Innholdsfortegnelse for Dec-14 i National Geographic Magazine

I’ve been at the National Geographic Society for almost a year now, and I am more convinced than ever: The most powerful teacher on the planet is media. I spent 20 years of my career at Sesame Workshop, focusing on the role of media in education through Sesame Street. This was followed by two years as CEO of National Public Radio, a global news organization. Coming here was a natural progression of my background in journalism and education. In fact I believe journalism and storytelling are education. This past year we realigned our staff to better inspire, illuminate, and teach across all our platforms. We also renewed our focus on our founders’ mission to report on science, exploration, and the environment through our media. I’ve been energized by the passion…

Culling can cast a long shadow for elephants. Graeme Shannon and Karen McComb of the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom studied a population of elephants orphaned from culling operations and placed in South Africa’s Pilanesberg National Park. They found that the practice, which involves killing older elephants and relocating young ones, has a strong effect on the behavior and social knowledge of surviving animals, causing symptoms similar to those experienced by people diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. South African wildlife officials used culling to control elephant populations from the mid-1960s until 1995. To gauge the effects, Shannon and McComb visited family groups in Pilanesberg and in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park, where culling didn’t occur. They played recorded calls from elephants familiar and unfamiliar to each, and of various…

When King Tut was buried in Egypt in about 1322 B.C., his treasure-filled tomb included two exceptionally ornate, gilded chariots. These vehicles were the limousines of their day, intended for parades and other grand occasions. They were put on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo shortly after archaeologist Howard Carter discovered the teenage pharaoh’s final resting place in 1922. But the decorated gold foil pieces from their leather trappings were sent to storage. The long-neglected artifacts are finally getting attention, following the launch of a German-Egyptian project to study and restore them. Experts are now working on the gold, leather, and adhesives and puzzling over the embossed scenes. This piece (left)—likely from the lid to an archery bow’s case—shows a dog and a mythical winged animal attacking an ibex.…

Japan A young woman rides an escalator through the kaleidoscopic entrance to the Tokyu Plaza Omotesando Harajuku mall in Tokyo. Behind her, mirrors reflect the images of shoppers in one of the city’s most fashionable districts. Indonesia At a slaughterhouse in Kertasura dead snakes are rolled up before being sold for food or traditional medicine. Villagers hunt the reptiles to supplement their income—and feed the billion-dollar global snake trade. India Brides with hennadecorated hands wait for their group wedding to begin. Thirty-five couples in Mumbai participated in the ceremony, which was arranged by a Muslim social organization to cut costs for poor families.…

Billiards players got an unexpected equine spectator—if you look closely—in this 1920s photo from the Overland Park motor camp in Colorado. The nearby city of Denver established the 160-acre camp (one of 247 that had been built in the state by 1922) to serve the growing number of vacationers touring the West by car. Among Overland Park’s amenities, besides a pool hall and a ballroom big enough for 500 dancers, was a “26-room community clubhouse for the campers, containing shower baths, rest and reading rooms, barber shop and large verandas for rocking chair rambles in the twilight,” noted American Motorist in October 1922. The magazine went on: “And the moon is hung in the sky to help incandescent arcs romantically light one’s way when bedtime comes.”…

That cartoon cliché of a man standing transfixed before an open refrigerator? That’s Mark Menjivar—except he’s aiming a camera. For a project Menjivar calls “Refrigerators,” the social worker turned photographer makes as-is images of the fridges of people from all walks of life. He captions them obliquely: The midwife, for example, recently vowed to eat only local produce. The street advertiser “lives on $432” a month. The bartender “goes to sleep at 8 a.m. and wakes up at 4 p.m.” (leaving little time to eat leftover takeout). Touring exhibits of the actual-size photos, Menjivar says, spark discussion of “not only our personal relationship to food but the larger society’s relationship to food systems.”…

Photographs by Robert Clark Rocket engine parts, chocolate figurines, functional replica pistols, a Dutch canal house, designer sunglasses, a zippy two-seater car, a rowboat, a prototype bionic ear, pizzas— hardly a week goes by without a startling tour de force in the rapidly evolving technology of three-dimensional printing. What sounds like something out of Star Trek—the starship’s replicator could synthesize anything—is increasingly becoming a reality. Indeed, NASA is testing a 3-D printer on the International Space Station to see if it might provide a way to fabricate meals, tools, and replacement parts on long missions. Back on Earth, long-term business plans are being reimagined. Airbus envisions that by 2050 entire planes could be built of 3-D printed parts. GE is already using printers to make fuel-nozzle tips for jet engines.…

He builds her a cozy love nest. He woos her with long serenades. Once they start a family, he babysits. The guy is such a catch that one lady after another shows up to play house with him. That’s good news—because the more the southern corroboree frog (Pseudophryne corroboree) procreates, the better the chance of saving one of Australia’s most famous and endangered amphibians. At the start of breeding season the quarter-size male uses his hind limbs to sculpt moss into a chamber near a water source. He keeps up a courtship call until a female enters the nest. She lays 15 to 38 eggs, onto which he directly deposits sperm. She departs; he stays. All season he keeps calling, welcoming up to ten females, fertilizing clutches of eggs—even building…

It’s a truism that men won’t ask directions. At least the men I know won’t. Paul Salopek is the exception that proves the rule: On his 30-million-step, 21,000-mile, seven-year journey, Paul is one man willing to inquire about the way forward. “I want to embed into the local cultures,” he told me recently, as we walked in a hot, dusty corner of southern Turkey, just north of the Syrian border. Asking directions, he finds, not only gets you where you are going but also unlocks something deeper. “It gives the locals a chance to tell you about their city, about their story,” Paul said. “They know more than you ever will.” Sharing rich, contextual narratives is the point of his quest. Paul is undertaking a solo walk (with the exception…

Some skies aren’t so friendly, thanks to unpredictable bouts of turbulence. A United Airlines flight in February hit such rough air that a baby was thrown into the air (but wasn’t harmed), one passenger’s head made a dent in the ceiling, and five people later went to the hospital. Because of climate change, the extreme weather events that breed turbulence “are likely to become more frequent or more intense,” says a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency report. “Flight plans avoid known regions of severe turbulence, but these regions move, and it is difficult to predict exactly where the severe turbulence is going to be,” says Sanjiva Lele of the Stanford-NASA Center for Turbulence Research. Help is on the way: Earlier this year one U.S. airline debuted new turbulence detectors that use…

Global undernourishment shouldn’t exist. Each day the world’s farmers produce the equivalent of 2,868 calories per person on the planet— enough to surpass the World Food Programme’s recommended intake of 2,100 daily calories and enough to support a population inching toward nine billion. The world as a whole does not have a food deficit, but individual countries do. Why do 805 million people still have too little to eat? Access is the main problem. Incomes and commodity prices establish where food goes. The quality of roads and airports determines how easily it gets there. Even measuring undernourishment is a challenge. In countries with the highest historical proportions of undernourishment, it can be hard to get food in and data out. Things are slowly getting better. Since the early 1990s world…

Assignment Point your camera toward our planet, we said. The Your Shot community responded with images of Earth’s wonders. Boris Basic Dubrovnik, Croatia As storms approached his hometown, Basic joined a group of storm chasers to fi nd the best vantage point. He set up for a few long exposures, then created this photo composite of six separate frames. “The wolf was huffing and puffing...” Roman Golubenko North Bergen, New Jersey Golubenko, a photographer, says he learned in Alaska that wildlife photography tends to be spontaneous. Sometimes animals are skittish. “But if I’m lucky,” he says, “I meet otters that all of a sudden decide to be playful and even pose for me.” “Just like you sometimes, Grandpa!”…

This special initiative explores how to sustainably feed everyone on our planet and celebrates the role food plays in our lives. What is it about eating that brings us closer? FOOD The sharing of food has always been part of the human story. From Qesem Cave near Tel Aviv comes evidence of ancient meals prepared at a 300,000-year-old hearth, the oldest ever found, where diners gathered to eat together. Retrieved from the ashes of Vesuvius: a circular loaf of bread with scoring marks, baked to be divided. “To break bread together,” a phrase as old as the Bible, captures the power of a meal to forge relationships, bury anger, provoke laughter. Children make mud pies, have tea parties, trade snacks to make friends, and mimic the rituals of adults. They…

Southern Africa has some of the world’s richest waters. But debate swirls over how to sustain these seas and the fishing communities that depend on them. Photographs by Thomas P. Peschak On Cape Town’s western shore, near a big-wave surf spot called Dungeons, is a low, flat island that seals have made their own. They snooze and bellow and nurse pups, and now and then heave themselves into the Atlantic, where snorkelers can join them in their frolics around reefs and through kelp forests. Sunlight sparkles on air bubbles trapped in their fur, and when they somersault and speed away, they trail a champagne wake. The island lies within the Karbonkelberg Restricted Zone, a “no take” sanctuary inside a much larger protected area that includes most of Cape Town’s coastline.…

No one talks much about toxic Superfund sites anymore. But 49 million Americans live close to one. For most of his adult life Jun Apostol has lived, willingly, in the shadow of a mountain of waste. An accountant who’s now retired, he planted his family in 1978 in a modest new house in Montebello, an industrial cum bedroom community just east of Los Angeles. Behind the house, in neighboring Monterey Park, sat an active landfill— but don’t worry, the developer said. Soon it would close and become a park or maybe even a golf course. The greens never came. It turned out that the landfill, a former gravel pit that had welcomed so much ordinary trash it had filled to ground level and then kept on rising, had also accepted…

As U.S. secretary of the interior, Sally Jewell, 58, heads an agency responsible for managing energy and water resources on public lands and trust commitments to Native Americans. But perhaps the part of the job closest to her heart—she grew up in the Pacific Northwest and is an avid outdoorswoman—is acting as steward of America’s national parks. WHAT’S THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE FOR PARKS? We need to make national parks relevant to new generations, to connect to people who have less time for a road trip or weekend campout with kids. We don’t have enough people with parks on the radar as a place they want to go. SO HOW DO YOU GET KIDS INTO NATIONAL PARKS? We’ve started a four-part youth initiative: play, learn, serve, work. First is play. Let…

In developing countries an estimated 20 million people need wheelchairs to get around—but standard wheelchairs, often donated, are not designed for negotiating rocky roads or sidewalk curbs. To solve the problem, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology team created the Leveraged Freedom Chair, a combination wheelchair and all-terrain trike. The LFC’s drivetrain is made of inexpensive, replaceable bike parts available even in remote villages. Its inventors founded a start-up that’s now producing the chairs and selling them to foundations, NGOs, and government agencies that distribute them for free.…

In December 1914 invading German troops and the defending Allies were dug in along battle lines in Belgium and France. From sodden trenches soldiers shot at each other across a no-man’s-land strewn with injured and dead comrades. But on December 24, at points along that western front, Germans placed lighted trees on trench parapets and the Allies joined them in an impromptu peace: the Christmas truce of World War I, a hundred years ago this month. The truce “bubbled up from the ranks” despite edicts against fraternization, says historian Stanley Weintraub, whose book Silent Night tells the story. After shouted exchanges promising, “You no shoot, we no shoot,” some erstwhile enemies serenaded each other with carols. Others emerged from trenches to shake hands and share a smoke. Many agreed to…

Assignment We asked to see images of life’s most universal expression. EDITOR’S NOTE “ A normal photo can become wonderful when you’ve thought of every detail. The light, the clouds, a genuine expression of pure joy riding a bike. It’s almost perfect.” Chris Minihane Great Falls, Virginia In Kenya, where bicycles can be scarce, Minihane wanted a portrait of a local boy riding. She bought a bike and tried to teach several boys to ride. “They’d crash every time,” she says. Finally one managed to stay on just long enough. Steven Chou Beijing, China Chou was walking along a road in the Liangshan area of Sichuan, China, when he met a woman who had finished her farmwork for the day. He talked to her for a few minutes, then took…

In Milpa Alta, Mexico, the faithful eat, pray, and celebrate to keep life whole. Every year for many years the people of Milpa Alta, Mexico, have prepared a meal before Christmas, the magnitude of which would seem to require a miracle. Sixty thousand tamales and 5,000 gallons of hot chocolate are made from scratch in less than a week, not too much and not too little for the thousands who show up for the feast. The feeding of this multitude is no simple matter. “There is an infinity of things to do,” Virginia Meza Torres says firmly, as if to signal no time to talk. She looks crisp and unruffled in a white piqué blouse. Her husband, Fermín Lara Jiménez, stands next to her on their patio, neatly dressed in…

Photographs by John Stanmeyer Jerusalem is not a city of war. Avner Goren is stubborn on this point. We are on foot, walking under a cloudless morning sky in the Levant, following a river of raw sewage that foams in torrents from East Jerusalem—12 million gallons a day, Goren informs me—a foul discharge that runs for 23 miles down to the Dead Sea. We are trailing the waste as a form of pilgrimage. Goren, one of Israel’s leading archaeologists, thinks like this. “There have been 700 conflicts here since Jerusalem was founded,” he says over his shoulder, wedging his way through religious tourists in the Old City. “But there were long times without war too. And people lived peacefully together.” There are three of us. Goren: a native Jerusalemite, a…

This is a story about blood, courage, and tradition, and like most stories of this nature, there are horses involved, and men of unlikely skill and reticence, and yes, of course, lives and limbs are at risk. Also, like most stories of this nature, the landscape is mythically wild, partly because it is so remote and therefore almost impossible to reach by ordinary, convenient means. If you know where to look, you can see Sutherland on a topographical map, a finger of land pointing into Chile’s Última Esperanza Sound, in southern Patagonia. But there are no roads near the place, and no settlements. To the north—but again, not accessible by ordinary means—there is Torres del Paine National Park, and beyond that the wild and impassable northern ice fields that cut…