Natural History articles from September 2005

Natural History archives from September 2005

A nose up.(THE NATURAL MOMENT)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2005... Snapping up a fish in its narrow jaws, a male gharial (Gavialis gaugeticus) in south-central Nepal thrusts his snout-a schnoz to make Cyrano envious--into the air. The most conspicuous part of its nose, though, the bulbous appendage at the end,...

Prove it!(UP FRONT)
September 1, 2005... Bobby R. Harrison took part in the first confirmed sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker in the United States in fifty years. By his own admission ("Phantom of the Bayou," page 18), the experience of rediscovering a bird long presumed extinct...

Ladies first.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2005... In their article "Dance of the Sexes" [6/05], Sharon T. Pochron and Patricia C. Wright ask why female lemurs are dominant over males in most groups of lemurs. I venture that the answer is found in the authors' own observation: "By the end of...

Losing sight.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2005... Luis and Monika Espinasa's article, "Why Do Cave Fish Lose Their Eyes" [6/05], brought to mind a zoology instructor who offered the following alternative explanation: In any fish population, mutations give rise to fish with defective,...

Do the hop.(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2005... In "Bird's-eye View" [5/05] Matthew T. Carrano and Patrick M. O'Connor examined modern birds to gain a better understanding of the birds' dinosaur ancestors. But has anyone ever considered whether theropods might have "hopped" like birds, and...

Tsunami postmortem.(SAMPLINGS)
September 1, 2005... According to the most reliable recent estimates, the monstrous earthquake that rocked the northwest coast of Sumatra and the nearby Andaman and Nicobar island groups on December 26, 2004, released the energy-equivalent of a 250-megaton bomb,...

Flipper fashion.(SAMPLING)(dolphin behavior studied)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2005... Not long ago in Shark Bay, off the coast of western Australia, a female bottlenose dolphin broke a chunk of sponge off the seafloor and wore it as a mask over her snout while she probed the sediment for fish. Today "sponging" is a foraging fad...

Color coordinated.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2005... To see color, your retina has to have cone cells; the more kinds of cones it has, the more colors you can differentiate. Like us, several species of Australian marsupials have three kinds of cones. One such animal, the honey possum--a wee...

Female radicals.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2005... It's hardly news that women, on average, live longer than men. So, in fact, does the average female of many other mammalian species. Jose Vina and several other biochemists at the University of Valencia in Spain have long been investigating the...

The birth of left and right.(SAMPLINGS)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2005... In spite of its many symmetries, the body is subtly asymmetric: the heart, for instance, lies to the left of center and the liver to the right. But how does the asymmetry arise? Investigators in the laboratory of Nobutaka Hirokawa, a cell...

Flash of insight.(SAMPLINGS)(gamma rays studied)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2005... Physicists once thought gamma rays--the most energetic form of electromagnetic radiation--originated primarily from distant celestial sources. But new technology has been registering gamma rays in Earth's own atmosphere, at a rate of at least...

You talking to me?(SAMPLINGS; animal kin recognition)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2005... For people, it's second nature to refer to a friend or family member by name, but there's scant evidence that other animals do the same. Some species do communicate information on the whereabouts of food or the presence of a predator, and...

Clues to shoes.(SAMPLING; wearing of footwera stiudied)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2005... When did people become the only animals that regularly wear shoes? The oldest well-dated surviving footwear--North American sandals made of plant fibers or leather--is 9,000 years old. Earlier shoes have decayed; their existence must be...

Phantom of the Bayou: the author's thirty-year personal quest to find the ivory-billed woodpecker culminates in the first confirmed North American sighting of the elusive bird in more than fifty years.(NATURALIST AT LARGE)
September 1, 2005... It had a long neck, and the head--it had a red topknot that came to point, and it had a big white bill--it looked real cartoonish." Gene Sparling, a kayaker from Hot Springs, Arkansas, was on the phone, eagerly describing his encounter with a...

Breaking point: not unlike a slab of cooling rock, DNA "cracks" under pressure in roughly predictable patterns.(BIOMECHANICS)
September 1, 2005... It's said that the legendary Finn MacCool created the Giant s Causeway--thousands of steplike stones on Ireland's northeast coast--in order to reach Scotland and thrash an upstart rival. As a child living in Dublin, I was fascinated by this...

Jaws of life: thousands of plant species place their fates in the mandibles of ants.(Cover Story)
September 1, 2005... I displaced a rock in Tennessee. Underneath, huddled at one edge of the exposed dirt, was a colony of ants. The slender ants moved slowly in the cool spring morning, and I had a long look at them before they vanished down their hole. The queen...

The ghosts in the machines: why does the industrial landscape seem so alien and forbidding?
September 1, 2005... One winter afternoon a few years ago I was standing by a highway outside Gallup, New Mexico, admiring the scenery. The vista before me was a classic of the American West: red sandstone buttes rising from a valley floor, made redder still by the...

The magic flutes: nine thousand years ago, Neolithic villagers in China played melodies on instruments fashioned from the hollow bones of birds.
September 1, 2005... Long ago in Jiahu village, an acclaimed musician passed away at the mature age of thirty-five. People who had appreciated his music flocked to the funeral ceremony. The musician's body was dressed in his finest clothing, and a turtle shell was...

Grand Canyon: Solving Earth's Grandest Puzzle.(Book Review)
September 1, 2005... Grand Canyon: Solving Earth's Grandest Puzzle by James Lawrence Powell Pi Press, 2005; $27.95 There are many passages in his classic, Tertiary History of the Grand Canon District, published in 1882, in which the geologist Clarence Edward...

A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire.(Book Review)
September 1, 2005... A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire by Amy Butler Greenfield HarperCollins, 2005; $26.95 In the highlands of southern Mexico, near the city of Oaxaca, lives an insect no bigger than a lentil, known to...

Silent Snow: The Slow Poisoning of the Arctic.(Book Review)
September 1, 2005... Silent Snow: The Slow Poisoning of the Arctic by Maria Cone Grove Press, 2005; $24.00 Flying over the Arctic, where few signs of human habitation and even fewer belching factories break the vast expanses of rock, open water, and snowy ice,...

Heat demons.(nature.net)(thermodynamics)
September 1, 2005... My interest in thermodynamics was recently rekindled while reading a copy of Basil Mahon's The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell. Outside the physics community, he has never been celebrated the way Newton or Einstein...

Finding the forest despite the trees: two new galaxies, hidden among, the stars.(OUT THERE)(Sloan Digital Sky Survey)
September 1, 2005... About fifteen years ago, a group of leading astronomers judged that the time was right for a new map of the sky. The map would tap revolutionary techniques and technology, including electronic cameras that collect light far faster than...

FYi reader service.(Advertisement)
September 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...

The sky in September.(OUT THERE)
September 1, 2005... Mercury, shining at magnitude -1.2, can be glimpsed with the naked eye during the first week of September, even though it is barely above the eastern horizon at middawn. On the morning of the 4th the first-magnitude star Regulus can be seen...

Evolution of the insects.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
September 1, 2005... You might learn to love insects after perusing a new 768-page reference book coauthored by Museum scientist David Grimaldi. It is the first comprehensive synthesis of all aspects of insect evolution. Dr. Grimaldi has traveled to 40 countries on...

At the Museum's DinerSaurus Cafe on 4, opened in conjunction with the exhibition Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries, visitors can dine on any of several surviving theropod dinosaurs, such as chicken and turkey.(At the Museum)
September 1, 2005... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Caption: At the Museum's DinerSaurus Cafe on 4, opened in conjunction with the exhibition Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries, visitors can dine on any of several surviving theropod dinosaurs, such as chicken...

The American Museum of Natural History is an educational destination for over 400,000 New York City schoolchildren who visit for free every year.
September 1, 2005... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Caption: The American Museum of Natural History is an educational destination for over 400,000 New York City schoolchildren who visit for free every year. Groups are guided through the Museum's halls by instructors...

Living with nature: consumer choices for children.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2005... Thursday, September 22 6:00 p.m., Resource Fair 7:30 p.m., Panel Discussion We all have a role to play in meeting the challenges of the biodiversity crisis--the accelerated loss of animals, plants, and habitats caused primarily by...

People at the AMNH.(American Museum of Natural History)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2005... Carl Mehling Fossil Amphibians, Reptiles, and Birds Collections Manager, Division of Paleontology Carl Mehling remembers the date he found his first fossil: May 28, 1977. A family trip to Pennsylvania stopped at a Devonian coral reef site,...

Museum events.(Calendar)
September 1, 2005... EXHIBITIONS Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries Through January 8, 2006 Discover the most current thinking on the mysteries of dinosaurs: what they looked like, how they behaved, and how they moved, as well as why--or even...

Science Explorations.(Explore the American Museum of Natural History with Scholastic!)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2005... A partnership between the American Museum of Natural History and Scholastic will promote science literacy and bring the Museum's scientists, laboratories, collections, and exhibitions to students in classrooms nationwide through the magazines...

Monomoy.(END PAPER)
September 1, 2005... Sometimes, a place you've heard about but never visited takes on an almost mythic quality, and so Monomoy was for me. For years I'd heard about this remote and wild group of shifting islands in Nantucket Sound that had once been part of the...