Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2017 i National Geographic Magazine

Who is the world’s happiest person? It may be Alejandro Zúñiga, a healthy, middle-aged father who socializes at least six hours a day and has a few good friends he can count on. He sleeps at least seven hours most nights, walks to work, and eats six servings of fruits and vegetables most days. He works no more than 40 hours a week at a job he loves with co-workers he enjoys. He spends a few hours every week volunteering; on the weekends he worships God and indulges his passion for soccer. In short he makes daily choices that favor happiness, choices made easier because he lives among like-minded people in the verdant, temperate Central Valley of Costa Rica. Sidse Clemmensen is another possible candidate. With a loving partner and…

In similar ways Denmark supports the well-being of people like Sidse Clemmensen. I met her on my third trip to Denmark to explore that nation’s unique brand of happiness—one that seems to enable people to live a purposeful life better than anywhere else. Sitting in her kitchen sipping tea, the 35-year-old working mother with short brown hair wore a sleeveless blouse, Moroccan slippers, and a diamond stud in her nose. “The state provides me with everything I need,” Clemmensen said. “My children are happy. I have a great husband. And I love my job. I know that nothing too bad can happen to me.” Clemmensen and her family are one of 22 households in a shared housing community called a bofællesskab in the city of Aalborg. Each family owns a…

Seen from space, high above Africa, the Okavango Delta resembles a gigantic starburst blossom pressed onto the landscape of northern Botswana, its stem angling southeastward from the Namibian border, its petals of silvery water splayed out for a hundred miles across the Kalahari Basin. It is one of the planet’s great wetlands, a vast splash of life-nurturing channels and lagoons and seasonal ponds amid a severely dry region of the continent. This delta doesn’t open to the sea. Contained entirely within the basin, it comes to a halt along a southeastern perimeter and disappears into the deep Kalahari sands. It can be thought of as the world’s largest oasis, a wet refuge supporting elephants, hippos, crocodiles, and wild dogs; lechwe and sitatungas and other wetland antelopes; warthogs and buffalo, lions…

Protecting the world About 85 percent of infants worldwide are now vaccinated against polio as well as diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. Vaccines save two to three million lives a year. Safety in numbers It’s called herd immunity: A disease can all but vanish from a population before everyone is vaccinated—because a high immunization rate reduces the spread of infection.…

INDONESIA Mount Bromo, on the volcano-dotted island of Java, erupted for exactly one year, from November 12, 2015, to November 12, 2016. The cone emitted varying levels of ash and heat, disrupting flights and local tourism. YOURSHOT.NGM.COM SUSTAINABILITY ASSIGNMENT We asked to see your images of sustainability, the idea that the future of our planet depends on the way we live today.…

MANUEL CANALES AND THEODORE A. SICKLEY, NGM STAFF. SHELLEY SPERRY. SOURCE: GALLUP WORLD POLL, 2015-16 DATA ARE NOT AVAILABLE FOR SOME COUNTRIES. SELECT TERRITORIES ARE INCLUDED.…

Singapore has developed its own approach to happiness, as personified by Douglas Foo. I first met Foo when I visited Singapore in 2008. He had a reputation for being hugely successful, community minded, consummately principled, and irrepressibly affable. But his clearest expression of happiness, I discovered, was neither his expensive sports car nor his trophy case of business awards. It was his laugh: a widemouthed, back-tilted howl of joy. Foo runs Sakae Sushi, Singapore’s largest chain of quick-service sushi restaurants, but he still finds time to volunteer for 22 organizations. During his 14-hour workdays he wears tailored blue suits and presides over a dozen meetings with a mix of earnest ceremony, careful consideration, baritone decisiveness, and pandemic humor. His gift for defusing tension with spontaneous laughter coupled with a herculean…

County fairs are a little like beauty pageants for animals. The way we selectively breed goats and sheep has shaped the course of their evolution. When I moved to Minnesota from Denver, I wanted to capture this notion of competitive livestock lineage. There’s a Will Ferrell movie about race-car driving called Talladega Nights. In it his dad tells him, “If you ain’t first, you’re last.” That’s the mind-set at these county fairs—owners want a grand-champion animal, but most animals don’t win. I think we all know what it’s like not to be chosen, whether for prom or the basketball team or a job. But what does it look like? At fairs I would watch the judges line up the animals and rank them. Then I’d approach the handlers of unchosen…

For all its restrictive laws, its harsh ruler, and its reputation as the Hermit Kingdom, North Korea has long been open to visitors. For years Chinese tour companies have taken foreigners into the country—including roughly 1,000 Americans a year—for a curated tour of daily North Korean life. Americans have been able to spend time at North Korean amusement parks, schools, and subway stations. Almost all left without incident. That changed this year. The June 19 death of American college student Otto Warmbier, who had been detained in Pyongyang and then convicted of stealing a propaganda poster from a hotel, increased tension between North Korea and the United States. As Pyongyang’s continued development of nuclear weapons heightened the prospect of war, the U.S. State Department restricted the use of American passports…

Name the last place where you saw seaweed on the menu, not including a Japanese restaurant. Drawing a blank? That may be because, outside of Japan and other parts of Asia, seaweed’s unique flavor and mouthfeel have not been widely embraced. These marine plants and algae are sometimes called “sea vegetables”—but there are reasons beyond gastronomy to appreciate them. Kelp, in particular, has the potential to greatly reduce ocean acidification. Naturally occurring in cold, coastal marine waters, kelp grows quickly without the need for fertilizer, and it takes up carbon dioxide—which can exacerbate climate change— as well as excess nitrogen and phosphorus. The problem, though, is that there’s not enough of it. Enter kelp farming. China currently leads the industry, having produced more than seven million metric tons in 2015,…

The Komodo dragon, the largest species of lizard now alive, can grow to 10 feet long and nearly 200 pounds. A muscular carnivore armed with sharp teeth, Varanus komodoensis dines on prey as large as deer, wild boar, and water buffalo. As formidable as the Komodo dragon seems, it’s very much at risk. On seven Indonesian islands that are the only places the species lives in the wild, humans burn its habitat to clear land and poach animals on which it preys. Even on land protected as Komodo National Park, officials reported just 3,013 Komodo dragons in 2016, down from 3,222 in 2013. When her species needs replenishing, what’s a mother dragon to do? She can reproduce the old-fashioned way, by mating with a male and laying eggs. Or she…

Let’s return to Alejandro Zúñiga, who works as a produce vendor at the central market in Cartago, a city just east of San José, Costa Rica’s capital. For decades the husky 57-year-old has been a fixture at the market, showing up day after day to sell avocados, socialize, and try out new jokes. Everyone there knows him. Whenever any of the five dozen or so other vendors falls ill or has a family emergency, it’s usually Zúñiga who takes up a collection to help. He organizes weekend trips to cheer on the city’s beloved but often hapless soccer team, C.S. Cartaginés. He’s a charismatic friend and a natural leader. One night a few years ago, Zúñiga got a call from a friend with exciting news. “You’ve won the lottery!” he…

Most people respond to the word ‘ pterosaurs’ with a puzzled expression, until you add, ‘like pterodactyls.’ That’s the common name given to the first pterosaur discovered in the 18th century. Scientists have since described more than 200 pterosaur species, but popular notions about pterosaurs—the winged dragons that ruled Mesozoic skies for 162 million years—have remained stuck. We invariably imagine them as pointy-headed, leather-winged, clumsily aerial reptilians, with murderous proclivities. Take a look, for example, at the 1966 film One Million Years B.C., in which a squawking, lavender pterosaur carries Raquel Welch off to feed the nestlings. (Spoiler alert: She lives.) For an update, turn to 2015’s Jurassic World, and you’ll find that pterosaurs are still plucking humans skyward, the sad lot of the perennially typecast. (A minor point: The…

Go see the child, Samir Saha said. Just sit with her. Probably the siblings will be there too, the brother and sister whose lives are also altered permanently. ‘T his is why the vaccine is so important,’ Saha said. ‘W e want to reduce this number to a minimum, if not zero. So no other children will be like this.’ It was a little after dawn in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, and Saha was in the back seat of his car, brooding. A uniformed driver threaded the Toyota through a cacophonous mess of jitneys, motorcycles, rickshaws, trucks, and battered buses with passengers hanging out the doors. “We could save the life, but we could not …” He left the sentence unfinished. “You’ll be seeing the scenario,” he said. “You’ll…