National Geographic Magazine - UK January 2020

NAT GEO TV Back with more mind-expanding illusions and experiments, Brain Games launches its eighth season by mixing brainpower and star power. Keegan-Michael Key (at left) hosts celebrity guests including Kristen Bell, Jack Black, Tiffany Haddish, and Ted Danson (at right). The two-hour premiere airs January 20 at 9/8c, followed by episodes on the next six Mondays at 9/8c on National Geographic. Previous seasons’ episodes will be available in late January on Disney+. BOOKS Immortality, Inc.: Can we outsmart aging? In what Publisher’s Weekly calls “a fascinating account,” journalist Chip Walter follows a group of entrepreneurs determined to find a cure for aging. Immortality, Inc.: Renegade Science, Silicon Valley Billions, and the Quest to Live Forever is available where books are sold and at shopng.com/books. NAT GEO WILD In Tampa,…

THE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC SOCIETY uses the power of science, exploration, education, and storytelling to illuminate and protect the wonder of our world. With this mission statement, we honor our legacy as a 131-year-old global nonprofit and the principles that will guide our work in the years ahead. As we start 2020, I’d like to share our plans for what will truly be a consequential year. We will commemorate important milestones, such as the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. We’ll celebrate the 60th anniversary of Jane Goodall’s arrival in what is now Gombe National Park, with an immersive museum exhibit at our headquarters in Washington, D.C. And National Geographic will join world leaders at the Convention on Biological Diversity meeting in Kunming, China, to help inform a post-2020 framework for supporting…

FIRST THEY WERE LOOKING at him—and then he started looking back. Photographer Remus Tiplea noticed the damselflies perched on foliage in his garden in Negrești-Oaș, Romania. Staring with bulging eyes, the delicate insects looked inquisitive, Tiplea thought, and a little imposing. Long afternoons photographing damselflies became his summertime ritual. Through hours of watching, Tiplea learned the behaviors of the damselflies, a close relative of dragonflies but with slimmer bodies and narrower wings. He observed when they got hungry, when they reproduced, and what caused them to suddenly take flight. He saw how they behaved in rain and how they chose where to sleep. With time, he could tell their gender and the dominant qualities in mate selection. If he saw multiple damselflies in one frame, he’d have a few seconds…

IN THIS SECTION Dirty Dirt Floors Lab of the Future Bootbuilding Tools How Many Passports? PICTURE YOURSELF AT A CROWDED airport departure gate. Your flight is 20 minutes late, although the illuminated sign still says On Time. The woman on your left is noisily eating something that smells awful. The overhead TV is tuned to a celebrity gossip show, a relentless stream of Bieber after Gwyneth after Miley, plus countless Kardashians. The man to your right is still braying into his cell phone, and the traveler next to him is preparing to kill time with … wait, is that a toenail clipper? Unless you are saintly or unconscious, a few things in that description—or many things, or all the things—are likely to really bug you. We know an annoyance when…

She’s helping Rwandans live cleaner by replacing unsanitary dirt floors. Days after graduating from business school at Stanford University in 2014, Gayatri Datar set off for Rwanda to pursue an unorthodox goal: to rid the world of dirt floors, which can make people sick. “There are bugs all over the place. Termites. Jiggers. Worms,” she explains. “Babies don’t have diapers, so kids poop and pee on the floors. They’re hard to clean. They don’t look good. People hate them.” Yet more than one billion people live on dirt because they can’t afford anything better. Datar’s start-up nonprofit, Earth-Enable, sells an earthen floor made of locally sourced clay, pebbles, and sand, sealed with a proprietary eco-friendly varnish. It costs about $70 per home, far less than concrete. EarthEnable struggled at first.…

Diagnosing patients’ ills often means sending samples to testing laboratories. For areas that lack such resources, Harvard’s George Whitesides has spent years developing a “lab” on a stamp-size filter paper square. When this low-cost, easy-to-use device absorbs a drop of blood or urine, dots of chemical reagent change color to indicate various conditions, such as an abundance of protein. A sparkling way to cut microplastics All that glitters is not green: Most glitters are plastic based and take hundreds of years to break down. Enter Bioglitter, created with cellulose from eucalyptus trees. In nature, the glitter biodegrades into harmless specks, says the U.K. firm that makes it. —ANNIE ROTH Learn more about plastic waste and take the pledge to reduce it at natgeo.com/plasticpledge.…