Innholdsfortegnelse for January 2020 i National Geographic Magazine - UK

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…

TEXAS HOUNDS ARE REVOLUTIONIZING anti-poaching work in South Africa. By some estimates, 4,000 rhinos were killed in the Kruger National Park area during the past decade; how many remain there is debated, with claims ranging from 5,000 to 9,000. Since May 2018, the hounds, raised by Texas rancher Joe Braman, have contributed to a 24 percent drop in rhino poaching in the park and a 54 percent increase in apprehensions of poachers, authorities say. In the past, law enforcement teams that used individual lead dogs to track poachers on foot struggled to keep up. Staff at the Southern African Wildlife College, a training facility outside Kruger, were eager to test free-running dogs in the area. After visiting, Braman, a passionate houndman and part-time cop, offered to train a team of…

THE SIMPLE WORDS painted on a billboard-size wall overlooking a parking lot in Swansea, Wales, read: “More poetry is needed.” A plea to locals? More likely an exhortation to the rest of the world—because poetry isn’t something I find Wales lacks. A short drive beyond any Welsh city leads to landscapes of imagination: hillsides embroidered with bluebells, lonely castle ruins on windswept crags, rocky coastlines noisy with seal song, valleys that are an encyclopedia of green. The industrial port city of Swansea is the gateway to the Gower Peninsula, the first Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) designated by the British government, in 1956. The recognition singles out for conservation exceptional landscapes of “distinctive character.” Wales now has five AONBs, in addition to three national parks. Three new touring routes,…

One thing you should know,” one man advised me. “No one on this street imagined they would end up like this. Every person here thought they had it under control.” That street could be anywhere in addicted America. This one is Kensington Avenue, a bleak stretch that runs beneath the elevated tracks in Philadelphia. I went there to witness the opioid crisis, to understand how people seeking relief from pain had ended up on the street. I’ve seen extreme misery in wars and natural disasters, but I was stunned by what I found in my own country. The rules of society seemed to have vanished. What remained was a raw struggle for one thing: the rush of relief from pain. In Philadelphia 1,116 people died from a drug overdose in…

HOW THEY COMMUNICATE VIA BLOODSTREAM AND NERVES Chemicals released by microbes into nerves or the bloodstream influence brain areas that deal with memory. Chemicals in the bloodstream can also signal the limbic system—a brain area that processes emotion and stress—to change our moods. THROUGH THE VAGUS NERVE Sensory neurons receive chemical signals from gut microbes and relay them up this primary signaling path between gut and brain. The brain sends back signals that modify function, such as tempering an inflammatory response so the gut will keep working even if a person is sick. USING THE ‘SECOND BRAIN’ Microbes can bypass communicating with the brain and directly signal the enteric nervous system—a meshlike network of neurons in the digestive tract, sometimes called the second brain—to independently influence gut movements and secretions.…

JUDGE ELENI DERKE cuts an imposing figure, shrouded in her black robe and seated behind the elevated wood-paneled bench in the county courthouse in Jacksonville, Florida. From the jury box and lawyers’ tables, you can’t see what else she’s wearing: wildly patterned yoga pants. More than 25 years ago, Derke discovered yoga. She was suffering from the searing abdominal pain of Crohn’s disease. Her doctor recommended surgery. Hoping to avoid it, she went to see a cousin who was a yoga master. He taught her the upside-down poses known as inversions. They are said to clear the body of toxins, though there’s no scientific evidence to support the claim. Derke’s symptoms quickly subsided. “Yoga saved my life.” She trained as a yoga instructor, and if it’s not too hot, she…

IN 1939 A GERMAN-BORN SHOEMAKER named Peter Limmer got the first U.S. patent for a “ski boot”—a stiff, square-toed leather shoe made to order. Today, gray-bearded Peter Limmer III hammers out about 200 pairs of hiking boots a year using his grandfather’s tools in the Intervale, New Hampshire, shop his grandfather opened. There’s a perpetual waiting list for the custom boots, priced at $775 and up; loyalists come from as far away as Tasmania for final boot fittings. Limmer, 63, still loves his work. “The best part,” he says, “is seeing customers dance in the driveway with their new boots on.”…

Women A Century of Change A YEARLONG SERIES AS AN EMERGENCY MEDICINE PHYS ICIAN since the mid-1990s, I’ve cared for all sorts of patients: old and young, rich and poor, male and female. I’ve also observed the companions who arrive with the patients, as they scramble to handle this health crisis amid work, family, and financial obligations. Often that burden lands chiefly on women, doing double, triple, quadruple duty to care for children, partners, parents, and other loved ones. It’s a global phenomenon: The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development says the world’s women spend more than 1.1 trillion hours a year on unpaid care of children and the elderly. Men spend about a third as much. As an executive producer on the television drama Grey’s Anatomy, I write these…

MORE THAN 14 YEARS have passed since Dan Buettner first wrote about the world’s longest-lived people for the magazine. Today he’s still uncovering the secrets of centenarians in regions he calls the blue zones. He recently returned to four of them to learn more about the foods that contribute to this remarkable longevity, collecting time-tested recipes and investigating why certain foods seem to promote long lives. HOME TO THE WORLD’S HIGHEST CONCENTRATION OF MALE CENTENARIANS SARDINIA, ITALY NINETY-NINE-YEAR-OLD ASSUNTA PODDA vigorously stirs an earthen pot and flashes a toothy smile. “Minestrone,” she explains with a swooping hand gesture. I peer into the mélange of beans, carrots, onions, garlic, tomatoes, fennel, kohlrabi, herbs—all under a golden veneer of olive oil. Behind her, a shaft of evening light angles through a window…

WHEN GOLDIE NEJAT BEGAN developing robots in 2005, she spent much of her time knocking on doors in hopes of demonstrating her high-tech prototypes. Back then, the health-care world was hesitant. “Now, it’s the opposite,” says Nejat, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Toronto. “I have people calling from around the world saying, When’s your robot going to be ready?” Nejat’s machines, a special type known as socially assistive robots, are designed to engage with humans and could help fill an urgent need: caregiving for the elderly. The population of people over age 80 is projected to almost triple worldwide, from 143 million in 2019 to 426 million in 2050. Such robots could be especially useful for patients with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia because the robots can…

WHO Doest, a photographer in the Netherlands, captures interactions between humans and the natural world. WHERE A veterinary practice run by his cousin, Odette Doest, on the Caribbean island of Curaçao. WHAT Doest took photos of this bird, Thomas, with everything from his smartphone to his DSLR camera. For this shot he used a 100mm lens. On Curaçao to photograph animals in rehabilitation at his cousin Odette’s veterinary practice, Doest met two flamingos: Bob, who became an internet sensation after recovering from a concussion, and Thomas (above), impaired by a serious foot infection. Odette is often faced with euthanizing injured animals if she can’t find creative treatments—such as the makeshift socks she fashioned to bandage Thomas’s wounds. In time, Doest says, Thomas was walking normally and was returned to the…

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…

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.…

NO CITIZENSHIP The exact number of stateless people isn’t known, but many millions around the world aren’t recognized as a citizen by any country. ANTI-TERRORISM TACTIC Countries are increasingly stripping away citizenship from people who’ve engaged in terrorist activities at home or abroad.…

A MESSAGE TO THE BRAIN Acute pain calls attention to actual or potential tissue damage. Signals to the brain travel an ascending pathway to motivate the body to respond quickly. THE PROMISE OF PAIN GATES Multiple “pain gates,” including the sodium channel Nav1.7, regulate the passage of sodium ions into axons, which can cause pain. Obstructing the gates with molecules via drugs or gene therapy may help doctors tailor pain treatment to individual patients. As a neuron fires, electricity-sensitive pores along its surface cycle through three states: inactive, open, and closed. THE BRAIN RESPONDS After the signals are received by the brain, the descending pathway is engaged. It cues the entire central nervous system to modulate and respond to the painful stimulus. THE OPIOID PROBLEM Opioids reduce pain by numbing…

THE MORE SCIENTISTS investigate the microbes living inside us, the more they learn about the surprising impact of these tiny organisms on how we look, act, think, and feel. Are our health and well-being really driven by the bacteria, viruses, fungi, and protozoa that live in our intestines, in our lungs, on our skin, on our eyeballs? What a weird concept—that the bugs we lug around appear to be essential to establishing the basic nature of who we are. The effects of the microbiome, this menagerie of microorganisms, can be profound—and can start incredibly early. In a study published last year, scientists showed that something supposedly as innate as a child’s temperament might be related to whether the bacteria in an infant’s gut are predominantly from one genus: the more…

PLANT VS. ANIMAL Not all foods are created equal. The global diet emphasizes plant-based foods and limits animal products, which are linked to chronic disease and often involve environmentally harmful production practices. THE WORLD ON A PLATE Scientists devised the diet by first analyzing a food’s nutritional data and then its environmental impact. Here that diet is broken down by food type and compared with consumption in world regions.…