tons of rock and soil, and that kind happens nearly every day. To catch up on the latest tolls in death and...

Not dead yet.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... While I enjoyed "Venomous Lizards of the Desert" (7-8/04), by my good friend, colleague, and collaborator Daniel D. Beck, I found it of interest to read that your editors apparently regard me as deceased. I can assure you that I am, thank you...

Bad behavior?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... In his review "Brains and the Beast" (5/04), Frans B. M. de Waal bashes a behaviorist straw person. For example, he writes that the "so-called" law of effect states that "all behavior is conditioned by reward and punishment." But the law of...

Mission impossible.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2004... In "No-Fly Zone" ("Endpaper," 4/04), Robert Zimmerman describes in gory detail an experiment showing that even with heroic efforts cosmonauts were unable to keep quail chicks alive at zero gravity. The author makes his point convincingly, then...

Ablaze from afar: astronomers may have identified the most distant "blazar" yet.(Out There)
September 1, 2004... Imagine standing on a hilltop on a foggy night, with a powerful flashlight in each hand. You point one flashlight forward and one backward, then turn them both on. If a friend is watching from far away, what would she see? It depends, of...

The sky in September.(Out There)
September 1, 2004... Mercury makes a brief appearance in the September sky, peeking out from the glare of the Sun in the first week of the month. On the 9th, shining at magnitude -0.4, the swiftest planet reaches its greatest elongation, eighteen degrees west of...

Picturing planets.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... Strange new worlds. They're out there, but has anyone actually seen a planet beyond our solar system? Ben Oppenheimer, a postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History, aims to be the first. He has built a camera, called the Lyot...

The transit of Venus.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... The transit of Venus--Venus passing in front of the Sun--on Tuesday, June 8, 2004, was visible from the Ross Terrace at the Rose Center for Earth and Space. Several hundred enthusiasts showed up in the very

High School Science Research Program.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)
September 1, 2004... When asked what they did on their summer vacations, the high school interns working at the American Museum of Natural History will have some amazing jobs to describe. For example, instead of serving up fries or ringing up retail sales like some...

A young visitor to the special exhibition frogs: a Chorus of Colors gets up close and personal with a bright blue dart poison frog.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... A young visitor to the special exhibition Frogs: A Chorus of Colors gets up close and personal with a bright blue dart poison frog. But she's not in danger--dart poison frogs in the wild are rendered toxic by their diet, and in captivity are...

The earth machine.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... One hundred sixty-eight imposing rock specimens greet visitors to the Museum's Gottesman Hall of Planet Earth. Gaze upon towering sulfide chimneys from the deep ocean, a striking 2.7-billion-year-old red and black banded iron formation that...

In June 2004, using the latest digital x-ray technology, scientists peeked under the skin of the African elephants in the Akeley Hall of African Mammals to see how the interior scaffolding of wood and metal is holding up.(At the Museum: American Museum of Natural History)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2004... In June 2004, using the latest digital x-ray technology, scientists peeked under the skin of the African elephants in the Akeley Hal of African Mammals to see how the interior scaffolding of wood and metal is holding up, in the last phase of an...

Museum events: American Museum of Natural History.(Calendar)
September 1, 2004... EXHIBITIONS Frogs: A Chorus of Colors Through January 9, 2005 This delightful exhibition introduces visitors to the colorful and richly diverse world of frogs, with over 200 live specimens thriving in re-created habitats. The exhibition...