Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2018 i National Geographic Magazine - UK

Back at university I became intrigued by a theory known as panopticism. In the late 18th century, social theorist Jeremy Bentham designed a prison with an observation tower in the center from which a guard might observe every inmate at once. Bentham proposed that in this prison, called a panopticon, the inmates would be unable to tell whether they were being observed or not: the mere knowledge that observation was possible would ensure their good behavior. French philosopher Michel Foucault developed his social theory of panopticism in 1975 as a metaphor for modern systems of societal control, achieved through the consciousness of constantly feeling watched. Were he alive today, I think Foucault would be shocked by the level of social surveillance that has been achieved through the advent of digital…

National parks throughout the world feature mountains or jungles or tundra. Others are deserts, coral reefs, moorland, or forests. But not one of these national parks is an entire city. Daniel Raven-Ellison, a geographer and National Geographic emerging explorer from London, is on a mission to change that. He wants to declare his hometown the world’s first “national park city.” He already has the support of London’s mayor Sadiq Khan and many of the city’s local politicians. If all goes to plan, Raven-Ellison will soon fulfill his mission and make the declaration this spring. What exactly is a national park city? Raven-Ellison and his network of volunteers provisionally define it as “a large urban area managed and semiprotected through both formal and informal means to enhance the natural capital of…

Peter Gold returns to the New Orleans street where he was shot while trying to rescue a woman who was being abducted at gunpoint. Gold, then a 25-year-old medical student, intervened when he saw a man later identified as Euric Cain attempt to drag the woman into a vehicle. The 2015 incident was captured on a video camera; it shows Cain shooting Gold in the stomach and then trying twice to shoot him in the head as he lay curled on the sidewalk. Both times, the gun jammed. Like the business owner who installed this camera, more cities and private citizens are turning to street-level surveillance to fight crime.…

In total darkness, a frame from a thermal imaging camera (above) shows rangers in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve chasing a poacher, who was soon caught. The devices, provided by the World Wildlife Fund to the Mara Conservancy, have allowed rangers (top right) to extend their work protecting wildlife into the night. By day, rangers rescue a male elephant calf (bottom right) that was separated from its herd and thus vulnerable to predators. The elephant was flown to an animal sanctuary.…

Remote refuge The archipelago is a haven for more than a hundred bird species, many of them seabirds. Thirty-six percent of the global numbers of southern rockhopper penguins, for example, live here. A delicate balance Threats to biodiversity include overgrazing and the introduction of non-native species, such as predators that can alter the natural ecosystem. CONTRADICTING CLAIMS Britain and Argentina warred over the islands in 1982, and both claim them. Tensions remain as interest in oil and gas exploitation grows. *LOCATION DATA ARE FROM 2015. BREEDING-PAIR ESTIMATES ARE BASED ON THE LATEST ISLANDWIDE CENSUS, FROM 2010. LAUREN C. TIERNEY AND IRENE BERMAN-VAPORIS, NGM STAFF SOURCES: FALKLANDS CONSERVATION; FALKLAND ISLANDS GOVERNMENT MINERAL RESOURCES DEPARTMENT; IBRU, DURHAM UNIVERSITY, U.K.; INSTITUTO GEOGRÁFICO NACIONAL, REPÚBLICA ARGENTINA; ESRI…

Each small compartment holds a treasure, a gift, that the crows have given her: a gold bead, a pearl earring, a screw, a red Lego piece, colored and clear glass chips, a chicken bone, a pebble, a quartz crystal, and many more. Though slightly soiled, all are stored as carefully as rare artifacts, dated, and categorized. Gabi selects two that she calls her First Favorites, and holds them up for me to admire. One is a pearly-pink heart charm, the other a tiny, silver rectangle with the word “BEST” engraved on one side. “It’s because they love me,” she says about the seemingly thoughtful objects, adding that she expects the birds will leave her a “FRIEND” charm one day. “They know everything I like—toys and shiny things—because they watch me.…

Giant shopping malls and soaring hotels have redrawn the skylines of cities like Dubai and Abu Dhabi. In the sweltering desert, indoor ski slopes are dusted in snow and flower gardens bloom. “They are constructing an artificial world that is completely disconnected from nature,” says Roger Grasas, a Spanish photographer whose project “Min Turab”—an Arabic expression meaning “from the earth”—looks at the idiosyncratic landscapes of the oil-fueled development boom in the Gulf region. These cities—like Dubai, Doha, and Abu Dhabi—“have in a way rejected the past,” says Grasas. “Before the oil these were poor countries. [Now] they are relating the new with something better.” Rapid development without regard for history or context was dubbed “dubaization” by Yasser Elsheshtawy, a former architecture professor at United Arab Emirates University. Open land has…

About 10:30 on a Saturday morning in the north London borough of Islington, two men on mopeds race down the shopping corridor of Upper Street. Sheathed in helmets, gloves, and jackets, they look more like manic video game figures than humans. They weave through traffic and around double-decker buses at kamikaze velocity. Motorists flinch at their approach. The bikers pop wheelies and execute speedy figure eights along the busy street. Still, something more purposeful than joyriding would seem to be on their minds. After three or four minutes, they abruptly turn off Upper and onto a quiet and leafy residential avenue. They hop the curb and cut their engines. Dismounting on the sidewalk, their helmets still on, they fall into a lengthy conversation. Their dialogue is known only to them.…

Seaports handle roughly 80 percent of worldwide trade by volume and play a vital role in border security. In a pilot program at the Port of Boston, scientists and engineers have designed an advanced scanner that can identify the molecular makeup of substances with far more specificity than ever before, quickly differentiating, for example, between salt and cocaine. HOW IT WORKS 1 Creating a 3-D model A scanner A bombards a truck and its cargo with high-energy x-rays. Sensors B then measure for backscatter radiation (see “Imaging With X-Rays,” below) to create a 3-D model. The truck and its contents are identified by four categories (right) based on average atomic number (the number of protons). 2 Hunting for contraband Algorithms then analyze the 3-D model for atomic numbers and densities…

Watching Jiang Wannian and Ping Cuixiang harvest a sixth of an acre of daikon seed in the north-central province of Gansu feels a little like traveling back in time. In a dry valley ringed by dusky mountains, on a brick-paved lot, Jiang drives a rusted tractor over a hip-deep mound of dried plants. As they crush down, Ping, Jiang’s wife, plunges a homemade pitchfork into the straw and arranges it for another pass. Eventually Jiang and Ping work side by side, wiry figures with tawny skin. It’s hot, but they are swaddled in clothes to protect themselves from the dust and the sun. They have handsome faces, taut and lined from years of laboring outdoors, and they turn them skyward as they throw fine chaff up and watch ruddy seed…

The complex thinkers Many brain structures involved in complex cognition are found in the forebrain. Scientists postulate that the bigger a bird’s forebrain as part of its entire brain, the smarter the bird. The crafty innovators Corvids rise above the rest when it comes to the ranking of a bird’s ability to use novel behaviors to solve a task. Intellectual heavyweights The forebrain’s pallium and subpallium regions—responsible for higher-order function—evolved differently in birds and mammals. Birds’ brains are smaller but more densely packed with neurons, the cells responsible for cognition. Bird Behavior Many skills displayed by birds are instinctual, but some birds are also capable of learning as they grow and adapt to their environments. PUZZLE SOLVING Some birds have the capacity to reason and make logical inferences. USING TOOLS…

LAND OF THE POLAR BEARS Depart from Longyearbyen, Norway (via Oslo) onboard the ice-class National Geographic Explorer. Svalbard, a high Arctic archipelago situated between Norway and the North Pole, is a place of deep fjords, snow-capped mountains, massive sheets of ice, and magnificent polar bears. Travel under the midnight sun and experience nature in its purest form. 11 Days | Guide Price From £8030 PP GALÁPAGOS ISLANDS The Galápagos Archipelago, Darwin’s living laboratory, is home to an abundance of wildlife. Isolated from the mainland for millions of years, the animals have no instinctive fear of humans. Experience up close encounters with unique species such as blue-footed boobies, marine iguanas, and domed giant tortoises. 10 Days | Guide Price From £5495 PP FRENCH POLYNESIA: BEYOND THE POSTCARD Experience the heart and…

Hong Kong Home to seven million people in just 426 square miles, Hong Kong is one of the world’s most densely populated cities. Lily Cole believes cities of the future will be smarter and more efficient, becoming “less polluted, less congested, and less noisy.” United States Handheld screens capture fireworks bursting over New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge. Alarmed by how disposable technology has become, Cole collaborated on the creation of a more sustainable smartphone. Order prints of select National Geographic photos online at NationalGeographicArt.com.…

The year is 2121. Stilted houses in Phnom Penh sit above urban farms fed by the Mekong River. Athens is smog free after a ban on cars, and Tokyo’s families live in nuclear radiation–proof homes. In Greenville, South Carolina, off-the-grid homes are powered by solar energy, and water is filtered off the roof (below). These cities of the future spring from the mind of Alan Marshall, an environmental social science professor at Mahidol University in Thailand. With the help of university students from around the world, Marshall imagined what cities that had successfully adapted to the next century’s environmental threats would look like. He collected those visions in the book Ecotopia 2121—and published it 500 years after Thomas More first wrote of an imagined, perfect place in his book Utopia.…

Dino Bertolino, a senior spacecraft technician at Planet, holds a camera-equipped satellite, which the San Francisco company calls a Dove. Planet has more than 150 of these shoe box–size satellites operating in orbit, snapping two images a second. With this fleet, when conditions are optimal, the company can photograph the Earth’s entire landmass in a day. These are a selection of images taken by Planet’s Dove satellites that were operating on September 20, 2017. 133 Number of satellites transmitting images that day 10,000 Number of photos each satellite shoots in a day 1.3MILLION Number of images collected in a day China’s first aircraft carrier built from scratch is launched in Dalian, a port city on the Yellow Sea. These images, taken by Planet’s Dove satellites, show the ship in a…

On the rocky shores of Steeple Jason, a distant island in the Falklands archipelago, I am awed by the magnificence before me. More than 440,000 black-browed albatrosses, the world’s largest colony, nest on steep cliffs. Along the beach below, southern rockhopper penguins call loudly. The always relentless striated caracaras—known as Johnny rooks—scout for penguin chicks or carrion to eat. The frigid waters host South American fur seals, orcas, Commerson’s dolphins, Peale’s dolphins, and sei whales. Underwater I swim through a majestic kelp forest that sways gently. Gentoo penguins dart above me, southern sea lions in hot pursuit. Lobster krill line up on the seafloor, pincers raised, as if for battle. The imagery is fitting. I am, after all, in the Falklands. War is a common theme. About 250 miles off…

Jefrin Bayona is already running late for school and it’s just after 6 a.m. “I barely slept last night,” the 15-year-old student says. “The baby woke me up at 10, 12, four in the morning.” Classes start early here in the rural plains of northeastern Colombia. Standing in the dark kitchen of his home, Jefrin drags a hand down his tired face between sips of hot chocolate. Estiven, his infant son, silently sits in a baby carrier on the sparse living room floor. Fortunately for Jefrin his early foray into fatherhood ends today. He’s participating in an immersive school program that aims to prevent teenage pregnancy. “Estiven” is actually a robotic baby designed to simulate a needy one-month-old—crying at programmed intervals day and night to provoke students to feed…