National Geographic Magazine - UK January 2019

In the 1990s Silicon Valley attracted hordes of inventors, investors, and con artists eager to join the technological revolution. The six-part series Valley of the Boom combines scripted storytelling with documentary interviews to chart the meteoric rise and cataclysmic burst of the dot-com bubble, through the lens of three companies that were trying to change the world with technology. The series premieres on January 13 at 9/8c, on National Geographic.…

From ancient sites hailed as wonders of the world to scenes of deep space, the 2019 National Geographic Almanac takes readers on a 400-page voyage of discovery. Packed with trivia quizzes, infographics, maps, time lines, and images, it’s available where books are sold and at amazon.co.uk.…

WHEN WE ASKED veteran journalist Fran Smith to write about new frontiers in medicine for this month’s issue, the first thing she did was volunteer to be, in her words, “a research guinea pig.” She got her genome sequenced. Smith didn’t hesitate. After all, she told me, she’s never understood some people’s skittishness about medical testing and learning what may—or may not—loom in their health future. “You’re not safer if you don’t know,” she says, sensibly enough. “And you can find out things that are very useful and that you can do something about.” Smith wanted her own experience of what’s come to be known as “precision medicine.” Unlike older medical models that tend to lump patients together and treat them for a category of illness, this approach uses gene…

WHENEVER PHOTOGRAPHER Gabriele Galimberti meets people on his travels, he asks the same question: Can I see what’s in your medicine cabinet? Some are shy; others proud to do so. “The medicines reveal who the people are,” says Galimberti. “Their desires, their wants, their diseases. It’s very intimate.” What can our medicines say about us? For one, how affluent we are. Cabinets in developed countries tend to overflow with pharmaceuticals. People in less developed countries collect medications more slowly or not at all. A Haitian woman had not a single pill in the house: “If I get sick, I’ll buy a pill from the street vendor,” she said. The medicine cabinet series, “Home Pharma,” is part of a larger ongoing project, called “Happy Pills,” in which Galimberti and three colleagues…

I STOPPED RECEIVING CALLS on my cell phone while I was training to be a doctor. My friends knew better. My life was not my own. As a resident I sometimes worked nearly a hundred hours a week, overseeing as many as 18 patients at once. Even my mom stopped calling me. I used my phone instead for medical apps—the one that could tell me which antibiotic to prescribe for which bug, the calculator that helped me determine treatments, the app that stored lab values I couldn’t remember. Then one day my cell phone rang. I was on rounds seeing patients and stepped out to the hall. I didn’t recognize the number, but the area code was Washington, D.C. This call, I thought, must be important. “Yes?” I whispered in…

MICHAEL ROIZEN, M.D., is chief wellness officer at the Cleveland Clinic and a New York Times best-selling author. MICHAEL CRUPAIN, M.D., is chief medical officer for television’s The Dr. Oz Show. Both have long linked a better diet with better health. But their new book, What to Eat When, says emerging science confirms that “when you eat is as essential as what you eat for maintaining a good weight, preventing and curing some diseases, and living a long, energetic, and happy life.” Ahead of the book’s December release, the doctor-authors answered questions for National Geographic. Tell us about the science behind your approach to eating. We’re all familiar with our biological clocks—the circadian rhythm that sends out chemical signals at certain times to help us wake, sleep, and do other…