Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2013 i National Geographic Magazine

There is a stream on my property in Rappahannock county, Virginia, that meanders through fields in its own sweet time, in its own sweet way. It’s a thread of water, narrow enough for me to leap over, modest in the grand scheme of nature, but I take my responsibility as its caretaker seriously. I keep wandering livestock out of the stream. I know their nutrient-rich manure turns water eutrophic, the scientific term for water overloaded with nutrients. I don’t mow grass along the edges but keep it long, as a buffer to absorb any fertilizer runoff from the fields, which could ultimately end up in the chesapeake bay and affect its fisheries. I try to be a good steward. the stream may be mine, but the water belongs to everybody.…

This page features two photographs: one chosen by our editors and one chosen by our readers via online voting. For more information, go to ngm.com/yourshot. EDITORS’ CHOICE Eva Kraaijenbrink Leusden, Netherlands At an animal show near Barneveld, Netherlands, this Angora rabbit was being inspected for the quality of its fur, which is often used to make luxury sweaters and scarves. “It was lying so still, it looked almost dead,” Kraaijenbrink says. She zoomed in to see if it was still breathing. It was. READERS’ CHOICE Sylwia Domaradzka London, England On a tour of central Poland’s countryside last fall, Domaradzka saw many small battles between white-tailed eagles. These two birds in particular wanted to sit in the same spot. “There was an awful lot of fighting and bickering among them,” she…

of Eindhoven is using circular reasoning. An elevated 360-degree bike circuit is the Netherland city’s answer to traffic congestion. Pedaling is not just a pastime in the region: About one-quarter of all transportation is by bicycle. Since bikes can’t go as fast as cars, they can precipitate jams, especially along the A2, the Netherlands’ most traveled north-south speedway. Open since last June, the bridge gives the local population of about a quarter million the option to ride above the gas-fueled fray. The bridge’s cable design with just one central support ensures that no sides are obstructed. “Users can connect in every direction,” says Adriaan Kok, one of the ring’s engineers. Though it seems to hover, the ring’s no pushover. Counterweights line the white inner ring to keep the structure stable,…

A mottled orb adrift in inky vastness, the full moon inspires myth and mystery, music and madness. But what you see on the face of it likely depends on where you live: Interpretations vary by region and culture. Yet most people see something. The reason? A phenomenon called lunar pareidolia—a cosmic Rorschach test in which we perceive illusory images based on the moon’s surface features. The light areas are anorthosite highlands, says plan etary geologist Cassandra Runyon. The dark areas are basaltic plains forged by meteorite impacts and volcanic eruptions. When we see them, an innate form of pattern recognition—or invention—kicks in. Now that human knack is helping NASA analyze new moon data, says the Lunar Science Institute’s Brian Day. As detailed photos emerge, computers struggle to ID what they…

RUBY TIMMS 85 The oldest of eight, Timms grew up “beyond poor” on a farm in Longview, Texas, where she helped her widowed mother cook and care for her brothers and sisters. Now widowed herself, Timms still lives in the San Diego house that she and her husband moved to in 1965. She relaxes under the patio lattice adjacent to the rose garden, where she likes to work first thing every day. “My mother used to say, ‘If you live to be 70, that’s all God promised you.’ ” On a crisp January morning, with snow topping the distant Aspromonte mountains and oranges ripening on the nearby trees, Giuseppe Passarino guided his silver minivan up a curving mountain road into the hinterlands of Calabria, mainland Italy’s southernmost region. As the…

Robert Mugabe won election as Zimbabwe’s first prime minister in 1980. He’s held on to power through violence and intimidation: Attacks by government-backed forces on civilians who could oppose him have peaked in election years (maps, right). The country’s natural resources—including gold and remarkable diamond deposits—have helped finance Mugabe’s rule, enriching him and his inner circle. 1965 The white government of the country of Rhodesia unilaterally declares independence from Great Britain rather than accept a plan for black-majority rule. 1979-1980 Blacks gain power in a war of liberation and rename the country Zimbabwe. Robert Mugabe is elected prime minister. 1982-87 Government forces kill 20,000 ethnic Ndebele in the west thought to oppose Mugabe. 1998 Mugabe sends troops into a war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The cost drains…

Last October 22, at 9:29 a.m., a bell rang in the main office of Yuri Oganessian’s lab in Dubna, north of Moscow. In a cramped warren partitioned by bookshelves and whiteboards, 12 nuclear physicists sat at desks stacked high with papers or strewn with snacks. Across the hall, a rebuilt but venerable cyclotron was flinging calcium atoms against a bit of foil at 67 million miles an hour. The chime of the little bell signaled that one of those collisions had worked: A new atom was born. At that moment it was the only atom of element 117 on Earth, and only the 19th ever to exist. The others had also been made in this lab, and all had quickly vanished. After a fraction of a second, this one was…

ÇAĞAN ŞEKERCIOĞLU is an ornithologist who works to document and prevent bird extinctions. He’s also a professor in the U.S. who runs an award-winning conservation group in his native Turkey. All those pursuits require juggling—and each entails big risks. Why do you do what you do? Who inspired you? I’ve always been drawn to nature. When other kids were playing soccer, I was bringing home insects and other animals. My mom took me to a child psychiatrist! But my beloved dad is my biggest inspiration. During tough economic times he left a safe accounting job to start Turkey’s first model-airplane company. It lasted 30 years. What are the physical hazards of your work? A whole range, from the mundane to the exotic. While surveying birds I’ve been charged by a…

Every month this page features our staff picks of National Geographic Society products and events. For more go to nglive.org. Scientists are on an endless quest to unlock the human brain’s mysteries. For example, what makes us lie or feel attraction? Back for its second season, Brain Games tackles these ques tions and more with interac tive experiments and, yes, games (involving boxes and a sledgehammer at left). The fun—with a side of neuroscience and psychology—starts this month on the National Geographic Channel. EVENT GEOGRAPHIC BEE Where would you find the Karoo? How about Teotihuacan? Students competing in this year’s National Geographic Bee know the answers. Watch the finalists of the 25th annual bee, hosted by Alex Trebek, compete live May 22 in Washington, D.C. For tickets visit nglive.org/geobee. TRIPS…

I beg to differ on the reasons for human migration to all corners of the world during the last 200,000 years. The last few hundred years of exploration represent less than one percent of human history and took place when humans had already occupied almost all the land on the globe. I believe that the migration of the human species in the other 198,000 years was the result of climate changes, a need for better foraging, and developed ways of living. Restlessness, curiosity, or a nomadic lifestyle did not play a role. STAFFAN PERSSON Madison, Alabama “Why We Explore” is why I’m a member. You bring us from our living rooms into the cold, hot, remote, high, low, barren, overrun, infested, and otherwise amazing places of our world. CHIP UNDERHILL…

Despite their dominance at the top of the food chain, dinosaurs had it rough. New research suggests that before an asteroid likely ended their lives, dinosaurs in genera like Parksosaurus (above) and Psittacosaurus and their brethren roamed a fiery planet. Charcoal remnants from the Cretaceous period around 80 million years ago reveal that the atmosphere was loaded with oxygen—around 25 percent, compared with 21 percent today. That helped propel widespread wildfires triggered by lightning strikes, allowing even moist trees and shrubs to burn. Then, with sparse vegetation, major floods could have drowned entire regions. Paleobotanist Sarah Brown suspects that the fires were “a regular part of the dinosaurs’ lifestyle,” forcing mass migrations. Not to mention the stress of looking for unburned food. —Daniel Stone…

The world’s total adult population weighs in at 633 billion pounds. That’s the equivalent of nearly 3,300 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers. Some of the last casualties of World War II didn’t die in combat. They were part of a military mission to chart Antarctica. When the George I crashed while mapping Thurston Island on December 30, 1946, just a day before President Truman proclaimed hostilities officially over, six men survived. They buried three others—Maxwell Lopez, Wendell Hendersin, and Frederick Williams—under the wreckage and wrote their names on the wing. Whether or not to recover them is at issue. The U.S. Navy considers the men properly buried. Polar recovery specialist Lou Sapienza counters that they are in a glacier, not the sea. The families, working with Sapienza and members of Congress to…

Nearly one in four people is a native speaker of Mandarin, Spanish, or English. Dung beetles roll pieces of cow droppings, a core part of their diet, away from the pile to avoid feeding frenzies. Now researchers have found that some species also use the tightly packed balls to stay cool when walking across sand as hot as 150°F in South Africa. To test the beetles’ heat threshold, scientists at Lund University and the University of the Witwatersrand outfitted them with boots made of heat-resistant silicon. The footwear let the insects walk on hot surfaces without pausing as often to climb atop the balls, which can be up to 77°F cooler. “These animals do amazing things on minimal computing power,” says South African entomologist Marcus Byrne. The dung balls aren’t…

The Artful Dodgers of Wrangel Island, arctic foxes steal as many as 40 snow goose eggs a day and cache them for their pups. Muskoxen—more akin to goats and sheep than to oxen—were introduced to Wrangel Island in 1975 and now number about 800. Increasingly, they cluster in tight groups to fend off a newly returned predator: wolves. THE ZODIAC RAFT motors through the freezing drizzle, skirting large ice cakes, taking on wave after invigorating wave of Chukchi Sea as we grope our way toward a shore obscured by fog. Although our Russian guide insists that a large island lies just ahead, I’m doubtful. But then the mists dissipate, and suddenly it looms with a starkness enhanced by the refractions of the Arctic atmosphere: a formidable piece of real estate,…

N. Nitrogen. Atomic number seven. Unnoticed, untasted, it nevertheless fills our stomachs. It is the engine of agriculture, the key to plenty in our crowded, hungry world. Without this independent-minded element, disinclined to associate with other gases, the machinery of photosynthesis cannot function—no protein can form, and no plant can grow. Corn, wheat, and rice, the fast-growing crops on which humanity depends for survival, are among the most nitrogen hungry of all plants. They demand more, in fact, than nature alone can provide. Enter modern chemistry. Giant factories capture inert nitrogen gas from the vast stores in our atmosphere and force it into a chemical union with the hydrogen in natural gas, creating the reactive compounds that plants crave. That nitrogen fertilizer—more than a hundred million tons applied worldwide every…

Over the past 73 years scientists have probed the frontiers of the atomic nucleus, synthesizing heavier elements one by one. The first step beyond uranium, the heaviest natural element, was neptunium, number 93 in the periodic table. The synthetic atoms are all radioactive: They decay into lighter elements, sometimes within milliseconds. In general, the heavier the element, the shorter its half-life. For decades researchers have been crossing a sea of short-lived elements in quest of the “island of stability,” where “magic numbers” of protons and neutrons might combine to make superheavy atoms that last long enough to be studied. MAGIC AND DOUBLY MAGIC NUMBERS Physicists theorize that protons and neutrons occupy separate series of shells in an atomic nucleus. A magic number of either particle is one that just fills…

Grand Canal barges have no fancy names, no mermaids planted on the bow, no corny sayings painted on the stern. Instead they have letters and numbers stamped on the side, like the brand on a cow. Such an unsentimental attitude might suggest unimportance, but barges plying the Grand Canal have knit China together for 14 centuries, carrying grain, soldiers, and ideas between the economic heartland in the south and the political capitals in the north. Outside the northern city of Jining, Zhu Silei—Old Zhu, as everyone calls him—fired up the twin diesels on Lu-Jining-Huo 3307, his shiny new barge. It was 4:30 a.m., and Old Zhu had hoped to get a jump on the other crews, who were still toying with their anchors. But as I gazed at the shore,…

To document human rights abuses, photojournalist Robin Hammond first went to Zimbabwe in 2007. After several visits and two arrests for taking photos in unauthorized places, he spent 26 nights in prison and was deported last year. Hammond was particularly struck by Mbare, an impoverished suburb of the capital. In an outdoor stairwell he spotted a boy getting his hair cut and looking at his reflection in a piece of a broken mirror hung against bars—a metaphor for a broken country unable to see the world beyond itself. BEHIND THE LENS Why did you want to tell Zimbabwe’s story? RH: This is a country that once fought for Robert Mugabe’s promise of a free Africa. Instead of getting freedom, its people have been oppressed by a dictator. The idea of…

EXPERTISE Human migration archaeologist LOCATION Oman My team members are from across the world— Ukraine, Germany, Italy, the U.S.—but often we don’t have anyone from the Arabian Peninsula, where we dig for evidence of ancient humans. So during our first year in the field, before I’d learned Arabic and there was Google Earth to help, I took on a local Bedouin guide. When I asked his fee, he responded, “We are brothers. It is my joy to take you around these places.” With a field budget of about $12,000 that had to cover equipment, car rental, and fuel, plus food and housing for eight men, I was more than happy to believe him. Three days later, when it came time to part ways, he asked how much I was planning…

This quiz is the third of seven to run in 2013 to celebrate National Geographic’s 125th anniversary. The next quiz will appear in July. MAPPING THE WORLD In The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sherlock Holmes spends a day roaming the Devonshire moors while his body somehow remains seated in an armchair, consuming “two large pots of coffee and an incredible amount of tobacco.” In that spirit this quiz celebrates the magical power of maps to transport us out of our own lives and into the unknown.…

The world’s total adult population weighs in at 633 billion pounds. That’s the equivalent of nearly 3,300 Nimitz-class aircraft carriers. Since 1977’s launch of Voyager 1, a golden record with an “interstellar message” has been hurtling with it toward the solar system’s edge. The late astronomer Carl Sagan led a team that chose earthly images and sounds to include. A cover etched with “scientific hieroglyphics,” as creative director Ann Druyan puts it, in dicates the craft’s point of origin and how to play the message for whoever (or whatever) finds it. —Luna Shyr GREETINGS are recorded in 54 human languages and a humpback whale’s. SOUNDS include rain and wind, frogs and elephants, a human heartbeat, laughter, Morse code, and a rocket launch. MUSIC ranges from Bach and Beethoven to Peruvian…

A hedgehog’s heart rate goes from 190 beats per minute to 20 when hibernating. People want pistachios. Native to the Middle East, the hearthealthy nut has gone global, especially over the past decade, as consumption rose more than 50 percent. Iran has long dominated the market, but when a 2008 frost ravaged its crop, farmers in fertile California saw a chance to meet rising demand. Politics also play a role. As sanctions have squeezed Iranian exports for 30 years, America has ramped up production, to a new high last year, according to the USDA. “The impact was pronounced when U.S. farmers planted in the ’70s and ’80s,” says the American Pistachio Growers’ Richard Matoian. Concerns over Iran’s nuclear program mean places like western Europe, China, and Israel— which cracks open…

There are at least two things to know about Zimbabweans. The first is that they have an immoderate attachment to their land, and no wonder. Anyone who has seen the spring-red blush of musasa woodland at the beginning of the rains, or felt the crackle-hot wind of a lowveld summer afternoon, or absorbed the scents of sweet potato and marigold as dusk settles over the bush will know that theirs is a soul-snagging land. Of course such an attachment to land comes at a price. For it, and over it, there will be wars and revolutions, and the inevitable loss of land by the vanquished or the politically unlucky will be so unendurable that the unmoored people will end up true ghosts, souls in search of soil. The second thing…

Nearly half the people on the planet wouldn’t be alive if not for the abundant food made possible by nitrogen fertilizer. Yet its benefits have not reached everyone. In sub-Saharan Africa, where 239 million people go hungry in a year, crops fail as soil is stripped of nutrients, and farmers can’t afford to buy fertilizer. Elsewhere overuse pollutes waterways and releases greenhouse gases. THE FLOW OF NITROGEN Synthetic fertilizer provides most of the nitrogen that makes soil fertile worldwide. Almost half the nitrogen is then harvested with crops; the rest is lost through leaching, erosion, and emissions. TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING Almost half the nitrogen fertilizer applied to major crops is not taken up by plants. Most of the excess is from wheat, rice, and corn farms in…

COMBINE SHRIMP SHELL and silk proteins and a miraculous new substance is born. “Shrilk” was invented by researchers at the Wyss Institute at Harvard, who layered the two components in a way that mimicked structures found in shells and insect cuticles. Shrilk is inexpensive to manufacture but has invaluable virtues: It’s tough, flexible, and biodegradable. In the future it may be used to make everything from wound dressings to trash bags to disposable diapers. And it might make many landfill-choking plastics obsolete. From the beginning of human history innovators have experimented with all kinds of elements, from the ordinary to the invisible, to try to come up with new, improved materials. The invention of plastic in 1907 inaugurated the era of synthetic materials that are stirred up in laboratories, greatly…

For centuries the power of emperors rose and fell with their control of the canal, built to link the ricegrowing region of the Yangtze River, in the south, with imperial capitals above the Yellow River to the north. Soldiers handled much of the vital rice transport on this national highway, which carried everything from food and lumber to textiles, lacquer, and porcelain. Builders of the Grand Canal Construction Begins A.D. 605 To bring trade to his new capital, Luoyang, Emperor Yang of the Sui dynasty built canals to connect the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers. More than two million conscripted laborers dug new channels and linked existing canals, lakes, and rivers. Completed in 611, the system grew in importance over the next 500 years. Reshaping the Canal 1279-1293 Parts of the…

“On the northern coast [of Portugal], at some small localities by the names of Apulia and Ver-O-Mar,” say the notes accompanying this 1950s photo, “the inhabitants occupy themselves with the gathering of sargassum and various sea-weeds which they gather in big nets. The ‘harvesting’ takes place near the coast, for the rough sea brings huge quantities.” Today the bulk of seaweed collected is for human consumption, not for fertilizing local fields, as this Portuguese take was. Production is dominated by Asian countries, often China and Japan. In Europe most seaweed is brought in mechanically, though some is still harvested by hand, using knives, rakes, pitchforks, sickles, and nets. Portugal is the only European producer of the briny commodity to employ diving. Flashback Archive Find all the photos at ngm.com.…