Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2018 i National Geographic Magazine - UK

ADREA SCHNEIDER’S HEART went to a woman in her 60s. Her liver went to a 66-year-old man. Her right lung was given to a 51-year-old woman, the left to a woman age 62. Her kidneys and corneas were donated. Her uterus was used for medical research on infertility. Her face went to Katie Stubblefield. This is a story about that face—a gift from a young woman who died, to a 21-year-old woman who would become the youngest face transplant recipient in American history. It is a story about breakthrough science and the doctors, nurses, and surgeons who created a medical miracle. It is a story about perhaps the most distinctive part of our body and the very nature of human identity. It is a story of second chances. The story…

HEAT AND SWIRLS OF DUST above the cracked earth of northwestern Nevada make any sign of life look like a mirage. In the fall of 2016, photographer Robert Ormerod turned off the road and onto the dried lake bed of the Black Rock Desert in search of a rocket launch. On the horizon he could make out a hazy row of RVs—those of the attendees of a famed amateur-rocketry convention. Since 1991 the Federal Aviation Administration has granted the Tripoli Rocketry Association permission to shoot rockets up to 492,000 feet (93 miles) in the air for the event. It’s one of the few times when high-altitude rockets can be safely and legally launched, so 100 to 200 hobbyists gather annually to test their creations. Tripoli calls the event “a venue…

TOMME DE SAVOIE Bacteria on this French and Swiss cheese use molds as low-friction highways to spread across the cheese surface—an example of fungi and bacteria working together. The cheese is lower in fat, which the microbes feed on; that reduces the extent and pace of microbial activity. COUPOLE The rind of this creamy Vermont cheese is dominated by a fungus. The mold gives the rind a wrinkled appearance. While the inside is mild and lemony, the rind is potent and intense, “like sweet buttery flatulence,” says microbiologist Benjamin Wolfe. BAYLEY HAZEN BLUE This variety of blue cheese brims with unique microbial behavior. Fungi wage open battle for territory by producing antibacterial compounds. Researchers also have documented that some microbes change with each new generation, similar to the way animals…

ADREA SCHNEIDER’S ORGANS AND TISSUES have helped at least seven people. From halting infections to curing blindness, a single donor can save or improve more than 70 lives. Enroll to donate organs, eyes, and tissues at RegisterMe.org and marrow at BeTheMatch.org. To donate a kidney or part of a liver or other organ while alive, contact a transplant center. Organs Transplants can help the afflicted return to normal life. Organs that pump blood, filter waste, and perform other crucial functions can be replaced when they’re diseased. Tissues Some tissues, such as heart valves, can be stored for up to 10 years. Composite tissues must be transplanted quickly. Lack of oxygen renders them unusable.…

I have come to this steaming forest to find a bird. I’m starting to wonder if it’s worth it. The terrain in Budo-Su-ngai Padi National Park in southern Thailand is so steep in places that you can reach out and touch the path in front of you. With each step on the rain-drenched ground, you risk sliding back down. Insects buzz in nose and ears, and if you stop long enough to look around, you’ll see an army of land leeches inching their wormy, blood-hungry little bodies toward you. The bird my fellow trekkers and I are after is the ancient, bizarre-looking, and now increasingly rare helmeted hornbill. The leader of our group is Pilai Poonswad, a Thai scientist known as the “great mother of hornbills.” She’s been studying the…

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch contains at least 88,000 tons of plastic—and almost half of it is fishing nets. A company called Bureo is trying to solve the ocean’s plastic problem by recycling nets into skateboards, surfboard fins, and sunglasses. At facilities in California and Chile, Bureo processes nets into pellets, then applies pressure and heat as the pellets are injected into molds—one win in the war on plastic pollution. —LC…

‘SOMETIMES YOU FALL DOWN AND HAVE TO GET UP AGAIN. BUT ONCE YOU WALK ACROSS, YOU CAN DO IT THREE OR FOUR TIMES.’—Stephan Siegrist T MINUS ONE WEEK SETTING THE SIGHT LINE After years of climbing up a pair of parallel limestone pillars in the mountains of Switzerland, photographer Thomas Ulrich and alpinist Stephan Siegrist wanted to walk between them. Three factors affect a high line walk: focus, balance, and altitude. Since the line crossed at the towers’ peaks, Siegrist would have no point of reference to focus on to keep his balance. “If you look straight, you see nothing—just air,” Siegrist says. To fix this, they placed a brightly colored backpack on top of the tower. T MINUS ONE DAY ESSENTIAL PREPARATION A cable car took Siegrist and Ulrich…

Sixteen hours ago surgeons in Operating Room 19 at the Cleveland Clinic began the delicate work of removing the face from a 31-year-old woman who was declared legally and medically dead three days earlier. Soon they will take it to a 21-year-old woman who has waited more than three years for a new face. The face lies on a surgical tray, eyes empty and unseeing, mouth agape, as if exclaiming, ‘Oh!’ For a moment, the face rests in its astonished solitude. Surgeons, residents, and nurses, suddenly silent, gaze at it in awe as clinic staff, like unusually polite paparazzi, move in with cameras to document it. The face, deprived of blood, grows pale. With each second of detachment, it looks more like a 19th-century death mask. Frank Papay, a veteran…

The stand-up comic Hari Kondabolu, who is Indian American, had just finished telling a joke about being brown in America when the laughter was interrupted. “Thank you, come again!” a heckler yelled mockingly in a thick, faux Indian accent. The phrase is instantly recognizable to millions of fans of The Simpsons television show as the signature utterance of Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, who is portrayed unabashedly as a racial stereotype: the thrifty, borderline unscrupulous, and somewhat servile Indian convenience store owner. To Kondabolu, those words at a show in October 2015 were even more familiar. Like many people of South Asian heritage in the United States, Kondabolu had “Thank you, come again!” aimed at him countless times while growing up. Now his irritation found expression in a smiling comeback. “I know you…

SUNDAR IS HIS NAME; Khusi is hers. Matchmakers in New Zealand introduced them—in the red panda habitat of the Wellington Zoo. Objective: reproduction. Global networks of captive-breeding programs share and pair animals, hoping to replenish at-risk species and foster genetic diversity. When Sundar and Khusi came from other zoos to Wellington in 2015, they “got on very well together,” says Maxine Jenkins, the zoo’s carnivore team leader. Even so, starting a red panda family can take time because females are in heat only once a year—for just 24 hours. On a July day in 2017, zookeepers noticed courting behaviors: loud vocalizations, Sundar forcing Khusi from a tree to the ground, trailing her for hours, and then… consummation(s). A few months later, more telltale signs: Khusi looked a little heavier and…

1 Keep her alive When Katie is first admitted to the Cleveland Clinic, she has already undergone multiple procedures to stabilize her. The clinic continues this work, removing shattered bones in her jaw and skull, keeping her windpipe open for breathing, and covering her wounds for healing. 2 Rebuild her nose and skull Doctors construct a nasal cavity, which will help protect Katie’s brain from infection and make eating and breathing easier. Plates and screws from previous operations are taken out, and her open face wound is sealed. Infected bone from her skull is removed. 3 Refine the jaw Katie’s jaw needs hardware to stabilize her face. Her sister is scanned to provide the necessary diimensions to build an appropriately sized jaw made of titanium and grafted leg bone. Composite…

Her hair was dyed purple. She wore spandex. She was dancing alone, the young foreigner, swaying barefoot on the roof of a car parked at an utterly remote frontier in the rocky core of Asia, hard beside the Panj River that saws Tajikistan from Afghanistan—a notorious opium smugglers’ paradise at the southern edge of the Pamir mountains. The car had EU plates. But who was she? A belated pilgrim on the old hippie trail? A mystic? An addict? A tourist? An adventurer? It was impossible to know. I raised my sweat-pickled hat in greeting as I shuffled past, chivying a tired cargo donkey, wind-chapped, and hollow-bellied from camping more than a month among the crags of Central Asia. I am walking across the world. For five years I have been…

The experiences of Asians in the United States, as measured by socioeconomic statistics, vary greatly by country of heritage. The data here encompass the 19 largest Asian groups and include both U.S. citizens and residents, except for the STEM workforce data, which compare foreign-born Asians with U.S.-born citizens. On most measures, Indians are faring notably well, while Burmese, Bhutanese, and Hmong—many having arrived as refugees—struggle economically.…