Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2017 i National Geographic Magazine

Who is a genius? This question has fascinated humankind for centuries—and it bedeviled us in putting together the cover story of this month’s issue. Let’s stipulate: Einstein was a genius. His face (his hair!) is virtually the international symbol for genius, so revered is he as an intellectual titan. But for our story we wanted to go beyond one man and explore the nature of genius itself. Why is it that some people are so much more intelligent or creative than the rest of us? And who are they? That’s where the trouble begins. When editors here first gathered portraits to create a gallery of geniuses past (because it’s hard to tell who among the living truly is a genius), the uniformity was obvious—and unsettling. In the sciences and arts,…

Capturing a three-dimensional image of an animal is tricky. “If it blinks or breathes or twitches its leg, you have to start over,” says Duncan Irschick. The University of Massachusetts biologist was lucky with a cane toad he encountered in the Philippines: It didn’t stray from its leaf while he took some 30 shots, from all angles, with a handheld camera—enough to stitch together the 3-D version of the image below. Now Irschick uses a technology called the Beastcam, a portable and adaptable multi-camera setup similar to what videogame designers use to create lifelike images of humans. The cameras, arrayed around the animal, capture images simultaneously—insurance against fidgets. “Not a lot of people have tried this in the animal world,” says colleague Christine Shepard, a photographer. Irschick and Shepard employ…

Many forms of music were forbidden in the Soviet Union, especially in the first years of the Cold War. Western jazz and rock-and-roll were deemed the music of the enemy; Russian-émigré pop, the music of traitors. The Soviets banned “any music with a sort of swing to it,” says Stephen Coates, a British musician who founded the X-Ray Audio Project to chronicle one effort to evade state control. In 1946 two enterprising music lovers in Leningrad, Ruslan Bugaslovski and Boris Taigin, figured out a way to copy records. The original music was smuggled into the country, often by sailors. Because materials in the U.S.S.R. were scarce, the two men scavenged parts from tools, such as drills, and old gramophones to build a recording machine. For the records themselves, they turned…

Crime scene investigators are about to get an assist from the land of the pharaohs. New research has shown that a pigment called Egyptian blue, formulated some 5,250 years ago, can be used as dusting powder to detect fingerprints on complicated surfaces. The earliest known synthetic pigment, Egyptian blue is found in some of the paint that still colors ancient statues, coffins, and tomb walls. Modern scientists were intrigued by this long-lasting tint and figured out its chemical components decades ago. More recently they discovered that it emits near-infrared radiation when exposed to a certain kind of light. Researchers have now demonstrated the forensic potential of that rare, invisible luminescence. After a crime is committed, police may dust relevant surfaces with a powder of a contrasting color. The powder sticks…

Today’s cities are finding it hard to be both livable and economically strong. Not one has truly balanced people, profit, and the planet, according to a new report on an index that ranks cities by sustainability. The index, from global design firm Arcadis and the Centre for Economics and Business Research, ranks cities’ success based on social, environmental, and economic factors. Rapidly urbanizing places, such as Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, tend to prioritize fiscal growth over environmental or health matters—at least at first, says Arcadis’s global director of cities, John Batten. For example, only after it had built a robust economy did Dubai begin investing in mass transit projects that would cut pollution and improve pedestrian safety. Increasingly, city leaders are seeing the value of raising the quality…

To reach the butterfly artist’s house, you have to navigate a maze of mud-brick homes near the wide, brown Oubangui River. Four years ago Muslim rebels and Christian militias rampaged through, fighting for control of Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic. Today the neighborhood is filled with squealing children playing soccer and chattering vendors hawking peanuts and eggs, avocados and mangoes, wild honey and peppercorns. But violence still plagues the city, and the people here remain keenly alert to the sounds of gunshots and military helicopters. Philippe Andé is oblivious to all of that. A slight, balding man, he hunches over a worktable covered in butterfly wings— a constellation of electric colors, flamboyant shapes, and exotic patterns. The Central African Republic is home to 597 identified species, and…

At exactly 6 p.m. on July 30, 2015, in Kingussie, Scotland, George Pirie, the agent acting on behalf of Eric Heerema, a Dutch entrepreneur, took possession of Balavil Estate from Allan Macpherson-Fletcher, its former owner. The sale, worth about five million pounds ($6.3 million U.S.), meant that the 7,000-acre property—with its gray stone 18th-century manor designed by Robert Adam, rolling moors, threemile beat of the River Spey, and Sarah the resident ghost—would no longer be part of a family legacy spanning 225 years. “It was a great way of life, but it was time,” Macpherson-Fletcher said later, sipping a whisky in the sunroom of a renovated crofter’s cottage in a corner of the estate he’d held back for himself and his wife, Marjorie. Macpherson-Fletcher, a warm, genial, white-haired man with…

Order prints of select National Geographic photos online at NationalGeographicArt.com. Madagascar A cloud of hungry migratory locusts descends on a tree near Isalo National Park. Swarms like this one— the result of a robust rainy season, when the insect’s population swells dramatically— appear once or twice a decade. CL IMATE CHANGE: IN FOCUS ASSIGNMENT Melting glaciers. Rising seas. Mass extinction. These are the terms. We asked to see what climate change looks like. Arka Dutta Kolkata, India Dutta visited India’s Ganges River Delta last summer to see conditions that could possibly be attributed to climate change. Rising water is encroaching on islands and eroding homes, in some cases forcing people to relocate. This woman stands where her house once was. Kira Morris Wichita, Kansas One winter when Morris was working…

Do androids, as sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick asked, really dream of electric sheep? The purpose and meaning of dreams have long been debated. Now scientists are getting closer to deciphering what humans see as they sleep—and how a robot can simulate it. In 2013 neuroscientist Yukiyasu Kamitani had test subjects take hundreds of brief naps in an MRI machine, repeatedly waking them so they could describe their dreams. Kamitani had already isolated the unique brain patterns for certain objects he’d shown subjects while awake. Their brains were scanned for those patterns as they napped, and a computer program automatically turned the basic contents of their dreams into short videos. The study found these were 70 percent accurate compared with what subjects remembered of their real dreams. Two years later…

A Cairo vendor sells masks of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi during Egypt’s 2014 presidential election. Having deposed his predecessor in a coup, the popular former general won 97 percent of the vote. After taking office, he announced the construction of a brand-new capital in the desert east of Cairo—a $300 billion project reminiscent of Akhenaten’s desert capital at Amarna. “It’s the same back then; it’s the same now,” archaeologist Anna Stevens says. “Everybody is running after Sisi because he’s a strong man.” SOMETIMES THE MOST POWERFUL COMMENTARY ON A KING IS MADE BY THOSE WHO ARE SILENT. One morning in Amarna, a village in Upper Egypt about 200 miles south of Cairo, a set of delicate, sparrowlike bones were arranged atop a wooden table. “The clavicle is here, and the upper…