Innholdsfortegnelse for Feb-14 i National Geographic Magazine

A few years ago I was in the middle of a meeting when one of our senior editors ushered in a tall man with a large, expressive face, wearing owlish glasses and dressed in a khaki suit. In a voice once described as “a baritone that seems precision-engineered to narrate a documentary about glaciers,” he addressed the group and pitched a story idea. He wanted, he told us, to do a story about his own “personal geography.” That man was the author, radio personality, and storyteller Garrison Keillor, and there could be only one answer to the appeal. Keillor’s reminiscence, “There’s No Place Like Home,” is the result. You might say it’s a piece he’s been writing his whole life. Ostensibly, it’s about Minneapolis-St. Paul. He conjures word pictures of…

United States Behind a theater window at Florida’s Weeki Wachee Springs State Park, Nikki Chickonski swims through swirling bubbles. Strategically placed air hoses allow the mermaids to take in lungfuls of air, then perform unencumbered by scuba tanks. Iceland The colorful rhyolite mountains of the Land-mannalaugar highlands are a popular hiking destination in Iceland’s southern interior. Getting there can be hard: Local roads aren’t paved, and rivers run across them. They must be forded using four-wheel drive. Bhutan Robes fly as monks practice a traditional dance in the courtyard of the Rinpung Dzong, a fortress and monastery complex dating from 1646—and now a seat of district government—located in Bhutan’s Paro Valley.…

Up to 5,000 people are in Westport, Washington, on a summer day. About a fifth could be too close to the coast and too far from high ground to escape on foot from a tsunami, which experts say would follow an earthquake there by 25 minutes. The city is forging a safe haven, building on state plans. Last April it approved a bond for the first vertical tsunami refuge in the U.S.—on top of a school and able to withstand a 9.2 magnitude earthquake. “Japan’s 2011 tsunami was a transitional moment in moving Westport from planning to imple mentation,” says emergency manager John Schelling. Westport residents saw parallels between the Japanese towns and their own area: both in a potential tsunami path, both flat. So when Westport needed a new…

Quinoa’s reputation is blossoming. The seed of a goosefoot species that originated in Peru and Bolivia around Lake Titicaca, it’s been a staple of Andean cuisine for millennia. Over the past decade other cultures have developed a taste for it too. Since 2007 U.S. imports have risen from 7 million to more than 70 million pounds a year. This growing appetite is affecting South America. Farmers are struggling to meet demand, and some urban populations can’t afford the resulting price increases. To cash in on the crop’s popularity, countries on other continents have begun moving from consumer to cultivator. There are now quinoa farms in 56 countries, including France, Thailand, Australia, and the U.S. Quinoa is also being grown in Africa, where the UN hopes its high protein content will…

Van Wedeen strokes his halfgray beard and leans toward his computer screen, scrolling through a cascade of files. We’re sitting in a windowless library, surrounded by speckled boxes of old letters, curling issues of scientific journals, and an old slide projector that no one has gotten around to throwing out. “It’ll take me a moment to locate your brain,” he says. On a hard drive Wedeen has stored hundreds of brains—exquisitely detailed 3-D images from monkeys, rats, and humans, including me. Wedeen has offered to take me on a journey through my own head. “We’ll hit all the tourist spots,” he promises, smiling. This is my second trip to the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, located in a former ship-rope factory on Boston Harbor. The first time, a few weeks…

Shawn Ryan recalls the hungry years, before his first big strike. The prospector and his family were living in a metal shack on the outskirts of Dawson, the Klondike boomtown that had declined to a ghostly remnant of its glory days. They had less than $300 and no running water or electricity. One night, as wind sneaked through gaps in the cladding, Ryan’s wife, Cathy Wood, worried aloud that their two children might even freeze to death Today the couple could buy—and heat—just about any house on Earth. Ryan’s discovery of what would eventually amount to billions of dollars’ worth of buried treasure has helped reinfect the Yukon with gold fever, and fortune seekers have stormed the Canadian territory in numbers not seen since the 1890s. The minerals rush has…

Brain Games It’s all in your head. That’s what Brain Games—back for its third season—proves once again through a series of experiments, optical illusions, and riddles rooted in science. Discover why trusting others benefits society and why some people prefer to cheer for the underdog. Got a competitive streak? Learn why that’s a good thing too, this month on the National Geographic Channel. Where the Locals Go Eat, shop, relax, and celebrate like a local even when you’re new in town. This international guide, compiled by National Geographic’s expert travel editors, provides insider tips on undiscovered restaurants, up-and-coming neighborhoods, street festivals, and other diversions far from the usual tourist traps. On sale February 4 ($24.95).…

125 Years of Photos As a college junior in 1976, I was an avid photographer. (How I miss my Pentax SP1000!) I wrote to National Geographic asking the requirements to be a staff photographer. I received a personal reply stating I would need to have a college degree and five years’ experience on a photo-oriented newspaper, and I probably should know another language. It also stated that “the average Geographic photographer spends far more time being a traveler, diplomat, making arrangements, and coping with a myriad of problems that can arise when he or she is working alone in a strange land.” NANCY J. BUSHNELL North Mankato, Minnesota To Robert Draper: I’m sorry. You are wrong. You are not “just one of the writers.” Your article on the power of…

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 Hong Ng CK Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia In the Dang district of Nepal, Hong was working with an organization that holds free art classes for young students. During a break, a girl began jumping rope, sending dust from the floor into the air as the sun shone in through a window behind her. READERS’ CHOICE Aleš Umek Celje, Slovenia Umek rode his bike 55 miles to take landscape shots of Slovenia’s picturesque Logar Valley. “I wanted to make a dream landscape,” he says. At the top of one hill he found a view of a small homestead that looked as if it belonged in…

Puckered digits were once thought to be just the bloated result of water absorption. Then Newcastle University evolutionary biologist Tom Smulders heard about another theory—that the lines promote water runoff and aid adhesion, like treads on a tire. Smulders confirmed that pruney fingers have the advantage in wet conditions. He’s only just scratched the surface of how the wrinkles work. For now, though, his findings could boost the theory that a million years ago the ancestors of modern humans went through a semiaquatic state, when skin folds might have helped toes cling to slick rocks and fingers catch wriggling fish.…

The world’s busiest air route connects Jeju and Seoul, South Korea. It saw 10.1 million passengers in 2012. There’s a new branch on the avian family tree. A 50-million-year-old fossilized bird found in Wyoming is thought to be an extinct cousin of modern hummingbirds and swifts. Based on the fossil’s well- preserved plumage, paleontologist Daniel Ksepka believes Eocyp selus rowei—four inches from head to tail—would have been a conventional flier. Its descendants’ feathers specialized, growing long so swifts could stay aloft all day and short so hummingbirds could hover.…

My grandma Dora Keillor was riding in my dad’s car one winter day in 1957 when the car spun out of control on an icy highway. Grandma didn’t cry out. John, she said, “Which way is north?” I share that need for clarity. Approaching Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport from the east, the plane descends over the green fields of Wisconsin and the St. Croix River into Minnesota, just above the farm in Denmark Township where my mother spent happy summer days visiting her sister Margaret—snapshots of girls in white summer dresses standing, holding their bicycles, Grace and Elsie and Ina squinting in the bright 1934 sunlight—and passes south of downtown St. Paul and the gleam of steel rails that carried Dad in the mail car of the Empire Builder departing Union…

Only about 13 percent of the Yukon’s land area is off-limits to mining, and any adult can stake a claim. As prospectors rush to exploit the sparsely populated landscape, conservationists and First Nations peoples warn of far-reaching consequences for wildlife and habitats, including the pristine Peel watershed. BATTLE OVER WILDERNESS ZONING Sprawling over 26,000 square miles, the Peel watershed is one of the largest wild areas remaining in North America. A 2011 zoning plan (below right) would have maintained the area’s wilderness character, but since then the Yukon government has proposed a plan more favorable to industrial development. STAKING SOARS WITH GOLD PRICES The year 2011 saw more than 115,000 mining claims, the peak of an intense rush. The driving factors were high prices for commodities— chiefly gold—aided by industry-friendly…

At Last, a Bear Photographer Paul Nicklen waded into the frigid water of a river in the Canadian Yukon and set up a camera with a remote trigger. Then he waited for a bear to come by. He’d seen plenty of bears chasing salmon in the river, but it took 15 days before a grizzly came to inspect the shiny camera housing. Nicklen had been drawn to the Yukon because of its beauty. He wanted to take pictures of the massive mountains and glaciers. But a gold rush started in 2011, after mineral deposits were unearthed north of Dawson, and so his coverage shifted: “It quickly turned from a pretty-picture story into an urgent one about mining a wild place.” Nicklen mingled with miners in hotels and bars, hearing their…

Jason De Leon National Geographic Emerging Explorer EXPERTISE Cultural Anthropologist LOCATION Arizona Border Lines My team studies what happens to undocumented migrants crossing the border from Mexico to the U.S. Many don’t make it. So the archaeology and anthropology we do are often unpleasant—uncovering death and physical and emotional suffering. We hope the research that we do can aid immigration law reform. On a trip to study a four-year old migrant site where the traffic had slowed, we found the body of a 41-year-old woman. She was just south of Tucson, Arizona, in the Sonoran Desert, only 30 miles from the Mexican border. The area is mountainous. She had been cresting a steep hill. It was July, and the temperatures there averaged 100°F or more. Finding a person meant the…

How long will an elephant live? Look to its teeth. TEETH MAY BE the most essential organ elephants have, says veterinary dentist David Fagan. The reason is appetite. An African savanna elephant consumes between 400 and 600 pounds of vegetation a day, an Asian elephant about 300. To process that quantity of food, elephants need to chew constantly. They wear down each tooth until it’s no longer useful. Then it falls out. Most other mammals have two sets of teeth in their lifetimes. Elephants go through six. Each set—one tooth on the top, one on the bottom—lasts about three years when an African savanna elephant is young but can be good for more than ten years later in life. Unlike human teeth, which sprout from the gum line, elephants’ start…

German engineers have a flight plan: mimic barn owls’ quiet aerial maneuvering to make less noisy airfoils for human aviation. Nocturnal hunters, barn owls use acoustics to locate prey, so they can’t be distracted by noises of their own making. Key to a barn owl’s stealth is flying slowly, with very little flapping. Its steep wing curve is a particular asset: It’s especially good at creating the low pressure on the top side that sucks the wings upward, says lead researcher Thomas Bachmann. Plumage plays a part too. Owls have extremely dense coats, and their feathers’ soft texture muffles sound. Fringes on the edges of feathers may also lead to ways to downplay turbulence.…

Women have long been shown to be better than men at remembering faces. New research from Canada’s McMaster University helps explain why. Kinesiologist Jennifer Heisz tracked the way men and women moved their eyes as they scanned pictures of faces (right). Both genders started at the center and looked at the same features—eyes, nose, mouth—but women made more eye movements between the features. “More frequent scanning generates a more vivid picture in your mind,” says Heisz. Understanding how the brain memorizes visual information could lead to improvements in how memory loss is treated. EYE SPY Dots represent instances—observed over the course of five seconds—when each gender fixated on a facial feature.…

In 1418the town fathers of Florence finally addressed a monumental problem they’d been ignoring for decades: the enormous hole in the roof of their cathedral. Season after season, the winter rains and summer sun had streamed in over Santa Maria del Fiore’s high altar—or where the high altar should have been. Their predecessors had begun the church in  to showcase the status of Florence as one of Europe’s economic and cultural capitals, grown rich on high finance and the wool and silk trades. It was later decided that the structure’s crowning glory would be the largest cupola on Earth, ensuring the church would be “more useful and beautiful, more powerful and honorable” than any other ever built, as the grandees of Florence decreed. Still, many decades later, no one…

On February 10, 2013, overcrowding at a railway station in the northern Indian city of Allahabad led to a stampede that killed 36 people. The city was full at the time. Very full. It was hosting the world’s largest religious gathering, the Maha Kumbh Mela, and the authorities estimated the number of pilgrims in the city that day hit its peak, at 30 million. The stampede made headlines around the world and is what most non-Hindus remember about the festival. But there’s another story about the Maha Kumbh Mela that hasn’t been told. It begins two weeks earlier, about four miles from the station, on the banks of the River Ganges. It’s the second major bathing day of the festival. Dawn has yet to break, fog shrouds the river, and…

In 1902, on the odd triangular lot created by the intersections of Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and 23rd Street, rose the Flatiron Building—one of New York City’s early skyscrapers. Originally the building had 20 stories. A 21st floor was added in 1905. This Fifth Avenue view of the wedge-shaped structure ran in the July 1918 issue of National Geographic to illustrate a story called “New York—The Metropolis of Mankind.” In that article author William Joseph Showalter notes, “From whatever angle it is viewed, whatever facet throws back the light of its activities to the beholder, New York challenges one’s interest and stirs one’s imagination.” Get Lost in Found. Go to NatGeoFound.tumblr.com.…