Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2020 i National Geographic Magazine

IN 1990 NASA and the European Space Agency launched a telescope designed to peer deep into the universe. Above Earth’s atmosphere, the satellite would see without distortions from air, light, and pollution. Scientists said it would last, at best, for a decade. Thirty years later, Hubble continues to fascinate. Its famous images have helped astronomers answer some of space’s biggest questions, from How old is the universe? (13.8 billion years old) to Do black holes actually exist? (yes, with frightening ferocity). In 1995 astronomer Bob Williams had a zany idea: What if NASA pointed Hubble at a seeming dark spot in the sky? That yielded the magical discovery that even where the human eye sees nothing, thousands of galaxies exist. “One of Hubble’s lasting achievements will be how it showed…

FOR AM ERICA’S BICENTENNIAL in 1976, Japan sent a gift of 53 bonsai trees. Many of them, including one that was first potted in 1625, now reside in Washington, D.C.’s National Bonsai & Penjing Museum. Tending to bonsai requires calm, focus, patience—and a set of miniature tools. “If you don’t under-stand the science to keep them alive, there’s no point in understanding the art to make them beautiful,” says Michael James, the museum’s curator. —NINA STROCHLIC…

‘GUYS! REMEMBER: ABOVE THE NECK! OK, GO.’ We are practicing giving compliments at the PEERS Dating Boot Camp, a program for teens and adults with special needs who hope to find love. The participants, many with autism, are mostly in their mid to late 20s, but seem years younger. They come alone or with parents, caretakers, sometimes a sibling. Almost all live with their families. There’s lots of unfortunate facial hair, T-shirts from obscure bands (Radioactive Chicken Heads), noise-canceling headphones for the hearing-sensitive, plushy key rings hanging off backpacks. Reading social cues is difficult for those on the spectrum, so everyone here wants to know the rules. And when it comes to dating, there are a lot of rules. Dating coaches, either doctoral students or administrators in the neuroscience program…

Since the early 1990s, the American foundation Tompkins Conservation (TC) has purchased more than two million acres of private land in Chile and Argentina, donating it to those countries to help establish or expand 14 national parks. In Argentina’s Iberá Wetlands (below) efforts are under way to reintroduce species into the wild that have been locally extinct for decades. INTO THE WILD 145 Collared peccary (Pecari tajacu) reintroduced since 2015 stable population 88 Giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla) 2007, stable 41 Pampas deer (Ozotoceros bezoarticus) 2009, stable 28 Red-and-green macaw (Ara chloropterus) 2015 MILESTONES AND ACQUISITIONS Land owned by Tompkins Conservation Land donated by TC Parkland donated by Chile and Argentina CHRISTINA SHINTANI, TAYLOR MAGGIACOMO, AND IRENE BERMAN-VAPORIS, NGM STAFF. SOURCES: TOMPKINS CONSERVATION; REWILDING ARGENTINA…

“AS GUS AGES into adulthood, the list of his challenges that worry me grows longer,” Judith Newman writes of her autistic 18-year-old son. “But the two questions that keep me up at night are: Will he find love, and will he find work that means something to him and allows him to at least partially support himself?” Love and work. Sigmund Freud considered them the cornerstones of our humanity, and they’re the ways most of us come to define our adult lives. Yet as Newman writes in this issue, finding love and work are huge challenges for people with autism spectrum disorder. Some eight in 10 are thought to be under- or unemployed—and about the same number indicate that they’d like a romantic partner. Many don’t have one. Because the…

EVEN BY NORTH KOREAN STANDARDS, the final event of the country’s 70th-anniversary celebration in 2018 was a jaw-dropping spectacle. Many thousands of torch-wielding students marched in waves around Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung Square. The electric flame on top of Juche Tower glowed while the sound of the students’ chants and the fireworks’ explosions echoed across the immense plaza. These mass displays have happened often over the 20 years I’ve spent covering North Korea. I photograph them not only because they’re very visual but also because they offer a way to understand the image that the regime wants to project to the world. They present an idealized version of the country—sanitized, curated, united, strong. North Koreans expect photographers to be pur-poseful propagandists, not photojournalists with a critical eye. That makes working…

The wide world of insects: In Arizona, Tennessee, and Ecuador, photographer David Liittschwager made portraits of dozens of bugs in a class (Insecta) that includes millions of species. All, when adults, have six legs, three body segments, and a rigid exoskeleton. Beyond that, diversity rules. Ten groups are represented here: beetles (Coleoptera); cockroaches and termites (Blattodea); butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera); flies (Diptera); true bugs (Hemiptera); bees, wasps, ants, and sawflies (Hymenoptera); walking sticks (Phasmida); alderflies, dobsonflies, and fish flies (Megaloptera); nervewings (Neuroptera); grasshoppers, locusts, and crickets (Orthoptera). The insects shown are identified by genus and species, if known. What’s been lost Entomologists from Krefeld, Germany, collected flying insects for two weeks in August 1994 (left) and—at the same site, with an identical trap—in August 2016 (this photo). Similar data from…

FOR PARENTS WHO LEARN their child has autism, the diagnosis often comes as a shock: How could their baby have gone from appearing healthy to having an incurable disorder? Since autism was first identified in the 1940s, researchers have struggled to explain it. The cause remains a mystery, but scientists are beginning to learn what happens in the brains of these children. Studies indicate that it may be possible to detect signs of autism at as early as three months of age, long before the disorder manifests itself. Early detection would allow for interventions that might prevent or mitigate the impairments associated with autism. “What we are learning is that autism is a trait, and whether or not that trait becomes a disability depends on early experiences,” says Ami Klin,…

FUNDAMENTALS OF MOVEMENT In a full stride, a land animal’s limb propels the body forward, then resets to recover leverage for the next step. Animals change gaits by varying the order that limbs make contact with the ground, as well as the duration and frequency of those contacts. FINS AND FEET Some modern fish can move overland by pushing their bodies up with their fins and flopping forward. The limbs of tetrapods—fourlegged vertebrates, including amphibians—evolved from the fins of ancestral fish species. Feet developed underwater, but the search for food and safety may have coaxed some early walkers onto dry ground. Natural selection drove arms, legs, feet, and hands to diversify and specialize. QUADRUPEDS From skittering shrews to lumbering elephants, quadruped bodies are shaped by physics and physiology. Larger animals…

National Geographic sent three artists and storytellers to explore Abu Dhabi, each following a different itinerary chosen by our readers. The journeys come to life online, as National Geographic Photographer Renan Ozturk and National Geographic Explorers Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, and Jeremy Collins each create a piece of art or music inspired by this mesmerizing landscape. JEBEL HAFIT ULTRA-BRIGHT Abu Dhabi’s spectacular topography inspired artist and photographer Renan Ozturkto create a mixed-media, impressionistic painting depicting the craggy landscape surrounding Jebel Hafit, Abu Dhabi’s highest peak. The seven-foot unstretched canvas glows with a fiery sunset medley of oranges and yellows rendered in pen, watercolor, and acrylic. WOVEN Artist and storyteller Jeremy Collins created a SO-foot mural in Abu Dhabi’s Reem Central Park portraying an Emirati woman practicing khous, a…

AT THE END OF A LONG DAY, we walked up to the village of Korcho. Tropical boubou birds were singing their duets on the edge of a lake. Circular huts, made of sticks and crowned with grass roofs, lay scattered along a ridge. Boys were herding cattle toward the family stockades for the night. Korcho is a village of the Kara people, one of the 16 ethnic groups said to inhabit Ethiopia’s Omo-Turkana Basin. Ethiopia may be known for its rich and varied mix of ethnicities, but the diversity in the lower Omo River Valley in the southwest of the country, home to more than 200,000 people, is unparalleled. One of the cradles of humankind, the valley was declared a World Heritage site by UNESCO in 1980. Ancient stone tools…

LAST WILD PLACES Tompkins Conservation is a conservation partner of the National Geographic Society’s Last Wild Places initiative. ‘It was a desperate time. Doug never got over it.’ KRIS MCDIVITT TOMPKINS SITS BEFORE A COFFEE table covered with colorful maps of Chile and Argentina, talking about the controversy in the early 1990s that swirled around a place called Pumalín, in southern Chile. Pumalín was the chastening early experience that showed her and her late husband, the retired businessman and adventurer Doug Tompkins, how hard it could be to convert Yankee dollars and good intentions into landscape protection in South America. ¶ Beyond the coffee table, beyond the maps, beyond the big windows of this handsome stone guesthouse, built like an aerie atop a small hill, stretches a vista of rolling grasslands,…

EACH JUNE, Nunzio Marcelli gathers his flock of 1,300 sheep and leaves his home near the medieval village of Anversa degli Abruzzi in the Apennine Mountains of central Italy. Walking some 30 miles over three days, 65-year-old Marcelli, his shepherds, and a few guests curious about this region’s traditional way of life herd the animals to an alpine meadow high above the Marcelli farm. The route from the farm to the animals’ summer pasture follows a tratturo, the Italian word for the paths carved into this land by more than 2,300 years of such migrations. After clattering through Anversa’s cobblestone streets, the sheep and their herders scramble upward. They switchback through seas of wildflowers, oldgrowth beech and pine forests, and crumbling stone villages—including the ethereal hamlet of Castrovalva, population 12,…