Discover, March 1, 1994

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In Rwanda’s Nyungwe Forest, researchers are finding it hard to sell the conservation ethic to people with more pressing problems.

The best-known way to see wild primates is to go to Volcanoes National Park in the central African country of Rwanda. There guides can lead you along trails to see the mountain gorillas made famous by the late primatologist Dian Fossey. Yet Rwanda, despite being only the size of New Hampshire, is the home of another group of primates that, while far less famous than the gorillas, are no less magnificent.

Continue reading “A Sanctuary Under Siege” →

Discover, February 1, 1994

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The fossil skull sitting on Alexander Kellner’s worktable makes no sense. Usually fossils are spark plugs in the engine of the imagination. One look at the long, gently curved bones of a spider monkey’s arm and you see a graceful swing from branch to branch; one glance at the weighty leg bones of a mastodon and you hear the rumble of a heavy stride. But this skull greets you with cognitive dissonance: all you see is essentially a flat triangle of bone. “A paleontologist once came in here and said, ‘What is that?’ ” says Kellner, himself a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Continue reading “Masters of an Ancient Sky” →

Discover, February 1, 1994

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Swear not by magnetic north–it drifts, takes long excursions, and sometimes even heads south. Earth’s patchy core may be to blame.

Although it has long served as a fixed reference for navigators, Earth’s magnetic field is anything but static. Over the course of decades and centuries, in what is called secular variation, the pattern of the field drifts randomly, such that at a given geographic location the direction a compass needle points may change by tens of degrees. Every 30,000 years or so things get more extreme: the magnetic poles suddenly begin shifting toward the equator, only to snap back into place.

Continue reading “Inconstant Field” →

Discover, January 31, 1994

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Something strange was in the air in 1993. In January the average worldwide level of ozone in the stratosphere was in a record-breaking slump; in the summer northern hemisphere levels reached new regional lows; in September the notorious ozone hole over Antarctica returned, nearly twice as deep as ever before. And although carbon dioxide continued to accumulate in the atmosphere, aggravating the greenhouse effect, temperatures were actually cooler than normal in the summer, particularly in the interiors of continents–which may or may not have helped precipitate the Midwest’s disastrous floods, depending on whom you talk to.

Continue reading “Pinatubo Lives” →

Discover, January 31, 1994

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Quantum mechanics has many assaults on common sense to answer for–telepathic particles, for instances, and wormholes to other universes. These bits of weirdness are now old hat. But last March a team of physicists from the United States, Canada, France, and Israel added a new one: teleportation.

At first, it might seem as if teleportation is merely a problem of technology rather than fundamental physics. With a few technical breakthroughs, you might imagine, you’d be able to teleport over to a friend’s house for dinner simply by stepping into a scanner that would record all the pertinent information about the atoms making you up–their positions, their bonds with other atoms, their energy levels, and so on.

Continue reading “Getting There Is Half the Fun” →