Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2021 i National Geographic Magazine - UK

IF YOU’RE AGE 30 or older, you probably remember what you were doing when you heard about the events of September 11, 2001. It’s one of those indelible, where-were-you moments, like the attack on Pearl Harbor or the Kennedy assassination for earlier generations. This month, we commemorate the 20th anniversary of “9/11”—that instantly recognizable, vastly inadequate shorthand to describe a day that killed nearly 3,000 people and launched the longest war in modern U.S. history. Two stories in this issue explore 9/11. One’s an on-the-ground report from Afghanistan. The other features still life photography of seemingly ordinary objects—a pair of boots, a watch, a snapshot—that aren’t ordinary at all. These objects, some never before displayed, came from the rubble of the World Trade Center in New York, a field in…

SINCE IT EMERGED from a Bavarian limestone quarry in 1861, the first known fossilized feather has been a paleontology icon: shockingly similar to modern bird feathers yet unfathomably ancient. The 150-million-year-old, isolated plume was the first fossil ever called Archaeopteryx lithographica—a name that now refers to a type of feathered dinosaur discovered less than two miles away in the same rock layers as the original feather. But did Archaeopteryx the dinosaur really shed its namesake feather? National Geographic Explorer Ryan Carney, a paleontologist at the University of South Florida, says the answer is a resounding yes. In a paper published last fall in Scientific Reports, Carney contends that the feather not only belonged to an Archaeopteryx but also specifically helped form the upper surface of the dinosaur’s left wing. Now…

1 WRITE CHOICES Three green tips for coloring, drawing 1. Store pens, markers, and highlighters topside down to keep the tips moist. 2. Look for supplies that use recycled materials—colored pencils made from old newspapers or mechanical pencils created from recovered plastic. 3. Most crayons contain petroleum and don’t easily biodegrade—so save broken bits for another use. You could melt them down in the oven to create cool color combos, or mail them to a group that recycles crayons, such as crazycrayons.com. 2 SHOP YOUR HOUSE RUMMAGE INDRAWERS AT HOME FOR USABLE MARKERS, SCISSORS, AND NOTE BOOKS BEFORE BUYING NEW ONES. STILL MISSINGS OMEITEMS? CHECK STATIONERY SHOPS AND BOOK STORES FOR PACKAGING-FREE SCHOOL SUPPLIES. 3 LUNCH BOOST Yes to taste, no to waste Got picky eaters? Bring your kids to…

TWO WORDS THAT don’t look tempting on a menu? “Swamp” and “rat.” At least that’s the dark-humored consensus among a literal boatload of chefs cruising along a Louisiana swamp just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. They’re touring at the invitation of local ecologists who want their help saving Louisiana’s threatened wetlands. And the “swamp rat” is the invasive nutria, once imported from South America for its fur but now loose in the wild, chewing up so much habitat the state has a six-dollar-a-tail bounty on the rodent. “Chefs here are our local celebrities,” says Jacques Hebert of the Restore the Mississippi River Delta coalition. “Our culture revolves around eating.” Perhaps conservation could too? The South is hard-hit but hardly alone. The United States is home to more than 6,500 invasive…

The question from the prosecutor is about the five cheetah cubs pressed together in a carrier, and held up for two defendants to see from their barred cell at the front of the courtroom. The cubs’ birdlike chirps of distress echo off the concrete floor and walls. One of the two, Cabdiraxmaan Yusuf Mahdi, better known as Cabdi Xayawaan, glances at the cubs. “I’ve never seen them before,” he says with a wave of his hand. A pause, then the second man, Maxamed Cali Guuleed, speaks: They look a little smaller, maybe, but those are the cubs from my house. The men are on trial in Hargeysa, the capital of Somaliland, a self-declared autonomous republic in the Horn of Africa. They’re accused of taking cheetah cubs from the wild at…

AT A LITTLE OVER 19,000 FEET ABOVE SEA LEVEL ON THE CHILEAN MOUNTAIN OF TUPUNGATO, Baker Perry and his fellow climbers were clobbered in the early morning hours by an unpredicted blizzard that pinned them in their tents with punishing winds and swirling snow. Perry, a climate scientist at North Carolina’s Appalachian State University, was philosophical as he recalled it. “It’s part of the beauty of the mountains that it is so challenging. That’s one reason there’s not many stations up in some of these places,” Perry says. “We want to see it at its stormiest and at its most challenging as well. That’s part of the climate. We need to measure that.” Perry is a co-leader of an international team that in February braved a global pandemic and a…

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC LOOKING AT THE EARTH FROM EVERY POSSIBLE ANGLE VOL.240 NO.3…

When the Venus flytrap’s jawlike leaves are stimulated by prey, the plant produces a small magnetic field, new research has found. Such fields have been detected in only two other plants: a bean and a single-celled alga. The scientists who discovered this field think it’s a by-product of electrical impulses that trigger the flytrap’s leaves to close. Biomagnetism of this type has been studied extensively in the human brain but is less understood in plants.…

DANTE LAURETTA IS SERENE AS HE PREPARES FOR THE 17 SECONDS HE’S WORKED TOWARD FOR THE PAST 16 YEARS. Lauretta, a University of Arizona planetary scientist, is transfixed by a monitor showing three simulated views of a rubbly, top-shaped object floating in a sea of stars. That’s the asteroid known as 101955 Bennu. He’s watching it while perched on an upholstered metal stool inside an unassuming building in Littleton, Colorado. With its cinder-block hallways, popout ceiling panels, and the occasional wasp problem, the building could be mistaken for a run-of-the-mill office suite. But the spacecraft decals on the walls and the labels above each cubicle—Electrical Power; Telecom; Guidance, Navigation & Control—reveal its true function: mission control at Lockheed Martin Space. It’s 1:49 p.m. mountain time on October 20, 2020, and…

TOP LEFT IDRIS When he was brought to a CCF rescue center with his sister Elba, Idris was skittish around people. He would let Elba investigate new situations first, staffers say, but now he has grown more confident. MIDDLE LEFT LINK AND ZELDA These siblings were among 10 cubs rescued last October after the high-profile arrest of Cabdiraxmaan Yusuf Mahdi, better known as Cabdi Xayawaan, on wildlife trafficking charges. Named after characters in Nintendo’s Legend of Zelda, the pair are inseparable—even when Link annoys Zelda with his roughhousing. BOTTOM LEFT SAN Called “Nose” in Somali, San is another of the cubs rescued in Cabdi Xayawaan’s case. She had a badly injured nose and cried at first, but since she’s been housed with Link and Zelda, she’s settled down. RIGHT FREYA…

SOME OF THE WORLD’S heaviest waves crash along the reef of Teahupoo, on the southeastern coast of Tahiti. The power of these barrels explains the small village’s selection as the venue for the 2024 Olympic surfing competition, but it’s also a place of dramatic beauty and rich culture. A WILD RIDE The barrier reef rises from dizzying depths at Teahupoo’s Passe Havae; it has the perfect shape and location to amplify Pacific Ocean swells. These can become the thundering surges known as plunging waves. May through October is the best time to catch the action, but exceptional surf rolls in year-round. For this image, photographer Andy Bardon went below the surface. “A deep breath and calm nerves are required to safely dive under and photograph these waves,” he says. But…

IMAGINE A FOREFATHER establishing a colony or organizing a government without his favorite powdered wig. Impossible, right? The hairstyles of 18th-century America live on at Colonial Williamsburg, a history museum in Virginia. There, wigmaker Debbie Turpin and an apprentice fashion new dos using hand-sewn wefts of hair and maintain wigs worn by their fellow costumed interpreters. As she describes the tools of her trade, Turpin mentions delivering a wig to the Marquis de Lafayette (or rather, the interpreter channeling the French aristocrat). Her job is unique, Turpin knows: “You won’t find a shop like ours anywhere else in the country.”…

FIGHTING FOR CONTROL The Taliban arose out of a civil war in the 1990s, after the Soviets were driven out. The Islamic militant group seized control of Kandahar in 1994 and the central government in Kabul in 1996, ruling most of Afghanistan until the U.S. invaded in 2001. They’re now retaking control of many areas, using rural footholds to advance on cities as the U.S. withdraws.…

FROM OUR PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO Winner of a Pulitzer Prize, Addario covers war and human rights, often with a spotlight on women. WHERE Helmand Province, Afghanistan WHAT A Nikon D3 camera with a 17-35mm lens Addario has spent her career capturing scenes of conflict, but it’s rare for her to see women on the front lines. So when she met senior U.S. Army pilot Jesse Russell while embedded at Afghanistan’s Kandahar Airfield in 2007, the two hit it off. They reunited in late 2009 at Camp Leatherneck, where Russell was flying a Black Hawk helicopter into combat areas to evacuate the wounded. Watching Russell in action never got old, says Addario. “I am always proud and a little bit excited to see women breaking stereotypes.” This page showcases images from the…