Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2019 i National Geographic Magazine - UK

NAT GEO TV Listening to The Story of God as Told in Many Lands In his series’ third season, Morgan Freeman explores how different faiths regard their central figures, both deities and demons. His journey includes visits to Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral to see what’s said to be the crown of thorns worn by Jesus and to Vietnam’s Tay Ninh Province for a prayer service at a Cao Dai temple (above). Watch new episodes of The Story of God at 9/8c Tuesdays through April 9 and past episodes on the Nat Geo TV app and on demand. TELEVISION How Species Fare on Our Hostile Planet As Earth’s climate becomes more volatile, animals must adapt. See their struggles to survive in a six-part documentary hosted by adventurer Bear Grylls. Hostile Planet…

THE PURPOSE OF CITIES is to bring people together. In the 20th century, we blew them apart. One day last year, Peter Calthorpe took me on a drive through some of the wreckage. He wanted to show me how he proposes to make cities whole again. ¶ Calthorpe is an architect who in the late 1970s helped design one of the first energy-efficient state office buildings, which still stands in Sacramento, California. But he soon widened his focus. “If you really want to affect environmental outcomes and social outcomes, it’s not shaping a single building that matters,” he says. “It’s shaping a community.” ¶ Today he runs a small but globally influential urban design firm, Calthorpe Associates. In his spare, airy office in Berkeley, the charter of the Congress for…

PHOTOS FROM OUR COMMUNITY WHO Yu, a camera engineer living in Shenzhen, China WHERE The Choi Hung public housing complex in Hong Kong’s Kowloon district. Its full Chinese name translates to Rainbow Village. WHAT Using a Nikon D610 camera with a 20mm F1.8 lens While on vacation in Hong Kong, Yu visited the Choi Hung housing complex. The cluster of multicolored buildings is a popular photographic destination, appearing frequently on Instagram. Yu arrived at noon, hoping the midday sun would minimize shadows on the facades. Near one building, he noticed laundry hung out to dry (next to a sign that said no laundry!). The drying clothes added a new dimension—and later, when he looked at this shot, he liked picturing the shirts and pants as emoji. Join National Geographic’s Your…

THE DISCOVERIES OF TODAY THAT WILL DEFINE THE WORLD OF TOMORROW NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC VOL. 235 NO.4 FOR MOST OF THE SIX MILLION YEARS of human evolution, all humans and protohumans lived like somewhat glorified chimpanzees, at low population densities, scattered over the landscape as families or small bands. Only within the past 6,000 years, a small fraction of human history, did some of our ancestors come together in cities. But today more than half the world’s people live in these new settings, some of which have tens of millions of inhabitants. Urban life involves trade-offs. We may gain big benefits in return for suffering big disadvantages. Let’s consider two of them: the trade-off between individual freedom and community interests, and the trade-off between social ties and anonymity. To understand the…

DESIGNING TO SCALE URBAN HUBS In a densely developed hub, sustainable land use within and outside its borders helps people thrive by providing water, food, and recreation. High-capacity transit reduces emissions and speeds commute times. SPONGE CITY According to SOM’s design, all parks and infrastructure allow water to percolate through soil to recharge the water table. Such “sponge city” measures are already being tested in Shanghai. PRINCIPLES OF CITY DESIGN ECOLOGY The future city is designed around natural features and forces, protecting wildlife habitat and natural resources. Based on a unified vision for the region, the city is compact and dense to limit impacts on the ecosystem. WATER Protecting upland water systems and rigorous collection and cleansing of stormwater improve water quality. Wetland restoration and sponge-city measures revive habitats and…

EARLY ON A COLD JUNE MORNING, I stood in darkness near the west bank of Tokyo’s Sumida River, watching tourists pull on bright nylon vests. They were green and glaring yellow, the sort of thing you’d wear in a pickup soccer game, as though the 70 shivering visitors from South Africa, China, Malaysia, Spain, and Russia had traveled all that way to chase balls along the gritty waterfront. ¶ It was an hour or two before dawn, and we were actually suiting up for a tour of Tsukiji Shijo, which at the time was the largest fish market in the world. Tsukiji was a labyrinth of warehouses, freezers, loading docks, auction blocks, and vendor stalls, and it had fed the city for nearly a century. It had also become—to the…

During your morning jog, sensors in your wearable detect a medical anomaly. The data is sent to your electronic health records where algorithms flag it up as a potential problem, alerting your doctor. Equipped with up-to-date details of your lifestyle, medical history, and your fully mapped genome, AI analysis offers a diagnosis. Your doctor videocalls you and suggests precautionary tests. In our hightech healthcare future, computers could know what’s wrong with us before we even know we’re sick. At the start of the 20th century many illnesses went unidentified, the human body was largely unmapped, nutrition was widely misunderstood, and medical treatments remained limited. Progress has been rapid. The mapping of our genomes and the development of CT and MRI scans have given us unparalleled medical insight. Antibiotics have revolutionized…

THIS TINY PIGEON is a New York City native—but his ancestors were not. According to the New York Public Library, Europeans brought pigeons to U.S. shores, probably in the 1600s, to raise as food or as a hobby. Some pigeons escaped and made their way to cities, where the ledges of tall buildings were as hospitable for nesting as the cliffs of their wild homes. Unlike bird species with specialized diets, pigeons can thrive on almost anything, including humans’ litter and leftovers. Small wonder that the world pigeon population is estimated at 400 million, with more than a million—and perhaps as many as seven million—of those in New York City.…

STANDING IN A SLIVER OF SHADE cast by a solar streetlamp, David Kwaje plugs statistics into his smartphone. ¶ Hidden from the harsh midday sun, he can see downhill to a row of white warehouses where residents collect food rations and beyond to two large tanks that supply water to roadside taps, yellow jerry cans radiating in all directions. ¶ All week Kwaje has been walking along dirt roads, plotting every business, church, school, clinic, water tap, and light source on a digital map. At each stop he marks the location and asks detailed questions: Does your school have running water? What hours is this store open? How many doctors does the clinic have? By the time he and a half dozen other mappers finish, they’ll have created an opensource…

RATS ARE OUR SHADOW SELVES. We live on the surface of the city; they generally live below. We mostly work by day; they mostly work by night. But nearly everywhere that people live, rats live too. ¶ In Seattle, where I grew up, the rats excel at climbing sewer pipes—from the inside. Somewhere in my hometown right now, a long, wet Norway rat is poking its twitchy pink nose above the water surface in a toilet bowl. Seattle also has another species, roof rats, which nest in trees and skitter along telephone lines. In the Middle Ages, they may have transmitted plague. ¶ From Seattle to Buenos Aires, urban rat populations are rising—as much as 15 to 20 percent in the past decade, according to one expert. Charismatic animals like…