National Geographic Magazine - UK September 2023

SHORTLY BEFORE I joined National Geographic last year, I traveled to one of my favorite places on the planet: Chile. During several visits over the years, I’ve fallen in love with its people and culture and with its landscapes, from the high desert of the north to the fjords and rugged mountains of the south. On this visit, my husband, Charles, and I returned to Patagonia, specifically to Patagonia National Park, created through the efforts of visionary American conservationists Kris and Doug Tompkins. (Their work in South America is the subject of a terrific National Geographic documentary, Wild Life, which you can watch on Disney+.) I’ve long considered this one of the great by-products of travel: While you’re having a good time, you’re also exposed to things that really make…

Thomas Peschak Educated as a marine biologist, Peschak picked up a camera in an effort to increase his influence on wildlife conservation. His images of oceans, coasts, and islands have filled eight books and garnered 17 Wildlife Photographer of the Year awards. An Explorer since 2017, he’s participating in the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Amazon Expedition, for which he photographed the magazine’s July 2023 article on Amazonian rock art. While shooting this month’s feature in Mozambique, he documented the relationship between people and wildlife, from a honey hunter raiding a beehive up a baobab tree to pilgrims revering baboons at a sacred ceremonial site. Page 108 Haruka Sakaguchi Born in Osaka, Japan, and now living in New York, Sakaguchi became an Explorer in 2022. Her photography on cultural…

LOOKING AT THE EARTH FROM EVERY POSSIBLE ANGLE When the U.S. dropped atomic bombs over Japan in August 1945, people were blown apart, burned, and crushed. Debris and ash descended as radioactive fallout, called black rain. The extreme heat of the explosions ignited massive fires that caused people to flee to rivers, where many drowned. By the end of the year, the death toll from Hiroshima and Nagasaki totaled more than 200,000. But it didn’t stop there. Many who initially survived would later succumb to radiation-induced illnesses; sometimes their children, too, suffered from related ailments. Hibakusha is the Japanese term for “atomic bomb survivors”—but given the lasting damages of radiation exposure, it’s perhaps more accurately translated as “atomic bomb sufferers.” At the time of the Hiroshima bombing, my mother was…

OUR TASK WAS SIMPLE ENOUGH: Find the most frugal way to cook pasta, and explain the science behind it. But there was the Nobel laureate’s plan to consider, as well as the opinions of Michelin-starred chefs. There were only a few elements—pot, water, pasta—but many ways to vary them, along with heat and time. There were ecological considerations, cost breakdowns—and, constantly, puns boiling over. All part of demonstrating science’s real-world applications. As often happens with scientific investigations, the inspiration came from something else entirely: a hummingbird hawk-moth using its slender proboscis to feed. As a physicist with a particular interest in all things soft or fluidlike, I was intrigued: How does the moth suck sticky nectar up that flexible tube? So I challenged two students, Mia London and Ross Broadhurst,…

In addition to the pasta-cooking experiments, David Fairhurst has joined colleagues and students at Nottingham Trent University in numerous other studies of everyday, close-to-home science. Among the phenomena they’ve explored: • The ideal technique for blowing the biggest soap bubbles. During a science interactive at Nottingham Castle, university scientists asked members of the public to blow bubbles while the scientists recorded the speed of breaths blown at the soap film and the size of the bubbles formed. The conclusion: Blowing at a steady airspeed of around 24 or 25 feet a second regularly produced bubbles “up to 10 times the size” of the wand, Fairhurst says. Blow slower, and the bubbles won’t detach from the wand; faster, and they’ll burst before getting really large. • The physical process that occurs…

Near the end of her 12-to 13-month gestation, a pregnant reef manta ray sports an impressive bulge: The fetus folded up in her womb has a wingspan of almost five feet at full term. But in a reef manta (Mobula alfredi), pregnancy doesn’t become outwardly visible until around halfway through gestation—so a group of scientists in the Maldives used contactless underwater sonograms (inset) to study the rays’ pregnancy and maturity states. Their findings, recently published in the Journal of Fish Biology, were “alarming,” says lead author Niv Froman (the diver pictured above) of the Manta Trust. After ultrasounds definitively showed which of the female reef mantas were reproductively mature versus immature, it seemed clear that scientists had underestimated the number that were mature—and likely capable of bearing pups. The new…