Discover, November 1, 1997

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Every scientific discipline has its defining challenges, the ones that mark the field’s outer limits. Astronomers feeling plucky might try to describe what it’s like to fall into a black hole. Particle physicists might attempt to see the guts of a quark. And biomechanists, who study how physical forces affect and direct the ways animals move, might reconstruct the biggest creatures ever to live on land: the sauropods, the long-necked, long-tailed, plant-eating behemoths of the age of dinosaurs. During their 160 million years on Earth, the sauropods produced species that grew over 130 feet long and that weighed in at 100 tons–animals that, biomechanically, defy comprehension.

Continue reading “Dinosaurs in Motion” →

Discover, November 1, 1997

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Walking through a forest is like sailing past an iceberg: you’re missing a big part of the picture. Trees hide nearly half their biomass in a vast tangle of roots, which in turn are usually woven into an even bigger web made of fungus. This benign fungal infection is a classic example of symbiosis, a relationship in which both organisms benefit. Trees can make new tissue from sunlight, water, and air, but their roots can’t extract enough vital nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus from the soil. Fungi produce digestive enzymes that free these compounds, but they can’t draw carbon from the air. So the organisms collaborate, the fungus taking carbon from the roots and pumping in soil nutrients in return.

Continue reading “The Web Below” →

Discover, September 1, 1997

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The puzzle–and joy–of evolutionary biology is to find the lost paths that life took to arrive at the strange forms it has today. Take, for example, the pufferfish. At first sight, it seems miserably adapted to the tropical waters where it makes its home: it is an unassuming, small fish, so slow you can easily catch it by hand. But when a predatory fish or bird attacks, a pufferfish goes through a unique transformation: it rapidly gulps water and swells into a huge, spiky, hard-shelled ball three times its normal size. How could anything like this evolve from an ordinary fish?

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Discover, July 1, 1997

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All vertebrates that live on land–from humans to alligators to birds–are collectively known as tetrapods, meaning four feet. The name sticks even though the legs to which two of these feet are attached have become arms in humans and wings in birds. In snakes, the change was even more radical: they lost all four of their limbs. One of the few remaining signs of their limbed heritage is the presence of vestigial hips imprisoned in the rib cage.

Continue reading “How the Snake Lost Its Legs” →

Discover, July 1, 1997

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On the first night of July 1994 Jeff Tobolski put himself and his Westwind 2 twin-engine jet nine miles above the Oklahoma-Arkansas border, just to the west of a gargantuan storm that was pummeling the ground below with baseballs of hail, heavy black sheets of rain, and enough bolts of lightning to turn the night almost to day. Usually Tobolski flies business executives from city to city, and usually he would not have brought his clientele anywhere near this particular point in space and time. But on this night he was piloting one of two jet loads of atmospheric scientists who would have flown right into the storm if they could have. We were flying for scientific discovery, and so, Tobolski remarks with considerable understatement, we were removing some of the typical caution.

Continue reading “Heaven’s New Fires” →