Magazine
September-October 2000
September-October 2000
Volume: 88 Number: 5
Ideas about the proton have evolved considerably since Rutherford first identified this subatomic particle in the second decade of the 20th century. In "The Search for QCD Exotics," Alex R. Dzierba, Curtis A. Meyer and Eric S. Swanson explain that theorists realized in the 1960s that the proton contains three elementary subunits—dubbed quarks. More recently, physicists have come to appreciate that quarks have "color" and that the proton encompasses an intertwined web of particles, some of which are made of nothing more than the force that holds matter together. (Illustration by Tom Dunne.)
In This Issue
- Agriculture
- Art
- Astronomy
- Biology
- Communications
- Economics
- Engineering
- Environment
- Evolution
- Mathematics
- Medicine
- Physics
- Psychology
- Technology
A New Urban Ecology
James Paul Collins, Ann Kinzig, Nancy Grimm, William Fagan, Diane Hope, Jianguo Wu, Elizabeth Borer
Environment
Modeling human communities as integral parts of ecosystems poses special problems for the development and testing of ecological theory
The Search for QCD Exotics
Alex Dzierba, Curtis Meyer, Eric Swanson
Physics
Particles predicted by the theory of quantum chromodynamics help explain why the fundamental building blocks of matter are impossible to isolate
Pollination of Cacti in the Sonoran Desert
Theodore Fleming
Environment Evolution
When closely related species vie for scarce resources, necessity is the mother of some pretty unusual evolutionary inventions
Andrew Ellicott Douglass and the Big Trees
Donald McGraw
Biology Environment
The Giant Sequoia was fundamental to the development of the science of dendrochronology—tree-ring dating
