Innholdsfortegnelse for FEBRUARY 2016 i National Geographic Magazine

Though some gestures of human affection may be timeless, kissing isn’t one of them. Showing love by passionately locking lips is a fairly recent development in human evolutionary history, says a study by researchers from the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. It is hardly a universal practice—and some cultures view it as decidedly “gross.” In what its authors say is the first large study of “romantic-sexual” kissing, only 46 percent of 168 cultures surveyedhad a social history that included smooching. Middle Eastern and European cultures have embraced such kissing, for example, but sub-Saharan African and Amazonian forager cultures have not. Study author William Jankowiak suggests that kissing may be “linked to the rise of leisure” in socially stratified societies; when the elites took…

‘IF YOU ASK PEOPLE WHAT ANIMAL EYES ARE USED FOR, THEY’LL SAY: SAME THING AS HUMAN EYES. But that’s not true. It’s not true at all.” In his lab at Lund University in Sweden, Dan-Eric Nilsson is contemplating the eyes of a box jellyfish. Nilsson’s eyes, of which he has two, are ice blue and forward facing. In contrast, the box jelly boasts 24 eyes, which are dark brown and grouped into four clusters called rhopalia. Nilsson shows me a model of one in his office: It looks like a golf ball that has sprouted tumors. A flexible stalk anchors it to the jellyfish. “When I first saw them, I didn’t believe my own eyes,” says Nilsson. “They just look weird.” Four of the six eyes in each rhopalium are…

Park rangers here call the high season—from June through early September, when Denali National Park and Preserve hosts the majority of its 500,000 annual visitors—the “hundred days of chaos.” Indeed a midsummer morning at the park’s Wilderness Access Center, located at the start of Denali’s fabled 92-mile-long Park Road, can feel a bit like rush hour at Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal. Loudspeakers announce bus boarding times, and visitors from many nations crowd the ticket counter. Most of Denali’s visitors are cruise ship passengers who see the park and its prolific wildlife largely through bus windows. “But if you’re seeking solitude, it’s not hard to find,” says ranger SarahHayes, who helps backpackers and hikers prepare for their adventures. “We’ve got six million acres of mostly trailless lands where wild animals…

SOURCES: JAY CARVER (LEAD ARCHAEOLOGIST), MARIT LEENSTRA, AND ANDREW DEMPSEY, CROSSRAIL; JOHN CLARK, MUSEUM OF LONDON; JON COULSTON, UNIVERSITY THE LONDON ENCYCLOPAEDIA; ORDNANCE SURVEY; LONDON: THE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY; LONDON: THE INFORMATION CAPITAL A BRONZE AGE (2000–600 B.C.) Plumstead Portal Area Nomads built tracks from tree trunks across these marshes to make travel and hunting easier. Crossrail teams found a stone hammer and wooden stakes with pointed ends. Settlement Wooden structure Other artifacts B ROMAN PERIOD (A.D. 43–410) Liverpool Street Roman rule marked a period of growth for the settlement of Londinium. Remains of a large road as well as skulls from nearby Roman cemeteries were found at this construction site. Second-century population 35,000 C MEDIEVAL LONDON (1066–1485) Farringdon Station The discovery of 25 skeletons provides evidence of London’s second emergency…

How do you illuminate a mountain, dazzle the snow with colored light, and take nocturnal skiing to vivid new heights? First, find pristine slopes in the craggy, sylvan backcountry of British Columbia and Alaska. Then, figure out how to get 10,000 pounds of equipment—4,000-watt lights the size of washing machines, generators to power them, scaffolding, wire and cable—up peaks higher than 7,000 feet. Spend months calculating wattage and beam diameters, weights and fuel consumption, distances and topography. Hire skilled gaffers and grips. Enlist a cadre of elite athletes. Put battery packs in their pockets, zip them into light suits, and strap LED-spangled packs on their backs. Turn the camera on. Hope for the best. That’s what Nick Waggoner and his partners at Sweetgrass Productions did in spring 2014, when a…

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown—even if that head belongs to a Labrador retriever chasing a tennis ball in a swimming pool. For the past 24 years the American Kennel Club (AKC) has proclaimed Labradors the most popular dogs in the United States, based on the number of dogs registered with the organization. But just ask English setters—number one in the 1880s, now 87th out of 187 breeds—how fickle fame can be. What predicts puppy popularity? Health, life span, and behavior don’t matter as much as movie roles, says Stefano Ghirlanda, a Brooklyn College psychology professor who has led studies on dog popularity. A breed starring in a successful film can enjoy a boost that lasts a decade. “We were surprised the movie effect was so strong,” he…

VISUAL TASKS Organisms that sense light but not where it’s coming from can regulate circadian rhythms and respond to shadows. Animals move toward or away from light to orient their bodies and trigger alarm responses to predators. Organisms that have developed low-resolution eyesight can detect their own motion, avoid objects, and find preferred habitats. The most advanced eyes help animals perform complex tasks like selecting mates and recognizing predators and prey. ADAPTATIONS The emergence of just a few photoreceptor cells is a fundamental development that allows simple organisms to react to light. Organisms that develop screening pigment, which partly shades their photoreceptors, can tell where light is coming from. Cup-shaped eyes with more receptors or compound eyes with additional cups can produce crude images of objects. Evolved sensory structures such…

1896 Gold prospector William Dickey names the area’s highest peak Mount McKinley. 1902 Geologist Alfred Brooks organizes the first mapping expedition in the mountain area. June 7, 1913 A team led by Harry Karstens and Hudson Stuck is the first to summit Mount McKinley’s south peak. February 26, 1917 Congress creates Mount McKinley National Park. 1,591,897 acres 1923-1938 The NPS constructs the 92-mile Park Road. 1960 Bradford Washburn publishes the first topographic map of Mount McKinley. June 1972 The NPS closes Park Road to cars and institutes a shuttle-bus system to safeguard the wilderness. December 1, 1978 President Jimmy Carter establishes Denali National Monument. 3,890,000 acres December 2, 1980 Congress enlarges Denali National Park and creates the Denali National Preserve. 6,075,030 acres August 28, 2015 Mount McKinley is officially renamed…

Vaccinations aren’t delivered only by doctors with syringes; they also can be passed from mother to young. This transfer was thought to be something only vertebrates could do, but scientists have discovered that some invertebrates, like honeybees, have the ability too. Dalial Freitak and Heli Salmela of the University of Helsinki and Gro Amdam of Arizona State University found that queen bees transfer pieces of diseasecausing bacteria to offspring through vitellogenin, an egg yolk protein. The protein travels from the queen’s blood to a liverlike organ and then to her eggs. It’s consumed by the developing bees, imparting immunity against local illnesses. Knowing this could help scientists make a vaccine to protect bees against deadly diseases like American foulbrood, Freitak says. “It’s a cornerstone in discovering new functions of the…

With just 3,160 tigers left in the wild, keeping count is crucial. But census data are elusive, and tracking the big cats is often slow work. Though camera traps net shots like these, they can be unreliable—and poaching roils the whole process. Enter crowdsourcing and citizen science. University of Surrey computer scientist Aaron Mason has created apps that can identify tigers by their faces and unique sets of stripes. Software scans millions of tiger photos online. When it recognizes a set of markings, that individual is added to a database that yields up-to-the-minute tallies. Similar software is now helping conservationists analyze and monitor other species, including lions. Lions, tigers—can bears be far behind?…

In a brightly lit laboratory above the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA), conservator Luisa Duarte is gently cleaning a large first-century fresco that had been brought into the museum a few days earlier from a construction site on Lime Street, in the heart of the city’s financial district. Workers digging out the foundation for a new 38-story office block had come upon the ruins of an early Roman building. The museum’s experts dated it to around A.D. 60, making this one of the earliest Roman frescoes yet found in London. At nearly ten feet long and more than six feet high, it’s also one of the biggest and most complete. “Whoever commissioned this was seriously rich,” says Duarte, palette knife in hand, gently prying away clumps of moist earth still…

Saudi Women What is life like for women in the most profoundly gender-segregated nation on Earth at a time of fraught change? This was the question that drew two extraordinary journalists—photographer Lynsey Addario and writer Cynthia Gorney—to an in-depth reporting assignment in Saudi Arabia. They returned with answers that show the tyranny of assumptions. Instead of victims beneath black veils, Addario and Gorney met warm, articulate women willing to invite them into their homes and talk about their experiences; women who joke, complain, express anger—and smash to smithereens the stereotype of the silenced Saudi woman. “I found women willing to argue energetically with me, and with each other, about almost everything,” says Gorney, including “women’s new expectations in the workplace, whether gender-separating rules ought to change in the modernizing nation,…

Poland Seen from the Grunwaldzki Bridge in Kraków, a winter scene offers a yin-yang study in contrasts. On the snowy banks of the Vistula River, a silhouetted figure feeds white swans and dark-plumed ducks and coots in the frigid water. Poland On the wintry Vistula Spit—a sandy, windcarved peninsula near Kaliningrad, a Russian province—a tractor pulls sledders across the snow-white expanse. The spit juts into the Baltic Sea, separating the Gulf of Gdan´ sk from the Vistula Lagoon. Germany A lone cross-country skier near Masserberg traverses the Rennsteig, an ancient ridgeway. The roughly 105-milelong hiking trail—a messenger route in the Middle Ages—runs west to east through the Thuringian Forest. Order prints of select National Geographic photos online at NationalGeographicArt.com.…