Word: fall
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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With uncanny precision, the northern hemisphere's migratory birds fly south in the fall and north in the spring-often to targets that are continents or even oceans away. One theory holds that some birds get their traveling orders from the stars. Not quite, says Cornell Ornithologist Stephen T. Emlen. The cue comes from a "biological clock" set by the birds' internal response to seasonal changes in the length of days...
Emlen's test subject was the indigo bunting, a little songbird and prodigious commuter that flies as far as 6,000 miles a year between Canada and Central America. Emlen put the birds in a planetarium and studied their reaction to fall star patterns. To his surprise, the birds seemed to ignore the artificial heavens on the planetarium dome. Outside it was spring, and the birds always tried to head north...
...planetarium stars. To test his hunch, Emlen began exposing the birds to periods of simulated daylight that lengthened faster than natural days. Within weeks he succeeded in advancing their biological clocks by six months. Though it was only spring at Cornell, the buntings showed physiological preparations for fall migration. Next Emlen exposed the birds to spring star patterns, which should have dictated a northward passage. But the birds seemed determined to fly south, as if it were fall...
...autobiography is complete unless its writer arranges to fall dead across the last page of corrected proofs, and Lind's account is no exception. But the book has a certain unity. At the end, young Lind has fled and fumbled his way backward from extinction to his tribal beginnings, and is now as ready as any two-year-old to start life...
State Commissioner of Education Neil V. Sullivan, who earlier this fall told school superintendents and principals to encourage classroom discussion of the war. authorized a $2500 budget for the uncensored program...