First, Kill the Babies

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, January 18, 1996

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Twenty-five years ago this summer a Harvard graduate student named Sarah Hrdy went to northwestern India and met the monkeys that would make her famous. The immediate impetus for the trip was a series of lectures by Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich on the dangers of overpopulation. Though Ehrlich was speaking about humans, what Hrdy thought of were the Indian monkeys known as Hanuman langurs. The langurs are considered sacred by many Indians and so are regularly fed by the people with whom they come into contact. Consequently, near towns, Hanuman langurs live in extremely dense populations, and apparently this unnatural density had led to unnatural, pathologically violent behavior. There had been several reports of adult males killing infants.

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From Teeth to Beak

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, January 1, 1996

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For 135 years, the earliest known bird, Archaeopteryx, led a lonely life. A couple of ambiguous fossils aside, no avian specimen anywhere near as old as this 147-million-year-old creature had been found. As China opens up to fossil hunting, however, it is giving Archaeopteryx some company. Three years ago researchers reported finding a 135-million- year-old bird, Sinornis, in China. And this past year Lian-hai Hou of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and his co-workers reported the discovery of an equally remarkable bird, possibly dating back as far as 142 million years.

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Verdict (Almost) In

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, January 1, 1996

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Police detectives aren’t the only people who look for fingerprints. Climatologists do, too: they’ve been looking for the collective fingerprint of humanity on Earth’s climate. Most of them suspect that the 6 billion tons of carbon we pump into the atmosphere each year, in the form of carbon dioxide, could warm the planet through the greenhouse effect. In the coming century the warming could be dramatic; but is it detectable already? This past year two teams of climate modelers said yes: man-made global warming is happening–almost certainly, anyway, and it’s getting more certain every year.

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Hot Sheet

Posted on by Lori Jia

Discover, January 1, 1996

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Since 1983 Kaj Hoernle has been studying a couple of hot spots: the Canary and Madeira Islands, two volcanic chains located in the Atlantic southwest of Gibraltar. Like other hot spots–Hawaii, for instance–these islands are thought to have been formed by narrow, pipe-shaped plumes of hot rock rising from deep in Earth’s mantle. Hoernle, a geochemist at GEOMAR, a marine geology institute in Kiel, Germany, has been measuring the chemical fingerprints of rocks on the islands. Last March he reported some bizarre results: those supposedly distinctive fingerprints look much like the ones of rocks found far away–on Mount Etna in Sicily, for instance, and as far off as Germany.

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