Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2020 i National Geographic Magazine - UK

To potentially help extraterrestrials locate Earth, this diagram (below) was first sent into space in 1972 attached to Pioneer 10. That spacecraft is still traveling on to the stars, but time and space are taking a toll on the cosmic coordinates it carries. The map gets increasingly unreliable as the galaxy rotates and our sun and its reference points—pulsars, the spinning cores of collapsed stars—change their relative positions. So one astronomer, Scott Ransom, is proposing a new map (far right) to overcome these weaknesses.…

I TOOK SOME 10,000 PHOTOS during the 12 days I spent in Detroit documenting the impact that the novel coronavirus had on the city’s people. I went everywhere, as carefully as I could. City buses that workers depended on to get to and from the jobs they couldn’t afford to give up. Houses and apartments where people lived and loved despite illnesses and job losses that threatened their well-being. Funerals where family members had to take turns saying goodbye to their loved ones—no more than 10 people allowed to gather at a time. Ten. That happens to be the number of children that Chester Lovett had. The Marine veteran and former mail carrier also had a mother, grandchildren, brothers, nieces and nephews, and countless others who loved him. Yet the…

EVOLUTION OF FEATHERS Fossils indicate that the first closed feathers (see below) evolved in the clade Maniraptora, along with the first color patterns in a single feather. The explosion of visual possibility for sexual display may have led to faster evolution by sexual selection. FEATHERY FUZZ Many species had single-fiber feathers. The discovery of more complex feathers in species like Kulindadromeus implies that feathers originated and diversified early on, likely for insulation and display, not flight. Caihong juji This rainbow-chested forest dweller may have used some feathers to fly and an array of iridescent feathers for display. HOW OUR THINKING HAS CHANGED Dinosaurs resembled reptiles in most early reconstructions. But scientists have been surprised to find that the genes leading to teeth, scales, hair, and feathers are closely related, making…

It was supposed to be a shortcut. Now, waist-high in latte brown water, I find myself stumbling over submerged logs, ducking under ant-teeming briars, and pushing through sticky curtains of spiderwebs—following a trail blazed by Brazilian biologist Everton Miranda. One expensive camera has already gone belly-up after field assistant Edson Oliveira face-planted into an engorged puddle, and a wasp sting on photographer Karine Aigner’s forearm has ballooned into a welt the size and color of a plump tomato. But if turning back is on anyone’s mind, they keep the thought to themselves. Our mission is too important. We’re here to find an elusive harpy eagle nest, rumored to be about a mile inside this patch of Amazon rainforest in Mato Grosso, a state more than three times the size of…

HEALTHY CORAL REEFS are pretty noisy places. “The crackle of snapping shrimp and the whoops and grunts of fish combine to form a dazzling biological soundscape” that draws juvenile fish looking for a place to settle, says marine biologist Steve Simpson. When a coral reef gets degraded, inhabitants disappear and the reef becomes “ghostly quiet,” he says. “But by using loudspeakers to restore this lost soundscape, we can attract young fish back again.” In 2017 Simpson and an international team of scientists placed loudspeakers along Australia’s Great Barrier Reef right after a mass bleaching event to see if playing the sounds of a healthy reef could entice fish to repopulate a damaged one. After six weeks, twice as many fish settled on bleached patches of reef where sound was played…

ON a chilly January afternoon, Susannah Maidment stands on the shore of a London lake, staring down a pack of dinosaurs. Maidment, a curator at the U.K.’s Natural History Museum, has come with me to tour Crystal Palace Park, which in 1854 included the world’s first public dinosaur showcase. The sculptures were a smash hit at their unveiling and sparked the dinomania that’s been with us ever since. More than a century before Steven Spielberg dazzled the world with Jurassic Park, the Crystal Palace dinosaurs drew two million visitors a year for three decades straight, and Charles Dickens name-dropped one in his novel Bleak House. To grant us a detailed look at these 166-year-old monuments, Ellinor Michel and Sarah Jayne Slaughter, trustees with the nonprofit Friends of Crystal Palace Dinosaurs,…

HOW OUR THINKING HAS CHANGED Dinosaurs were thought to have been cold-blooded, like modern reptiles. But new signs of rapid growth rates show that some may have had faster metabolisms than suspected, possibly resembling those of warm-blooded mammals and birds. Some dinosaurs were even at risk of overheating. SMALLER AND COOLER Small dinosaurs had a high surface-area-to-volume ratio that maximized their ability to shed heat without special adaptations. Most dinosaur species grew larger over time, but paravian theropods—the precursors of birds—grew smaller over time, which was eventually helpful for flight. SMALL-BODIED DINOSAURS Evenly distributed blood flow Stegoceras Because of its small size, this dinosaur likely kept cool by modifying its behavior. It didn’t need adaptations to keep its brain cool; blood flow in the head was balanced. BIGGER AND HOTTER…

My summer place is priceless: Not even Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates could buy it today. It sits on the slopes of Mount Hood in Oregon, near the Pacific Crest Trail. It’s at timberline, where stunted trees give way to delicate alpine meadows bursting with flowers. A glacier-fed creek serenades me as I sleep at night. I’ve been visiting my summer place since I was 14. Most of the year it’s covered in deep snow, but even in winter it reassures me from a distance. If I have trouble sleeping, I conjure the scene, and nature lulls me. Fortunately it’s in my family, and I hope my unborn grandchildren will one day play in the brook as well. Yet, while it’s in my family, it’s also in yours. It’s my land…

Bumblebees force plants to flower by biting their leaves—a discovery that may help improve agriculture. When common European bumblebees and their larvae emerge in spring, pollen is all they eat. Scientists recently found that if plants aren’t flowering, the bees bite them—and those incisions somehow speed the arrival of pollenladen blooms. When scientists tried to mimic the marks, the plants bloomed earlier, but not as early as they did for bees. DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONT LINE SO FSCIENCE AND INNOVATION A gift wrapped in tissue With a heart’s blood and cells removed, a scaffold of connective matter (left) remains. Texas Heart Institute scientist Doris Taylor supplies stem cells, oxygen, and blood to the “ghost heart”—and new heart tissue grows. Taylor’s team has grown more than a hundred test hearts and…

WHAT’S NEW A groundbreaking discovery provides evidence that Spinosaurus was mostly aquatic. It had a tail designed for propulsion in water, a forward-leaning center of gravity good for swimming, and curved claws more suited to catching prey in water than to walking on land. HOW OUR THINKING HAS CHANGED Before 2014, paleontologists had only fragments of Spinosaurus’s tail and theorized it was rigid, like those of other theropods. As more fossils came to light, the understanding of how the dinosaur moved changed from it being a landlubber to a shallows wader to a skillful swimmer.…

WHAT’S NEW Our understanding of how dinosaurs looked continues to evolve. Researchers now know that many dinosaurs had feathers of some kind that came in a variety of colors, based on their fossilized pigments. Other species had patterned skin coloring for display or camouflage.…

About this story: To protect the privacy of the girls who were trafficked and to comply with Indian laws on identifying victims of sexual crimes, we are not disclosing their identities or those of their family members. We photographed them in ways intended to obscure their faces and altered some images to hide distinguishing features. We use pseudonyms for the two girls featured in the story. After a fight with her mother, R. left her home near Kolkata, one of India’s largest cities. At a train station, she met some men who tricked her and took her to a red-light district in the city. Many girls who are trafficked in their teens spend the rest of their lives in brothels. R. was rescued before she was sold to one. She…

WHO A Kenya-based photographer who seeks to capture humanity’s fraught and intimate connections to the natural world WHERE A village outside of Caynabo, Somaliland, an autonomous region within Somalia WHAT A Hasselblad 501CM camera and a Zeiss Planar 80mm lens Sobecki has worked for nearly a decade in East Africa, where nations are burdened by conflict, the climate crisis—and now, COVID-19. Despite the challenges, she says, the people in Somalia are known for a wicked sense of humor. Consider Ahmed Abdi Omar, 17, and a porcupine caught invading his fields. In Sobecki’s photo Omar has a rope leash on the captured pest (which is not an endangered species). Sobecki overheard villagers chuckling “that the porcupine would be dinner that night.” She didn’t stick around for the punch line. This page…