National Geographic Magazine - UK September 2020

HUMANKIND HAS A complicated relationship with robots. On one hand, we appreciate how they can do dangerous, repetitive work so we don’t have to. Robots don’t need vacations or medical insurance. And in areas such as agriculture, where farmers can’t find enough people to pick the produce, robots can shoulder (do they have shoulders?) some of those tasks. But polls show that the growing robotization of the planet makes us feel deeply uncomfortable—and threatened. Pew Research Center surveys after 2017 found that more than 80 percent of Americans believed that by 2050, robots would do much of the work humans now do—and about 75 percent believed that would make economic inequality worse. Across lines of race, age, and education, people who said automation has hurt workers outpaced those who said…

After he bought his farm around a decade ago, Costa Rican coffee grower Luis Emilio fell in love with the idea of farming a plantation almost indistinguishable from its lush natural surroundings by using sustainable cultivation methods that boost local flora and fauna. Luis chose this path because he understands that enjoying delicious, high-quality coffee must be a regenerative process: Coffee plants respond best when nurtured naturally, and the land they’re grown in must be replenished if it’s going to be able to keep on giving. To achieve his dream, Luis partnered with the Nespresso AAA Sustainable QualityTM Program, through which he met agronomist Fernando Segura. Together, they’ve transformed Luis’s farm into a model of sustainability that’s also resistant to climate change. Growing coffee in the shade of barrier trees,…

THE IMPRESSIVE LANDSCAPES on Earth can take a person’s breath away. But for Reuben Wu, that wasn’t enough. Wu—a photographer, visual artist, and music producer—felt that the planet’s majestic mountains, glaciers, and beaches were missing something. Specifically, unnatural lighting. The idea was born from a mistake. One night near Death Valley, California, Wu set a camera to make a time-lapse series in the dark. A pickup truck drove by and washed out the scene with its harsh headlights. At first, says Wu, “I was really annoyed. But when I looked at the images, I was fascinated. Here was artificial lighting in a natural environment.” The juxtaposition launched his desire to try adding light to other scenes where it didn’t belong: on lakes, in canyons, on tall rock pillars in the…

SINCE MY CHILDHOOD by the Mediterranean Sea, I’ve been enchanted by the diversity of life on our planet and eager to learn all I could about it. I’ve spent much of my career studying the ocean food web, where in the course of natural events the smallest of the small are consumed by larger and larger predators, often ending in us. But scientists know there is more to the story, and I’ve been humbled to see life on our planet brought to a standstill by a tiny virus. From a Wuhan, China, “wet market” where freshly butchered meat and live wild animals are sold for food and medicine, the virus likely was transmitted in late 2019 via wildlife to humans. And in a matter of months, COVID-19 has felled hundreds…

LABORATORIES LIKE THIS “high containment” facility are used to safely handle infectious agents. Whether detecting pathogens and diagnosing diseases or unraveling the molecular structure of microbes, scientists use specialized tools with great care. This lab, at the Szentágothai Research Center at Hungary’s University of Pécs, is rated at a high biosafety level, meaning that transmission of microbes handled here can cause serious or deadly disease. This work space is photographed through a technician’s face shield and past its respirator mask valve.…

Cities in the United States used a wide range of interventions to try to contain the 1918 pandemic—from closing schools and banning public gatherings to enforcing isolation and quarantine. Each city shown here adopted at least one measure. The time of implementation and duration of social distancing measures proved to be significant factors in a city’s mortality rate.…