Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2018 i National Geographic Magazine

The kaleidoscopic ball above is more— and less—than meets the eye. This vivid terrain is actually a color-coded Zika virus, millions of which could fit in the period that ends this sentence. We can see the virus here thanks to cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), an extremely cool imaging technique that lets scientists visualize molecules, making it easier than ever to study life’s cellular machinery. Cryo-EM works by firing an electron beam at a flash-frozen film of water containing copies of a given molecule. This “exposure” yields many 2-D images of the molecules at different angles, which algorithms then merge into one 3-D model. At first cryo-EM rendered molecules as vague lumps, so some dismissed it as “blobology” compared with x-ray crystallography, a less versatile high-resolution imaging technique. But in 2013 cryo-EM…

SAMANTHA CRISTOFORETTI ITALIAN ALPS The Italian astronaut holds the record for the second longest uninterrupted spaceflight by a woman, having spent 199 days on the International Space Station in 2015. (NASA’s Peggy Whitson, on the cover, topped that record by almost a hundred days in 2017.) The longer she was in orbit, Cristoforetti says, the more her perception of humanity’s time on Earth evolved. When the massive geologic forces that have sculpted the planet are visible at a glance, the eons in which we crafted pyramids and skyscrapers become nearly indistinguishable. It’s as if, from her vantage point, all our constructed monuments arose overnight. “You’ve got this planet beneath you, and a lot of what you see, especially during the day, does not necessarily point to a human presence. If…

TIRE TRACKS STRETCHED ACROSS THE FLAT LAKE BED TO THE HORIZON. We followed them in a Suzuki 4x4, looking for clues about what’s happened to Poopó, once Bolivia’s second largest lake, which has vanished into the thin air of the Andean highlands. We were driving on the lake bottom, yet we were more than 12,000 feet above sea level. The spring air was lip-chapping dry. Many of the fishing villages that have relied on Lake Poopó for thousands of years have emptied too, and we drove past clusters of abandoned adobe homes. Dust devils danced around them, spinning in warm winds. In the distance we spotted several small aluminum boats that seemed to be floating on water. As we drove closer, the mirage receded, and we found the boats sitting abandoned…

MICRONESIA The Pacific Ocean atoll named Pingelap—pictured here in infrared—is also known as the Island of the Colorblind, because as many as 10 percent of the residents are believed to carry the achromatopsia gene that causes complete colorblindness. A typhoon wiped out most of the island’s population in the 18th century, and a chief with the gene is said to have helped repopulate it. Order prints of select National Geographic photos online at NationalGeographicArt.com. Ottó Méhes Calgary, Alberta On a trip to Budapest, Méhes, an IT analyst, wandered the city with friends. Day’s end found them at the Széchenyi thermal baths. As his friends waded into the water, Méhes, shaking with cold, took the shot he’d envisioned all day. “I would call this image,” he says, “a calculated coincidence.”…

Panoramic images capture a single day in the life of these birds. Photographer Stephen Wilkes selected a vista, set up his camera, and photographed from day to night. Wilkes then edited the photos to select the best moments and digitally blended them to compress an entire day into a seamless composite image. “What you are seeing in these pictures is truly the story of what happened in that day,” he says. Northern gannets BASS ROCK, SCOTLAND During breeding season, 150,000 gannets throng this island in the Firth of Forth. In winter the birds decamp south as far as West Africa. To make this image, Wilkes and an assistant lugged his gear 122 steps uphill and set up near the ruins of a church about six feet from the nesting birds.…

Earth is well equipped as a planet and ideally placed in our solar system and galaxy to support life as we know it. The product of some 4.6 billion years of cosmic construction, our planet is flush with life thanks to a fortuitous set of conditions, from the optimal chemical makeup of our planetary core to our safe distance from the hidden black hole at the heart of our galaxy. 1 Our planet recycles life-friendly carbon over time Carbon dioxide is one of many greenhouse gases that trap heat and keep Earth’s surface warm enough to support life. The static surfaces of Venus and Mars keep carbon locked in the air and rocks. But over millions of years, Earth dynamically cycles this vital element through its air, land, and sea…

Fairy tales can come true, but sometimes it takes a few decades. As a city kid, Elena Anosova heard seemingly tall tales of a village visited by elk and wolves, of a vast forest, impassable roads, and an environment both bitter and beloved. As an adult, the visual artist, now 34, finally visited the settlement founded more than 300 years ago by her ancestors. They were hunters, swept up in the waves of Russians who ventured east to Siberia in search of fur and never left. Anosova’s father was born there, and most of the 120 or so people who call the place home—and don’t want outsiders to know its name or location—fall comfortably into the category of family. In the native Tungus (or Evenki) language, the settlement’s name translates…

Mushrooms are everywhere—on forest floors, in gardens, in networks connecting below our feet. The largest organism on Earth is actually a honey mushroom, an underground web that covers more than 3.7 square miles in Oregon’s Blue Mountains. Yet mushrooms are poorly understood, and the field of medicinal mushrooms is still in its infancy. Fungi used to be overlooked as a low-calorie, low-nutrition food, but in fact many are full of nutrients. According to biochemist and herbalist Martin Powell, many produce compounds that show potential for improving treatment results for those suffering from ailments such as cancer and dementia. “Fungi are far more mysterious than plants,” says Robert Beelman, director of the Penn State Center for Plant and Mushroom Foods for Health. He led a recent study showing that two common…

Coffee lovers, rejoice. New research suggests that people who drink two to three cups of coffee a day—caffeinated or not— may have a lower chance of dying from certain illnesses than those who abstain. The study, thought to be the largest of its kind, followed more than 500,000 people in 10 European countries over the course of 16 years. It found that compared with those who don’t drink coffee, those who do show signs of having healthier livers and circulatory systems, as well as lower levels of inflammation, says epidemiologist and study leader Marc Gunter. The findings also indicated that “higher coffee consumption was associated with a reduced risk of death from any cause,” including circulatory diseases and digestive diseases, says Gunter, who heads the nutrition and metabolism section of…

On the third floor of a crumbling building, a pink sunset glowed through the clear plastic sheet covering a gaping hole in the wall. Sixty-year-old Amira Garman sat in a powder blue cardigan on a swinging bench beneath a gold-fringed yellow canopy. A broken chandelier with a single bulb doused the little room in shaky light. Through the makeshift window she looked down at Al Yarmouk school across the street, its playground now littered with bullet casings and an improvised cannon. Garman’s family had lived on the top floor, now a maze of caved-in walls and rubble. “I want to be in my home,” she said. They took shelter in this room, one of only two occupied in the building. On their street, shops reopened among the debris; people bustled…

Today’s high-tech cancer killers are based on a century-old idea: turning the body’s immune system against tumors. In 1891 a New York City surgeon named William Coley noticed that some cancers seemed to disappear after patients suffered an infection. Acting on a hunch, Coley injected bacteria into a patient with a deadly neck cancer, and the man’s tumor began to shrink. Now immunotherapy is the hottest field in cancer research. Scientists have learned that an infection can rev up the immune system, dispatching T cells that hunt and kill foreign invaders, including cancer cells. Research is yielding new ways to boost such immune attacks, including drugs that strip cancer cells of the camouflage they use to hide from T cells. Some approaches take the brakes off the immune system, while…