Innholdsfortegnelse for NOVEMBER 2016 i National Geographic Magazine

TELEVISION Countdown to MARS Launch A six-part series that blends documentary footage, scripted drama, and computer-generated visuals, MARS is the creation of award-winning filmmakers Brian Grazer and Ron Howard. Premieres Monday, November 14, at 9/8c on National Geographic TELEVISION Join a Botswana Safari Safari Brothers follows the adventures of a family-run expedition company in Botswana. Fridays at 10/9c starting October 14, on Nat Geo WILD NATGEO.COM/PHOTOCONTEST Win a Trip to the Galápagos Submit your best nature images at natgeo.com/photo contest for a chance to win a Galápagos trip for two and be named Nat Geo Nature Photographer of the Year. NATGEO.COM VIDEO Meet the Deep’s Dexterous Denizen, the Octopus A remarkably complex nervous system operates those characteristic eight legs. Watch videos throughout the article at ngm.com/Nov2016. TELEVISION Tales of the…

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Science 50 Years of Martian Invasions Even before humans landed on Earth’s moon, we’d been sending spacecraft to our closest planetary neighbor, Mars. As these craft have flown past, orbited around, landed on, and driven over the surface of Mars, there have been utter failures and spectacular successes. As NASA sets its sights on a manned Mars mission in the 2030s, we look back on mission history. MISSIONS TO MARS Each line below is color-coded to represent one mission that reached Mars or failed in the attempt; the type of mission; and the country of origin. FAILURE TO LAND Many missions launch with several stages planned. While an orbiter might be successful, its lander can fail; that’s been the case with Mars 2, Mars 6, Phobos 2, and Mars Express.…

Orangutans that live in Sumatra usually make their nests in palm forests. But one day in 2014, Panut Hadisiswoyo caught sight of an orangutan riding around the streets of Medan, the island’s largest city, in a rickshaw. Hadisiswoyo runs the Orangutan Information Centre, an Indonesian NGO devoted to saving endangered apes, and so he gave chase, on foot, through traffic. “I jumped in the rickshaw and made the driver stop,” he says. Then he put the orangutan’s chaperone, a wildlife trader, under citizen’s arrest and called for backup from his staff. The police arrived three hours later. His work is not often that exciting. It’s also rarely easy. The National Geographic emerging explorer spends most of his time trying to stop deforestation by palm oil and other commodity companies in…

If the trip doesn’t kill you, living there might. Landing softly, so as to fly again Aerospace company SpaceX is developing a technology it says may one day enable humans to land on Mars: reusable rockets. Here a Falcon 9 rocket lifts off (far left) from Cape Canaveral, Florida, to deliver supplies to the space station. After a few minutes the booster separates from the second stage, which continues toward orbit. Instead of falling into the ocean, the booster flips over and fires its engines twice more to slow and guide it to a soft landing at a nearby pad (right). A long exposure (center) captures the whole sequence; the straight light streak at right is the booster’s return path.…

The first Cuba sighting came Monday morning, just after sunrise. The island is almost 800 miles tip to tip, and for a while there was a horizon shimmer, then hilly outlines against pink sky, and finally: rooftops. A domed shape, maybe a cupola. The ship’s topmost deck was jammed with television crews; the rest of us mashed up against the railings on the next deck down. Somebody handed out little Cuban and American flags. Now we could make out the Malecón, the seawall and walkway that serves as a collective front porch for people seeking fresh air or respite from overcrowded households. On warm evenings Cubans always populate the Malecón, but this was something new—nine in the morning, and crowds seemed to have gathered, lofting flags of their own, waving.…

The Red Planet In winter the temperature at the poles of Mars can reach 200° below zero Fahrenheit. But make no mistake: The red planet is the hottest topic in space. Astronauts might begin a mission to explore Mars in 2024, as SpaceX company founder Elon Musk projects. Or, as NASA contends, it may take longer: The space agency puts the date in the 2030s, and then not to land on Mars but just to orbit it. At National Geographic, exploration of new frontiers is in our DNA. As far as Mars goes, we’ve already launched—and landed. This month: • National Geographic will unveil a six-part television series, MARS, blending documentary footage of today’s efforts to reach the planet with a scripted story focused on how we might eventually build…

Most animals seek shade when temperatures in the Sahara soar to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. Saharan silver ants (above) seek lunch, skittering from underground lairs into the sun’s brutal rays to scavenge animal carcasses. In 2015 they were joined by scientists from two Belgian universities, who spent a sweltering month tracking the ants and digging out their nests. The goal: to discover how the species adapted to the kind of heat that can melt shoes. Back in Belgium, the scientists looked at the ants under an electron microscope and found that their dense, triangular hair reflects light like a prism, giving them a metallic glint and shielding them from the sun’s heat. When Ph.D. student Quentin Willot shaved an ant with a tiny scalpel and put it under a heat lamp,…

THE POWER OF PARKS A YEARLONG EXPLORATION Fifteen years had elapsed since we last explored the Gardens of the Queen. In the necklace of keys, mangrove islets, and reefs about 50 miles off Cuba, we had discovered a marine wilderness that astonished us with its vibrant life. We returned to Cuba anxious about what we would see in the wake of time and climate change in this national park now covering about 850 square miles. On our first dive we descended into a large stand of elkhorn coral, a critically endangered species diminished throughout the Caribbean. We found ourselves in a dense thicket, amazed as we watched grunts and snappers jostle for space among the broad branches, as if in a game of musical chairs. This is exactly what we…

I always want to know what goes on backstage. Whether I’m photographing baseball or ballet, I like to peek behind the curtain and see what people’s lives are really like. So when I got a grant to spend three years documenting Roman Catholic nuns cloistered in Mexican monasteries, I jumped at the chance. In Puebla, Mexico, where I grew up, some Catholic churches are more than 400 years old. The first sisters here helped the Spanish spread Catholicism in Mexico. But many of the nuns stay secluded in their convents, forbidden to engage with the world. When I was a kid they seemed like legends to me. Gaining access to their world wasn’t easy. When I’d knock on a convent door, they’d tell me to go away—then slam the door…

In 1974 farmers uncovered strange terra-cotta figures while digging a well near the old Chinese capital of Xianyang. Excavations revealed a virtual army of warriors, presumably meant to eternally protect China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang Di, after his death in 210 B.C. But an account from about 89 B.C. makes no mention of those figures. Instead, it tells of the next emperor sacrificing concubines to be buried with the deceased ruler and entombing craftsmen to keep them from talking about the lavish burial they had created. Was that historian wrong? Perhaps not. Over the past four decades, archaeologists have discovered various mass burials in the emperor’s funerary complex—the 20-plus square miles around his tomb, partly illustrated here. The emperor’s final resting place remains untouched. But in light of these…

In sexual reproduction—the way most life-forms procreate—each parent provides half an offspring’s chromosomes. Over generations, this mating and procreating shuffles the DNA deck, giving sexual reproducers a genetic diversity that helps them adapt to changing environments. By contrast, asexual reproducers—some 70 vertebrate species and many less complex organisms—“use all the chromosomes they have” to solitarily produce offspring that are genetic clones, says molecular biologist Peter Baumann. Because the organisms are genetically identical, they’re more vulnerable: A disease or an environmental shift that kills one could kill all. But there’s a twist in the case of the genus Aspidoscelis, the asexually reproducing whiptail lizards that Baumann and his colleagues have been studying at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, Missouri. The lizards are all female and parthenogenetic, meaning…

You’re sitting on the seabed, just off the coast of the Indonesian island of Lembeh. You’re not deep—20 feet or so—and there’s plenty of light. As you’d expect in such a tropical place, the water is warm. All around, you see ripples of a fine gray-black sand, covered, in places, with a kind of greenish scum. As you explore, you notice a conch shell. Stoutly made, it has six heavy spikes coming off it. Perhaps the maker is within. Or perhaps the maker is long dead, and the shell now belongs to a hermit crab. Curious, you flip it over. A row of suckers. A pair of eyes. An octopus. In particular, Amphioctopus marginatus, also known as the coconut octopus. Its common name comes from its habit of hiding in…

The photograph the young woman holds is barely the size of a postage stamp. But it is the only one of her husband she could find here in her parents’ house. They had not approved of her marriage, given that he was just a fisherman from the coastal town of Mannar, while her family has lived in Jaffna, the capital of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province, for generations. But as the photo attests, her husband, a Tamil like herself—is broad-faced and confident. Staring at the tiny image of the man who went missing a decade ago, her mahogany eyes brighten as she loses herself in memories. They’d fallen in love at a refugee camp in southern India in 1999, when she was 17. Both had escaped Sri Lanka’s wantonly vicious civil…

With Bill Bonner, National Geographic Archivist Turkey farming helped countless families weather the Great Depression—and it was often farm wives who ran the cottage industry. This Idaho woman (inset), camouflaged within an impressive flock in 1940, was likely one such businesswoman. Hatching time could be chaotic: “Turkeys in the parlor, turkeys on the chair, turkeys in the dishpan, turkeys everywhere,” exclaimed an Emmett, Idaho, newspaper in 1933. But the birds didn’t just have the run of the house. They had the hills too. Before commercial farming overtook the family enterprise by the mid-century, says Idaho historian Madeline Buckendorf, farm kids herded the birds “much like sheep.” She still cherishes the bell her grandfather would place on the “lead” turkey’s neck so the flock could be heard “when turned out to…