Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2018 i National Geographic Magazine

As New York City’s mayor from 2002 to 2013, Michael Bloomberg pushed sustainability. Now 75, the businessman and philanthropist has co-authored a book, Climate of Hope, in which he says that “cities, businesses, and citizens can save the planet.” Although I was an editor at Bloomberg News for several years, I hadn’t talked in depth with its outspoken founder until we sat down for this interview. Susan Goldberg: Roughly two-thirds of people will live in cities by 2050. There are 31 cities now that are considered megacities, with 10 million people or more; by 2030 there’ll be 41 cities of that size. Why are people flocking to cities? Michael Bloomberg: The marketplace is clearly saying this is where we want to be. Big cities provide culture; they can be much…

Like wine and beer, honey has an array of flavor notes that can be tricky to pinpoint. A honey’s taste is influenced by the types of nectar and pollen bees collect. But until recently scientists couldn’t say precisely what bees fed on or where. Now, by sequencing the genetic material in honey, scientists can tell which plants are in the sweet stuff. Noah Wilson-Rich, founder of the Best Bees Company, an urban beekeeping service, heads a study profiling the DNA of honey from major U.S. cities. Samples are taken from hives in city centers. DNA tests reveal how many plant species honeybees visit within the foraging range of three to five miles, showing what plants they prefer. Wilson-Rich says higher plant diversity in urban areas could be one reason that…

When land developers remove native vegetation to put in subdivisions, some songbirds do just fine. These “adapter” species find alternative places to nest and may even thrive near humans, says John Marzluff, a wildlife science professor at the University of Washington. But other species of songbirds flee in search of undisturbed habitat, even if it means leaving a mate and losing chances to reproduce, Marzluff says. In the face of urbanization, the “avoider” species—such as the Wilson’s warbler above—are known to decline. Marzluff and his colleagues spent 12 years gathering data for one of the few studies that have been done on how urbanization affects songbird species’ dispersal. The researchers identified three types of sites: forest reserves, existing subdivisions, and “changing sites” where forest was being turned into subdivision. There…

CELEBRATING THE YEAR OF THE BIRD The American crows in Gabriella Mann’s Seattle neighborhood love her, and the eight-yearold girl has the goods to prove it. She places a plastic jewelry box on a kitchen counter and lifts the lid. Each small compartment holds a treasure, a gift, that the crows have given her: a gold bead, a pearl earring, a screw, a red Lego piece, colored and clear glass chips, a chicken bone, a pebble, a quartz crystal, and many more. Though slightly soiled, all are stored as carefully as rare artifacts, dated, and categorized. Gabi selects two that she calls her First Favorites, and holds them up for me to admire. One is a pearly-pink heart charm, the other a tiny, silver rectangle with the word “BEST” engraved…

Daan Roosegaarde—urban architect, innovator, and night diver—finds bioluminescent plankton inspiring. “They don’t have a battery, they don’t have an energy bill, they don’t have a maintenance contract,” he says. “What can we learn from them?” That question drives Roosegaarde’s life’s work: drawing on nature to make cities more efficient and more beautiful without damaging our planet. To emulate plankton that emit light, Roosegaarde and his colleagues embedded solar-powered stones in the bike path seen here. The path is in Nuenen in the Netherlands—onetime home of Vincent van Gogh—so the glowing stones were arranged to resemble the artist’s masterwork “The Starry Night.” The Dutch innovator considers it “weird” that people focus on vehicles but neglect the surfaces they drive on: “Infrastructure defines our cities and landscapes way more than the cars.”…

Squirrels aren’t natural city slickers. In the mid-1800s the tree-dwelling rodents were released in America’s urban areas to “create pockets of rural peace and calm,” says University of Pennsylvania historian Etienne Benson, who studied our relationship to squirrels over the course of five years. The creatures became nuisances instead, and by the 1970s many parks prohibited feeding them. Today, says Benson, “people’s experiences with squirrels depend on their real estate investments.”…

About 10:30 on a Saturday morning in the north London borough of Islington, two men on mopeds race down the shopping corridor of Upper Street. Sheathed in helmets, gloves, and jackets, they look more like manic video game figures than humans. They weave through traffic and around double-decker buses at kamikaze velocity. Motorists flinch at their approach. The bikers pop wheelies and execute speedy figure eights along the busy street. Still, something more purposeful than joyriding would seem to be on their minds. After three or four minutes, they abruptly turn off Upper and onto a quiet and leafy residential avenue. They hop the curb and cut their engines. Dismounting on the sidewalk, their helmets still on, they fall into a lengthy conversation. Their dialogue is known only to them.…

Birds are far more intelligent than once believed, but not all are intellectual equals. Parrots, as well as birds in the corvid family, such as jays, ravens, and crows, are among the smartest species, thanks to proportionally large forebrains with densely packed neurons. They’re also some of the most sociable, exhibiting interactive behaviors that might be expected of a primate. The complex thinkers Many brain structures involved in complex cognition are found in the forebrain. Scientists postulate that the bigger a bird’s forebrain as part of its entire brain, the smarter the bird. Intellectual heavyweights The forebrain’s pallium and subpallium regions— responsible for higher-order function—evolved differently in birds and mammals. Birds’ brains are smaller but more densely packed with neurons, the cells responsible for cognition. FUNCTIONS NEURON DENSITY Pallium neurons…

The year is 2121. Stilted houses in Phnom Penh sit above urban farms fed by the Mekong River. Athens is smog free after a ban on cars, and Tokyo’s families live in nuclear radiation–proof homes. In Greenville, South Carolina, off-the-grid homes are powered by solar energy, and water is filtered off the roof (below). These cities of the future spring from the mind of Alan Marshall, an environmental social science professor at Mahidol University in Thailand. With the help of university students from around the world, Marshall imagined what cities that had successfully adapted to the next century’s environmental threats would look like. He collected those visions in the book Ecotopia 2121—and published it 500 years after Thomas More first wrote of an imagined, perfect place in his book Utopia.…

Sweeping reforms starting in the late 1970s have transformed China from an isolated, centrally controlled economy into an increasingly market-oriented juggernaut. Agricultural and industrial modernization has fueled continuing migration to cities, rising incomes, and a growing appetite for a more westernized diet among China’s 1.4 billion people. More people and food Economic and food-production reforms have helped China’s growing population double its supply of daily calories. Craving protein China has overtaken the United States in its daily supply of calories from meat, poultry, seafood, and offal. † THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA CLAIMS TAIWAN AS ITS 23RD PROVINCE. TAIWAN’S GOVERNMENT (REPUBLIC OF CHINA) MAINTAINS THAT THERE ARE TWO POLITICAL ENTITIES. *“ GLOBAL MIDDLE CLASS” REFERS TO PEOPLE MAKING $11 TO $110 A DAY, “LOWER” TO THOSE EARNING $2 TO $11…