Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2018 i National Geographic Magazine - UK

FOR THE PAST 130 YEARS, National Geographic magazine has offered its readers a portal to the farthest reaches of the Earth, and beyond. Our founders understood the power of storytelling: Since our first issue was published in September 1888, we’ve been the voice of the National Geographic Society, forming a powerful partnership that has helped shape the way our readers see the world—and themselves. To mark our anniversary, we worked with a range of notable British explorers and changemakers, who joined the National Geographic family as guest editors. They included Ranulph Fiennes, Brian Cox, Maria Balshaw, Ellen MacArthur, Mo Farah, and Tim Peake. As we bring this program to a close, we want to shine a spotlight on the inspirational work of National Geographic grantees. The yellow border is…

PAUL ROSE LEFT SCHOOL with a single qualification in metalwork and a mind fueled by dreams of adventure. After training as a diving and climbing instructor, he’d found his life’s calling. “I realized scientific expeditions needed non-scientists as support,” he says. “Then by chance I met someone who worked for the British Antarctic Survey and he offered me a job.” Three decades later Rose is one of the world’s leading polar and undersea explorers—and an expedition leader on National Geographic’s Pristine Seas project. “It all started with Enric Sala in 2008,” he says. “Enric felt he was writing the ocean’s obituary while researching it, so he launched Pristine Seas to explore and protect its last wild places. We’ve since become very good at it.” That may be an understatement: 26…

The heat is merciless among the barren hills of the Judaean desert near the shore of the Dead Sea. But it’s mercifully cool inside the cave where Randall Price lies on his stomach, staring at the crevice where just yesterday he discovered a 2,000-year-old bronze cooking pot. “This cave was robbed by Bedouins maybe 40 years ago,” explains Price, an American archaeologist and research professor at Liberty University in Virginia. “Fortunately for us, they didn’t dig very deep. Our hope is that if we keep digging, we hit the mother lode.” Anyone who’s heard of these famed caves near the ancient Jewish settlement of Qumran knows what mother lode Price has in mind. In 1947 young Bedouin goat herders peered into a nearby cavern and made one of the biggest…

The palm fruit The African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis) is native to Africa but has been introduced all over the world. The tree is an oil-producing machine with some 20 fruit bunches, found at the top of its trunk, each containing up to 3,000 palm fruits. Processing palm The flesh of the palm fruit and the kernel (once crushed) both produce oil. After refining, the different oils are modified into varying products. GLYCEROLYSIS Chemical bonds broken with glycerol to keep oil from separating from water INTERESTERIFICATION (IE) Fatty acids rearranged to change melting point DISTILLATION Oil heated and cooled to extract fatty acids FRACTIONATION Oil separated into liquids (oleins) and solids (stearins) REFINING Impurities removed from oil CRUSHING Kernel cracked to remove shell and then crushed and pressed MILLING Palm…

The problem began with one word: “America.” That word, honoring Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, was coined in Europe in 1507, when it was used on a map of the New World. But back then, the only Americans were indigenous. It was our world, but it wasn’t our word. By the time the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, white people were simply referred to as “the Americans.” My ancestors were called American Indians. It’s a label twisted by accidents of history: The Italian explorer who gets his name on two continents and another Italian, Christopher Columbus, who dubbed indigenous people “Indians,” presumably because he thought he was in the East Indies. American Indian: Two labels we didn’t choose. We might have been called something else. Columbus wrote on October…

The puma population in Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park is booming, but the protected cats are straying beyond park borders to prey on livestock. Their travels seem to be haphazard: In a survey of Chilean ranchers near the park, most had seen pumas on their land, but others hadn’t seen any.…

Paleoanthropologist and National Geographic Emerging Explorer Ella Al-Shamahi wants to uncover why we are the only species of hominin left walking the Earth. Her search for answers recently led her to the island of Socotra in war-torn Yemen, her ancestral homeland, to look for prehistoric caves. Birmingham-born Al-Shamahi is also a stand-up comic. She considers humor a way to present her scientific findings to a wider audience. “Not many people have jokes about land mines and caves. If my work gets too dark, I take a moment to remember the funny,” she says.…

Parrots Crack Each Other Up New Zealand’s naturally playful keas get their funny bones tickled when other parrots make a specific call, Nature reports. The gentle, low warble sends keas into fits of “laughter,” making them the first non-mammal known to show contagious emotion, as rats, chimps, and humans do.…

1 Activation A caterpillar eats often and grows quickly. It molts several times, each molt marking a new larval stage, until it reaches maturity. Then its hormones shift, signaling the onset of the chrysalis phase. 2 Transformation Once it’s big enough, a caterpillar finds a safe spot and often attaches itself to it with silk. A final molt reveals a shell called a chrysalis; inside, the insect changes dramatically in preparation for adult life. 3 Emergence The butterfly sucks in air until its chrysalis breaks open. It then flaps its wings for several hours to dry them and to circulate blood before flying off in search of a mate. METAMORPHOSIS IS A RADICAL CHANGE in form and function. Frogs and sea urchins metamorphose. Many insects do too, shifting from crawling…

CONSTRUCTING THE CANONS The “divine library” is the work of more than 35 authors spanning at least a millennium. Determining which writings should be included in the official canon of holy Scripture took hundreds of years. MANUSCRIPT EVOLUTION For thousands of years sacred Scripture was laboriously copied character by character. Tradition and location influenced what materials were used.…

Oil palms grow best in the steamy tropics, where rainfall and sunshine are abundant. Most of the world’s palm oil comes from Southeast Asia, but production is rapidly expanding in Africa, the trees’ original home. Borneo today Industrial oil palm plantations have caused 47 percent of the deforestation on the island since 2000. Some 877,000 acres are currently lost each year. Gabon’s future Little of Gabon’s land is planted with oil palms. But as it looks to diversify its economy beyond petroleum, Gabon is exploring how to embrace the cash crop sustainably. MATTHEW W. CHWASTYK AND RYAN T. WILLIAMS, NGM STAFF SOURCES: USDA; DAVID GAVEAU AND OTHERS, BORNEO ATLAS, CENTER FOR INTERNATIONAL FORESTRY RESEARCH; INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR APPLIED SYSTEMS ANALYSIS…

Recuerdo Morco was 22 when he first saw snow. Wrapped in four layers of coveralls and parkas, he looked up into the swirling sky as huge flakes settled onto the deck of his cargo ship. He carved his girlfriend’s name into the snow and circled it with a heart. Recuerdo had grown up in the Philippines on a tropical island rimmed with white sand and coconut palms. Standing on the cargo ship slicing through the icy waters near the Arctic Circle, snowflakes tickling his face, was a dream come true. “I’m really here,” he thought. They pulled into the port of Kemi, Finland, in the wake of an icebreaker, jagged blocks of white peeling off the sides of their ship. Recuerdo stepped ashore and went on what he calls the…

Through the medium of film, Bertie Gregory wants to recruit others who care about animals as much as he does. The 25-year-old National Geographic Young Explorer recently captured video and images of the abundant wildlife that makes the subantarctic island of South Georgia such a powerful conservation success story. “After explorers arrived in the 1700s, the island’s seals were killed for their fur,” says Gregory, who spent three weeks on the island while filming his digital wild_life series for National Geographic. “They also hunted its whales and introduced rats that decimated its birdlife.” Protections were put into place, and today whales are returning, seals are thriving, and the island has been declared rat free. “South Georgia is proof that if we all care enough, and invest enough time, wildlife can…

THE WORLD’S RICHEST countries, such as Luxembourg and the United States, have average incomes per person about 100 times higher than in the poorest countries, such as Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. That’s a tragedy for poor countries. Is it also a looming tragedy for rich ones? Until recently all those poor people elsewhere were no threat to rich countries. “They” out there didn’t know much about our lifestyle—and even if they did and became angry, they couldn’t do anything about it. But today, poor remote countries are able to create problems for rich ones, and the reasons can be summed up in a word: globalization. As a result of the increased connections among all parts of the world, people in developing countries know more about differences…

There’s a perception that evolution moves from simple to complex, but bird nests are an exception. Scientists have discovered that bowl-shaped nests (above right) probably evolved from roofed nests (above left) at least four separate times in the history of bird species. A study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B found that the common ancestor of the passerine group—which encompasses 60 percent of species, including all songbirds—constructed domed nests. Today three-quarters of them build open nests, which are generally easier to fashion but expose the eggs to predators and the elements. This finding, says study author Jordan Price of St. Mary’s College of Maryland, illustrates how a trait’s current prevalence “does not necessarily indicate the order of events during its evolutionary history.”…

TELEVISION Progress on MARS Watch season two of the docudrama series MARS. Episodes air Mondays at 9/8c through December 17, on National Geographic.…

Deceased: Adult male lion, roughly 14 years old, with a dark mane, known to researchers—and to readers of National Geographic magazine—as C-Boy. Dead of natural causes, his body discovered by a tour driver in the backcountry of Serengeti National Park, Tanzania, in early June 2018. His demise mourned by those who knew and read about him; his longevity and force of character a marvel to same. THE CATEGORY “NATURAL CAUSES,” in the case of African lions, includes the kind of murder and mayhem that occurs routinely among competing members of the species. As the lion expert Craig Packer once told me, “The number one cause of death for lions, in an undisturbed environment, is other lions.” This was about five years ago, when photographer Michael “Nick” Nichols and I were…

IN southwestern Gabon, the old-growth forest stretches hundreds of miles. One January morning I disembark from a narrow boat on the shore of the Ngounié River with a few employees of Olam, a Singapore-based agribusiness company. Following elephant tracks, we plunge into the forest. We pass towering, ancient trees, chimpanzee nests, piles of day-old gorilla dung. Monkeys scamper overhead. A young Olam ranger yanks off his boots and climbs barefoot up a trunk, returning with handfuls of pink, plumlike fruits. Wandering farther we find wild mangoes, kola nuts, bark that smells of garlic. At a sun-dappled clearing, fish splash in a watering hole. The trees around it have been scratched by elephant tusks. To stand here in the slanting sunlight and imagine all this being razed is heart-stopping. The place…

Native American photographers are pushing back against portrayals of their culture by non-natives, capturing scenes that reflect alternative views of indigenous life. Madeline Sayet grew up on native land in southern Connecticut, where Mohegans have lived for thousands of years. The daughter of a tribal historian and a defense lawyer, she heard tales of Chahnameed, a Mohegan trickster character. When she turned seven, her grandfather gave her Shakespeare’s complete works for her birthday. “Almost as early as I had traditional native stories, I also had Shakespeare,” Sayet says, recalling her earliest encounters with the bard. Sayet was 14 when she first acted in a Shakespeare play, appearing as Iris in The Tempest. Later she was in a production of Macbeth and played Juliet in Romeo and Juliet. Now, at 28, she’s…

The first mountain lion I set eyes on was a heavily muscled creature, snarling with fear, 20 feet up a pine tree in central Utah. Treed by hounds, the animal was shot by a federal employee protecting a rancher’s sheep. If that encounter was pure Sam Peckinpah, my next sighting of the elusive cats—in Chile, where they’re known as pumas—would be straight out of a storybook. Wedged between shrubs on a wind-blasted slope just outside southern Chile’s Torres del Paine National Park, I watch three tawny cubs tumble and race along the shore of an aquamarine lake, testing their strength, their teeth, their social status. Now and then their mother, known as Sarmiento, stops to assess the situation: Her green eyes, circumscribed with black eyeliner, are calm, her thick tail…