Innholdsfortegnelse for Oct-14 i National Geographic Magazine

If you’ve ever heard of Modesto, California, a dusty agricultural town as unprepossessing as its Spanish name, it’s likely because it is the place depicted by George Lucas in his 1973 blockbuster, American Graffiti. Today Modesto’s 200,000 residents are the stars of a different story: the unrelenting drought gripping the West. Modesto, like other parts of the Central Valley, is an agricultural paradise—when you water it—a vast, flat expanse, Michelle Nijhuis writes in this issue, where crops from grapes and tomatoes to almonds and oranges grow better than anywhere else in the country. When you water it. Which brings me to my second-favorite activity in Modesto—seeing the Modesto Arch. Standing 25 feet high, crossing the 75-foot expanse of I Street downtown, it was built in 1912 by the Modesto Business…

The worms that crawl in David Kaplan’s biomedical lab at Tufts University aren’t pests. They’re a key to helping broken bones heal faster. The protein fiber that silkworms spin into cocoons is being turned into screws and plates that can hold bones together. The silk screw (left) was designed by researchers at Tufts and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center as an alternative to traditional steel screws and alloy plates, which, while strong, often place stress on bone and tissues, interfere with x-rays, and require second surgeries to remove. Silk, by comparison, degrades in the body, eliminating the need for follow-up incisions. “It has just the right mix of properties,” says Kap lan, a biomedical engineer. It’s both strong and malleable. Advanced engineering can create silk screws that last as little…

Biofuel production is booming, up fivefold in a decade. Investment in biofuel technologies creates more renewable fuels and jobs, but critics argue that industry- friendly policies have artificially inflated demand. Producing green fuels like cornbased ethanol diverts land and water resources from food crops. Biofuels can also drive up the cost of corn that is used for food, especially in developing countries that rely on imports of the grain. According to Timothy A. Wise of Tufts University, “The higher your import dependence, the higher your vulnerability to global price spikes.”…

College campuses used to produce radicals. Today they also produce revenues. U.S. universities netted $4.6 billion in 2011 licensing their names and logos for merchandise. In recent years they’ve also trademarked 10,265 slogans, like those on this page. That’s led to puzzling litigation such as Eastern Carolina University suing Cisco Systems over the stock phrase “Tomorrow Begins Here.” Jacob Rooksby, a Duquesne University law professor, tracks the trend via the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s database. He says excessive trademarking “blurs the lines of higher education and industry and encroaches on free speech in the public sphere. We need to say, Let’s cool it a little bit.”…

Canada On a gravel beach along the Bay of Fundy, two semipal mated sandpipers take off as hundreds more flock together. These sixinch-long shorebirds migrate thousands of miles a year from Arctic breeding grounds to South American coasts. Canada Two miles off the western coast of the Hudson Bay and just south of the Arctic Circle, a polar bear comes in for a closeup. As the winter pack ice melts in summer months, the world’s largest bears—a vulnerable species— must swim for shore. Bahrain In the village of Sanabis, a suburb of the capital, Manama, two Shiite girls take part in an Ashura ceremony. The annual holiday commemorates the seventh-century martyrdom of Husayn, a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, founder of Islam.…

A megaphone-brandishing census taker hails occupants of the Deer Island lighthouse in Boston, Massachusetts. Was anyone listening? Yes, it turns out—under archivist Bill Bonner’s magnifying loupe, a man in a jaunty cap is visible at the rail with a megaphone of his own. This photo was likely acquired for (but never published in) our November 1959 story on the U.S. census. “An army 160,000 strong prepares to count noses across the land,” wrote authors Albert W. Atwood and Lonnelle Aikman. “To satisfy the Nation’s curiosity about itself, roving interviewers will trudge country roads, brave dark alleys, ride mules, row small boats, and bounce in jeeps and snowmobiles.” Megaphones were optional.…

For three generations the Diener family has farmed the same ten square miles of Central Valley dirt. In the 1920s they grew barley and alfalfa to feed the mules that powered the construction of Los Angeles. In the 1930s, as internal combustion replaced animal muscle, they grew cotton to bind rubber car tires. Today, as California limps through its third year of drought, John Diener, his sons, and their land are getting into the cactus business. Diener grows produce on as grand a scale as any in the Central Valley, cultivating hundreds of acres of tomatoes, almonds, organic broccoli, and other crops. But he thinks differently from most farmers here. Maybe it’s that he’s the youngest son of a youngest son, used to making the most of bad situations. Or…

They say that five sieverts of radiation is enough to kill you, so I was curious to see the reading on my Russian-made dosimeter as our tour van passed into the exclusion zone— the vast, quarantined wilderness that surrounds Chernobyl. Thick stands of pines and birches crowded the roadside as our guide reminded us of the ground rules: Don’t pick the mushrooms, which concentrate radionuclides, or risk letting the contaminants into your body by eating or smoking outdoors. A few minutes later we passed the first of the abandoned villages and pulled over to admire a small band of wild Przewalski’s horses. Twenty-eight years after the explosion of a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl, the zone, all but devoid of people, has been seized and occupied by wildlife. There are bison,…

David Rubenstein, 65, the Baltimore-born co-founder of the private-equity firm the Carlyle Group, practices what he calls patriotic philanthropy. Among his efforts: buying an original 1297 Magna Carta, an Emancipation Proclamation, and a Declaration of Independence for public display. He also gave $7.5 million to fix the earthquake-damaged Washington Monument. WHAT IS THE MOTIVATION FOR YOUR GIVING? “Philanthropy” comes from an ancient Greek word that means “loving humanity.” It doesn’t have to mean writing checks. I have more money than I really need, so I am giving it away to places that were good to me, or to good causes. Most of my money actually goes to education or medical research. I like to say that if you have a last name like mine and your father was a postal…

There’s no place quite like Earth, but Saturn’s moon Titan, with an atmosphere, seasons, and a rocky surface, may be its closest relative nearby. The latest evidence: Titan has liquid on its surface. NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, which has studied Saturn since 2004, captured high-resolution images of three seas, collectively about twice as large as North America’s Great Lakes. The seas are not water but methane and ethane at minus 300°F, and they’re believed to contain compounds that were precursors to life on Earth. Says astrogeologist Randolph Kirk, “What’s cool about Titan is that the physics are the same as on Earth, but the chemistry is completely different.”…

Hungry for information? Make a selection from our menu of food facts—and taste more at natgeofood.com. DANGEROUS LEAVES Rhubarb leaves contain a toxic substance and are poisonous, even though the stalks are fine to eat. RICE TO THE PEOPLE Rice is the staple food for more than half the world’s population. CHOCOWEEN A 2013 survey found that 72 percent of people prefer chocolate at Halloween. LIFE SAVERS Life Savers candies were invented by a chocolate maker who wanted to sell sweets that wouldn’t melt in the summer. CORNY HALLOWEEN More than 35 million pounds of candy corn (original name: chicken feed) are produced annually. TEA COORDINATES What Westerners know as black tea (such as English breakfast) is called red tea in China.…

It started as a joke—and ended up among the most commonly used words in the world. This year marks the 175th anniversary of “OK,” first printed in a Boston newspaper in March 1839. Caught up in a fad for whimsical misspellings and abbreviations, editors indicated that a statement was all correct by using the first two letters in “oll korrect.” By 1840 “OK” had gone national, used even by Martin Van Buren’s presidential campaign. His nickname? Old Kinderhook.…

“ Khalid [photo above] sent us photos of airplanes before, but this one had more depth. You can tell he waited for a rare moment. The plane, the flag, the woman —the elements all work together.” —Jeanne Modderman, National Geographic photo editor Khalid Rayhan Shawon Dhaka, Bangladesh For more than a year Shawon has photographed people living around Bangladesh’s Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport. In a roofless building, he waited several days to capture his country’s flag and a flying plane in the same frame. Vedran Jankovic Zagreb, Croatia A college project asked Jankovic to show “the illusion of space,” so he and two friends decided to reimagine a zebra. One of them painted a hand with intricate stripes while Jankovic found a location and composed the shot. Karl Ander Adami Tallinn,…

Something is killing Ramadhani Juma’s cassava crop. “ Maybe it’s too much water,” he says, fingering clusters of withered yellow leaves on a six-foot-high plant. “Or too much sun.” Juma works a small plot, barely more than an acre, near the town of Bagamoyo, on the Indian Ocean about 40 miles north of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. On a rainy March morning, trailed by two of his four young sons, he’s talking with a technician from the big city, 28-year-old Deogratius Mark of the Mikocheni Agricultural Research Institute. Mark tells Juma his problem is neither sun nor rain. The real cassava killers, far too small to see, are viruses. Mark breaks off some wet leaves; a few whiteflies dart away. The pinhead-size flies, he explains, transmit two viruses. One ravages…

THE MEN GATHER AT DAWN near the stone tower, cradling knives in callused hands. After a night of snowfall—the first of the season in Svaneti, a region high in Georgia’s Caucasus Mountains—the day has broken with icy clarity. Suddenly visible above the village of Cholashi, beyond the 70-foot-high towers that form its ancient skyline, is the ring of 15,000-foot peaks that for centuries has kept one of the last living medieval cultures barricaded from the outside world. Silence falls as Zviad Jachvliani, a burly former boxer with a salt-and-pepper beard, leads the men—and one recalcitrant bull—into a yard overlooking the snow-dusted valley. No words are needed. Today is a Svan feast day, ormotsi, marking the 40th day after the death of a loved one, in this case Jachvliani’s grandmother. The…

The object of his desire, the female Ailuropoda melanoleuca, goes into heat once a year—for just 24 to 72 hours. Small wonder that pandas are endangered and their procreation in captivity is monitored as obsessively as the begetting of British royals. With such a fleeting chance to make that love connection, what’s a panda lad to do? Be anatomically equipped and on sexual standby. Female pandas’ fertility spell can occur at any time from February through May. To be forearmed for that moment, males go into hormonal overdrive starting in autumn. During the females’ four “maybe” months, the males’ testes may balloon to two or three times their normal size. When scientists in Chengdu, China, studied anesthetized panda males, they found the animals’ sperm was more abundant and motile during…

Climate change will force 314 bird species out of most of their current ranges by the end of the century, according to a new study from the National Audubon Society, which focused on birds in the continental United States and Canada. Nearly 200 of the threatened species may find hospitable climatic conditions elsewhere—with the right temperatures, precipitation, and seasonal fluctuations—but for 126 species there will be nowhere else to go. “Half of the birds of North America are at risk of extinction,” says Gary Langham, Audubon’s chief scientist. Despite this grim prognosis, which doesn’t factor in how physical habitats might change as the continent warms, Langham insists there’s reason to be hopeful. The study generated maps of climatic suitability down to 38.6 square miles. Mapping each species’ climatic range and…

Four hundred miles west of Anchorage, archaeologists are racing to save the remains of a coastal village occupied by Yupik Eskimos between about 1300 and 1650. Known today as Nunalleq, the once frozen site is thawing and being swept away by the rising Bering Sea as the result of global climate change. An emergency excavation, launched in 2009, has recovered some 20,000 artifacts previously locked in permafrost. Examples shown here include a lifesize ceremonial wooden mask, dolls carved from driftwood, harpoon points of caribou antler, arrowheads of slate, and two linked rings of walrus ivory. “Since we’ve been here, the site has eroded back about 30 feet,” says lead archaeologist Rick Knecht. “We’re barely ahead of it.” He estimates five more years of work—unless a big winter storm carries off…

Two years ago Hurricane Sandy ripped three holes through the barrier islands off Long Island’s southern coast. The Army Corps of Engineers quickly filled two. But the third, on Fire Island opposite Bellport on the Great South Bay, was in a federal wilderness area, requiring a waiting period before bulldozers could move in. Though some flood-fearful homeowners demanded that the inlet be immediately closed, others noticed something miraculous occurring. Flushed twice a day into the ocean, the polluted waters of the bay were turning clear. The following summer clammers—the bay once supplied most of the clams for the U.S. market—noticed wide new growth rings on their quarry. Sightings of gray seals were not unusual. Before the inlet, one might as well have looked for mermaids. “It’s a totally different system…

Hybrids work better in countries where traffic is worse. In China and India traffic is so bad—slower than in the United States, with much more stop and go—that hybrids use up to 54 percent less fuel compared with conventional cars, according to a pair of studies from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “In these highly congested conditions,” says researcher Samveg Saxena, “your [conventional] engine is operating at close to its worst efficiency.” Not so the hybrid: Braking recharges the battery, and idling shuts off the engine. Carbon dioxide emitted by vehicles is projected to double by 2050, much of the growth coming from burgeoning car markets in countries such as India and China (that’s the southern city of Shenzhen above). “If we can get cleaner vehicles deployed early on in…

“ When we asked to see versions of homes, we were surprised with the array of places people find comfort and identity. Homes vary widely and aren’t always places to live.” —Susan Welchman, National Geographic photo editor Hemant Deswal New Delhi, India While visiting northern India, Deswal and his friends had to stop amid heavy rain at a hotel in Pulga. In a common room they met a young girl. Timid at first, she later started a pillow fight with one of Deswal’s friends. Larry Deemer Breezy Point, New York During a trip to Nova Scotia, Deemer hiked with friends on Cheticamp Island. They stopped to rest in a patch of grass. “It was such a beautiful backdrop,” Deemer says, “so I started taking pictures to record our time together.”…

In the chicken business the whole (bird) is worth less than the sum of its parts. About 90 percent of U.S.-raised broiler chickens—those destined for the plate rather than a life of egg laying—are cut up before they are sold. The American appetite for white meat means very few of these birds’ breast quarters are exported; palates elsewhere tend to find the meat bland. But the rest of the chicken may go all over the world. Discovering international markets for parts few used to want has been crucial. Chicken-part exports (see maps) grew from 6 percent of production in 1990 to more than 20 percent today.…

On the evening of March 3, 2013, a young paleontologist named Nizar Ibrahim was sitting in a street-front café in Erfoud, Morocco, watching the daylight fade and feeling his hopes fade with it. Along with two colleagues, Ibrahim had come to Erfoud three days earlier to track down a man who could solve a mystery that had obsessed Ibrahim since he was a child. The man Ibrahim was looking for was a fouilleur —a local fossil hunter who sells his wares to shops and dealers. Among the most valued of the finds are dinosaur bones from the Kem Kem beds, a 150-mile-long escarpment harboring deposits dating from the middle of the Cretaceous period, 100 to 94 million years ago. After searching for days among the excavation sites near the village…