National Geographic Magazine - UK August 2021

ART SUPPLIES, models, tools, works in progress: This photo gives one glimpse into the studio of Senior Artist Fernando Baptista, at National Geographic’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. I’m writing about Fernando’s work now because there’s so much of it in this month’s issue: The cover art for “Gladiators: Ancient Rome’s Fight Club.” Eight pages of infographics showing how these warriors fought and lived. And, for our story on southern Africa’s Kalahari, an explainer about animals’ adaptations to heat. A native of Spain, Fernando was the director of graphics at El Correo in Bilbao—a newspaper renowned for its visual journalism—when National Geographic called. “They offered me a job, and I thought, Why not?” says Fernando, who moved to the United States and joined us in 2007. His art has won every…

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC LOOKING AT THE EARTH FROM EVERY POSSIBLE ANGLE VOL. 240 NO. 2…

WHEN SHE WAS A KID, Zsófia Pályi spent summers with her family at Lake Balaton in western Hungary. Many Hungarians then couldn’t afford travel to other countries, she says, so the lake was an exotic getaway. For others, it was a respite: From the 1960s to ’80s, German families separated by the Berlin Wall reunited on its shores for vacation. People called it the Hungarian Sea. Today, Hungarians still vacation at the lake, and photographer Pályi returns to capture one particular aspect: its shallowness. Balaton is only a few feet deep at the lake’s south end. That makes it a good place for families and kids, says Pályi, and also for the camera shy: The depth lets people decide how much of their bodies to show off and how much…

RANGER MIKE FITZ WAS at the front desk of the Katmai National Park and Preserve’s visitors center in late September 2014, when he had the idea. Katmai, in southern Alaska, is known for its salmon and brown bears. In summer, fish by the ton barrel up the rivers, desperate to spawn, and bears stake out spots where they can grab and gobble up prey in order to pack on fat for the cold months to come. At certain prime fishing locations, cameras are set up to stream live video. The “bear cams” attract a loyal online audience and generate a spirited comments section. On that late September day, Fitz was moderating the comments when he saw a diptych one viewer had posted. On the left was a “before” photo of…

DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONT LINES OF SCIENCE AND INNOVATION HUNDREDS OF DRUGS designed to fight glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive brain cancer, have failed in clinical trials, often because they’re stopped by specialized blood vessels known as the blood-brain barrier. So Joelle Straehla, a postdoctoral fellow in the Hammond Lab at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, is developing nanoparticles that could someday ferry drugs past the barrier and directly to tumors. To test the system, Straehla injects empty nanoparticles and a fluorescent dye into a mouse’s bloodstream as images of the brain are recorded. The dye illuminates the branchlike blood vessels (nine images above). The particles glow in a contrasting hue; if they reach the brain (shown as black), algorithms can detect each glow. In these photos, specks represent…

She champions a rare, imperiled species found only in South America. As a child living on the outskirts of São Paulo, Brazil, Patrícia Medici spent her playtime “walking along trails in the forest and watching animals.” Her passion for wildlife blossomed into a career: Medici, a conservation biologist and National Geographic Explorer, is the world’s leading expert on the lowland tapir, a large, elusive South American herbivore. Looking like a cross between a pig and an elephant, tapirs can be six feet long and as heavy as a pony. “They’re so big and powerful but still so gentle,” Medici says. “When they walk through the forest, you can barely hear them.” When she started studying lowland tapirs in 1996, little was known about them other than that they were at…