Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2025 i National Geographic Magazine - UK

PLUS: Making sense of the pyramids’ enduring mysteries Nothing has captured our imagination quite like the Pyramids of Giza. Built 4,600 years ago during Egypt’s Old Kingdom, the three monuments served to honor and house the remains of the Pharaohs Khufu, his son Khafre, and grandson Menkaure. In the thousands of years that followed, they awed and inspired everyone from the ancient Greeks to Napoleon Bonaparte. For several thousand years, the Great Pyramid reigned supreme as the world’s tallest human-made structure, originally standing 481 feet high. The pyramids are icons of ingenuity and imagination, and yet almost from the moment they were constructed, they have been shrouded in mysteries. Perhaps the biggest and most popular one is, How exactly were they built? The Great Pyramid comprises over two million stone blocks,…

ONE OF THE world’s oldest maps was etched into a clay tablet likely sometime between 1500 and 1300 B.C. And ever since its discovery, during an 1899 excavation in what’s now Iraq, scholars have argued over how to read it. A bit larger than an adult hand, the map shows distances between gates in the wall surrounding the Mesopotamian city of Nippur. But to some archaeologists’ eyes, the locations of structures on the tablet didn’t seem to align with the city’s excavated remains. Many experts believed the map was simply off—until the 1970s, when University of Chicago archaeologist McGuire Gibson came across aerial photos of Nippur and thought he could pinpoint where the map showed city walls jutting south. When excavations there revealed traces of fortifications, Gibson realized the map’s…

CRAFT “The slow, precise reconstruction of her image … It’s like she’s eternal now.”CÉLINE CLANET, photographer RITUAL “When Yamantaka steps into the monastery courtyard, the air itself seems to TREMBLE. In his gaze, evil DISSOLVES. In his dance, the world is made new.”JATENIPAT KETPRADIT, photographer LAND “It’s different when you see this work from ABOVE. It was exciting to see what, in essence, was a CANVAS. His tractor is a kind of paintbrush.”ESHA CHIOCCHIO, photographer and National Geographic Explorer…

So the pyramids might have been a kind of marine-industrial project, and what we now know as the sandblasted Giza plateau perhaps bordered a bustling harbor. It takes some getting used to. Those giant triangles in the desert—at once confounding to modern adults and relatable to preschoolers everywhere—have spawned so many crazy ideas that they long ago began to seem like primeval provocations. Some of this, including the persistent notion that these are alien deposits, was owed to the implausible sourcing and transport of so much raw material, hurdles that recede after the discovery of a lost branch of the Nile. But the pyramids’ final assembly instructions remain lost in the mail. We know only that they are uncannily aligned with the cardinal directions and that their bases are remarkably…

Reporting in this article is presented by the National Geographic Society in partnership with Rolex under the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Ocean Expeditions. THE OMINOUS TEXT arrived when National Geographic Explorer Jane Younger was aboard a research vessel in Antarctica’s Weddell Sea: “More dead crabbies.” It was from a friend working as an expedition leader on a nearby cruise ship. He had spotted dead crabeater seals on the edge of the sea ice. Younger was studying how the bird flu sweeping the globe was circulating in the region, and the sighting suggested that the virus had jumped to crabeaters. But it was also a potential piece of a much larger puzzle. Antarctica is one of the fastest warming places on Earth—temperatures are rising on the continent at two…

FOR MORE THAN A DECADE, University of Chicago cognitive scientist Wilma Bainbridge has been tackling the mysteries of why certain images stay with us and others fade from memory. She’s found trends suggesting that humans, regardless of culture, prioritize visual info in surprisingly similar ways. Using that insight, she’s helped develop ResMem, an AI model that can predict which images humans will remember—even better than we can predict their memorability ourselves. A tool like ResMem could have broad applications, assisting in everything from language learning to early Alzheimer’s diagnoses to assessing social media’s impact. Next Bainbridge hopes to build other predictive neural networks to quantify and predict memorability, including one focused on sound. “What happens,” she wonders, “if you design a world to be unforgettable?” Which Photos Are Most Memorable?…

IN THE SUMMER OF 2022, a small but bustling town appeared atop the normally barren Greenland ice sheet. Rows of red tents flapped in the wind, and an LC-130 Hercules cargo plane occasionally delivered food, fuel, and equipment. But the camp’s main activity lay hidden 30 feet below the surface, in a network of tunnels that workers had spent weeks chainsawing into the ice. Researchers bundled in down jackets toiled around the clock in these snowy tunnels as a massive drill rig churned downward to extract core samples and the secrets they contain from the deepest recesses of the ice sheet below. Some of these cylindrical ice cores—each about the width of a pool noodle—hadn’t seen daylight for 100,000 years. They’re clear and flawless, “like window glass,” says Jørgen Peder…

A STRONG MEMORY is associated with smarts; forgetfulness is the province of scatterbrains. But that’s unfair to the human mind, because we start to forget as soon as we begin to remember—and this is a good thing. Forgetting keeps our heads from being overrun by useless information or emotionally painful memories. And it turns out we have a surprising amount of control over what we want to forget. Jonathan Fawcett, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, has demonstrated as much through “directed forgetting” experiments. Subjects are shown words followed by one of two directions: forget or remember. Later, it turns out, they better recall the “remember” words. And while our everyday lives don’t come with directions telling us what to mentally keep and discard, such experiments show…

NEARLY ALL THE competitors at the USA Memory Championship have one thing in common. To memorize hundreds of random words, dozens of strangers’ life histories, the order of shuffled card decks, and more, they use variations on an age-old technique called the method of loci—also known as the “memory palace” or “Roman room” method—which transforms any familiar space into a storage system for new information. The basics are straightforward: Make a mental map of a familiar place, then create associations between items and specific locations along a route. Indigenous cultures worldwide have relied on similar techniques since time immemorial. Native American pilgrimage trails, Australian Aboriginal Songlines, and Pacific Islanders’ ceremonial roads all follow a similar pattern. Elders would sing, dance, or tell stories at specific locations, making information stick by…

BOOKS IT WAS A big task to curate images for inclusion in the new milestone anthology The Photographs: Iconic Images from National Geographic. The process began with thousands of candidates drawn from Nat Geo’s enormous archive, says Adrian Coakley, the director of photography at National Geographic Books, who coedited the anthology along with photo editor Katie Dance. With so many standout photos telling so many different types of stories, Coakley says one of the most important questions asked of each image was also one of the simplest: “Does it make me stop and take notice?” The arresting pictures that made the cut represent more than a century of photos taken in every corner of the globe. They’re interspersed with reflections from acclaimed photographers on the power of a memorable image to…