Recently added articles from Natural History:
PALEOBOTANY
Jul 01, 2008; Anderson, Robert ... ALTHOUGH DARWIN FIGURED out that natural selection was the general force driving evolution, he knew there were difficult puzzles left to solve. For example, he called the sudden appearance of flowering plants in the fossil record an "abominable mystery." Popular accounts of evolution tend to ...
WORD EXCHANGE
Jul 01, 2008; Anthony, David W; Olsen, Sandra L ... Looking a Horse in the Mouth Sandra L. Olsen's "Hoofprints," [5/08] was a stimulating summary of her groundbreaking'research. I have an additional piece of evidence that supports her early date (3500-3300 B.C.) for horse domestication. My colleague Dorcas R. Brown and I have defined a ...
THE NATURAL EXPLANATION
Jul 01, 2008; Espelie, Erin ... Up against a wall-that's often precisely where you want to be when diving. An underwater wall can provide a peerless viewing experience, a full screening of colors, textures, and creatures in wraparound splendor (eat your heart out, IMAX). And any diver who has struggled to maintain a steady ...
Many Whales Ago
Jul 01, 2008; Bell, Lydia ... For many Arctic peoples, whales have traditionally been an important source of food and of bone for buildings and tools. But capturing such enormous quarry is no easy task-it requires a cooperative effort, multipassenger boats, and substantial weaponry. When did Arctic residents develop the ...
Poison Control
Jul 01, 2008; Reebs, Stéphan ... That so many bacteria have become drug-resistant is testimony to the microbes' toughness, but here's tougher: some bacteria actually eat antibiotics for breakfast. What's more, such super-tough bacteria are naturally widespread in the soil, according to a new study by Gautam Dantas, graduate ...
A Whiff of DNA
Jul 01, 2008; Reebs, Stéphan ... It's easy for small creatures to hide in a pond-what with all the murky water, vegetation, rocks, and logs-so biologists who want to catalog them must do a lot of mucking around. A new technique might make that task a lot easier: just collect half a tablespoon of pond water and examine the DNA ...
The Petal Effect
Jul 01, 2008; Reebs, Stéphan ... Ah, roses. Their heady fragrance and delicate petals glistening with dew could soften the hardest heart. But take a sharper look at the dewdrops. They bead, rather than spread-and that's because the material composing the petal surface doesn't bond well with water. Yet the droplets don't roll ...
Sea of Stripes
Jul 01, 2008; Borrell, Brendan ... Sailors and scientists have been mapping ocean currents for centuries, but it turns out they've missed something big. How big? The entire ocean is striped with 100-mile-wide bands of slowmoving water that extend right down to the seafloor, according to a recent study. Nikolai A ....
Bugs Smell Funny
Jul 01, 2008; Reebs, Stéphan ... When an animal detects an odor, a flurry of activity ensues inside its sensory cells-whether they're in a dog's nose or a moth's antenna. Those cellular mechanisms are extremely complex and were thought to be universal. New research shows, however, that in a striking departure from the rest of ...
How Dogs Came to Run the World
Jul 01, 2008; Wang, Xiaoming; Tedford, Richard H ... IMAGE AND/OR TEXT OMITTED ...
Six-Legged Agents of Change
Jul 01, 2008; Reebs, Stéphan ... THE WARMING EARTH Hordes of mountain pine beetles are decimating British Columbian forests. Rising temperatures due to global warming have boosted the beetles' numbers by increasing their reproductive rate and reducing their winter die-off. Now, in a perverse twist, a new study shows ...
Brain Freeze
Jul 01, 2008; Borrell, Brendan ... No one likes making mistakes on the job, but it's easy to lose focus when you're stuck doing the same thing over and over. What if you could predict-and prevent-such errors? A new study shows that the brain begins to wander as long as thirty seconds before the body makes an error, a departure ...
Clouds and Mirrors
Jul 01, 2008; Reebs, Stéphan ... The space surrounding a black hole at a galaxy's center normally radiates lots of X-rays, yet the vicinity of the black hole called Sagittarius A that lies at the hub of our own Milky Way is unusually dim. It wasn't always so: 300 years ago, astronomers now say, Sagittarius A flared up with ...
Flatland: A Journey of Many Dimensions; The Movie Edition
Jul 01, 2008; Marschall, Laurence A ... ALSO WORTHY OF MENTION Flatland: A Journey of Many Dimensions; The Movie Edition by Edwin A. Abbott with Thomas Banchoff and the Filmmakers of Flatland Princeton University Press, 2008; $15.00 Originally published in 1884, this wonderful fantasy-written three decades before Einstein's ...
Final Theory
Jul 01, 2008; Marschall, Laurence A ... Final Theory by Mark Alpert Touchstone, 2008; $24.00 Given the centuries-Old literary tradition of the Holy Grail and the more recent blockbuster success of The Da Vinci Code, it's not surprising that new versions of the grail quest story continue to appear. This latest contribution, ...
The Stone Gods
Jul 01, 2008; Marschall, Laurence A ... The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson Harcourt, 2007; $24.00 This isn't exactly science fiction, though it does feature a lot of space travel and a world in which people are genetically engineered to stay as young as they choose. Nor is it exactly lesbian lit; yet the central love theme ...
Cretaceous Dawn
Jul 01, 2008; Marschall, Laurence A ... Cretaceous Dawn by L. M. Graziano and M. S. A. Graziano Leapfrog Press, 2008; $15.95 Something Strange has been happening in the graviton laboratory of Yariko Miyakara, a physicist at the University of Creekbend, South Dakota. Although the chamber that holds her apparatus is sealed and ...
Birds of a Different Feather
Jul 01, 2008; Goodale, Eben; Salgado, Amila; Kotagama, Sarath W ... By mimicking a variety of animal calls, Sri Lankan drongos influence the behavior of mixed-species flocks. We were losing the flock. A thicket of bamboo in the Sri Lankan rainforest blocked a clear line of pursuit, and we hadn't heard any birdcalls for several minutes-only the sawmill ...
JULY NIGHTS OUT/AUGUST NIGHTS OUT
Jul 01, 2008; Anonymous ... 1 Mercury approaches its greatest elongation (apparent distance) west of the Sun-a separation of 22 degrees. Look for the planet low near the east-northeast horizon about an hour before sunrise. An hour or so after sundown this same day, low in the western sky, yellow-orange Mars will appear to ...
The Abyssinian Proof
Jul 01, 2008; Marschall, Laurence A ... The Abyssinian Proof by Jenny White Norton, 2008; $23.95 You can almost see the smoke and hear the calls to prayer as author Jenny White guides you through the narrow streets of Istanbul. The year is 1887, and Kamil Pasha, a magistrate under the Ottomans, is trying to keep the city from ...