Innholdsfortegnelse for Jun-14 i National Geographic Magazine

Layka, the dog pictured on our cover and here, was two when she was sent to help clear an enemy compound in Afghanistan. During her search she was shot by enemy forces and took four rounds from an AK-47 at point-blank range. Despite her injuries, she attacked and subdued the shooter, protecting her handler, Staff Sgt. Julian McDonald, and other members of the team. It took seven hours of surgery, including the amputation of a limb, to save her. In 2012 Layka was presented with a medal of heroism and adopted by McDonald, who now trains dogs and their handlers at Fort Benning, Georgia. Our cover story, “The Dogs of War,” is about a special bond. Dogs have been our best friends for at least 14,000 years. The relationship is…

For June’s assignment, we requested scenes that made you dream. For future assignments, visit yourshot.nationalgeographic.com/assignments-stories. Veronika Kolev Toronto, Canada At the Oktoberfest in Munich, Germany, Kolev pointed her camera at a nun riding a swing carousel. After the nun (at center) got off the ride, Kolev congratulated her on her bravery. The woman responded that it had been her greatest dream to ride the swings. Nicholas Paoni Encinitas, California On a small bridge over California’s San Elijo Lagoon, Paoni photographed an egret hunting in the shallow water. When it disappeared under the bridge, Paoni moved his camera to capture the bird emerging from the other side. Tarek Touma Beirut, Lebanon During a lunch break Touma, a doctor of osteopathy, left his clinic in northern Lebanon to get something from his…

An adult human’s skin covers a surface of around 21 square feet, the equivalent of half a Ping-Pong table. The wings of butterflies don’t just help the insects fly. They also repel water. The wings do it so well, in fact, that an international team of engineers now sees them as models for how future airplanes could be made. Moisture makes flight less efficient. Ice is even more of a drag. A butterfly’s wings, with their intricate ridges and waxy covering, can buck a water droplet 40 percent faster than the famously hydrophobic lotus leaf. Every millisecond is important. “If we can reduce the contact time with water, a surface can stay dry longer,” says MIT’s Kripa Varanasi. That would mean faster flights and less need to spray de-icing chemicals,…

In the late 1960s in Phoenix, Arizona, John van Hengel heard a woman say that she relied on grocery store Dumpsters to find food for her children. She gave him an idea: create a place where food could be deposited and withdrawn, as at a bank. “It upset him to see usable food go to waste,” says Ross Fraser of Feeding America, the network of more than 200 food banks that grew from van Hengel’s first warehouse. The group now helps feed one in eight Americans. Food banks are also on the rise globally. “We are seeing a new face of hunger,” says Fraser. “There are Ph.D.’s on food stamps.” WASTE NOT Food collected would otherwise be discarded.…

HERE IS MARINE CORPORAL JOSE ARMENTA in his tent on the night before getting blown up in Afghanistan. He jokes with Mulrooney and Berry and the medic the guys have nicknamed “Christ.” He feeds and waters his dog, Zenit, a sablecoat German shepherd. He lets Buyes, who will be dead in three months, ruffle Zenit’s fur, for the radioman is crazy about the dog. Then he takes Zenit outside in the waning light of this dusty, desert otherworld to train. They’re happiest like this. Jose has Zenit sit, which the dog does obediently, and then Jose jogs 50 yards down and hides a rubber toy, a Kong, up against a mud wall, covering it with dirt. On Jose’s command, Zenit bursts forward, zigging in search of it, tail wagging. It’s…

By 2050 we’ll need to feed two billion more people. This special eight-month series explores how we can do that—without overwhelming the planet. Can the “blue revolution” solve the world’s food puzzle? In a dark, dank warehouse in the Blue Ridge foothills of Virginia, Bill Martin picks up a bucket of brown pellets and slings them into a long concrete tank. Fat, white tilapia the size of dinner plates boil to the surface. Martin, president of Blue Ridge Aquaculture, one of the world’s largest indoor fish farms, smiles at the feeding frenzy. “This is St. Peter’s fish, the fish Jesus fed the multitudes,” he says, his raspy voice resonating like a preacher’s. Unlike Jesus, however, Martin does not give his fish away. Each day he sells 12,000 pounds of live…

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ON TV Every month this page features our staff picks of National Geographic Society products and events. For more go to nglive.org. This month the National Geographic Channel takes viewers to the heart of the war in Afghanistan. When four Americans are killed at Bagram Airfield by Taliban rockets, our camera crews embed with elite Air Force units as they fly to rescue the wounded and go on the offensive, hunting down the insurgents responsible for the attack. TRIP SAFARIS National Geographic’s expert-led safaris offer a range of ways to discover the world’s wildlife, from walking with the Maasai in Tanzania to spotting tigers in India and leopards (left) in Botswana’s private game reserves. Choose the safari that best suits your interests at ngexpeditions.com/safari. EXHIBIT COSMOS: A SPACETIME…

It seems Garrison Keillor and I grew up in the same town— except mine was in Michigan. Each of us constructs a sort of geographical-highlight map of places we’ve lived. Even years later my recollections can help a traveler find the best restaurants or avoid shadier parts of town. I recall reading that chimps likely use a mental picture of their forest to find what they need to survive. The capacity to create a mental sketch of the most relevant parts of the environment must be a key survival technique that humans inherited from the earliest primates. Of course we no longer need to know where to find the best fig tree, just the nearest coffee shop. What to call such an important survival construct? May I suggest we call…

Most redheads experience pain differently than the rest of us. Their hair color is caused by a mutation in the skin’s melanocortin-1 receptor gene, which may “inadvertently activate” similar receptors in the brain that process anxiety and pain, says Anthony G. Doufas of the Outcomes Research Consortium of clinical anesthesiologists. Anecdotal evidence long held that redheads were harder to anesthetize. The consortium tested this theory and found that redheads required 19 percent more gas for general anesthesia. They’re also more sensitive to thermal pain and more resistant to local anesthesia. No wonder the Journal of the American Dental Association reports redheads are “more than twice as likely” to avoid the dentist’s chair.…

There’s a reason we love cheese. It contains tiny amounts of potentially addictive substances. Some of the feel-good chemicals come from casein, a milk protein that’s concentrated during cheesemaking. Our digestion breaks down casein, creating morphine-like chemicals called casoorphins. But that’s not all. Milk may also include traces of morphine itself, produced in the cow’s liver. Such natural drugs are likely beneficial to calves for two reasons: They have a calming effect, and they hook the calf on milk, compelling it to nurse so it gets all the nutrition it needs.…

Nepal is currently the only country that does not have a rectangular or square flag. On the world’s most barren continent emperor penguins opt to sit in traffic. Why? Antarctic temperatures plunge as low as -60°F, so a tight huddle helps incubating male birds stay warm and conserve energy. Unlike human traffic jams, however, in which each person is an individual actor, the penguins act as a unit. A group of international researchers discovered last fall that when one bird moves even a few inches, it triggers waves of motion in every direction as the rest of the penguins adjust. Other birds flock together too, as do schools of fish. “What makes emperors different is that they try to limit the space between them [for heat],” says University of Erlangen-Nuremberg…

In the late afternoon light along the Peruvian coast, local workmen gather as archaeologists Miłosz Giersz and Roberto Pimentel Nita open a row of small sealed chambers near the entrance of an ancient tomb. Concealed for more than a thousand years under a layer of heavy adobe brick, the mini-chambers hold large ceramic jars, some bearing painted lizards, others displaying grinning human faces. As Giersz pries loose the brick from the final compartment, he grimaces. “It smells awful down here,” he splutters. He peers warily into a large undecorated pot. It’s full of decayed puparia, traces of flies once drawn to the pot’s contents. The archaeologist backs away and stands up, slapping a cloud of 1,200-year-old dust from his pants. In three years of digging at this site, called El…

Although ancient Romans used metal spikes to winkle out snails, the fork didn’t appear with regularity until the 17th century. In the gilded world of late 19th-century America, flatware sets could stretch to 30 types of forks, with various ones for shrimp, sardines, lobster, scallops, and oysters. “Americans became fork crazy. It played to social-status building,” says Sarah Coffin, a curator at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City. Gentle reader, should you encounter multiple forks at table, fear not. The rule is: Start with the one farthest to the left, and work in from there. Oyster fork Size and shape determine a fork’s use; this one’s best for plucking oysters from their shell. Cocktail fork Also for cold meat, this art deco Georg Jensen fork was designed in…

Robert Clark has shot a lot of archaeology stories for the magazine, including several in Peru. But he calls this month’s feature on the northern Wari people (“Untouched”) “just amazing. By far the richest dig I’ve ever been on.” A 1,200-year-old tomb known as El Castillo de Huarmey—unlooted at a much plundered site—is yielding new insights into South America’s first empire builders. Yet mysteries remain. One was in Clark’s hotel. “Behind the front desk was a Wari pot,” he says. “The owner said he bought it from a tomb raider, like a lot of people around town had.” Over the next three weeks, as Clark photographed the dig site and objects being studied in a lab, he thought about the pot. “I wanted to show its beauty,” he says, “and…

Germany The head of a trapped red squirrel pokes through a manhole cover in Isernhagen. Police freed the rodent by gently pushing back its ears and drizzling olive oil on its neck. But the ordeal proved too stressful, and the squirrel did not survive. England To celebrate the 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, Princess Anne’s dress holds court in Buckingham Palace. Nearly three years old at the time of her mother’s ceremony, Anne was deemed too young to attend. Order prints of select National Geographic photos online at NationalGeographicArt.com. Poland On their way to harvest grain in Policzna, a woman and her grandson share a horse-drawn cart with a horse-headed volunteer promoting a traveling festival. The surreal attire was ignored by the farming-focused villagers.…

How often does food make us sick? Since most cases of food poisoning go unreported, the true extent of global foodborne illness is unknown. Improvements in international monitoring have led to greater public awareness, yet the rapid globalization of food production increases consumers’ vulnerability by making food harder to regulate and trace. “We have the world on our plates,” says Hilde Kruse of the World Health Organization. “But with more options comes more risk.”…

“Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death,” wrote Ernest Hemingway. Now the art itself seems to be in danger. The number of corridas held each year in Spain is down 57 percent since 2007, unemployed matadors are leaving for Latin American arenas, and the region of Catalonia has banned the centuries-old spectacle. Like the bull stabbed multiple times in the ring, bullfighting suffers from many wounds. Nationalists in the country’s autonomous regions reject bullfighting as too Spanish, while animal rights groups say it’s too cruel. The deepest wounds come from Spain’s economic crisis. “If you are unemployed,” says Vicente Royuela, an economist at the University of Barcelona, “you aren’t going to a bullfight.” Last year, after 590,000 Spaniards signed a petition, the government…

Most people can’t chop an onion without crying. That’s because of something called the lachrymatory factor : a tear-inducing compound onions unleash when cut. In nature, says organic chemist Eric Block, this is likely a defense against predators. In the kitchen, it’s a nuisance. So scientists from Japan and New Zealand have created a “tearless” variety by suppressing the enzyme that triggers the irritant. The genetically modified bulbs (left) are strictly for study, but the goal is to breed an edible version naturally. That would be a sight for sore eyes.…

Here they come, wings beating like a manic pulse, bodies a blur of black and white, a flash of orange from beaks cartoonishly large. Cliff tops, empty and dark for months, turn to commotion near the beginning of April with the arrival of antic, adorable-looking Atlantic puffins. Smallest of the four puffin species, they have come en masse to breed on Britain’s rumpled islands and coasts, the more remote, unpeopled, and predator free, the better. No one is certain precisely how and where Fratercula arctica (“little friar of the Arctic,” so named for its monkish, dark-colored hood) spends the rest of the year. They are somewhere in the vast northern seas, solitary, almost never seen, as they fly, feed, and float. Ah, but spring. It’s like carnival time for puffins.…

THE AILING AND THE INJURED await the train at every stop. In Khani, a village of 742 people wedged between the snowy peaks of the Stanovoy Mountains, patients emerge from concrete buildings and gather along the tracks. They all seek medical treatment. One man fell down a staircase while drunk and broke both of his ankles. A teacher at the only school in town wants a checkup for her 14-year-old daughter, who came down with appendicitis a month earlier and was, quite luckily, evacuated on a cargo train. She had her appendix removed in Chara, three anguished hours away. These and other patients are waiting now to board the Matvei Mudrov medical train. This is Khani’s main lifeline—a mobile medical clinic with basic equipment, exam rooms, and 12 to 15…

Women once warmed to the 109ºF whirlpool bath—and scantily clad statuary—on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at the European Health Spa in St. Petersburg, Florida. Men had access to the facility on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. No information is available about what happened on Sundays. This photo was originally published in National Geographic’s November 1973 issue with an article called “Florida’s Booming—and Beleaguered—Heartland.” These days any beleaguered visitors to the site of the long-closed spa may seek a different sort of relaxation: It is now a liquor store. Get Lost in Found. Go to NatGeoFound.tumblr.com.…