Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2019 i National Geographic Magazine - UK

BERNDNAUT SMILDE CREATES fluffy clouds in locations where nature never would place them. The Dutch artist’s sculptures last five seconds—10 seconds tops—before they disappear. Smilde’s ongoing project, called “Nimbus,” explores the visual effects of clouds. A church or museum interior looks different behind a cloud, and an everyday cloud is peculiar in a castle or a canyon. Each scene is made more intense by lasting only moments. The ingredients for Smilde’s clouds: just smoke and water vapor. He requires a cold and damp space with no air circulation, lest the clouds never form or fall straight to the ground. He mists an area with a spray bottle to put water vapor into the air. Then he turns on fog machines that spout tiny particles, and the vapor condenses around them.…

NORTHERN INDIA embraces a sprawling network of waters, from the muddy tributaries of the Indus in the west to the banks of the sacred Ganges coiling along its central plains and the miles-wide currents of the Brahmaputra in the east. Creeks, canals, wetlands, dams, and swollen torrents help irrigate the most populous democracy on Earth. Yet this river-etched heartland is the scene of one of the most dire water crises today. Last year, a government study revealed that nearly half India’s population—some 600 million people—ekes by on scarce or polluted supplies of water. As many as 200,000 Indians die annually from the effects of water contamination. And it’s been projected that more than 20 major cities—Delhi, Bangalore, and Hyderabad among them—will zero out their groundwater stores in less than two…

The knot of microfibers above is less than four millimeters across, roughly the size of tiny aquatic organisms known as plankton. Every week scientist Richard Kirby sets sail from the coast of Plymouth, England, trailing a net behind his yellow boat to gather plankton—but lately he finds nearly as much plastic in his catch. More than 600,000 tons of plastic microfibers are estimated to enter the ocean each year, shed from fleece, polyester, and other synthetic fabrics during washing. Plankton may eat them or get tangled in them, and the ecological impacts are under study. “Our pollution has extended right down to the bottom of the marine food chain,” Kirby says. “We’ve changed the plankton for the foreseeable future, for hundreds of years or possibly thousands.”…

“I feel a real connection with Mozambique,” says Shannon. “It reminds me of home - there’s a lot of similarities to the Australian Outback, with its beautiful red dirt and dust, highlighted against the blue sky.” Northeastern Mozambique’s sanguine earth has concealed a precious secret for millennia: the world’s biggest deposit of rubies; natural gemstones that formed here over five hundred million years ago. Today, Gemfields’ Montepuez Ruby Mine (MRM) produces over half of the global ruby supply, employs 1,110 local people, and funds health, education and agricultural projects that are helping to transform lives in this rural community. “Here, like so many remote regions across Africa, access to schooling, healthcare and basic facilities have been very limited,” explains Shannon. “The new MRM mobile health clinic has made high-quality care…

In her office on the 17th floor of MIT’s Building 54, Sara Seager is about as close to space as you can get in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From her window, she can see across the Charles River to downtown Boston in one direction and past Fenway Park in the other. Inside, her view extends to the Milky Way and beyond. Seager, 47, is an astrophysicist. Her specialty is exoplanets, namely all the planets in the universe except the ones you already know about revolving around our sun. On a blackboard, she has sketched an equation she thought up to estimate the chances of detecting life on such a planet. Beneath another blackboard filled with more equations is a clutter of memorabilia, including a vial containing some glossy black shards. “It’s a…

On Earth, chlorophyll in photosynthesizing plants absorbs red and blue light, so vegetation appears green. On other living worlds, though, photosynthesis might use a different pigment. The lavender hue of this hypothetical exoplanet, viewed from its icy moon, derives from a pigment called retinal, which is also able to convert light to metabolic energy and may have preceded chlorophyll in Earth’s early history.…

Breakthrough Starshot is an ambitious plan in development to send tiny probes on a 20-year journey to the exoplanet Proxima Centauri b. But even a featherweight spacecraft needs fuel. The farther it goes, the more it needs. The proposed solution? Forget fuel: Launch it from an orbiting satellite and propel it with Earth-based lasers. 1 The mother ship Situated in low Earth orbit, a satellite houses thousands of probes. When the individual probes are released, their sails automatically unfurl. 2 Phased lasers On Earth, nearly a billion laser beams are directed at a probe to create a pulse with the power of 100 gigawatts, lasting several minutes. 3 Going interstellar Those few minutes are just enough to accelerate the probe to one-fifth the speed of light and into the vacuum…

CECILIA MARTÍNEZ WAS 15 in 1998 when she slipped into Arizona from Mexico. She came with no family and arrived to none, striking out on her own, scraping by on babysitting and bagging groceries. It was hard but preferable to her native El Salvador: “I came to work. Everyone said you could make a better life here.” Indeed she has. Three years after she arrived, Martínez received temporary protected status (TPS), an immigration classification given to people from countries where conditions—such as armed conflict or natural disaster—would make returning unsafe. El Salvador qualifies: In 2001 two catastrophic earthquakes struck, and since then escalating warfare among gangs, police, and the military has made the nation one of the world’s deadliest outside of war zones. Martínez is among the 200,000 Salvadorans who…

LENGTH: 20 feet WEIGHT: 1.4 to 4 tons LOCATION: Montana AGE: 76 million years old IN THE 1 984 FILM GHOSTBUSTERS, a ragtag crew of parapsychologists does battle with Zuul, a hellhound with a gargoyle’s face. Minions possessed by the fictional beast proclaim, “There is only Zuul!” But in real life, scientists have discovered a doppelgänger: Zuul crurivastator, a new genus and species of dinosaur with movie-monster looks. The creature is the most complete ankylosaurid—a type of club-tailed armored dinosaur—ever found in North America. It’s also amazingly preserved. Zuul’s armor fossilized in place, down to the furrowed soft tissues sheathing it. Preserved damage on Zuul’s flank may even chronicle its battles with other ankylosaurids. “It’s beyond our wildest dreams,” says David Evans, the Royal Ontario Museum paleontologist who is leading the…

ILLUMINATING THE MYSTERIES—AND WONDERS—ALL AROUND US EVERY DAY SPECIES The African elephant genus includes two species: the bush elephant Loxodonta africana and the forest elephant Loxodonta cyclotis. RANGE African bush elephants primarily inhabit the dry, grassy plains of East Africa, where temperatures often exceed 85° Fahrenheit. 1 A smoother start Elephants are born with an uncracked skin surface and an uneven sublayer (dermis) with protrusions known as papillae. When skin cells die, instead of sloughing off, they accumulate. 2 Supersoaked The buildup of cracked layers creates a network of channels in which water moves by capillary action. Skin like this can retain up to 10 times as much water as a smooth surface. 3 Mud shield against parasites The pattern of cracks helps keep mud and water from sliding off…

The Kepler telescope, which detected thousands of exoplanets, was retired last year when it ran out of fuel, but new telescopes promise dramatic improvements in the hunt. The telescopes shown here are expected to significantly advance our ability to detect signs of habitability thousands of light-years away. In addition to a planet’s size and distance from its star, they might be able to study its terrain and check for cloud cover. TERRESTRIAL INSTRUMENTS Ground-based scopes can hold heavy, powerful optics that are comparatively easy to maintain. But Earth’s atmosphere filters and distorts starlight, limiting what these telescopes can see in outer space. ORBITAL INSTRUMENTS Away from Earth’s atmosphere, telescopes can detect frequencies and wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum. But they must be small enough to launch, and they fly too…

Until now, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has focused on detecting an incoming radio signal. With increasing computational power and more sensitive telescopes, researchers are expanding the search to optical and infrared emissions, targeting the “technosignatures” of advanced civilizations. These could include laser pulses, polluting gases, or megastructures built around a nearby star to harness its energy.…

Criminal gangs in El Salvador command tens of thousands of members, and their battle for supremacy has fractured this tiny country. Generations of migrants have carved out lives for their families in the U.S., far from the violence that continues to plague their homelands. The deportees from the United States file out of the buses with their heads down, stripped of belts and shoelaces like criminals. Rounded up from immigration detention centers around the country, they’d been boarded onto an unmarked jet near the Texas-Mexico border early in the morning and flown more than 1,100 miles to an airport outside El Salvador’s capital, San Salvador. In just four hours a perilous journey north that had taken many of the migrants years to prepare for and weeks to complete was undone.…

EXPLORERS ARE REVEALING THE SECRETS OF SOME OF THE BIGGEST, MOST MYSTERIOUS CAVES ON EARTH. Late on a sweltering morning in April, two slim British cavers named Frank and Cookie lowered themselves into a slick, humid pit deep below Borneo’s rainforest. CLIMBING DOWN PAST AN ANCIENT HEAP of bird guano and pushing through a gallery of gleaming pillars the color of old bone, the pair were hoping to make history. They had crawled into Cave of the Winds, deep inside a cave system known as Clearwater, where they would search for a passage to Racer Cave, part of the Racer-Easter system. Connecting the two would create a “super system,” one of the longest subterranean labyrinths on the planet. As the men wormed down, drilling and hammering bolts into the slick…

With water misters and smoke machines, Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde creates the vaporous puffs—and poses them. LOOKING AT THE EARTH FROM EVERY POSSIBLE ANGLE…

In this illustration, an exoplanet orbits in front of a star much like the sun. One way to find out if a planet might contain life is to look for telltale signs called biosignatures. As starlight reflects off a planet or passes through its atmosphere, shown here in blue, gases absorb specific wavelengths. The spectrum observed through a telescope could show whether gases associated with life, such as oxygen, carbon dioxide, or methane, are present.…

Earth supports life in part because its terrain is rocky, it doesn’t receive too much solar radiation, and its distance from the sun allows water to be in a liquid state. So far, 47 exoplanets have been found that fit this profile. But that number will grow as new telescopes search for planets in broader swaths of the galaxy than ever before.…

El Salvador may be Central America’s smallest country, but it’s also the most densely populated and one of the deadliest—long past the end of its 1980-1992 civil war. In August 2015 there was a homicide every hour. The following years have offered little reprieve, with nearly 4,000 homicides in 2017. The high count has multiple causes, including gang activity, drug trafficking, and extrajudicial killings by police and military forces. Fleeing to the U.S. The number of Salvadorans in the U.S. is equal to one-fifth of El Salvador’s current population. Though some immigrants lack legal status, the safety and opportunities found in the U.S. outweigh the risk of deportation. A History of Violence The U.S. supported the Salvadoran government in a civil war during which an estimated 75,000 people died, 8,000…

If there were a competition for the world’s weirdest insect, treehoppers would have a clear shot at first place. See one for the first time and you’re sure to wonder, What are those strange protrusions sprouting from its body? Many treehoppers flaunt outlandish outcroppings, such as the helicopter-like orbs of Bocydium sp. (above). Others play it coy, mimicking thorns, leaves, or insect droppings. Still others impersonate ants or wasps. Forty-plus named species, as well as another 700 or so awaiting scientific description, resemble drops of rainwater. Those singular shapes, insect anatomists explain, stem from the treehopper’s specially modified pronotum—a section of the thorax that in other insects resembles a small, shield-like plate. But treehoppers are the creative kids in their class, with their pronota arching into grotesque spires or globes,…