Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2019 i National Geographic Magazine - UK

I FIRST WENT TO NORM ANDY in 1974. I was a 27-year-old news photographer shooting the French presidential election, and my visit happened to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the D-Day landings. I was amazed that the French still welcomed American veterans as their liberators—a warm feeling between the countries that still exists today. Since that trip, I’ve returned to the beaches nearly a dozen times in the past half century, with each visit observing those hallowed sands and bearing witness to how the past refuses to be erased. I’ve met countless veterans who at first seem perfectly ordinary, like the guys I grew up with who ran the hardware store or pharmacy. I’ve had to pull their extraordinary stories out of them—each one a remarkable memory of a…

WHAT WOULD A SCARY movie be without the ominous creak of floorboards? Sound effects—called Foley—add crucial value to any film. “The challenge,” says Foley artist John Roesch, “is to create something in sync with the picture that is totally believable.” Step one: watching a scene in silence. “I hear the sound in my mind,” says Roesch. Then with his partners, Shelley Roden and Scott Curtis, he tinkers with countless gadgets and props at the Skywalker Sound studio in Marin County, California, to try to replicate it. To “Foley” an ice-skating scene, for example, he drags crampons across concrete. And if the plot should take a perilous turn? Squeezing a water-soaked chamois cloth, says Roesch, makes the perfect “blood gooshy” sound.…

I’ve come back to check on a baby. Just after dusk I’m in a car lumbering down a muddy road in the rain, past rows of shackled elephants, their trunks swaying. I was here five hours before, when the sun was high and hot and tourists were on elephants’ backs. Walking now, I can barely see the path in the glow of my phone’s flashlight. When the wooden fence post of the stall stops me short, I point my light down and follow a current of rainwater across the concrete floor until it washes up against three large, gray feet. A fourth foot hovers above the surface, tethered tightly by a short chain and choked by a ring of metal spikes. When the elephant tires and puts her foot down,…

Pangolins—scaly, shy, and sensitive—are believed to be the world’s most trafficked nonhuman mammals. Their scales, which are made of keratin (the material in fingernails), have no scientifically proven curative properties but are in demand for use in traditional Chinese medicine. All eight species are threatened with extinction, despite a 2017 ban on international commercial trade, and experts estimate that more than a million pangolins were poached from 2000 through 2013. AFRICAN SPECIES Temminck’s ground pangolin Smutsia temminckii This ground pangolin is the only species that regularly walks on hind legs, using its large tail as a counterbalance. This keeps its front claws sharp for digging. Black-bellied pangolin Phataginus tetradactyla The smallest of the eight species and the only one with black skin, this pangolin has 47 vertebrae in its tail,…

VOLCANIC TITANS The volcanoes shown are among those most likely to threaten humans. (At press time, an eruption of Popocatépetl raised the alert level to one below mandatory evacuation.) The latest eruption and the number of people living within 60 miles are noted. Each mountain is scaled to show prominence—how far it rises above its immediate surroundings.…

IMFINZI SIGNIFICANTLY REDUCED THE CHANCE OF LUNG CANCER SPREADING IMFINZI may not work for everyone. IMFINZI was studied in 713 patients with unresectable Stage 3 NSCLC who completed at least 2 cycles of chemotherapy that contained platinum given at the same time (concurrent) as radiation before starting the trial. Patients in the study had good performance status (WHO 0 or 1). IMFINZI was tested against placebo (no medication). The main goal of the trial was to measure the length of time people remained progression free (without cancer growing or spreading) and overall survival. At the time of analysis, overall survival comparison was not yet available. This trial is still ongoing. WHO IS IMFINZI FOR? IMFINZI® (durvalumab) is a prescription medicine used to treat a type of lung cancer called non-small…

ILLUMINATING THE MYSTERIES—AND WONDERS—ALL AROUND US EVERY DAY NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC VOL. 235 NO. 6 ‘IN A CAVE THERE’S NO WAY TO GET A SIGNAL. THERE’S NO WAY TO TALK WITH ANYBODY EXCEPT THE PEOPLE AROUND YOU.’—Alessandro Cerè ITALIAN PHYSICIST and photographer Alessandro Cerè took a break from work at the Centre for Quantum Technologies in Singapore to venture into Hang En (pictured) and Hang Son Doong, two of the top three largest known caves in the world. To get there, a punishing path and 90 percent humidity test even the fittest hiker. T MINUS ONE MONTH A WALK FOR THE FORTUNATE FEW Only a limited number of travelers are allowed to visit these caves each year, but Cerè snagged a last-minute spot through a friend of a friend. Looking at…

Sgt. Vimbai Kumire holds up a photo of a dead leopard on her phone. She stares at the image as the truck she’s riding in bounces over the rutted road. The cat’s neck is slashed and its bloody paws hang slack. “Before this job, I didn’t think about the animals,” she says. Now Kumire, 33, and her all-female wildlife ranger team, the Akashinga, are among the animals’ fiercest protectors. The rangers are an arm of the nonprofit International Anti-Poaching Foundation, which manages Zimbabwe’s Phundundu Wildlife Area, a 115-square-mile former trophy hunting tract in the Zambezi Valley ecosystem. The greater region has lost thousands of elephants to poachers over the last two decades. The Akashinga (“brave ones” in the Shona language) patrol Phundundu, which borders 29 communities. The proximity of people…

‘There’s nothing like it in any other ocean,’ says marine biologist Brian Lapointe. ‘There’s nowhere else on our blue planet that supports such diversity in the middle of the ocean—and it’s because of the weed.’ LAPOINTE IS TALKING about a floating seaweed known as sargassum in a region of the Atlantic called the Sargasso Sea. The boundaries of this sea are vague, defined not by landmasses but by five major currents that swirl in a clockwise embrace around Bermuda. Far from any mainland, its waters are nutrient poor and therefore exceptionally clear and stunningly blue. The Sargasso Sea, part of the vast whirlpool known as the North Atlantic gyre, often has been described as an oceanic desert—and it would appear to be, if it weren’t for the floating mats of…

LOOKING AT THE EARTH FROM EVERY POSSIBLE ANGLE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC VOL. 235 NO. 6…

The World Health Organization lists Chagas, sleeping sickness, and Guinea worm disease among “neglected tropical diseases.” But there’s progress reining them in thanks to successful interventions: controlling for disease vectors, ensuring that people can filter their water, and getting infected people access to health care. Sleeping sickness Parasites enter the body through tsetse fly (left) bites. 1999: 27,862 chronic cases 2017: 1,420 chronic cases Guinea worm disease Guinea worm larvae enter the body via drinking water. 1989: 892,055 infected 2018: 28 infected Chagas disease 1990: 30 million infected 2010: 6 to 8 million infected…

He’s the size of a golden retrıever puppy and covered with scales. With his tail stretched out parallel to the ground for balance, Tamuda holds his little arms in front of him like a T. rex. The caretaker gently guides the young pangolin toward a dirt mound that he starts to break apart with a pick. Look, he encourages Tamuda: ants. Tamuda catches on and begins to eat, his nearly body-length tongue searching the crevices, his long claws mimicking the pick. After a few minutes of eating, it’s time to move on. Tamuda lumbers a little farther. The caretaker shows him a new ant mound. This time the pangolin isn’t interested. He flops on his side like a toddler about to throw a tantrum. He curls his body around the…

WITHIN THE ROCKY BASIN of the Pacific, volcanoes and earthquakes have been causing death and destruction for millennia. The tectonic cycle unleashes enormous energy here, in seismic and volcanic events that change the face of the globe. Today, with booming growth in Asia and parts of the Americas, more people live close to calamity than ever before. On just one island in Indonesia—Java, shown here—41 active volcanoes threaten some 151 million people. As Earth’s population swells toward eight billion, the threats from this Ring of Fire will compound.…

I CAN ALMOST FEEL the sizzle of energy as sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water work the magic of photosynthesis while I drift, wrapped in a golden curtain of sargassum, just off Bermuda. I revel in the sensation and am thrilled to see tiny bubbles of oxygen, a by-product of photosynthesis, rise to the surface and join the oxygen produced by trillions of diatoms, blue-green bacteria, and other phytoplankton in the surrounding ultraclear water. As a living laboratory, the Sargasso Sea—with its masses of sargassum and their cargoes of lilliputian creatures—has yielded important findings about how and why the ocean matters to everyone, everywhere, all the time. It was in 1986 that Prochlorococcus—Earth’s smallest and most numerous photosynthetic organisms—were discovered in the Sargasso. Now known to occur globally, they churn out…