Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2020 i National Geographic Magazine

To potentially help extraterrestrials locate Earth, this diagram (below) was first sent into space in 1972 attached to Pioneer 10. That spacecraft is still traveling on to the stars, but time and space are taking a toll on the cosmic coordinates it carries. The map gets increasingly unreliable as the galaxy rotates and our sun and its reference points—pulsars, the spinning cores of collapsed stars—change their relative positions. So one astronomer, Scott Ransom, is proposing a new map (far right) to overcome these weaknesses. Stable signposts If a small, dense pulsar is paired with another star, it siphons material and energy from its companion, accelerating the pulsar’s already rapid rotation. At up to 43,000 rotations per minute, the radiation appears to pulse and acts like a beacon. This system is…

01 HOW THEY MOVED 02 HOW THEY HATCHED 03 HOW THEY GREW 04 HOW THEY LOOKED 05 HOW THEY SOCIALIZED a chilly January afternoon, Susannah Maidment stands on the shore of a London lake, staring down a pack of dinosaurs. Maidment, a curator at the U.K.’s Natural History Museum, has come with me to tour Crystal Palace Park, which in 1854 included the world’s first public dinosaur showcase. The sculptures were a smash hit at their unveiling and sparked the dinomania that’s been with us ever since. More than a century before Steven Spielberg dazzled the world with Jurassic Park, the Crystal Palace dinosaurs drew two million visitors a year for three decades straight, and Charles Dickens name-dropped one in his novel Bleak House. To grant us a detailed look…

HOW THEY GREW HOT BODIES, COOL HEADS SMALLER AND COOLER Small dinosaurs had a high surface-area-to-volume ratio that maximized their ability to shed heat without special adaptations. Most dinosaur species grew larger over time, but paravian theropods—the precursors of birds—grew smaller over time, which was eventually helpful for flight. BIGGER AND HOTTER Giant sauropods, the largest animals to walk the Earth, could top 110,000 pounds. How to get so big? Grow slowly over a long life, like crocodiles, or grow fast, which these dinosaurs did. Reaching full size within 20 years, sauropods’ low surface-area-to-volume ratio supported a fast metabolism but required special adaptations to shed heat. A NOVEL APPROACH Non-avian theropods had a special way to keep cool. When they opened their mouth, the jaw muscles pulled on a unique…

About this story: To protect the privacy of the girls who were trafficked and to comply with Indian laws on identifying victims of sexual crimes, we are not disclosing their identities or those of their family members. We photographed them in ways intended to obscure their faces and altered some images to hide distinguishing features. We use pseudonyms for the two girls featured in the story. After a fight with her mother, R. left her home near Kolkata, one of India’s largest cities. At a train station, she met some men who tricked her and took her to a red-light district in the city. Many girls who are trafficked in their teens spend the rest of their lives in brothels. R. was rescued before she was sold to one. She…

HEALTHY CORAL REEFS are pretty noisy places. “The crackle of snapping shrimp and the whoops and grunts of fish combine to form a dazzling biological soundscape” that draws juvenile fish looking for a place to settle, says marine biologist Steve Simpson. When a coral reef gets degraded, inhabitants disappear and the reef becomes “ghostly quiet,” he says. “But by using loudspeakers to restore this lost soundscape, we can attract young fish back again.” In 2017 Simpson and an international team of scientists placed loudspeakers along Australia’s Great Barrier Reef right after a mass bleaching event to see if playing the sounds of a healthy reef could entice fish to repopulate a damaged one. After six weeks, twice as many fish settled on bleached patches of reef where sound was played…

HOW THEY MOVED SWIMMERS AND FLIERS ELONGATION Vertebrae grew longer and thinner toward the tip of the tail, giving the appendage additional length and height for flexibility and propulsion FLIGHT TEST Did dinosaurs take wing from the ground or glide down from trees—or both? To test these hypotheses, scientists used computer simulations, robot models, and even animals of today in multiple experiments. LATERAL FLEXIBILITY Unlike tails on other theropods, bony overhangs on the vertebrae called zygapophyses are small and barely overlap. This allows the tail to flex laterally, acting more like a flexible chain than a reinforced rod. A TAIL LIKE A PADDLE Elongated extensions of bone above and below the tail, called neural spines and chevrons, give it abundant surface area. This helps with both propulsion and steering, allowing the tail…

HOW THEY LOOKED RESURRECTED IN COLOR EVOLUTION OF FEATHERS Fossils indicate that the first closed feathers (see below) evolved in the clade Maniraptora, along with the first color patterns in a single feather. The explosion of visual possibility for sexual display may have led to faster evolution by sexual selection. FEATHERY FUZZ Many species had single-fiber feathers. The discovery of more complex feathers in species like Kulindadromeus implies that feathers originated and diversified early on, likely for insulation and display, not flight. MODERN RELATIVES Melanosomes—cellular structures that contain the pigment melanin—help give feathers their color. By comparing their shape and arrangement in fossils with those in modern birds, experts can reconstruct a dinosaur’s color and even see whether it was iridescent. PREHISTORIC PATTERNS Patterns give clues to environment and behavior.…

It was supposed to be a shortcut. Now, waist-high in latte brown water, I find myself stumbling over submerged logs, ducking under ant-teeming briars, and pushing through sticky curtains of spiderwebs—following a trail blazed by Brazilian biologist Everton Miranda. One expensive camera has already gone belly-up after field assistant Edson Oliveira face-planted into an engorged puddle, and a wasp sting on photographer Karine Aigner’s forearm has ballooned into a welt the size and color of a plump tomato. But if turning back is on anyone’s mind, they keep the thought to themselves. Our mission is too important. We’re here to find an elusive harpy eagle nest, rumored to be about a mile inside this patch of Amazon rainforest in Mato Grosso, a state more than three times the size of…

I TOOK SOME 10,000 PHOTOS during the 12 days I spent in Detroit documenting the impact that the novel coronavirus had on the city’s people. I went everywhere, as carefully as I could. City buses that workers depended on to get to and from the jobs they couldn’t afford to give up. Houses and apartments where people lived and loved despite illnesses and job losses that threatened their well-being. Funerals where family members had to take turns saying goodbye to their loved ones—no more than 10 people allowed to gather at a time. Ten. That happens to be the number of children that Chester Lovett had. The Marine veteran and former mail carrier also had a mother, grandchildren, brothers, nieces and nephews, and countless others who loved him. Yet the…

My summer place is priceless: Not even Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates could buy it today. It sits on the slopes of Mount Hood in Oregon, near the Pacific Crest Trail. It’s at timberline, where stunted trees give way to delicate alpine meadows bursting with flowers. A glacier-fed creek serenades me as I sleep at night. I’ve been visiting my summer place since I was 14. Most of the year it’s covered in deep snow, but even in winter it reassures me from a distance. If I have trouble sleeping, I conjure the scene, and nature lulls me. Fortunately it’s in my family, and I hope my unborn grandchildren will one day play in the brook as well. Yet, while it’s in my family, it’s also in yours. It’s my…

FROM OUR PHOTOGRAPHERS WHO A Kenya-based photographer who seeks to capture humanity’s fraught and intimate connections to the natural world WHERE A village outside of Caynabo, Somaliland, an autonomous region within Somalia WHAT A Hasselblad 501CM camera and a Zeiss Planar 80mm lens Sobecki has worked for nearly a decade in East Africa, where nations are burdened by conflict, the climate crisis—and now, COVID-19. Despite the challenges, she says, the people in Somalia are known for a wicked sense of humor. Consider Ahmed Abdi Omar, 17, and a porcupine caught invading his fields. In Sobecki’s photo Omar has a rope leash on the captured pest (which is not an endangered species). Sobecki overheard villagers chuckling “that the porcupine would be dinner that night.” She didn’t stick around for the punch…