Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2014 i National Geographic Magazine

Staying True We cover indigenous cultures all the time and have done so, you might say, ever since John Hyde, an early Editor of the magazine, ran a photograph of a Zulu bride and groom in 1896. It’s part of our DNA, one of the many ways in which we show readers the great diversity of our world. Often these are sad stories of dispossession and disappearing cultures, but this month’s feature about the Kayapo, perhaps the richest, most powerful of Brazil’s indigenous people, is different. Though the Kayapo follow a subsistence way of life, they have satellite dishes, disposable cigarette lighters, and boat motors. But the artifacts of modernity have been incorporated without compromising the tribe’s identity. As Chip Brown reports, their language, ceremonies, and cultural systems remain intact.…

This page features two photographs: one chosen by our editors and one chosen by our readers via online voting. For more information, go to yourshot.nationalgeographic.com. EDITORS’ CHOICE Giséle Teixeira Richmond, California While cleaning her house, Teixeira, a third-grade teacher, came across an old pin-box toy. Lying on her bed, she envisioned a creative self-portrait. As she held her breath for each take, she experimented to find the best distance and angle at which to hold the camera. READERS’ CHOICE Bridgena Barnard Cape Town, South Africa Barnard hoped to photograph a cheetah kill during a trip to South Africa’s Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. When her daughter spotted a group of cheetahs on a dune surveying a group of springbok antelopes, Barnard found the perfect position to capture the pursuit of a fawn.…

Scientists have long known that sea stars have eyes. New research on Linckia laevigata (above)—one of the most common sea stars found on coral worldwide— illuminates how those eyes work. Located at the tips of the arms, the eyes don’t function like human eyes. “We think they can only see the difference between light and dark in low resolution,” says neurobiologist Anders Garm. The difference has to do with brain size. Human vision evolved to process more input as the human brain grew bigger and increasingly complex. Sea stars, by comparison, have only a small collection of nerve cells that interpret visual information. Even primitive eyesight, Garm says, is sufficient for the animal’s needs.…

Tatooine—where Luke Skywalker grew up and his father, Anakin, pod raced in the Star Wars movies—is being swallowed by the Tunisian desert. A 300-foot-wide, crescent-shaped sand dune called a barchan (above) is bearing down on the set of 1999’s The Phantom Menace (top). Most of the original Star Wars Tatooine set was already engulfed by the early 2000s. Those who would preserve the fictional planet are short on time. Geologically speaking, only lava flows and mudslides move faster than sand, says the team of planetary scientists studying the dune’s activity. This particular barchan has been slowed just slightly by airflow around the set’s buildings and the estimated 100,000 tourists annually tromping through. It’s marching forward about 45 feet a year, says Johns Hopkins University’s Ralph Lorenz. He expects the Menace…

WALTER LOOKS COMFORTABLE. Dead for 50 years, the giant Pacific octopus is resting in a ten-gallon tank of ethanol solution, six-foot arms folded in cephalopod repose. His nextdoor neighbors hail from the Atlantic: a jarred colony of sea squirts, their bluegreen bioluminescence long extinguished. Corals and algae bloom on a shelf. Leis of Tahitian snails dangle from hooks. Pearly shelled mussels from the Mississippi River, source of a once profitable button industry, glisten under glass. And then there are the cabinets, all 230 of them: airtight, custom-made, climate-controlled homes to ten million mollusk specimens. Many were gathered on far-flung expeditions led by the likes of Ernest Shackleton, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Gifford Pinchot, and William Bartram. Where is this storehouse of wonders? And how did we get here? The…

Valery Inozemtsev ascends a high mountain path through the churned mud of development. He climbs past an Olympics dormitory, past a Moscow bureaucrat’s sprawling new dacha and trucks hauling gravel and steel beams—past all the things that were never here before. Inozemtsev has lived in this formerly sleepy village of Krasnaya Polyana in the Russian North Caucasus for a half century, since before it became a matter of urgent Kremlin concern. “This was the best place in the Soviet Union,” he says. “Virgin nature. And now …” His voice trails off in discontent. Inozemtsev, 73, continues up the mountain in long, youthful strides. Reaching a wood of chestnut trees, he pauses to fling back his brown cape. He runs two fingers over his white, bushy mustache, then points down the…

Beached in Dubai “All these construction workers would come around and watch life at the beach, but none of them would sit on the sand,” says Jonas Bendiksen, who photographed this month’s story on guest workers in the Gulf states. “I think they felt somehow that they didn’t belong.” Foreign laborers, like those shown below at Jumeirah Beach in Dubai, are doubly isolated. Their families are many hundreds of miles away in places like India and Vietnam, yet they’re also cut off from the people they serve. Even though foreign workers make up the vast majority of Dubai’s population, they’re housed mostly in residential camps on the city’s outskirts. Many work 12- to 15-hour shifts to maximize earnings, leaving little time for other activities. To capture off-the-clock moments, Bendiksen wore…

Rising Seas The human race is facing a sort of problem it has never been up against before. Not only are the implications of climate change enormous, but the general public also seems unwilling to look the problem in the eye. Drastic action is going to have to be taken at some point in the future, but without public support governments will have a hard time being able to do anything significant. The first step should be to say, Hey, this is really happening. It is a whole lot easier to take action if everyone agrees there is actually something to take action about. FEEDBACK Readers offered their thoughts on the effects of rising seas. When the overwhelming evidence is so compelling and the costs—even now—are so enormous and mounting,…

SKYCAST Overhead this month in parts of the world January 2-3 Quadrantids meteor shower January 5 Jupiter and its moons visible Khat is controversial. People in the Horn of Africa have chewed it for centuries. Last July the plant (right) lost its last foothold in Europe when Britain declared cathinone—khat’s active ingredient—illegal. It’s been considered a nonmedical drug in the U.S. since 1993. For growers looking to sell to the East African diaspora, losing Britain is a major blow. That country provided a substantial consumer base of Somali immigrants. Britain also provided a hub for quick dispersal, because of its centrality and numerous daily flights. That’s important, since khat loses potency as it dries, usually within 48 hours. Kenyan farmers are protesting the loss of income from nearly 2,000 tons…

The rock hyrax (left) is the size of a groundhog, yet it’s a close genetic relative of the towering African elephant. “What unites them is a common ancestor,” says biologist Arik Kershenbaum. The two species, along with manatees, are part of a taxonomic group called Paenungulata, which diverged from other mammals 65 million years ago during climate shifts. They later began to diverge from each other to adapt in different habitats. Although they look nothing alike, hyraxes and elephants share some physical similarities, including spongy pads under their feet.…

Where would dessert tables be with out vanilla? It’s a key ingredient in countless confections and is the number one ice-cream choice in America, according to the International Dairy Foods Association. Vanilla’s essence lies in a chemical called vanillin—the dominant flavor compound among hundreds found in the vanilla bean (below). Frequently, though, vanillin has nothing to do with the bean. Notes vanilla historian Tim Ecott, most store-bought sweets are flavored with a synthetic version derived from other plants, wood, or even coal tar. Chefs prefer natural extracts, says Ecott, but people don’t seem to care. “Using vanillin from other sources isn’t fraud exactly,” he adds, “but it is a bit of smoke and mirrors.”…

Noon in the United Arab Emirates is four in the afternoon in the Philippines, which means that Teresa Cruz’s two older children are supposed to be home from school and back inside the apartment of their aunt, who is raising them. Teresa lives in Dubai, the U.A.E.’s most populous city, 4,300 miles from the Philippines. She’s a 39-year-old sales clerk at a clothing store in one wing of a shining multistory Dubai mall. Her job requires her to straighten clothes, ring up transactions, keep track of receipts, and smile whenever a customer walks in. She’s on her feet six days a week, Fridays off. So Friday midday is a scheduled time for Teresa to see her 11-year-old daughter and 8-year-old son, and because she’s an overseas worker—one of many millions…

“Do you mind if I look around?” Alex asks the villagers. We’re standing with a group of fishermen in front of a small mosque in northern Oman. A row of whitewashed buildings lines the pebbly beach. Behind the village rises a sheer 3,000-foot cliff that shimmers under a blistering midday sun. “You can do as you please,” says Taha Abdullah Saif Althouri, speaking for the group. There are no roads in the village, which lies at the head of a deep fjordlike waterway on the remote Musandam Peninsula. The only way to get here is by boat, which is how we arrived. Jutting deep into the world’s busiest oil shipping channel, the peninsula lies only 24 miles from Iran and is one of the most strategic military locations in the…

Fish Stacks A wall of frozen walleyes testifies to a successful weekend of ice fishing on Minnesota’s Mille Lacs Lake. This photo first ran in the December 1958 issue of National Geographic. “Minneapolis people … camped in comfort in their 42-foot trailer,” wrote staff member Thomas J. Abercrombie. “Driving onto the frozen lake, they heated their mobile home with a portable electric generator, dug holes in the ice, set their lines, and stood watch behind sealed windows. When a bobber jumped, all rushed out to see what they had caught.” Mille Lacs has long been famous for its walleyes, but the lake’s population of the species is in decline. In 2013 Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources increased restrictions for anglers, limiting size and number caught to help protect younger, smaller…

Gregg Treinish National Geographic Emerging Explorer EXPERTISE Adventurer LOCATION Chile Cold Crossing My partner and I were walking from the Equator to the southern tip of South America, trying to learn the secrets of sustainability from people who had lived on the land for generations. Just south of Santiago, Chile, there were giant snowfields. We had to cross them if we were going to continue. We walked for a week across the snow’s crust, often falling through because it was melting. When we came out on the other side, the snow gave way to fine ash. When a sudden wind kicked up, we had to wrap our shirts around our faces to avoid breathing it. Finally we made it to Laguna de la Invernada. According to the map and some…

It’s not only Earth that has a winter, spring, summer, and fall. “Anything with an atmosphere has seasons,” says NASA’s Jim Green. They just look different on other celestial bodies. Equinoxes and solstices mark the change in seasons, and rotation, orbit, distance from the sun, and axial tilt all play a role in how weather shifts play out. When Pluto is farthest from the sun—winter—its atmosphere collapses. Saturn’s rings don’t cast shadows during equinoxes. On its moon Titan, spring showers are made of methane and can last for several Earth years. Winter on Mars brings carbon dioxide snow. Mercury, notably, remains nearly seasonless—due to a thin atmosphere and a rotation so slow that one of its days is equal to the length of two of its years.…

As the U.S. population has grown, so too has its collective output of waste—a quantity that last year topped 250 million tons. At modern landfills, waste managers compress and sculpt rising heaps of garbage in order to maximize capacity. With the dirty work also comes an opportunity. As garbage breaks down, the organic material produces carbon dioxide and methane, a potent gas that can be burned to produce large amounts of energy. At existing landfill plants, that method has been used to create nearly 15 billion kilowatt-hours, enough to power roughly one million homes for a year. More than 600 energy projects at landfills pipe the gases to the surface, in every U.S. state except Alaska and Hawaii. California has the most, with 75. The Environmental Protection Agency has categorized…

It was tempting to think we were going back in time, slipping the bonds of the modern world for tribal life in one of the last great bastions of indigenous culture, chronically jeopardized but still vital, intact, unvanquished. The outsiders who first ventured into the southeast Amazon Basin centuries ago—missionaries, El Dorado seekers, slave traders, jaguar-skin hunters, rubber tappers, wilderness explorers known as sertanistas— traveled by river on laborious boat journeys. We had a single-engine Cessna and good weather on a September morning late in the dry season. The plane clawed through the haze of forest fires around the Brazilian frontier town of Tucumã. After half an hour heading south and west at a hundred knots, we crossed the twisting course of the muddy Rio Branco, and suddenly there were…

Here’s what it takes to catch a dragon. Slaughter a goat. Cut it up. Enlist a few strong friends to hoist three ten-footlong steel traps, grab bags of goat meat, and trek a few miles up and down knee-punishing hills. Ignore the 90-plus-degree heat that wraps you up and steams you like a dumpling. Set up the first trap with hunks of flesh and hang a few meat bags in trees to “scent” the air. Hike another couple of miles. Lay another trap. Cover three or four more miles, repeat. Return to camp; fill a bucket with cold water and dump it over your head. Sleep. Revisit each trap in the morning and afternoon for the next two days. They’ll likely be empty, but if you’re lucky, you’ll draw near,…

Ultimate Survival Alaska Armed with nothing more than their wits and their backpacks, eight survivalists are setting out on a mission: Stay alive in a race through the Alaska wilderness. Find out who has the strength, stamina, and nerve needed to overcome endless obstacles— from glacial ravines to wolves on the prowl— this month on the National Geographic Channel. TRIP STUDENT EXPEDITIONS High schoolers learn photo skills (left) and take part in conservation and community service projects on these summer trips. Explore our programs in Mozambique, Thailand, and the Czech Republic at ngstudentexpeditions.com/2014. SPEAKER MYSTERIES OF THE ANCIENT MAYA Archaeologist William Saturno has devoted his career to unraveling the history of the Maya culture. Hear him share tales of his most exciting finds at the Mesa Arts Center in Mesa,…