Innholdsfortegnelse for Dec-15 i National Geographic Magazine

“A diamond is forever,” De Beers jewelers declared in 1947. Millions of people were sold—on both the diamonds and the connection between lavish weddings and lasting marriages. Now a pair of economists have found evidence that the opposite is true. An Emory University survey of heterosexual adults found that men who spent more than $2,000 on a ring were more likely to end up divorced than grooms who spent less. And couples who had big-money nuptials (over $20,000) were three and a half times as likely to report shorter marriages. Burdensome wedding debt may be one source of marriage stress, says Emory’s Hugo Mialon. Also, the types of couples who have thrifty nuptials may just be better matched and thus less divorce prone, he says. Something else the survey associated…

HOLY MARY • HOLY MOTHER OF GOD • HOLY VIRGIN OF VIRGINS • MOTHER OF CHRIST • BLESSED MOTHER • MOTHER OF DIVINE GRACE • MOTHER MOST PURE • MOTHER MOST CHASTE • MOTHER MOST ADMIRABLE • MOTHER UNDEFILED MOTHER MOST AMIABLE • MOTHER OF GOOD COUNSEL • MOTHER INVIOLATE MOTHER OF OUR CREATOR • MOTHER OF OUR SAVIOR • VIRGIN MOST PRUDENT THE VIRGIN MARY • VIRGIN MOST VE NERABLE • VIRGIN MOST RENOWNED VIRGIN MOST POWERFUL • VIRGIN MOST MERCIFUL • VIRGIN MOST FAITHFUL MIRROR OF JUSTICE • SEAT OF WISDOM CAUSE OF OUR JOY • SPIRITUAL VESSEL VESSEL OF HONOR • SINGULAR VESSEL OF DEVOTION • ARK OF THE COVENANT TOWER OF DAVID • TOWER OF IVORY HOUSE OF GOLD • HEALTH OF THE SICK HELP OF…

Long ago, as an eight-year-old boy standing on the roof of a threestory tenement in Brooklyn, I first experienced a sense of wonder. We had moved to our unheated top-floor flat a few weeks earlier in 1943, leaving a damp ground floor apartment beside a clamorous factory. I had never climbed to the new roof alone. It was too dangerous, my mother said, a man-made cliff. At dusk, my friends gone home to eat, my mother out shopping, I ventured up the last flight of stairs in a tentative, now-or-never way. I opened the hook on the tar-papered door and stepped into a world of planks, pebbles, chimneys, pigeons gurgling in a coop, and clotheslines. In that instant I felt my life change. To the west, far off across the…

A PHOTOGRAPHER’S JOURNAL | proof.nationalgeographic.com Sometimes, as he traveled through former Soviet territories, photographer Danila Tkachenko waited days or weeks for the right amount of snow. To capture his vision of the abandoned spaceports and oil field pump jacks littering the land, “I needed a lot of snow falling,” he says. “This created a special atmosphere in the photographs, a kind of … very diffused light.” Other times, gusts whipped snow into blinding blizzards, obscuring what Tkachenko was determined to document: buildings, hardware, and monuments that once stood as symbols of progress and now were purposeless, rusting against the sky. To Tkachenko, these relics looked like “a metaphor of a postapocalyptic future.” From 2012 to 2015 he spent months photographing them for a project he called “Restricted Areas.” The name…

The genesis of this month’s cover story dates to a year ago, when an exhibition opened at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. “Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea” brought together 74 artworks from the 14th through the 19th centuries, lent by galleries including the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Louvre in Paris, and the Vatican Museums. The exhibition drew the largest crowd ever for the Washington, D.C., museum. That got us wondering: What is it about Mary? She is the world’s most depicted woman, yet among the most mysterious, with more written about her in the Koran than in the Bible. Her powers are invoked for anything and everything: by the sick in search of a cure and quarterbacks hoping for a Hail Mary pass to win the…

Scientists analyzing the skull of the largest known rodent have determined that the prehistoric herbivore’s front bite was as strong as a tiger’s. What’s more, its curved, foot-long incisors could withstand forces three times as powerful as the force its jaw muscles could generate. The conclusion? This distant cousin of the guinea pig “must have been doing something more with those teeth than just eating with them,” says anatomist Philip Cox. At an estimated weight of 2,200 pounds, Josephoartigasia monesi likely didn’t face too many threats as it lumbered through the estuaries and deltas of South America more than two million years ago. Cox and his colleagues suspect that J. monesi relied on its front teeth for sparring with rivals and defending itself against predators, as well as for rooting…

Order prints of select National Geographic photos online at NationalGeographicArt.com.…

TASTE IS CHEMISTRY It begins when a food molecule touches a microscopic taste bud on the tongue. The buds hide inside papillae, the pale dots made visible here by blue food coloring. In the brain, where taste merges with other senses, it becomes the rich, personal, joyful experience that makes us long to eat. FEASTING THE EYES, EARS, AND NOSE Inspired by research showing that flavor comes from more than our taste buds, Heston Blumenthal, owner of the Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, England, practices “multisensory cooking.” These diners are enjoying a dish of razor clams, cockles, salty foam, and “edible sand,” made from tapioca starch, panko, and baby eels. They’re listening to crashing waves and crying seagulls on iPod Nanos concealed inside shells. On the menu it’s called “Sound…

PHOTO BY MYRMARA PROPHÈTE, 14 Six-year-old Tamara Pierre, in Ca Douche, wears choublak—hibiscus blossoms—in her hair. “ I took this picture,” says Prophète, “because the hibiscus is one of my favorite flowers.” PHOTO BY ANGELAURE SAINT LOUIS, 17 The bustling Iron Market in Port-au-Prince, destroyed by the 2010 earthquake, was restored to look as it did when built more than a century ago. “So many people work in the Iron Market,” says Angelaure, “I was happy it was rebuilt.” PHOTO BY WILKY DOUZE, 19 Douze caught the early morning action on the beach in Jacmel as fishermen hauled in their nets. “I love how our fishermen work,” he says, “with a lot of determination to catch fish in order to feed their families.” The Haitian student photographers ranged in age…

World Soil Day is celebrated every December 5. Soil, in which nearly all our food grows, is a living resource that takes years to form. Yet it can vanish in minutes, says Ronald Vargas of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Each year 75 billion tons of fertile soil are lost to erosion. That’s alarming—and not just for food producers. Soil can trap huge quantities of carbon dioxide in the form of organic carbon and prevent it from escaping into the atmosphere. “If we protect and sustainably manage soils,” says Vargas, “we can combat climate change.” SOIL MATTERS 95% OF THE WORLD’S FOOD GROWS IN SOIL. CARBON CAPTURE Over the course of 25 years healthy soils can absorb an estimated 10 percent of human-generated carbon emissions. A DWINDLING…

If you can’t go to the moon, the closest you can get—while still on Earth—may be the Haughton Crater on Devon Island, Canada. Because the site resembles the desolate, cratered surface of the moon and Mars, NASA uses it as a planetary stand-in. On a 2010 “mission” there, the space agency mimicked a long trip in the southern polar region of the moon. Space researchers frequently look for such celestial replicas, known as analogs, on Earth. Antarctica’s cold, windswept landscape has helped engineers design a housing structure for use on Mars. An underwater “low gravity” lab off Florida’s coast has been used to assess navigation and communication systems. “We wouldn’t want to be out in space testing technology for the first time,” says NASA’s Kathryn Hambleton. The analogs help researchers…

We were sitting in the dark, waiting for the leopards beside a trail on the edge of India’s Sanjay Gandhi National Park, 40 square miles of green life in the middle of the sprawling gray metropolis of Mumbai. A line of tall apartment buildings stood just opposite, crowding the park border. It was 10 p.m., and through the open windows came the sounds of dishes being cleaned and children being put to bed. Religious music floated up from a temple in the distance. Teenage laughter, a motorcycle revving. The hum and clatter of 21 million people, like a great machine. Somewhere in the brush around us, the leopards were listening too, waiting for the noise to die down. Watching. About 35 leopards live in and around this park. That’s an…

Now more than ever, Planet Earth needs our collective help. At National Geographic, we believe it needs the kind of thoughtful and engaged citizens that you, our members, have always been. It also needs individuals and institutions committed to illuminating the critical issues and exploring solutions to its challenges. With that in mind, I am delighted, in this end-of-the-year letter, to report that your Society is doubling down on its commitment to harness the power of science, exploration, education, and storytelling to change the world. The creation of National Geographic Partners, which was announced a few months ago, is the catalyst for our renewed vigor. That move reconfigured our activities into two entities, each with enormous advantages. The National Geographic Society will expand its work as one of the world’s…

During times of political upheaval, a country’s wildlife may be as likely as its people to suffer. To gauge the impact of socioeconomic shock on wild animals, a team led by Russian-born ecologist Eugenia Bragina recently studied the effects of the Soviet Union’s collapse on eight large mammal species: reindeer, roe deer, red deer, moose, wild boar, brown bear, Eurasian lynx, and gray wolf. All showed strong population fluctuations in the decade before and after the U.S.S.R. dissolved in 1991, with wild boar, brown bear, and moose numbers declining rapidly post-collapse, likely because of poaching, loss of farmland as foraging ground, and little enforcement of wildlife protection laws. Only gray wolf numbers rose—more than 150 percent—perhaps due to the end of population control programs. Bragina, a North Carolina State University…