Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2018 i National Geographic Magazine

Need a refresher on the world around you? The new National Geographic Almanac can help with that. The 2019 edition, coming this month, illuminates the worlds of science, nature, history, and geography in vivid detail. Dazzling photography, maps by distinguished cartographers, illustrated time lines, and quizzes in each section will help catch you up on the latest discoveries. Available where books are sold and at shopng.com/books. NAT GEO BOOKS NAT GEO WILD Who’s Taking Fido’s Photo? Pupparazzi Pet photographer Kaylee Greer is known for her fetching photos of canines in unusual settings—salt flats in Utah, a gondola in Venice—and at shelters to encourage adoptions. Greer and her fiancé, Sam Haddix, take viewers along on four-legged photo shoots in Pupparazzi, airing September 15, 22, and 29 at 10/9c on Nat Geo…

Her mission: preserve an endangered ecosystem in rural Panama. The key: community outreach. Ruth Metzel may have figured out a way to save a critically endangered ecosystem: build relationships with the people who live there. For a decade the ecologist has studied tropical dry forests in Panama’s rural Los Santos Province. There, intensive cattle farming reflects the threat to the forests countrywide. Many farmers, proud of their traditions yet aware that land-use techniques need to change, are eager to do something about it. Metzel co-founded Azuero Earth Project as a way to guide those who lean most heavily on the forest ecosystem toward living more harmoniously with it. “The key,” she says, “is to reach people where they’re at.” Azuero works with cattle ranchers to identify exactly which trees—native and…

SHORT FOR “PICTURE ELEMENT,” a pixel is one of many tiny, illuminated squares on a digital display. A smartphone screen contains thousands of pixels, so densely packed that they seem to disappear inside a smooth, vivid image. But packing pixels is necessary only for up-close viewing. A digital billboard can have fewer pixels than a smartphone yet still appear seamless from afar because the human eye can’t perceive individual pixels from great distances. OPTICAL OVERLAP If two pixels are close to the eye, the retina sends two signals for the brain to interpret. Farther away, two pixels prompt one signal.…

“I felt like something exciting was happening. I didn’t understand.”DOROTHY HIURA FAMILY 0311 INCARCERATED AT SANTA ANITA (CALIFORNIA) ASSEMBLY CENTER AND JEROME (ARKANSAS) RELOCATION CENTER In 1942, then college freshman Dorothy Takii beamed as she hung from the family car, entering the Santa Anita racetrack, a temporary detention center in California. She soon realized life there would not be the adventure she’d hoped for. Her family was sent to an incarceration camp in Jerome, Arkansas. Released from the camp in 1943, she moved to Chicago, where she met her husband. The couple moved to San Jose, California, in the 1950s. In 2017, at 93, Dorothy Hiura posed outside her San Jose home. She never discussed the incarceration with her son and daughter. “I never felt like it was something that…

PHOTOS FROM OUR COMMUNITY WHO Bui Quoc Ky Kynhong, 41, an artist and photographer in Vietnam WHERE Vietnam’s Moc Chau tea-growing region WHAT A Phantom 4 Pro drone with focal length 8.8mm In the famous tea-growing region of northwestern Vietnam, workers harvest green tea in the spring and summer. Bui, who was visiting the area, flew a drone overhead to capture the pickers at work. The leaves they gathered would be shipped to markets around the world. He arrived early each morning in search of the best compositions. But he often had to wait until afternoon—and work around the pickers’ rest breaks—to catch the light just as he wanted it. Join National Geographic’s Your Shot community and share your photos at YourShot.ngm.com.…

One of the most challenging aspects of storytelling at National Geographic is introducing our readers to people and cultures they’ve never seen before. It’s a beautiful part of our 130-year history but also an ethical minefield: What’s our responsibility in telling the stories of those who, at least outwardly, seem so different from us? How do we cover cultures sensitively, without “exoticizing” or romanticizing what’s natural for them? ‘IF YOU STRIP AWAY YOUR PRECONCEPTIONS, IT’S A FAR MORE HONEST WAY OF CONVEYING WHAT PEOPLE ARE ACTUALLY LIKE.’ This month’s cover story, on grave threats to the indigenous people who live in the Brazilian and Peruvian Amazon, brings this subject into high relief. Our photographer, Charlie Hamilton James, spent a month with indigenous groups such as the Awá and Guajajara people;…

YOU WOULD ALMOST have to be nuts to be filled with hope in a world so rife with hunger, hatred, climate change, pollution, and pestilence, let alone the self-destructive or severely annoying behavior of certain people, both famous and just down the hall, none of whom we will name by name. Yet I have boundless hope, most of the time. Hope is a sometimes cranky optimism, trust, and confidence that those I love will be OK—that they will come through, whatever life holds in store. Hope is the belief that no matter how dire things look or how long rescue or healing takes, modern science in tandem with people’s goodness and caring will boggle our minds, in the best way. Hope is (for me) not usually the religious-looking fingers of…

FOR UNDERWATER PHOTOGRAPHER Brian Skerry, there are good days. The sun shines, the water’s clear, the surface is calm, the whales come, and Skerry can slip into the ocean fast enough to photograph them as his mask stays unfogged and his camera doesn’t malfunction. But most days aren’t like that. The whales don’t show up, or there are particles in the water, or wind roils the waves, or the sun dips behind a cloud at the worst moment. Or, as soon as Skerry gets in the water, the whales dive several thousand feet to feed, and he can chase them only as far as one breath will take him. A National Geographic photography fellow and the 2017 Rolex National Geographic Explorer of the Year, Skerry free dives—which means no scuba…

He’s about 60 years old, and his deeply furrowed brow hints at a hard life in the jungle. Stopping at the top of a hill, he turns to me and lifts his faded red shirt to show a six-inch scar on his side just below his ribs. “Mashco,” he says quietly, referring to the Mashco-Piro tribe. He holds up his bow as if shooting, then moves his hand to the scar, closes his eyes, and grimaces to mimic pain. Shuri is a Mastanahua, one of several tribes that inhabit the remote southern Peru-Brazil borderlands. Fifteen years ago, evangelical missionaries came to the Curanja River to lure his people out of the forest. The missionaries built a village, cleared land for a farm, recruited interpreters from local tribes, and left gifts…

BRAINS ARE in short supply. Neuroscientists need brain tissue of all types to study the diseases that affect more than 15 percent of people in the world. Enter Tish Hevel. In 2015, after Hevel’s father died from Lewy body dementia, her family wanted to offer his brain for research—but knew that it would take much more than an organ donor card. The experience inspired Hevel to create the Brain Donor Project “to raise awareness of the critical need” and make enrolling easier for would-be donors. Nearly two years in, more than 2,000 people have signed up. MEDICINE Busting Myths About Donating Your Brain The organization that Tish Hevel created—online at braindonorproject.org—aims to simplify “the process of donating postmortem human brains for research,” she says, and dispel misconceptions about it. Here’s…

AIR POLLUTION KILLS seven million people a year. Two of the chief contributors are lax vehicle emissions standards and traditional cooking methods, according to the findings of a recent World Health Organization analysis of air quality data from more than 4,300 cities in 108 countries. More than 90 percent of the deaths occur in low- and moderate-income countries where families are more likely to cook with charcoal and kerosene. These materials release pollutants into the air that can cause heart disease, lung cancer, and other health issues. Urban population growth compounds the problem: Air quality in many of the world’s megacities is five times worse than what WHO recommends. But the organization sees signs of hope in some nations, such as India and Mexico, that are initiating clean energy efforts…

TAXIDERMY ISN’T FOR THE FAINT OF HEART. Widely considered an art form, the process of mounting animal skins can involve sawing through bone, scraping tissue, and slicing open ears and other features. The resulting hide is usually tanned, mounted on a mannequin, and sewn up. The goal is to preserve the creature in a lifelike state, for use as an educational tool or to commemorate a hunt. Timothy Bovard has preserved countless animals as the taxidermist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County—but some, he says, will always be off-limits: “I won’t do my pets.”…

Moon jellies, which are found in shallow bays around the world, look like small, not entirely friendly ghosts. They have translucent bells fringed with pale tentacles, and as they pulse along, it almost seems as if the water itself has come alive. At the National Aquarium in Baltimore, when visitors are invited to touch moon jellies, their first reaction is usually fear. Assured the jellies won’t hurt them, the visitors roll up their sleeves and hesitantly reach into the tank. “They’re squishy!” I hear one boy squeal. “They’re cool!” a girl exclaims. “I think they’re just mesmerizing,” Jennie Janssen, the assistant curator who oversees the care of the aquarium’s jellyfish, tells me. “They don’t have a brain, and yet they’re able to survive—to thrive—generation after generation.” Scary, squishy, cool, brainless,…