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Greenup of the Planet Is Not Black Or White

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WIRED, November 8, 2007

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Every Spring, the Earth blooms. Scientists call it greenup: New buds sprout, fresh leaves unfurl, and continents turns green.

Exactly when greenup takes place each year is the result of an algorithm embedded in the DNA of plants. They track the rising temperature in spring, gauge the rainfall, measure the lengthening days, and then calculate when to start growing.

People have been trying to figure out the greenup algorithm for millennia. Farmers needed to know when to plant their crops; herders needed to know when pastures would be ready for their herds. In China and Japan, greenup records reach back 5,000 years.

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Skeletons Flesh Out Life’s Past

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The New York Times, November 6, 2007

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About half a billion years ago, our ancestors were slender, jawless, fishlike creatures. Their backs were stiffened by a rod of cartilage, along which grew bony prongs. That smattering of bone was the forerunner of our vertebrae, and it gave us and all the other descendants of those ancient animals our name: the vertebrates. Vertebrates have evolved into tens of thousands of species dominating the ocean, land and sky. Much of their success is due to the many new forms their skeletons have taken. A new coffee-table-format book, “Evolution” (Seven Stories Press), offers hundreds of gorgeous photographs of those forms, as diverse as bats with fingers thinner than pipe cleaners and rhinos with skulls as stubborn as boulders.

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This Man Wants To Control the Internet

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Discover, October 25, 2007

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John Doyle is worried about the Internet. In the next few years, millions more people will gain access to it, and existing users will place ever higher demands on our digital infrastructure, driven by applications like online movie services and Internet telephony. Doyle predicts that this skyrocketing traffic could cause the Internet to slow to a disastrous crawl, an endless digital gridlock stifling our economies. But Doyle, a professor of control and dynamic systems, electrical engineering, and bioengineering at Caltech, also believes the Internet can be saved.

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In Study of Human Patterns, Scientists Look to Bird Brains

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The New York Times, October 23, 2007

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Last month, a bird known as a bar-tailed godwit took flight from Alaska and headed south. A day later, it was still flapping its way over the Pacific. An airplane pilot would have a hard time staying awake after 24 hours of flight (the Federal Aviation Administration allows pilots to fly just eight hours in a row). But the godwit kept flying for an additional week. After eight days and 7,200 miles, it landed in New Zealand, setting a record for nonstop flight.

“If they spend so many hours flying,” said Ruth M. Benca of the University of Wisconsin, “where do they find the time to sleep?”

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If the First Bite Doesn’t Do It, the Second One Will

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The New York Times, September 11, 2007

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There are times when life imitates art. Then there are times when life imitates science fiction.

One of the most famous monsters in film history is the extraterrestrial beast of the “Alien” series. It slowly opened its glistening fangs to reveal a second set of jaws that shot forward to kill its victims.

Scientists have now discovered a fish that does the same thing.

Rita Mehta did not have aliens in mind when she began to study the moray eel. Dr. Mehta, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Davis, where she studies the evolution of feeding, was intrigued by the dining habits of morays.

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