Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2017 i National Geographic Magazine

In 1950 less than a third of the world’s people lived in cities. Today more than half do. By 2050 two-thirds of humanity is expected to reside in urban areas. Many sprawling, densely populated areas are all about “un”: unplanned, unhealthy, unsustainable. I remember feeling the “un” when my husband and I were in New Delhi in November 2016: In the capital city of the second most populous nation on Earth, the pollution was so bad that schools had to close because it wasn’t safe for kids to be outdoors. The growth of cities has produced some of the most complex issues of our time. It’s a phenomenon that creates disruption— but also great reason for hope. At National Geographic we’re known for telling stories about vast and open places.…

This article is part of our Urban Expeditions series, an initiative made possible by a grant from United Technologies to the National Geographic Society. To plunge headlong into the audacity of Dubai—the sprawling efflorescence of concrete, glass, and steel that has sprung up over the past three decades on the scorched sands of Arabia—you could start by going skiing. From outside the Mall of the Emirates, the slope looks like a silver spaceship impaled in the ground floor. Inside you can window-shop at Prada, Dior, and Alexander McQueen before pushing through the glass doors of Ski Dubai. Passing a mural of the Alps, you zip up your parka, pull on your gloves—and marvel at what air-conditioning can do. The souvenir T-shirt I bought bears a cartoon of a Celsius thermometer.…

Dance!” shouted the army officer, waving a gun at the trembling girl. Afifa, just 14 years old, was corralled in a field with dozens of girls and women—all members of the Rohingya Muslim minority. Soldiers had invaded her village in western Myanmar that morning last October. The men and boys, fearing for their lives, had dashed into the forests to hide. After enduring an invasive body search, Afifa had watched soldiers drag two women into a rice paddy before others turned their attention to her. “If you don’t dance at once, we will slaughter you,” the officer warned. Choking back tears, Afifa swayed back and forth. The soldiers clapped rhythmically, and the officer slid an arm around her waist. “Now that’s better, isn’t it?” he said, flashing a smile. The…

The world’s farmers grow enough food to end global hunger, but 795 million people remain undernourished. Poverty keeps many from meeting the UN Food and Agriculture Organization’s recommended average intake of 2,353 calories a day. Access is the primary problem, says the FAO’s Carlo Cafiero. Political unrest, economic crises, and natural disasters can snarl food distribution, creating pockets of scarcity that exacerbate people’s struggle to access food. The world has made progress against hunger. Undernourishment has declined from 23 to 13 percent in developing countries over the past quarter century. Even so, what a country eats reflects its economic status: People in less prosperous nations get more calories from grains or starchy roots; in industrialized countries, animal protein, fats, and sugar make up a larger portion of meals.…

A honeybee queen, when all is right in her world, should live for two to three years. But in the United States, beekeepers have seen that life span drop by more than half over the past decade, and researchers are trying to determine why. It’s one of many questions surrounding the mystery of honeybee mortality, a disturbing phenomenon that’s linked to a mix of factors, including parasites, pesticides, and habitat loss. Aside from making a delicious natural sweetener, honeybees—which are not native to the U.S.—also provide a crucial service to agriculture: pollination. From apples to almonds, many crops would suffer without honeybees. And while about 90 percent of beekeepers in this country are hobbyists, the majority of hives belong to large-scale, commercial operations, says North Carolina State University entomologist David…

In a single generation Dubai exploded from a humble settlement with modest oil reserves to a sprawling, car-centric metropolis fueled by tourism, real estate, and aviation—it has the world’s third busiest airport and is building another. For a more secure, sustainable future, it’s investing in solar energy, green building, and mass transit.…

Clad in a camouflage jacket, the mosquito netting unzipped from his hood, Yuri Khudi squats by the fire inside his large chum. Outside, seven more of the teepee-like tents cluster in a semicircle. Swells of Siberian tundra roll north toward the Arctic Ocean; a reindeer herd grazes on a distant crest. It’s mid-July, and the group of Nenets herders that Yuri leads are about halfway through an annual trek that takes them 400 miles north on the Yamal Peninsula to the Arctic coast—in normal years, that is. “It’s been three years since we have made it all the way to our summer pastures by the Kara Sea,” Yuri says as his wife, Katya, pours him a steaming mug of tea. “Our reindeer were too weak for the long journey.” In…

For those who’ve long wondered if their cats regard them merely as kibble dispensers, a report in the journal Behavioural Processes should be reassuring. In a study that exposed adult cats to four categories of stimuli—food, toy, scent, and human social interaction—the majority of cats preferred human interaction over all other options, even food. This type of research “was done on dogs in the ’90s” but not on cats until now, says Oregon State University’s Kristyn Vitale Shreve, a co-author of the study. “We’re trying to catch up.” Cats are stereotyped in the U.S. as untrainable and unsocial, she says, but they can be taught using the same general principles as dogs—so long as the incentives are right. Vitale’s next study will research how to use cats’ preferences to train…

Let’s face it: When it comes to expressions, a horse is no one-trick pony. Recent findings have revealed that our equine friends use 17 discrete facial movements to communicate. That’s 10 fewer than humans—but one more than dogs and four more than chimpanzees. Researchers at the University of Sussex discovered this by dissecting a horse head and identifying the musculature below its facial features. Then they watched behavioral footage—15 hours of video showing 86 male and female horses, from a variety of breeds, ranging in age from four weeks to 27 years. The last step was to use a tool called EquiFACS (Equine Facial Action Coding System) to catalog the eye, lip, nostril, and chin movements they’d observed. The result: a gestural map that suggests evolutionary parallels among varied species.…

In 1957 a young Jane Goodall travels to Africa and meets the eminent paleontologist Louis Leakey. Three years later he assigns her to study chimpanzee behavior in Tanzania, where she discovers that chimpanzees make and use tools, and eat meat. Her findings spark worldwide interest and upend the conventional wisdom on the exceptionalism of humans. The fruits of teamwork At first reluctant to have a photographer document her research, Jane partners with Hugo in work, and later in marriage. She makes significant discoveries about animal behavior.…

Elephants kept appearing in wrinkled herds, loitering near the dusty pans, in search of water. With the September temperature pushing a hundred degrees at midday, the pachyderms were moving at the edge of the Kalahari Desert in Namibia in a communityrun wildlife reserve, or conservancy, called Nyae Nyae, where roughly 2,800 San people live today in unyielding conditions. The elephants left snapped branches and warm scat in their wake. When they caught our scent, our sweat mixing with the sun-scorched grasses, they broke into a trumpeting jog and were gone. Later, more materialized on the horizon, in the shade of the camel thorn trees, shades themselves. For such enormous creatures, they were nearly invisible but to the sharpest eyes. And those eyes belonged now to Dam, a short, compact man,…