Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2020 i National Geographic Magazine

TARDIGRADES—ALSO KNOWN AS water bears for their rotund bodies—are marvels of biology. When dry spells strike their moist homes, such as the film of water atop lichens and mosses, they dehydrate into a protective dormant state that also helps them withstand intense heat, x-ray radiation, and even outer space. Scientists are beginning to learn how they do it. In 2016 Japanese researchers found that a species of tardigrade contains a unique protein, called Dsup, that protects its DNA from damage. Now scientists at UC San Diego have shown that Dsup is in a second tardigrade species, which hints at the protein’s ubiquity within the group—and have uncovered more about how the protein works. The team found that Dsup binds to the “spools” that package DNA in cells and that it…

AT HIS TINY STUDIO in Milan, just past the Porta Ticinese, 89-year-old Osvaldo Menegazzi has been creating his own versions of classic tarot decks since the 1970s. The cards are made of thick stock and hand-dyed; the faces seem to gaze at you from across the centuries. Of the countless tarot decks that flood the market each year, those by Menegazzi, a formally trained fine artist, are unique primarily because they feel so personal. “Le carte parlano,” he has said. “The cards speak.” He is one reason tarot lovers, like me, come to Milan. In the mid-15th century, the Visconti and Sforza families, rulers of Milan for more than two centuries, commissioned a local artist named Bonifacio Bembo to illustrate a custom tarot deck for them. Painted in tempera, then…

THE 110 YOUNG MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN who boarded the Clotilda in May 1860 came from Bantè, Dahomey, Kebbi, Atakora, and other regions of Benin and Nigeria. Among them were people from the Yoruba, Isha, Dendi, Nupe, and Fon ethnic groups. Their parents had named them Kossola, Kupollee, Abile, Abache, Gumpa. Some were long-distance traders, likely carrying salt, copper, and fabric. They may have produced iron. Others may have woven cloth, harvested yams, or made palm oil. Some women were married and had children; they likely worked as farmers or market traders. One man, Kupollee, had a small hoop in each ear, which meant he had been initiated in an ile-orisa—house of the god—into the religion of the Yoruba. Ossa Keeby came from Kebbi in Nigeria, a kingdom renowned for…

Women: A Century of Change A YEARLONG SERIES THE SUDANESE MODEL Alek Wek appeared on the November 1997 cover of the U.S. edition of Elle magazine, in a photograph by French creative director Gilles Bensimon. It was, as is so often the case in the beauty business, a global production. Wek, with her velvety ebony skin and mere whisper of an Afro, was posed in front of a stark, white screen. Her simple, white Giorgio Armani blazer almost disappeared into the background. Wek, however, was intensely present. She was standing at an angle but looking directly into the camera with a pleasant smile spread across her face, which wasn’t so much defined by planes and angles as by sweet, broad, distinctly African curves. Wek represented everything that a traditional cover…

A stranger with an air rifle appeared out of nowhere in the mountain valley where Lang and I were standing. This should be interesting, I thought. “Hi. We’re lost,” said Lang, who wore a handwoven traditional blouse over her spandex trousers and rubber boots. “Have you seen my relatives? Seven men and two women?” To get here, we’d spent a day riding motorbikes over a bumpy mountain pass, fording knee-high rivers, winding our way up switchbacks, and even sidestepping a poisonous snake. Now we were close to our destination—a black cardamom forest on a nearby peak—but couldn’t find the approach trail among the shrubs and wildflowers. Lang’s husband, Duong, had just wandered off to look for it. As it turned out, Lang and the hunter were from the same village,…

WHEN I WAS YOUNG, what my friends and I considered pretty was everything I was not: Tall. Stick-straight blond hair. Blue eyes. We wanted to look like Peggy Lipton from the TV show The Mod Squad. Or a 1960s Barbie, with her yellow ponytail and absurdly unattainable figure. But every day, the mirror provided a reflection of how I, and so many others, failed to attain that ideal. As writer Robin Givhan puts it in “Redefining Beauty,” her story in this issue, “For generations, beauty required a slender build but with a generous bosom and a narrow waist. The jawline was to be defined, the cheekbones high and sharp. The nose angular. The lips full but not distractingly so. The eyes, ideally blue or green, large and bright. Hair was…

IN THE EARLY 1900S, two African-American women inventors with both science and business acumen—Madam C.J. Walker and Annie Turnbo Malone—developed products that made them fortunes. Though their rags-to-riches stories are similar, one name is widely recognized and the other is nearly forgotten. Both were born to formerly enslaved parents. Both got their start in St. Louis, catering to underserved consumers. Skilled in chemistry, Annie Turnbo was in her 30s when she started experimenting with hair products, which led to a hair and scalp formula gentler than other products black women had been using. Sold door-to-door, her products were a hit; she expanded production, opened a school for black cosmetology, and franchised sales in other countries. She married and became known as Annie Turnbo Malone. Sara Breedlove, a widow who had…

WHEN YOU ARE STORM CHASING, most mornings start off in a cheap hotel sipping bad coffee and trying to remember where you had ended up the night before. If all goes well, you know that later that day you’ll be racing headlong into chaos. You hope that you’ll also catch a moment of the sublime. On this particular morning, we were in Wichita, Kansas, midway through a project to photograph the dramatic and destructive weather that barrels across the middle of the United States every spring. Nick Moir, our expedition leader and weather sage, sat stooped on the edge of the bed, poring over a litany of apps and online radars in search of a good storm cell for us to pursue. Nick is fluent in the subtle hieroglyphics of…

On July 8, 1860, 108 captives disembarked from the schooner Clotilda to become the last recorded Africans enslaved in the United States. Europeans first brought Africans as slaves to the Americas to maximize the output of gold and silver mines as well as the profitability of crops such as sugar, tobacco, and rice. The trade spanned nearly four centuries and brought a documented nine million men, women, and children across the ocean to be owned as property and forced into grueling labor.…

LAST WILD PLACES American Prairie Reserve is a conservation partner of the National Geographic Society’s Last Wild Places initiative. We bounce in the truck along a furrowed road, through a mud slick and up to a bluff that looks out to the curve of the Earth. The plains glow emerald in this wet spring, rolling toward distant hills. Near an oxbow in the creek beneath us, a herd of buffalo graze. They are primeval creatures, bearded and huge, their winter fur peeling off in strips like old wallpaper. In the days before horses and guns, Plains Indians chased buffalo off this steep embankment to their deaths. It’s late in May, late in the afternoon, and the light has taken on a rich, nostalgic cast. Damien Austin, a former zookeeper with…

We’ve been chasing beauty for millennia, primping and painting our way to a more desirable ideal. Cultures in every era have held different standards of feminine beauty and myriad means of achieving it, from the toxic lead cosmetics of the past to today’s Botox injections. But the standards often serve the same aims: to attract and retain a mate; to signal social status, wealth, health, or fertility; and of course, to simply feel beautiful. ANCIENT EGYPT 3100-30 B.C. 1. DRAMATIC COSMETICS Heavy eye makeup, typically kohl, was worn by both sexes to darken and contour eyelids and for religious and medicinal purposes. The dark mineral was thought to prevent eye infections and ward off evil and could be complemented with green eyelid accents. Curled or braided wigs were also popular.…

INSTEAD OF GIVING his wife flowers for her birthday, as he did most years, contemporary photographer Abelardo Morell decided to choose something that would last longer. Say, a photograph of flowers. The Cuban-born, Boston-based photographer started with a still life of a mixed bouquet. He took a photo, then rearranged the flowers and took another photo. He repeated that 20 times, then layered the images together. Still lifes of flowers are a classic subject for photographers. But Morell is well-known for another distinctive photographic approach: camera obscura, a technique that captures inverted views projected through a pinhole onto a surface in a darkened room. So he saw this very different pursuit, a project he called Flowers for Lisa, as a chance to stretch his creativity as well as to devise…

When a needle sticks you, where does the pain come from? The obvious answer: nerves in skin. But new research in mice suggests the origin might be a previously unknown organ under the skin called the noci-ceptive glio-neural complex (marked in green, below). When glial cells were turned off via gene editing, the mice were less sensitive to pain such as pinpricks. Still to be explored: how the organ works in humans and whether it can be manipulated to help treat pain.…

VISUALIZE A SWARM of 70 billion flying insects, covering 460 square miles—about 1.5 times the size of New York City—and devouring more than 300 million pounds of crops in one day. That’s how big a single swarm can get. Plagues, made up of multiple swarms, are referenced in the Bible and the Quran. Of the thousands of grasshopper species, only 22 can be described as locusts. They’re distinguished by their ability to transform from a solitary state—actively avoiding other locusts—into a social, or “gregarious,” state in which masses of them darken the sky, ravage the land, and terrorize inhabitants. In 2004 a million Malians faced famine after locusts consumed 90 percent of their country’s cereal crops. Changes in locusts’ behaviors and physical traits can eventually be reversed if locusts get…

THE AFRICANS WERE SOON joined by a few African-American families who were moving off the farm to find work in the nearby mills and port. In 1910 the community built the Mobile County Training School, which over the next decades would graduate dozens of preachers, teachers, entrepreneurs, even some professional athletes. Most famously, alumni Cleon Jones and Tommie Agee helped win the 1969 World Series for New York’s Miracle Mets. By the 1960s two giant paper mills were running night and day, jobs were plentiful, and more than 12,000 people called Africatown home. Anderson Flen grew up during Africatown’s heyday and remembers it as a place where children were sure to speak to elders sitting on their porches and where elders made sure no child went hungry. As he shows…

A cloud of conflict shadows a massive swath of grasslands in Montana. The nonprofit American Prairie Reserve (APR) is purchasing land and reintroducing native plants and herds of bison to echo the wild state that existed before homesteaders arrived in the 1800s. Many local ranchers, however, see the reserve as a threat to their future and 150 years of cowboy tradition. Private land Most private land in this area is used for cattle ranching. Many ranches include grazing leases on nearby public lands to stay in business. Negative bison easement In 2017, 63 landowners signed on to a “negative bison easement.” It forbids bison on their properties for 20 years, even if the land is bought by APR. Public land The Bureau of Land Management regulates most public land in…

BOB ENJOYS BREAKFASTS OF CAVIAR, dips in his own saltwater pool, and biweekly foot massages on the beach. A charmed life, perhaps, but you could say he deserves it: Bob spends a lot of his time interacting with schoolchildren on his native island of Curaçao, serving as an emissary for conservation. Bob, you see, is a flamingo. Veterinarian Odette Doest rescued Bob in 2016, after the bird slammed into a hotel window and got a concussion. While rehabilitating the bird at her nonprofit wildlife sanctuary, Fundashon Dier en Onderwijs Cariben (Foundation for Animals and Education in the Caribbean), Doest discovered that Bob previously had been domesticated: He was very relaxed around people, and he suffered from bumblefoot, a chronic foot disease common in captive birds, which would have impaired his…

WHO Photographer and filmmaker Frost focuses on humans’ relationships with the wild. WHERE At the Hoja Nueva research station in the Peruvian Amazon, where Frost worked with wildlife reintroduction specialist Harry Turner WHAT A Canon 5D Mark IV with a 100mm f/2.8 macro lens Yes, cat pictures are a perennial hit online—and this one has become the most liked image on the @natgeo Instagram accounts. About three months old here, the male ocelot was bound for the illegal wildlife trade before Hoja Nueva staffers rescued him and named him Keanu. Conservationists aim to thwart sales of ocelots and return them to the wild: “It’s heart-wrenching work,” Frost says. Keanu is now 18 months old. With some monitoring from staffers, he lives in the forest, hunting rodents and reptiles for food…