Recently added articles from Natural History:
THE NATURAL EXPLANATION
Feb 01, 2009; ... Before fireflies took up "flash-dancing," their ancestors likely relied on pheromones to find a partner, as many insects do. Light first appeared in the larvae - probably to advertise their toxicity and so warn away predators - and only later evolved into a seducer supreme for the adults. Thus ...
WORD EXCHANGE
Feb 01, 2009; ... Hebrew Lesson A little more than a year ago, linguist Sarah Grey Thomason reported on a Native American language that is on the brink of disappearing ["At a Loss for Words," 12/07-1/08]. Subsequently, Allen Tobias, a writer and producer for print, film, and video, suggested a contrasting ...
SUPERORGANISMS
Feb 01, 2009; ... nature.net I have a love/hate relationship with the ants, termites, bees, and wasps that organize into miniature societies. Their castes and capacity for intricate group behavior create alien worlds as enthralling as any in science fiction. But social insects may bite, sting, or slowly ...
Mystery Leaf
Feb 01, 2009; ... When a high-ranking Mesopotamian woman named Pu-Abi was laid to rest in the Royal Cemetery of Ur some 4,500 years ago, she wore a spectacular headdress. The adornment, disinterred in the 19205, in what is now Iraq, sports numerous gold leaves modeled after an unknown species- and so do numerous ...
DNA Hopscotch
Feb 01, 2009; ... Genes are normally inherited from parents, but they can also be inserted into a genome by viruses, plasmids, and other foreign agents - a phenomenon called horizontal transfer. Bacteria are promiscuous gene swappers, but horizontal transfer has been documented in only a few multicellular ...
In or Out?
Feb 01, 2009; ... Newly discovered fossils from New Mexico and China are providing contradictory clues to the origin of the turtle's shell. Two hypotheses have long competed as the evolutionary explanation. One proposes that ancestral turtles grew bony plates on their skin that eventually fused with one another ...
Red-Hot Cones
Feb 01, 2009; ... The western conifer-seed bug, Leptoglossus occidentalis, has a peculiar world view. Objects stand out against the background as a result not of their color, but of their temperature - and the infrared radiation that comes with it. Trees, warmed by their active metabolism, appear as if on fire, ...
Queen of Her Castle
Feb 01, 2009; ... In fiddler-crab architecture, chimneys-cylindrical mud walls the crabs build around their burrow entrance - have various functions. Depending on the crab species, they hide the hideout from wandering males looking for lodging, shield mating males from rivals, or regulate the burrow's temperature ...
Onboard Computer
Feb 01, 2009; ... Two chemists at the California Institute of Technology have engineered a cellular "computer" within the genetic material of living yeast cells. The cells can signal the presence or absence of two drugs in their environment- theophylline, a former asthma treatment, and tetracycline, an ...
Rocky Road
Feb 01, 2009; ... Diamonds may be forever, but that's not true of most minerals. In fact, about two-thirds of the 4,300 known minerals on Earth today owe their existence to biological processes, and thus evolved fairly recently in geological terms. So says Robert M. Hazen of the Carnegie Institution in ...
Let There Be Light
Feb 01, 2009; ... In thirty years of satellite surveillance, never has there been so little ice covering the Arctic Ocean as in the summer of 2007. (And 2008 was a close second.) Images show a 39 percent loss compared with the 1979-2000 average, a dramatic extension of a trend that started in the early 1970s. The ...
Hog Haven
Feb 01, 2009; ... Think "burrow dweller," and the animal that springs to mind might be a gopher, maybe an owl- but certainly not a pig. Yet each night African warthogs hunker down inside burrows, usually choosing the abandoned digs of an aardvark. They back down into a tunnel that leads to a circular chamber, ...
Learning Lizards
Feb 01, 2009; ... Several years after my retirement from the University of MissouriSt. Louis, my wife, Huida, and I settled on Virgin Gorda in the British Virgin Islands. As a biologist, 1 developed an interest in the native fauna. In particular, I enjoyed the nearly ubiquitous lizard populations and decided to ...
Seeing Corals with the Eye of Reason
Feb 01, 2009; ... A rediscovered painting celebrates Charles Darwin's view of life The sweetest words to a scientist, to pa rapii rase Isaac Asimov, may be not "Eureka! I've found it!" but "Hnnii . . . that's funny. What's that doing there?" A historian of science often has the same experience: a bit of ...
Flowers Have No Names
Feb 01, 2009; ... The revival of Hebrew as a living language after two thousand years was no miracle. To forge a national identity in the modern age, a group of people required a common history, with a common mythology and treasure trove of memories, culture, and literature; a traditional territory; and a ...
Could an Ant Colony Read This Book?
Feb 01, 2009; ... Could an Ant Colony Read This Book? In biology one can spend a lifetime studying an ob- scure sliver of life - be it fish ovaries, flea legs, or the mites that live in the nostrils of birds. It's often that obsessive focus that makes broader truths come clear. Edward O. Wilson and Bert ...
Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War
Feb 01, 2009; ... Six-Legged Soldiers: Using Insects as Weapons of War by Jeffrey A. Lockwood Oxford University Press. 2009: S27.95 Humans, according to Aristotle, are the only political animals, but that hasn't stopped insects from fighting alongside us in military conflicts worldwide since the dawn of ...
SKYLOG
Feb 01, 2009; ... For those Of US Who live in the north- ern latitudes, Castor and Pollux, the brightest stars of Gemini - the Twins - are nearly overhead around 10 p.m. local time on February 1, and around 8 p.m. by month's end. The two stars were named in antiquity for the mythical sons of Leda, but in 1678 the ...
Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet
Feb 01, 2009; ... Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet by Oliver Morton HarperCollins. 2008; $28.95 All hail the chloroplasts! Oliver Morton loves those tiny organelles, and so should we, for our lives and our livelihoods depend on their diligent work in taking sunlight and turning it into chemical ...
Rocket Land
Feb 01, 2009; ... Wildlife finds a haven where space shuttles fly. Along Florida's eastern coastline a string of peninsulas and islands intercedes between the Atlantic Ocean and a succession of lagoons, estuaries, and waterways. Among those barrier lands is a fifty-mile- long peninsula that extends from ...