Innholdsfortegnelse for May-14 i National Geographic Magazine

Find more from National Geographic’s food series at natgeofood.com. Food, like water and air, is life. starting this month and continuing through the end of the year, we will focus on food and the challenge of feeding the global population of nine billion projected by 2050. We would do well to pay attention to how our food is produced and whether that is done in a sustainable, efficient, and safe manner. nearly 40 percent of the world’s ice-free land is given over to agriculture. Farming has an impact on our water supply, which can be polluted by pesticides and fertilizer runoff. it affects climate, releasing, by some measures, more greenhouse gases than all the cars, trucks, and planes in the world. dams rearrange and disrupt rivers to provide water for…

The old saying “cold hands, warm heart” may have some truth to it. University of Utah researchers found that though women’s core body temperature can run 0.4ºF higher than men’s, women’s hands run 2.8ºF colder—87.2ºF on aver age, compared with 90ºF for men. Blood vessels in the body’s extremities are the first to constrict when temperatures drop. The gender differences in such cold responses are still not completely understood, says Johns Hopkins University’s Fredrick Wigley, but hormone levels and muscle mass could play a role. Women are also up to five times as likely to have Raynaud’s, a disorder in which cold temperatures or even emotional stress can make blood vessels temporarily collapse. Fingers can turn white, blue, or red in even mildly cold situations, such as when opening a…

The original peanut of the American South—brought over on slave ships from West Africa— is back. Called the Carolina African, it vanished 90 years ago, supplanted by the less sweet but more popular Virginia variety. Now Clemson University scientist Brian K. Ward and University of South Carolina food historian David Shields are reviving the lost legume, growing seeds from the 1930s found frozen in a seed bank. Ward harvested the first crop (right) last November. In two years, he says, locals will get to taste what they’ve been missing.…

Hungry for information? Make a selection from our menu of food facts— and taste more at natgeofood.com. EVERYTHING BUT THE SQUEAL GO ASK YOUR MOM More than a third of American adults still call their mothers for cooking advice. DRIVE-THROUGH MENU In 2013 the state of Montana legalized salvaging roadkill. EATING OUT Amount U.S. restaurant sales are projected to reach in 2014 BERRY BANANA A banana is technically a berry, but a strawberry is not. BEST OF BOTH WORLDS Melons can be considered both a fruit and a vegetable. POTATO REcORD The weight of the largest potato ever grown, according to Guinness World Records HERE’S A TIP Half of all American adults have worked in a restaurant at some point in their lives. CHOCOLATE STATE The Swiss eat more chocolate…

You might say the apple fell from grace in the 1920s and ’30s with the advent of refrigerated long-distance shipping. Thanks to supermarket Darwinism, thousands of heirloom varieties, like many of those at right, went commercially extinct. Produce bins featured Delicious, Jonathan, and Rome—selected for durability and beauty, but boring in taste. “People switched off their tastebuds,” says Diane Miller, an apple geneticist at Ohio State University. Apple consciousness-raising, says Miller, came with the release of the aptly named Honeycrisp hybrid in 1991. Now breeders create dozens of flavorful new hybrids a year and heirlooms are back in style.…

The Gulf of St. Lawrence is the sum total of everything that rolls downhill. It gathers from rivers whose finger streams begin hundreds of miles away—in cities like Montreal and in old-growth forests in New York State. It sweeps up sediment, runoff, and the litter of leaves. It churns and roils in a constant state of metamorphosis. Underwater, bacteria and plankton mix sediment with light and animate the inanimate. The accounting adds up to a density of shimmering, biting, drifting life as rich as anywhere else on Earth. Geologically speaking, the gulf is new to the world. Nineteen thousand years ago, the entire gulf was under ice more than a mile thick. The ice pressed down the land to such an extent that when it finally melted, the earth sprang…

Each afternoon, with the sun slipping toward the horizon, photographer Mike Hettwer would hurry from Bangladesh’s shipbreaking yards to a teahouse where workers gathered for their evening break. “I noticed this golden light that would gradually descend the wall for just a few minutes,” he says. The men seemed to bask in it, lingering over the last of their sweet tea before returning to the job at hand: dismantling derelict ships, using little more than acetylene torches and their bare hands. “When I started photographing in the yards, I was impressed by the spectacle of massive ships being demolished,” says Hettwer. “But I soon realized the heart of this story is these men who risk their lives for little more than a couple dollars a day.” During several trips over…

As I consider climate change, species disappearing, violence among humans, the population explosion—the whole global crisis—one thing strikes me. Who will adapt? Who will survive? Who will thrive? Certainly, indigenous people such as the Kayapo have the best chance. I was very struck with your phrase, the Kayapo’s “conception of the continuum between humans and the natural world [is] intact.” ANNETTE CLARK Reeseville, Wisconsin How I loved seeing the observation “they know who they are” mirrored in the eyes of the Kayapo elders. It was an arresting feeling to look into those eyes through the almost humansize photographic portraits. LORENE LAMBERT Cross Plains, Tennessee I am disappointed that your article on the Kayapo did not represent both genders of activists in this tribe. Why not showcase youth movement Mebengôkre founder—and…

Cockroaches can live without their heads for weeks. One monkey looks at another and imitates the expression on its face. That’s what primatologist Elisabetta Palagi saw in a zoo in Rheine, Germany, where she was studying geladas, a species that has roamed Ethiopia’s high grasslands for some three million years. For her, it was a eureka moment. Humans instinctively engage in what’s called rapid facial mimicry, but this was evidence of its ancient origins. The geladas, which weigh in at 30 to 45 pounds, are the only surviving species of grazing primates. “It is not a behavior that can be learned,” says Palagi, who works at the University of Pisa. “If you don’t have a brain adapted to express the behavior, you can’t do it.” The copying is believed to…

The local-food movement is blossoming, with farmers markets springing up all over the United States. Demand for fresh produce and a desire to invest in local economies are driving this growth. Consumers show increased interest in “food transparency”—what the USDA’s Arthur Neal defines as the “full story behind how our food is produced.” Improved marketing, he says, using tools like social media and electronic forms of payment, is also contributing to the boom.…

Bison Bob (above) is a 36,000-year-old Ice Age steppe bison. The Idaho Museum of Natural History wants to bring his bones—and its complete collections—to the masses. Bob is part of an online repository of archaeological and fossil scans including everything from ancient Helicoprion sharks to bows and arrows. The 360º scans of these objects can be rolled, flipped, and zoomed, at better resolution than the naked eye can see. The museum’s director, Herb Masch ner, calls it a move to democratize science and preserve fragile specimens. More than 15,000 bones and artifacts have already been scanned. See Bison Bob at ivl.imnh.isu.edu along with the other items. ET CETERA China—the world’s biggest market for illegal ivory—held a public ceremony to crush more than six tons of CONFISCATED IVORY to discourage trade.…

The Miller brothers looked more like prospectors than paleobotanists. Their beards were caked with dirt; goggles kept their eyes from being sandblasted by the desert winds. Both were big men, more than six feet three, and on a knife-edged ridge in southern Utah they moved with the quiet confidence of outdoorsmen. As Ian swung a pickax into the mudstone, Dane attempted to roll a cigarette between gusts. Loose tobacco flew from the paper. “Doggone it,” he said, and tried again. Along with Scott Sampson, chief curator at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, and Joe Sertich, the museum’s dinosaur paleontologist, the brothers were prospecting for fossils last spring in the Grand Staircase– Escalante National Monument. Within that largely roadless wilderness they were exploring a particularly remote area, a maze…

Most every morning at nine, the emergency responders assigned to the Seine pull on their wet suits and swim around the Île de la Cité. In the course of their circuit around this teardrop-shaped island in the middle of the river in the middle of Paris, the firemen-divers scour the bottom, retrieving bikes, cutlery (which they clean and use in the nearby houseboat where they live), cell phones, old coins, crucifixes, guns, and once, a museumgrade Roman clasp. By the Pont des Arts, where lovers affix brass locks inscribed with their names (“Steve + Linda Pour la Vie”), they retrieve keys tossed in the water by couples hoping to affirm the eternal nature of their padlocked love. One bridge upriver, at the Pont Neuf, near the Palace of Justice law…

“Sheer muscle power lifts the structure inch by inch,” notes the caption for this photo—published in the May 1963 Geographic—of the Nagarjuna Sagar Dam on India’s Krishna River. “Some 125,000 workers pour out their strength in building dam and irrigation canals,” the caption continues. “Two-man teams haul 300-pound rocks up the bamboo ramps; women in ceaseless streams carry up pans of mortar on their heads. By using hand labor, India saves the hard currency needed to buy machinery abroad.” The project was begun in 1955 and put into full use in 1972. Measuring 407 feet high and more than half a mile long, the Nagarjuna Sagar is the largest masonry dam in operation in the world. Get Lost in Found. Go to NatGeoFound.tumblr.com.…

United States A hundred miles off the southern California coast, near the Cortes Bank, a curious harbor seal peers through a kelp forest. The kelp is a rich habitat for many marine species. The swaying stalks offer seals a fish buffet—and safety from predators. Vietnam On the Huong River in Hue, young women in traditional garb float paper-flower candles— lights for lost souls pardoned every July 15. The Buddhist holiday began in medieval China. Today it’s celebrated throughout Asia. Order prints of select National Geographic photos online at NationalGeographicArt.com. Brazil Dozens of bioluminescent mushrooms sprout on a dead log, green stems glowing in the light of a full moon. This species— Mycena lucentipes—grows on the wood of flowering trees in the rain forests of Brazil and Puerto Rico. Its edibility…

Men are nearly six times as likely to be killed by lightning strikes in the United States as women. Seahorses bob about clumsily in the water, they have no teeth, and their main food source—a tiny crustacean called a copepod—is highly elusive. So how does this upright-swimming fish manage to capture 90 percent of the prey it pursues? It’s all in its head, says marine biologist Brad Gemmell. Using a high-speed, hologram-generating optical system, he found that the seahorse’s snout allows it to come in for the kill without creating much disturbance in the water. This is key, since copepods are blind and rely on current fluctuations as their signal to flee. “People see seahorses as slow and passive,” says Gemmell, “but in reality they’re very effective predators, able to…

There are 16 people per elephant in Botswana. A better treatment for baldness could be coming soon. Researchers from Durham and Columbia Universities discovered that cells from human hair follicles could produce new hair in donor tissue, but only when grown in a spherical environment instead of a traditional petri dish. After gravity helped the human hair cells clump together, the cells were transplanted into the dermis and epidermis of human skin that was grafted to lab mice. In five of seven rodents, the human hair that sprouted several weeks later was fine, like “peach fuzz,” says lead researcher and geneticist Angela Christiano. This method could be especially useful for people who don’t have thick enough patches of hair for traditional hair-transplant surgery. Christiano says the next step is to…

The Future of FOOD natgeofood.com By 2050 we’ll need to feed two billion more people. This special eight-month series explores how we can do that—without overwhelming the planet. Where will we find enough food for 9 billion? It doesn’t have to be industrial farms versus small, organic ones. There’s another way. When we think about threats to the environment, we tend to picture cars and smokestacks, not dinner. But the truth is, our need for food poses one of the biggest dangers to the planet. Agriculture is among the greatest contributors to global warming, emitting more greenhouse gases than all our cars, trucks, trains, and airplanes combined—largely from methane released by cattle and rice farms, nitrous oxide from fertilized fields, and carbon dioxide from the cutting of rain forests to…

A MARITIME GRAVEYARD A satellite image shows a mile-long stretch of the Bangladeshi coast just north of Chittagong, where ships from around the world are beached and dismantled. Eight miles of mangroves have been cleared for the shipbreaking yards, which are often little more than a sliver of beach wide enough for a single large ship. The coast now holds 80 active yards, with new ones added each year. I had been warned that it would be difficult to get into Bangladesh’s shipbreaking yards. “It used to be a tourist attraction,” a local man told me. “People would come watch men tear apart ships with their bare hands. But they don’t let in outsiders anymore.” I walked a few miles along the road that parallels the Bay of Bengal, just…

Every month this page features our staff picks of National Geographic Society products and events. For more go to nglive.org. NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ON TV This month the National Geographic Channel stages one-on-one battles between some of the world’s most powerful inventions. The goal? To find out which is stronger. See for yourself whether a 5000°F torch can ignite a fireproof superfabric (left) and whether a giant rock breaker is tough enough to smash through a heavy-duty safe. EXHIBIT PERUVIAN GOLD See jewelry and other artifacts, like this headdress (right), crafted by early Andean civilizations, at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, D.C. For more information visit ngmuseum.org. SPECIAL EDITION GREAT WOMEN Remarkable women who have shaped human history come alive in the latest edition of National Geographic’s Exploring History. Cleopatra,…