Innholdsfortegnelse for Feb-15 i National Geographic Magazine

Air Force Staff Sgt. Robert “Bo” Wester (Ret.) was an explosive ordnance disposal technician in Iraq. He faced hundreds of IEDs without incident and a few with grievous consequences. “Most of my injuries are invisible, and the rest are hidden,” he says. Army Maj. Jeff Hall (Ret.) was 35 feet from a car bomb when it went off in a crowded marketplace north of the city of Baghdad. He didn’t lose his arms or his legs or suffer visible wounds. But “I am just not the same human being as I used to be,” he says. Brain injuries caused by the shock waves generated by explosions have become the signature injury of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, leaving hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers and veterans with a life-altering list…

Like the French cafe, the British pub is more than a watering hole. It’s what regulars call a home away from home—and a social institution that can anchor a community. But for how much longer? U.K. pub numbers, dwindling for decades, are now in free fall. Since 2008 about 7,000 have shuttered or been sold off to developers—and each week 31 more close, says Neil Walker of the consumer group Campaign for Real Ale. Changing tastes, economics, and laws, along with supermarkets selling cheap beer and more restaurants serving alcohol, have all spurred the decline, says pub advocate John Longden. The result, he says, is “fewer pubs but more places to drink.” Most U.K. “locals,” as they’re known, used to belong to breweries, says author and historian Paul Jennings. Then…

Over the past six decades the number of days when at least one tornado touched down in the United States has dropped. When climatologist James Elsner saw the data on that decline, he found it strange. “We know that the atmosphere is getting warmer and more humid,” he says, “so we might expect to see some fingerprint of climate change in tornado activity.” Then Elsner and his Florida State University colleagues found a fingerprint: On days when there are tornadoes, there are likely to be a lot more of them. Outbreaks of 32 or more twisters in a single day were once rare in the U.S.; since 2001 they’ve become a yearly occurrence. “If the atmosphere is becoming more efficient at producing tornadoes,” Elsner cautions, more people will need to…

Estonia In the village of Kurtna, a pony named Rainbow basks in the winter sun. The four-year-old gelding is part Estonian native horse, part Shetland pony—two breeds known for their hardiness and versatility. United States Seen from above, a seamless sheet of white paper—folded into the shape of an eye—holds and beholds 81 dancers from the New York City Ballet. This 6,500-square-foot composite image was a collaboration with the French artist JR. United States In a lab at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, hibernating arctic ground squirrels pose medical mysteries. The species can lower its body temperature below freezing and avoid serious head injuries while in hibernation, which lasts seven months. Order prints of select National Geographic photos online at NationalGeographicArt.com.…

In the islands where surfing began, the waves on that particular day were a disappointment—mushy, chest high, and annoyingly infrequent. Still, Hawaiians have never needed much of an excuse to grab a board and hit the ocean, and the takeoff zone was packed. Teens on shortboards. Moms on long-boards. Grade-schoolers on bodyboards. A guy with a gray ponytail on a stand-up paddleboard. Some had tribal tattoos in the style of Polynesian warriors. Straddling my surfboard in the deep water beside the reef, I surveyed the crowd with a knot in my stomach, feeling that I didn’t belong. Makaha has long been known as a beach where haoles, a Hawaiian term for white people and other outsiders, venture at their peril. Located on Oahu’s west coast, far from the glitzy North…

Frank Behrens, a gregarious pitchman for a Dutch development company that sees profit, not loss, in climate change, cuts the engine on our 22-foot Hurricane runabout. We drift through brackish water toward the middle of privately owned Maule Lake in North Miami Beach. It’s not quite paradise. The lake, like so many others in Florida, began as a rock quarry. In the years since, it has served as a venue for boat races, a swimming hole for manatees, and a set for the 1960s TV show Flipper. More recently, as if to underscore the impermanence of South Florida’s geography, more than one developer has toyed with partially filling in the lake to build condos. Behrens is promoting a floating village with 29 private, artificial islands, each with a sleek, four-bedroom…

Nominate someone for 3 Questions at nationalgeographic.com/3Q. WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY YOUR SHOW’S TITLE, A NEW WILD? The new wild is the realization that we humans are part of nature and that saving nature is really about saving ourselves. Nature isn’t something out there, far away. It’s living, breathing. It’s part of us. WHY IS THIS NEW WILD SO IMPORTANT? I love nature. I live in Montana; I grew up in Africa. Wild places are almost places of worship for me. But love alone isn’t enough to save them. And in some cases, as we show in the program, when nature is taken off track, the consequences for human life are epic. I don’t think people quite get that. If we did, we wouldn’t make the decisions we do.…

When water vapor in hot aircraft exhaust hits very cold, moist air, it freezes. That creates white contrails, which can spread into wispy cirrus clouds with climate change potential. Some reflect the sun’s heat before it reaches Earth’s surface, for a cooling effect. But overall, contrail cirrus clouds trap heat and, by one estimate, contribute more to warming than aircraft carbon dioxide emissions do. Planes could be rerouted to avoid contrail-inducing weather, a study in Environmental Research Letters found. In one case, a 13.7-mile detour in a transatlantic flight eliminated a contrail 62 miles long and the clouds it would have spurred—so even counting extra emissions from the detour, the flight resulted in less warming. Nonetheless, no one suggests rerouting planes yet. Forecasters can predict contrail formation, says study author…

Built nine centuries ago in what is now Cambodia, Angkor Wat draws millions of visitors each year. Some head to the Buddhist temple—which was originally dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu—for religious reasons. Others come to take in the site’s famously intricate carvings. A team of archaeologists, though, is focused on a less obvious attraction: some 200 elaborate, roughly 16th-century paintings that had been obscured by the effects of weather and time. To see them, rock art researcher and study leader Noel Hidalgo Tan uses a technique that combines digital photography and computer analysis. “What was once thought to be a faint splotch on the wall,” he says, “turns out to be two elephants or an entire Khmer orchestra.” The purpose of the artwork isn’t clear, but further investigation could…

YourShot.ngm.com EDITOR’S NOTE “ Photographs can be made stronger by what isn’t seen. Absence—of a person or the photographer herself—invites us to look deeper and discover imaginative new layers.” —Jessie Wender, senior photo editor Adela Zatovičová Bzince pod Javorinou, Slovakia A wall covered in ivy offered Zatovičová an idea for an interpretive shot of a person drowning in the leaves. With no one else around, she set up a tripod and posed. Matyas Sarvady Budapest, Hungary Sarvady, who spent part of his childhood with his grandparents, tried to chronicle their 52-year marriage. After his grandfather passed away in 2014, Sarvady devised a way, using old clothes, to portray his grand father’s absence.…

Several years ago I made a bet about face mites, animals that live in hair follicles. They are so small that a dozen of them could dance on the head of a pin. They are more likely, though, to dance on your face, which they do at night when they mate, before crawling back into your follicles by day to eat. In those caves mother mites give birth to a few relatively large mite-shaped eggs. The eggs hatch, and then, like all mites, the babies go through molts in which they shed their external skeleton and emerge slightly larger. Once they’re full size, their entire adult life lasts only a few weeks. Death comes at the precise moment when the mites, lacking an anus, fill up with feces, die, and…

Extreme weather, sometimes related to climate change, seems to be everywhere these days. And yet it can be hard to see the impact on individual lives. I began documenting that impact in 2007, when I photographed two floods that occurred within weeks of each other, one in the U.K. and the other in India. I was deeply struck by the contrasting effects of these floods and the shared vulnerability that seemed to unite their victims. Since then I have visited flood zones around the world, traveling to Haiti, Pakistan, Australia, Thailand, Nigeria, Germany, the Philippines, and the U.K. again. In flooded landscapes, life is suddenly turned upside down, and normality is suspended. Portraits rest at the heart of this project. I often follow my subjects as they return home through…

In its own destructive way, kudzu is impressive. A relative of the pea, the vine was introduced to the United States from Japan in 1876 to create quick shade and stabilize soil. But its growth is so fast—up to a foot a day—and undiscerning that it carpets trees, light posts, and even buildings. Across at least 20 states, thousands of square miles of field and forest have disappeared under it. New research suggests kudzu may be doing still more damage. Scientists at Clemson University report it may accelerate climate change by decreasing carbon stored in the soil of the native-plant ecosystems it overruns (such as the Mississippi woodland seen here). The carbon loss happens mostly in topsoil and occurs over decades, says weed ecologist Nishanth Tharayil. Previous studies have shown…

Torrential rains, typhoons, and floods force millions from their homes every year. Those who live in poverty are the most likely to be displaced. In the past 40 years the urban population of developing countries has grown more than 320 percent, putting even more people in potential paths of destruction. Climate change is expected to make extreme weather worse and more frequent. Political conflicts and natural disasters such as earthquakes are compounding issues. Says Michelle Yonetani of the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, “We are increasingly talking about crisis in the plural.”…

A genteel disquisition on love and lust in the animal kingdom How slow are sloths, generally considered Earth’s slowest mammal? Distance moved in a day: often just a few yards. Time at rest: up to 20 hours out of each 24. Metabolism: so slow that the tree-dwelling herbivores climb down to defecate only about once a week. That’s for the best, because their ungainliness on the ground makes them vulnerable to cars, humans, and other animals. The sloth skeleton is suited for reclining or hanging upside down in trees. That’s how sloths eat, sleep, give birth—and mate. Though the rain forest exhibit at Baltimore’s National Aquarium has welcomed four sloth babies, the staff has never seen a sloth birth or copulation, says curator Ken Howell: “I think of them as…

Marine Cpl. Chris McNair (Ret.) Afghanistan 2011-12 Impeccable in his Marine uniform and outwardly composed, McNair sits on the porch of his parents’ home in Virginia, anonymous behind a mask he made in an art therapy session. “I was just going through pictures, and I saw the mask of Hannibal Lecter, and I thought, ‘That’s who I am’ … He’s probably dangerous, and that’s who I felt I was. I had this muzzle on with all these wounds, and I couldn’t tell anyone about them. I couldn’t express my feelings.” Inside the protective bunker I waited with the explosives team, fingers wedged firmly in my ears. Outside, shot number 52, trailing a 20-foot length of yellow-and-green-striped detonating cord, was securely taped to the wall of a one-room plywood building with…

On a crisp summer morning in Degioz, a slate-roofed village in northern Italy, Luigino Jocollè is sharing the local news. He and four other gray-haired men are sitting in a tiny café, sipping cappuccino as espresso machines whir and pastry sugar perfumes the air. But they’re not discussing sports or politics. “Three nests!” exclaims Jocollè. His friends murmur and nod. “Three nests in a single kilometer! Extraordinary.” They’re talking about their neighbors. A pair of bearded vultures—breeding again in the wild a hundred years after the last one vanished from the Alps—has taken up residence near two pairs of golden eagles. The return of a majestic species, and the sight of two top predators living so close together, might be cheered in many places. But in Gran Paradiso National Park,…

With Bill Bonner, National Geographic Archivist An optometrist’s shop sign looks up from the loupe in this 1914 street scene in Zacatecas, Mexico. Rebel leader Pancho Villa’s forces had just taken the crucial railway town from President Victoriano Huerta’s federal troops. The Battle of Zacatecas was one of the Mexican Revolution’s bloodiest. Some 7,000 died; thousands more were wounded. This photograph was likely acquired for, though not published in, stories on Mexico that ran in the July 1916 issue of National Geographic. The man shown carrying a coffin (at center) is perhaps the only clue to the message inscribed on the back of the print: that this picture was once among “the latest war photos.”…