Innholdsfortegnelse for August 2020 i National Geographic Magazine - UK

A PICTURE OF THE EXTINCT, flightless bird that has inspired artists and tall tales for centuries is slowly coming into sharper relief. Modern scientific tools and newly discovered bones, in combination with historic sightings and previously studied specimens, are giving scientists fresh insights into the mysterious bird’s anatomy and life cycle on Mauritius, where it once thrived. A YEAR IN THE LIFE Recent discoveries help explain how the dodo—smarter and sleeker than once thought—had adapted to its cyclone-prone environment. Then in 1598, Europeans, rats, and pigs arrived in Mauritius and drove dodoes to extinction.…

75 percent of deaths among Napoleon’s soldiers in 1812 were from typhus. In the aftermath of a victory over the French in 1743, about 1,500 British soldiers, uninjured but deathly ill, straggled into the army’s general hospital in a village on the outskirts of Frankfurt, Germany. Men lay two or more to a bed and packed together on the floor. Most of the sick had dysentery, and everything was inevitably covered with excrement, urine, blood, sweat, and vomit. Fleas and lice abounded. Dysentery soon gave way to typhus. Hundreds died. John Pringle, an army physician on his first campaign, observed the dying in horror. The ideas he developed for preventing illness became one of the earliest expressions of filth theory. It held, in brief, that filthy conditions foster diseases and…

2.3 million doses of penicillin were manufactured in preparation for the D-Day landing. Desperately ill, Albert Alexander, a middle-aged police officer, lay in an Oxford, England, infirmary. It had started with a thorn scratch on his face as he tended his rose garden, according to a common account—or, as other evidence suggests, from a minor injury suffered in a German bombing raid. Now, though, he had lost an eye and was oozing pus all over from sepsis, an extreme and potentially lethal reaction to infection. He had at least come to the right place. Researchers at Oxford University, led by Howard Florey, an Australian pathologist, and Ernst Chain, a biochemist who had fled Nazi Germany, were developing a promising new drug. On February 12, 1941, Alexander became the first patient…

IT IS THE VILLAGERS OF RAJASTHAN. They watch us pass in the hot light of the Thar Desert. We are unwashed, covered in coarse dust, darkened by sun: charred scarecrows trudging across India with a cargo donkey. Local people mistake us for vagabond performers, traveling quacks, circus nomads. They believe we are sorcerers. The answer to their question is: Yes, of course. We carry magic. But then, so does everyone. It lies in water. Human beings are mobile wells of mildly salty water. As every schoolchild knows, our bodies contain roughly the same percentage of water that covers the Earth’s surface. Such harmonies are no mystery. We are water animals born onto a water planet. Water is everywhere and nowhere. It is a restless element—unstill, on the move, always shifting…

Mabel PING-HUA LEE Suffragist and advocate for the Chinese immigrant community A Chinese immigrant, Lee became an advocate for women’s rights at a young age, leading a 1912 New York City suffrage parade on horseback when she was 16. The first Chinese woman to get a Ph.D. in economics at Columbia University, Lee wouldn’t gain the right to vote until 1943, when Chinese immigrants finally were allowed to become U.S. citizens. Milagros BENET DE NEWTON Puerto Rican educator and suffragist The 19th Amendment didn’t give women the right to vote in Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory. Newton, a conservative educator from an influential family, joined forces with other Puerto Rican women to boost the suffragist cause. They succeeded in getting the vote for literate women in 1929 and for all…

SOREN WALLJASPER AND MATTHEW W. CHWASTYK, NGM STAFF; SCOTT ELDER SOURCES: RONAN DONOVAN; VERNON REYNOLDS; RICHARD WRANGHAM; POLICE REPORTS; WORLD DATABASE ON PROTECTED AREAS; NASA EARTHDATA; UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND; OPENSTREETMAP CONTRIBUTORS, AVAILABLE UNDER OPEN DATABASE LICENSE…

PEPPERED MOTHS ARE MASTERS of camouflage. In the larval stage, they can change the color of their skin to blend into their settings—even without seeing those surroundings, a new study found. After raising more than 300 peppered moth larvae, U.K. researchers obscured the vision of some with black paint (which the larvae later shed, unharmed). The larvae were placed in boxes containing white, green, brown, or black sticks, and given time to adapt. When the researchers opened the boxes, they found that nearly all the caterpillars, with or without vision, had changed their body colors to match the sticks in their box. The researchers then moved the caterpillars into new boxes containing sticks of two different colors, and about 80 percent of the insects chose to rest on sticks that…

From archaeologists’ finds, he reconstructs lifelike human faces. Oscar Nilsson has the gift of being able to put a face (but not necessarily a name) to roughly a hundred once anonymous individuals whose remains have been excavated by his fellow archaeologists. The Swedish reconstruction expert relies on his deep knowledge of facial anatomy as well as his skills as a sculptor to bring to life, for example, the regal visage of a 1,200-year-old Peruvian noblewoman or the surly adolescence of a 9,000-year-old Greek teenager. Nilsson begins with a 3D-printed copy of an original skull and crafts facial features by hand, guided by bone structure and relying on scientific data sets to estimate the thickness of muscle and flesh in different areas of the face. Once reconstruction reaches what Nilsson calls…

How pandemics change us Will we remember the lessons we have learned after the danger has passed? What history has taught us What it means for us today Shortly before sunset, the Pike approached a tender lowered from the Grand Princess. Callahan, age 57, and his team, still seasick, were now also half-deafened and blinded in full biocontainment gear. One by one, they made the leap first to the tender, and then, as the boat banged against the hull of the 188-foot-tall cruise ship, they leaped again onto a ladder and climbed up the hull to begin their work. The entire world at that moment was also taking a leap into the unknown. Or rather, into the forgotten. Epidemics always have afflicted humans, and pandemics since we first sprawled across the…

MY FIRST NAME COMES from the children’s books about Thomas the Tank Engine, The Railway Series. My eldest brother had been reading the books, and Oliver the Western Engine was one of his favorites. My mother thought the name was beautiful, and so I was named after a train. The name also served a poetic purpose: I was born an identical twin, which placed me onto a set of parallel tracks with my brother, Ethan. If you’ve known twins, you’ve heard a version of this story before. We were dressed in matching outfits, our hair cut into identical shiny black bowls. We looked the same and were treated the same, always together. As we grew, Ethan and I were eager to establish separate identities. We made different friends, wore different…

The New World had felt its dreadful effects before, passing through in unpredictable waves over 200 years, inflicting panic and misery on the colonists and wiping out entire Native American societies. But it had been 19 years since Boston’s last epidemic, time enough to raise a fresh generation of victims. When the first light-red spots appeared, you could hope it might be just measles. But then the spots turned into bumps, filled with fluid, and rose up like volcanic islands on the skin. Hundreds of them could clot the eyes, the air passages, the entire body, to make even breathing an agony. The pustules gave off the stench of rotting flesh. Survivors were often blinded, crippled, or badly disfigured. (The doctor tending one sick British woman was instructed, “Preserve her…

“So unforeseen and appalling was the attack,” wrote a district official, that astonished residents “fled in crowds to the country as the only means of escaping impending death.” In just a few weeks, 10,000 people died in this one district. A booming commercial and colonial trade carried the new outbreak overland and across oceans and made it pandemic. Newspaper readers could follow reports from the front lines as the dreaded disease crept toward them. It wasn’t just that it killed half its victims and did so with appalling speed. A special horror attended the way they died, with a person who was in the prime of life one moment seeming, in the next, to liquefy and flow out in uncontrollable vomiting and diarrhea. Intense thirst followed. Spasms and cramps wrenched…

But in the 19th century, as microscopes became more powerful and more widely distributed, other researchers began to open up the world of microorganisms. The idea that specific microorganisms could cause specific infectious diseases—and even decimate human societies—became more persuasive History tends now to honor two men, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, as the fathers of germ theory and forget the chorus whose work they built on. That’s partly because human nature responds more to a few great names than to the cumulative and collaborative way most discoveries happen. But Pasteur and Koch were also masters of experimental science, meticulous about methods, and brilliant at choosing the right path from one experiment to the next. They hated each other as rivals in the same field of discovery—more human nature—and also…

LAWSON PARKER. SOURCES: CENSUS; CENTER FOR AMERICAN WOMEN AND POLITICS; HISTORY, ART & ARCHIVES, U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES. GRAPHIC DATA INCLUDE NONVOTING DELEGATES AND RESIDENT COMMISSIONERS…