Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2018 i National Geographic Magazine - UK

Is SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s proposal to launch humans to Mars by 2024 realistic? I’ve talked to Musk about this and I think hisplansareambitious.Havingsaidthat, SpaceX continually confounds expectations;theynowflyreusablerocketstothe International Space Station and aim to carry astronauts next year. My guess is there will be a crewed Mars mission in the 2030s, a collaboration involving commercial launch companies with NASA, the European Space Agency, or others. When can we expect a colony on Mars and then humans spreading throughout the universe? Regarding a Mars colony, first you send the base there and make sure it’s working. Then you send the astronauts. Once you’ve gone to Mars, and you have the rockets, it’s all about building bigger habitation modules on the spacecraft so you can travel farther. I can imagine that by…

The kaleidoscopic ball above is more—and less—than meets the eye. This vivid terrain is actually a color-coded Zika virus, millions of which could fit in the period that ends this sentence. We can see the virus here thanks to cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), an extremely cool imaging technique that lets scientists visualize molecules, making it easier than ever to study life’s cellular machinery. Cryo-EM works by firing an electron beam at a flash-frozen film of water containing copies of a given molecule. This “exposure” yields many 2-D images of the molecules at different angles, which algorithms then merge into one 3-D model. At first cryo-EM rendered molecules as vague lumps, so some dismissed it as “blobology” compared with x-ray crystallography, a less versatile high-resolution imaging technique. But in 2013 cryo-EM achieved…

On the third floor of a crumbling building, a pink sunset glowed through the clear plastic sheet covering a gaping hole in the wall. Sixty-year-old Amira Garman sat in a powder blue cardigan on a swinging bench beneath a gold-fringed yellow canopy. A broken chandelier with a single bulb doused the little room in shaky light. Through the makeshift window she looked down at Al Yarmouk school across the street, its playground now littered with bullet casings and an improvised cannon. Garman’s family had lived on the top floor, now a maze of caved-in walls and rubble. “I want to be in my home,” she said. They took shelter in this room, one of only two occupied in the building. On their street, shops reopened among the debris; people bustled…

1 Our planet recycles life-friendly carbon over time Carbon dioxide is one of many greenhouse gases that trap heat and keep Earth’s surface warm enough to support life. The static surfaces of Venus and Mars keep carbon locked in the air and rocks. But over millions of years, Earth dynamically cycles this vital element through its air, land, and sea due to the constant action of plate tectonics. 2 We have an ozone layer to block harmful rays Ancient plantlike organisms in the oceans added oxygen to the atmo sphere and created a high-altitude layer of ozone that shielded early land species from lethal radiation. 3 We have a big moon to stabilize our axial wobble Earth is tilted with respect to the sun, and teeters as it spins. This…

TIRE TRACKS STRETCHED ACROSS THE FLAT LAKE BED TO THE HORIZON. We followed them in a Suzuki 4x4, looking for clues about what’s happened to Poopó, once Bolivia’s second largest lake, which has vanished into the thin air of the Andean highlands. We were driving on the lake bottom, yet we were more than 12,000 feet above sea level. The spring air was lip-chapping dry. Many of the fishing villages that have relied on Lake Poopó for thousands of years have emptied too, and we drove past clusters of abandoned adobe homes. Dust devils danced around them, spinning in warm winds. In the distance we spotted several small aluminum boats that seemed to be floating on water. As we drove closer, the mirage receded, and we found the boats sitting…

Today’s high-tech cancer killers are based on a century-old idea: turning the body’s immune system against tumors. In 1891 a New York City surgeon named William Coley noticed that some cancers seemed to disappear after patients suffered an infection. Acting on a hunch, Coley injected bacteria into a patient with a deadly neck cancer, and the man’s tumor began to shrink. Now immunotherapy is the hottest field in cancer research. Scientists have learned that an infection can rev up the immune system, dispatching T cells that hunt and kill foreign invaders, including cancer cells. Research is yielding new ways to boost such immune attacks, including drugs that strip cancer cells of the camouflage they use to hide from T cells. Some approaches take the brakes off the immune system, while…

After releasing stunning, never before seen images of the solar system and providing new insight into the possibility of life on some of Saturn’s moons, the Cassini-Huygens mission is considered to be a complete success. The culmination of a long-held dream, the mission was the result of close collaboration among three space agencies: the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) of the United States; the European Space Agency (ESA); and the Agenzia Spaziale Italiana (ASI), Italy’s space agency. The mission’s collection of vast amounts of data and important discoveries provide a boost to space exploration and confirm what scientists already sense: Changes are on the horizon that will alter our view of the cosmos. The story of Cassini dates back more than 30 years, to an exchange of ideas between…

Northern gannets BASS ROCK, SCOTLAND During breeding season, 150,000 gannets throng this island in the Firth of Forth. In winter the birds decamp south as far as West Africa. To make this image, Wilkes and an assistant lugged his gear 122 steps uphill and set up near the ruins of a church about six feet from the nesting birds. Standing on the rocky ground for 28 sleepless hours, he took 1,176 photos. “It’s like a meditative state,” he says. “I’m alert to everything. I’m seeing everything.” He selected about 150 photos to make this image. Lesser flamingos LAKE BOGORIA, KENYA The lesser flamingos of Africa’s Great Rift Valley thrive in the extreme environment of high-altitude soda lakes, feeding on algal blooms that are toxic to many other creatures. The birds…

MIKE MASSIMINO NEW YORK CITY In 2009 the NASA astronaut visited the Hubble Space Telescope, some 350 miles above the planet, on a mission to fix the beloved eye in the sky for the last time. Hubble’s gaze is perpetually turned toward outer space, but tethered next to the massive observatory, Massimino was entranced by Earth. With verdant South American rain forests, rugged African deserts, and sparkling city lights spread out below him, the planet looked like a paradise. “I thought at one point, if you could be up in heaven, this is how you would see the planet. And then I dwelled on that and said, no, it’s more beautiful than that. This is what heaven must look like. I think of our planet as a paradise. We are…

6 We’re at just the right distance from the sun Earth orbits in the so-called Goldilocks zone, where it’s not too close and not too far from the sun for water to be liquid on its surface. 7 We’re situated safely away from gas giants If the orbits of the solar system’s biggest planets were much closer, tugs from their powerful gravity could cause disastrous fluctuations in Earth’s distance from the sun. 8 The sun is a stable, long-lasting star Stars more massive than the sun burn hotter and usually don’t live long enough for planets to develop life. Less massive, younger stars are often unstable and are prone to blasting their planets with bursts of radiation. 9 We have the right stuff to host a dynamic core The interstellar…

Single-celled and simple multicellular organisms reigned on Earth for more than three billion years. Then, starting 635 million years ago—after a long series of glaciations called “snowball Earth”—ice melted and oxygen reached a critical threshold that allowed more complex multicellular life to flourish. In the Cambrian period, animal life as we know it exploded into its myriad forms. Single-cell and simple multicellular organisms The earliest fossil evidence of large, multicellular life dates to some 570 million years ago. But ages derived from the fossil record represent minimum estimates; genetic studies of living organisms suggest complex life existed even earlier.…

The UK media industry is buzzing with creative people who appreciate the authenticity and power of the National Geographic brand. To celebrate this, we invited them to enter a unique photo competition on the theme of travel. The response was extraordinary: nearly 900 entries were judged. The standard was consistently high, and Sylvia Bors, Senior Photo Editor at NG Creative was particularly impressed by the entrants’ passion for photography and genuine affection for the National Geographic brand. Sylvia was looking for photos that evoked feelings of “wish you were here.” First-prize went to Hair-raising Beauty, of which Sylvia commented: “This is a view to be blown away by, literally. I appreciated the happenstance double intention with the addition of humor and sophistication.” Of the runners up, Sylvia said of 3am…

Exactly 556 people have been to space, starting with cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and his first orbit of Earth in 1961. Among them, 553 have circled the planet, 24 beyond the orbits of most satellites. Twelve have walked on the moon. These travelers share something exceedingly rare in the human experience: a planetary perspective of our home. JASON TREAT, NGM STAFF SOURCES: NASA; JAPAN AEROSPACE EXPLORATION AGENCY; EUROPEAN SPACE AGENCY; CANADIAN SPACE AGENCY; GAGARIN RESEARCH & TEST COSMONAUT TRAINING CENTER; NATIONAL CENTER FOR SPACE STUDIES (CNES)…

11 Our sun offers protection from galactic debris The sun engulfs its planets in a bubble of charged particles that repel dangerous radiation and harmful materials coming from interstellar space. 12 Our galactic path steers us clear of hazards The solar system is comfortably nestled in a safe harbor between major spiral arms, and its nearly circular orbit helps it avoid the galaxy’s perilous inner regions. 13 Our location is far from stellar crowds There are relatively few stars near the sun, reducing risks to Earth from gravitational tugs, gamma-ray bursts, or collapsing stars called supernovae.…

Like more familiar echinoderms such as sea stars and sea urchins, the Ordovician sea lily above and modern basket star at right have a body plan arranged symmetrically around a central mouth. Fixed to the bottom by a stalk, the sea lily fed by gathering particles from the water with its arms and bringing them to its mouth. Four hundred fifty million years later, the basket star employs much the same strategy, spreading its profusion of armlets to filter as much water as possible.…

Fairy tales can come true, but sometimes it takes a few decades. As a city kid, Elena Anosova heard seemingly tall tales of a village visited by elk and wolves, of a vast forest, impassable roads, and an environment both bitter and beloved. As an adult, the visual artist, now 34, finally visited the settlement founded more than 300 years ago by her ancestors. They were hunters, swept up in the waves of Russians who ventured east to Siberia in search of fur and never left. Anosova’s father was born there, and most of the 120 or so people who call the place home—and don’t want outsiders to know its name or location—fall comfortably into the category of family. In the native Tungus (or Evenki) language, the settlement’s name translates…