Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2017 i National Geographic Magazine

Of these three hunky monkeys, which would you say has the most sex appeal? That’s easier to answer if you’re a rhesus macaque( Macaca mulatta)— or Constance Dubuc, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Cambridge. Since 2012 Dubuc and colleagues from New York University have studied more than 250 free-ranging rhesus macaques at a field site in the Caribbean. The goal: to learn how face color—which varies from pale pink to deep red in the species—affects reproductive success. To isolate color’s role in attraction, Dubuc showed each rhesus test subject two photos of faces in different shades of red. She found that dark red faces appeal strongly to females and somewhat to males—and she did so, in part, by tracking eye movements. “It’s the same as with humans,” she…

NEARLY A CENTURY ago, some members of the Chicago White Sox baseball team accepted a bribe—as much as $100,000 (about $1.4 million today)—to deliberately lose the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. Suspicions arose in the first game after uncharacteristically sloppy pitching by the White Sox, who were heavily favored to win. “I don’t know why I did it,” pitcher Eddie Cicotte testified before a grand jury. “I must have been crazy.” He and seven other players, including “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, were indicted on nine counts of conspiracy but acquitted by a jury. They were banned from the game for life. OTHER FAMOUS FIBS LANCE ARMSTRONG: “I’ve said it for longer than seven years. I have never doped.” As he had many times, the seven-time Tour de France winner lied…

Beneath a white, indifferent sky, a pale boy in a blueand- red uniform shyly bows his head as tears begin to slip down his cheeks. He is retelling his terrible story. His father, visiting for the first time in two years, pulls out a white handkerchief. In the shade of a lone tree in the center of a Tanzanian schoolyard, the man reaches over to cradle his son’s head and dab his eyes because the boy can no longer dry his own tears. Emmanuel Festo, who is 15 years old, has spent much of his life learning to live with what he lost one night when he was six. Four men with machetes hacked off most of his left arm, most of the fingers on his right hand, part of…

As soon as Rick Medina saw the body slumped over the curb on the evening news last November, he knew it was his 23-year-old son, Ericardo. The victim—dumped on a quiet avenue in Manila, the Philippine capital— could have been anyone. His back was to the TV cameras, but a father knows. The next morning his daughter Jhoy, 26, visited the morgue. Eight bodies were lined up on the floor. They had all died the same way: Their heads had been bound in packing tape, their chests and necks stabbed repeatedly with an ice pick. A cardboard sign left on Ericardo’s body labeled him a drug dealer. According to his father, Ericardo never touched drugs; Jhoy says he dabbled in them. Either way, his killers meted out a final punishment…

Read on for excerpts from the book Pandora’s Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong. During the past few years I’ve asked doctors, scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, skeptics, and friends to list what they think were the world’s worst inventions. Here are the seven finalists: Six thousand years ago the Sumerians discovered hul gil, “the plant of joy,” which gave birth to a class of drugs that kills over 20,000 Americans every year. More young adults die from opioids than from auto accidents. In 1901 a German scientist performed an experiment that revolutionized the food industry. Today one estimate says that eliminating trans fats would prevent 250,000 heart-related deaths a year in the United States. In 1909 another German scientist invented ammonia fertilizer. It won the Nobel Prize, helped feed…

Order prints of select National Geographic photos online at NationalGeographicArt.com. DAILY DOZEN EDITOR’S PICK Each day online we feature the 12 best photos submitted to our Your Shot community. This is one of our favorites. Albert Dros Leusden, Netherlands Dros loves to shoot in Asia, but he knew photographing from one of the highest residential towers in Busan, South Korea, wouldn’t be easy. He negotiated with officials for months to get permission. Then one night he was escorted to the roof with his fish-eye lens and pointed the camera down. #NGM ADVANCES ASSIGNMENT We asked to see images of progress—of advances that transform your community, your region, or the entire world. Aya Okawa El Cerrito, California Okawa was flying in a small plane near Rio Vista, California, at what’s known…

“ Even more wonderful than the dizzy heights of the buildings is the blaze of electricity radiating from them,” National Geographic said of the New York City skyline in 1917. “People now living remember the time when there was no gas and candles were universal.” Alexander Graham Bell hated few things more than summertime in Washington, D.C. He usually escaped to his estate in Nova Scotia, but one year obligations forced him to stay in the humid capital. Sweltering in 100°F heat, he wondered why humans had figured out how to warm a house but not how to cool one— until now. Nearby, President Woodrow Wilson had installed an ice plant that lowered the temperature in the White House to 80 degrees. By the time Bell read about it in…

THE ART FORGER Lying for self-aggrandizement Mark Landis, who says he was a failure as a commercial artist, spent nearly three decades imitating the works of famous painters, including this one in the style of folk artist William Matthew Prior. Posing as a philanthropist or Jesuit priest, he donated them to art museums and enjoyed being treated with respect. “I had never experienced this before, and I wanted it to go on,” he says. “I have no feelings of conscience about this. When I was exposed and had to stop, I was very sorry.” IN THE FALL OF 1989 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY WELCOMED INTO ITS FRESHMAN CLASS A YOUNG MAN NAMED ALEXI SANTANA, WHOSE LIFE STORY THE ADMISSIONS COMMITTEE HAD FOUND EXTRAORDINARILY COMPELLING. He had barely received any formal schooling. He…

IT WAS A GRUESOME CRIME: In 1918 Bolshevik revolutionaries executed Russian tsar Nicholas II, the empress, and their five children. But did Anastasia, the youngest daughter, escape? Several impersonators exploited this hope, most famously Anna Anderson, an Anastasia look-alike who filed an unsuccessful suit in 1938 to try to prove her identity—and claim an inheritance. Anderson, who had supporters as well as detractors, died in 1984. A posthumous DNA test found she was unrelated to the Romanovs and appeared to confirm she was a Polish factory worker named Franziska Schanzkowska. OTHER FAMOUS FIBS JOAN LOWELL: “Any damn fool can be accurate—and dull.” Lowell famously fabricated her bestselling 1929 memoir, The Cradle of the Deep, about childhood adventures aboard a schooner with her sea captain father. HAN VAN MEEGEREN: “It was awfully hard…

IN 1912 FOSSIL ENTHUSIAST Charles Dawson and his collaborator Arthur Smith Woodward, a geologist at the British Natural History Museum, announced the unearthing of humanlike skull fragments and an apelike jawbone from a gravel pit near Piltdown, England. Just a few years earlier, Dawson had written to Smith Woodward, saying he was “waiting for the big ‘find.’ ” But Piltdown man, initially hailed as the missing link connecting ape to human, was a fraud: The bones were stained to resemble ancient fossils, and the teeth, from an orangutan, had been filed down to appear human. OTHER FAMOUS FIBS HWANG WOO-SUK: “I created an illusion and made it look as if it were real. I was drunk in the bubble I created.” The South Korean scientist claimed in 2004 that he had…

Human skin, hair, and eye color is controlled by several genes that determine the amount and type of melanin pigment a person has. An inherited genetic mutation can interfere with this process, resulting in little to no melanin and raising the risk of severe sunburn, skin ulcers, and skin cancer. “OCA-2”— the most common type of albinism— is caused by a mutation that results in only small amounts of melanin. INCIDENCE OF ALBINISM Accounting for nearly half of albinism cases worldwide, OCA-2 is most widespread in sub-Saharan Africa. It’s 14 times as prevalent in Tanzania as in North America and Europe. The Guna people of Panama have one of the highest rates. Shielding skin from the sun Melanin is the main pigment in the skin of humans and all other…

VETERAN CAVERS PETER AND ANN BOSTED WERE CRUISING AROUND THEIR HOMETOWN OF HAWAIIAN OCEAN VIEW, ON HAWAII’S BIG ISLAND, A FEW YEARS AGO WHEN ANN SPOTTED A SMALL HOLE OFF THE SIDE OF THE ROAD. It was no more than three feet wide—just big and inviting enough for the couple to pull their car over and try to slink into. “We had a couple hours to kill,” Peter told me, “so we started surveying, and we found a side passage that turned out to be a lot more mazy than we expected.” Back home, Peter marked the puka, or cave entrance, on a digital map and planned to return later—with the landowner’s permission— to see where the opening might lead. From outer space, the town of Hawaiian Ocean View looks…

Bam! Thwak! Pow! Diverse superheroes are giving old stereotypes a beating. As comic book and graphic novel sales in North America cracked one billion dollars in 2015, nontraditional characters—racial and cultural minorities, women, LGBT figures—are becoming major players. Some heroes in this inclusive pantheon are new. But well-known characters and brands are also getting a makeover: Marvel now has a black Spider-Man and a female Thor; Archie Comics’ multiracial character Harper is disabled; DC’s Wonder Woman recently officiated at a lesbian wedding. Industry analyst Milton Griepp says once marginalized groups started appearing regularly in mainstream comics about 10 years ago. The rise of manga, with its heavily female readership, and the recent superhero films of Hollywood have been catalysts for the change, he says. So have shifts in popular culture,…

In 2014 radiology professor Mark Griswold was looking for a new way to teach anatomy. Running a cadaver lab can be expensive, and corpses offer surprisingly limited views into the body. In the midst of his search, he was invited to Microsoft’s top secret testing facility. He expected to be shown a virtual reality headset, a potentially useful tool for teaching. Instead technicians outfitted him with something even more groundbreaking: a mixed reality headset, called HoloLens, the first self-contained computer that allows users to see holograms amid their surroundings. When Griswold put on the headset, he was transported to a mountain on the surface of Mars. Standing beside him was a NASA scientist. They chatted and even made eye contact, but the scientist was a hologram—a real person beamed in…

ON THE MORNING of June 17, 1972, five men were arrested after breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate building in Washington, D.C. The media, led by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, doggedly pursued the story, exposing wiretaps, secret documents, and hush money. President Richard Nixon denied involvement in the scandal, declaring, “I am not a crook,” in a nationally televised press conference. But the White House coverup failed. Faced with almost certain impeachment, Nixon resigned from his second term in office on August 9, 1974. OTHER FAMOUS FIBS DONALD TRUMP: “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” The president—who won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote—has kept fact-checkers busy with his steady tweets, many…

Jon Witman checks his air gauge, adjusts his flippers, and falls backward into the Pacific. Nearby, the ocean throws itself against Isla Beagle, one of a hundred-plus rocks, pinnacles, and islands that form the Galápagos archipelago, a province of Ecuador that straddles the Equator. Rebuffed, the sea retreats in a white flag of foam. On a shelf above the spray, blue-footed boobies dance with the awkwardness of teens at a junior high prom. Below them on the rocks, an argument breaks out between two Galápagos sea lions. The scene could have looked and sounded the same when Charles Darwin sailed here almost two centuries ago. These creatures, fine-tuned to life on harsh isles, seemingly can weather anything, even time itself. Suddenly Witman breaks the surface. “It’s beginning,” he tells me…

Stunning Discovery Some 110 million years ago, this armored planteater lumbered through what is now western Canada, until a flooded river swept it into open sea. The dinosaur’s undersea burial preserved its armor in exquisite detail. Its skull still bears tile-like plates and a gray patina of fossilized skin. Solving the Puzzle In life this imposing herbivore—called a nodosaur— stretched 18 feet long and weighed nearly 3,000 pounds. Researchers suspect it initially fossilized whole, but when it was found in 2011, only the front half, from the snout to the hips, was intact enough to recover. The specimen is the best fossil of a nodosaur ever found. COMPOSITE OF EIGHT IMAGES PHOTOGRAPHED AT ROYAL TYRRELL MUSEUM OF PALAEONTOLOGY, DRUMHELLER, ALBERTA (ALL) On the afternoon of March 21, 2011, a heavy-equipment…

HOW A LAVA TUBE IS FORMED A VOLCANO ERUPTS Molten rock and gas escape from deep beneath the Earth’s surface, sending lava spewing out in effusive and sometimes explosive eruptions. LAVA FLOWS Factors like speed, gas content, and volume can yield two flow types: the rough and chunky aa or the smooth pahoehoe. Most lava tubes in Hawaii are formed by pahoehoe flows. LAVA IS INSULATED As the outer layers of lava cool and solidify, they form an insulated tube, trapping heat and allowing the molten core to flow long distances. TUBES TO CAVES After an eruption subsides, the remaining lava hardens, and some tubes can become accessible caves. Many have long served as an important part of native Hawaiian culture and as a source of water and shelter. A…