Innholdsfortegnelse for Mar-14 i National Geographic Magazine

I grew up in Central Point, Oregon. From my house I could see Upper Table Rock, a plateau once occupied by the Rogue River Indians. As a kid I’d heard stories about a vicious raid by a white mob and how the Indians leaped from the rock rather than be captured. It was part of the mythology of the landscape, though I’ve never been able to verify it. What is true is that my father, who was a social studies teacher, made sure I understood Native American history in the most positive way. He wanted me to look beyond myths to the truths of their culture. Among Native American accomplishments and skills, he told me, were their adoption of the horse and their deep, almost mystical, connection to that animal.…

Namibia Some 300 people a month trudge up the sandy slopes of desert dunes near Swakopmund for the novelty of “sand boarding.” Fans say sand is a bit slower than snow—but much softer if you fall. Portugal Plummeting from a 95-foot precipice would unnerve most mortals, but “in that moment, everything is calm,” said Colombian diver Orlando Duque during the 2012 Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series. The ninetime world champion placed second. Order prints of select National Geographic photos online at NationalGeographicArt.com. United States Joining hands in a heads-first free fall to form a human snowflake, 138 skydivers set a world record at Skydive Chicago in August 2012. The upside-down photographer bit a switch in his mouth to trigger a helmet camera.…

Lately outdoor ice-skating rinks are melting faster than the winter cold is lasting—making them a prime indicator of climate change. That’s the idea behind RinkWatch, a citizen science website created by Haydn Lawrence, Robert McLeman, and Colin Robertson of Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University. The project allows users of the home ice rinks popular in colder climes to log the skateability of their backyard ice. According to recent reports, fewer rinks are maintaining optimum skating temperatures throughout the winter. With a cultural staple on the line, RinkWatch has caught on in Canada and the northern United States. “If you took outdoor skating from us, it would be like taking cowboy hats from Texans or the Red Sox from Bostonians,” says McLeman. “Life would go on, but there would be something missing.”…

Since at least the 17th century, art conservators have turned to products like glue, ashes, onions, and even beer to clean blemishes from works of art. Now they have gels and lasers. Yet one old-fashioned item is still in vogue: saliva. Last summer a Massachusetts conservator used her own saliva to clean Padihershef, a 2,500-year-old Egyptian mummy. Enzymes in human spit dissolve and lift oils, including fingerprint grease. Saliva is more viscous than water, so it doesn’t seep into paint cracks. “We tend to use saliva when there’s grime, soot, or nicotine,” says Andrea Chevalier, an Ohio conservator with the Intermuseum Conservation Association. The process is slow. A worker can spend up to five hours on a standard portrait, gently rolling moistened cotton swabs over dirty areas. It’s helpful, Chevalier…

Glacier-scoured lowlands north of Jackson Bay are a legacy of the Pleistocene epoch and its ice sheets. Here the Waiatoto River breaks through a gravel bulwark to meet the Tasman Sea. Jeff Mahuika bends down suddenly. Among the thousands of river pebbles at our feet, he has seen something my eyes have missed. His fingers grasp the edge of a stone and pry it gently from the gravel that all but hides it from view. It is a finger-long sliver of pounamu—greenstone, or jade—and as he holds it to the light, it gleams a cool gray green. He passes it to me, and I stroke its river-smoothed skin. “Our people have a tradition that you don’t keep the first piece you find,” he says. “So I’m giving it to you.”…

Bluefin are highly migratory fish, crossing seas around the world in yearly cycles of spawning and feeding. At least two groups share the Atlantic. One spawns in the Gulf of Mexico, the other in the Mediterranean. The groups mingle in the center of the ocean. Some fish even spend years on the opposite side of the ocean from where they spawn. Atlantic bluefin tuna ranges The ranges below show the extent of tagging data collected by Barbara Block’s team and the large area where the two stocks overlap. The Super Fish BREATHING A bluefin swims with its mouth open, forcing water past the gills in a process called ram ventilation. Its gills have up to 30 times more surface area than those of other fish, and they extract nearly half…

The horse originated in North America nearly two million years ago and spread to Eurasia over the Bering land bridge. Then, about 10,000 B.C., horses vanished from the New World, possibly killed for food by humans who had come to the continent from Eurasia. When the horse returned with European conquistadores and colonists (map), it transformed the culture of many tribes. In turn, Native Americans and settlers changed the horse, developing new breeds from Old World stock (bottom).…

What’s a camel doing inside a Damascus meeting hall? Photographer Andrea Bruce knows the answer. One night in the walled Old City she was taking photos of a group of five pro-government fighters. The men, part of a neighborhood guard created so the military could attend to more serious matters, had spent the evening at checkpoints inspecting cars for guns and bombs. Around midnight they headed to the hall, where they typically gather to drink tea. Eager for comic relief after the tense evening, one fighter (in foreground, below) stares into the eyes of a camel that has been brought in from a nearby stable, says Bruce, “as a joke.” It’s no laughing matter for the camel. This fighter and his comrades, one of whom is seen at left, are…

The Last Chase When I saw the photo of Tim Samaras on the cover of the November issue, I thought that Samaras was running away from the tornado in the background. But after reading the article and seeing the entire photo inside the pages, I quickly realized he wasn’t running from anything—he was telling somebody in his crew to get the equipment in place fast, so they could get the critical tornado information. May he rest in peace, and may we all pass doing what we love, as Tim Samaras did. Godspeed, Tim. BOB FIELDS Maitland, Florida I’m blown away. The iPad is the only way to convey this powerful story. It’s like reading in 3-D. HUGH C. DAMON Honolulu, Hawaii Robert Draper’s story left me with a sick regret…

EDITORS’ CHOICE Chris Matthew Brady San Diego, California As he drove near a wildfire in Borrego Springs, California, Brady stopped at one of several dinosaur sculptures in the area. He set his tripod to take some long exposures—80 in all. To light the eye of the dinosaur, he mounted a laser pointer on another tripod nearby. READERS’ CHOICE Andrew Inaba Bellevue, Washington Under a pile of avalanche snow in the Cascade Range, Inaba found a tunnel that had been carved by summer runoff and wind. While he prepared his shot, he says, “water rained intensely from the ceiling.” Ivan Lesica Queens, New York Lesica stopped on New York’s Williamsburg Bridge to point his camera into a viewing box containing several pieces of multicolored glass. He captured part of the Manhattan…

Visiting Brazilians spend about nine billion dollars a year in the U.S. on everything from iPhones to baby gear. Prices are high in Brazil, and “even with plane tickets and hotels it can still be cheaper to shop in the States,” says the U.S. Embassy’s Dean Cheves. To encourage tourism, the U.S. has sped up visa processing for Brazilians from 120 days to two days; roughly 5,000 Brazilians apply daily. To cope with the extra baggage, airlines take on additional fuel for return trips.…

Protests against the Syrian government three years ago sparked a continuing battle for control of the country. Here in the capital the army shells rebel-held neighborhoods from the mountain where this photo was taken. With the conflict cracking around them, city residents wait for peace and hope their distinctive culture survives. On the front line of the conflict a Syrian security forces officer patrols the shattered suburb of Tadamun. Sometimes he hears rebels shouting from their positions, just blocks away. Fearing for the safety of his family, he asks not to be identified by name—just an alias, Abu Aksam. In the rectangular courtyard of the Umayyad Mosque, the heart of Old Damascus, women swathed in black sit and chat on the cream-colored stone floor, polished smooth by the comings and…

One moment the undersea is featureless blue, an empty cathedral, the sun an undulating hot spot in the vault of waves overhead, its beams radiating down as if from stained glass. The next moment the ocean is full of giant, bomb-shaped bluefin tuna, the largest measuring 14 feet long and weighing three-quarters of a ton. In the sea’s refracted sunlight, their pale flanks flare and scintillate like polished shields. Their fixed fins—the long, curved anal fin and the second dorsal—flash like sabers. Their quick-sculling tail fins drive the formation forward at ten knots, with sprints to 25, a ceaseless, staccato beat. And just as suddenly they are gone. The ocean is empty again. Here and there a small galaxy of scales marks where a bluefin swallowed a herring. The victim’s…

OUR STAR, THE SUN, WILL DIE A QUIET DEATH. The sun’s of only average mass, starwise, and after burning through the last of its hydrogen fuel in about five billion years, its outer layers will drift away, and the core will eventually compact to become what’s known as a white dwarf, an Earth-size ember of the cosmos. For a star ten times as big as the sun, death is far more dramatic. The outer layers are blasted into space in a supernova explosion that, for a couple of weeks, is one of the brightest objects in the universe. The core, meanwhile, is squeezed by gravity into a neutron star, a spinning ball bearing a dozen miles in diameter. A sugar-cube-size fragment of a neutron star would weigh a billion tons…

Nature’s inventiveness knows no bounds. Consider the case of the nectar-drinking bat and the night-flowering vine whose lives intertwine in the lowland tropical forests of Central America. Glossophaga commissarisi, a tiny, winged mammal with a body no bigger than your thumb, flits among the flowers of Mucuna holtonii, lapping nectar, much as hummingbirds and bumblebees do. In exchange it pollinates the plant. In daylight flowers can flaunt their wares with bright colors such as scarlet and fuchsia, but at night, when even the brightest hues pale to a moonlit silver, Mucuna flowers resort to sound to catch the ear of nectar bats. At La Selva Biological Station in northern Costa Rica a vigorous old Mucuna has woven a leafy ceiling above a forest clearing and lowered dozens of flowers into…

A cattle auction draws a crowd on tiny Grimsay Island, part of the Outer Hebrides. The shaggy double coats of Highland cattle, native to Scotland, are well suited to the region’s cold, wet, windy weather. This photo first ran in National Geographic’s May 1970 story “Scotland’s Outer Hebrides,” but the magazine had made mention of the breed decades earlier. According to “The Taurine World,” an article in the December 1925 Geographic, “Few of these cattle have found their way from the Scotch Highlands for they do not satisfactorily adjust themselves to strange conditions.” Apparently they adjusted. Today many purebred Highlands live outside Scotland—an estimated 25,000 in the United States alone. The breed is especially prized for its meat, which is lower in fat and cholesterol than most other beef. —Margaret…

Steve Boyes National Geographic Emerging Explorer EXPERTISE Conservation Biologist LOCATION Botswana Curiosity and a Cat Every year my team delves deeper into the Okavango Delta–a 10,000-square-mile fan of channels, floodplains, lagoons, and islands. Within its maze there are more than 2,000 lions, plus leopards, hippos, crocodiles, and nearly 80,000 elephants. The local Bayei people are descendants of hippo hunters, so they have taught us to respect that animal’s natural rhythms. When we pole into the delta, we wait until nine to set out. That’s when the hippos come off the islands and go into deeper water. They return again around five. We’re off the water before they get back. Before we had the help of the Bayei, we had a steeper learning curve. One morning my brother and I heard…

When you can hop online and order coconut oil direct from Fiji, you might conclude that the Internet knows no bounds. But much of the world remains beyond the reach of an Internet Protocol (IP) address—the unique code assigned to each Internet access point. This is one reason that only around a third of the global population was using the Internet at the end of 2011. IP addresses proliferate as economies grow, so expect a surge in Asia in coming years, says Eduardo Cruz of IPligence, which tracks Internet use by country. One address can serve as a gateway for millions of mobile devices, belying rumors that we might exhaust IP space, he says. Besides, the new version of the IP system accommodates 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses, “enough for…

Since Edward Jenner dosed an eight-year-old boy with cowpox from a milkmaid’s hand in 1796 to prevent him from catching smallpox, immunizations have had a substantial success record. They are credited with reducing diphtheria, measles, mumps, and rubella incidences in the U.S. by 99 percent. Later incarnations of smallpox vaccines eventually led to that disease’s global eradication in 1979. According to researchers, immunization ranks with clean water, nutrition, and sanitation in health necessities. School entry requirements and pediatric health care subsidies in the U.S. help ensure children get every vaccine. Adults, a significant source of children’s infections, aren’t as well inoculated. Public and health care–provider education is needed to get adult numbers up, says the Immunization Action Coalition’s L. J. Tan. “Vaccines don’t give themselves.” RECOMMENDED PEDIATRIC IMMUNIZATIONS IN THE…

By the end of 2013, Syria’s bloody and complex civil war had displaced some nine million men, women, and children (map, right). Although most of them have relocated to less troubled parts of the country, roughly one in four has fled altogether, desperate to escape the violence and chaos and the mounting shortages of food, medicine, and other necessities. This relentless exodus has created a humanitarian crisis for neighboring countries and is spilling into Europe and beyond. And as the conflict enters its third year, there is no sign of resolution in sight. Photographer Lynsey Addario has documented the struggles of the displaced in Syria as well as in the four nations that have seen the greatest influx. The man pictured above is one of the millions, shown after he…

Once a lowly sandwich filling, tuna has gone upscale. The largest members of the Scombridae family are now worth about $5.5 billion a year on the global market. These are the most popular. Skipjack This cheap, plentiful fish ends up mainly in cans. The label “light meat” applies to skipjack and yellowfin. Yellowfin Of all the tunas, yellowfin have some of the highest levels of mercury. Their best meat is often served raw. Bigeye This tuna has become increasingly popular for raw dishes in Japan as the price for bluefin has soared. Albacore With its mild flavor and firm texture, this is the king of canned tuna—identified as “white meat” on the label. Pacific bluefin The 2012 assessment found this species to be at only 3.6 percent of historic levels.…

In September 1874, in the panhandle of Texas, the great Comanche equestrian empire came to an ugly and sorrowful end. This event boded deep changes on the Great Plains, because the Comanche had been among the first tribes, and the most successful, to adopt the horse after its arrival with Spanish conquistadores. They had become proficient, expert, ferocious, and even lordly as horseback warriors, terrorizing their Indian neighbors, making wrathful assaults to stem the trend of white settlement and buffalo slaughter, and eventually bedeviling the U.S. Army. And then, on September 28, 1874, the largest remaining body of Comanche fighters (along with a number of Kiowa and Cheyenne allies) was caught, amid their tepees, with their families, in an undefended bivouac at a place called Palo Duro Canyon. The attack…

This month the National Geographic Channel invites you to experience the universe like never before. Hosted by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson (left), this new series draws on the latest rigorous science and pays homage to the show that inspired it, Carl Sagan’s 1980 hit, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. SPECIAL EDITION JESUS AND THE APOSTLES Christianity’s first centuries are the focus of this special edition. In it you’ll explore the life and times of Jesus and find profiles of the Apostles as well as an in-depth look at the Gospels. On sale March 11 on newsstands and at shopng.com/specialeditions. LECTURE STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND Jodi Cobb has spent her career photographing secretive groups, like the geisha of Japan. Join her for a retrospective of her groundbreaking work. For dates see…