Innehållsförteckning för July 2023 från National Geographic Magazine

Don’t underestimate a Goffin’s cockatoo with the munchies. In a recent study, researchers challenged the birds to solve a puzzle box with a cashew hidden behind a transparent paper membrane. In the first test, the birds could succeed only by using two different tools—a short, sharp stick (above left) for poking through the barrier and a long, flexible stick (above right) to fish the nut out afterward. Easy! Some birds solved the puzzle in less than 35 seconds. In the second test, the scientists gave the cockatoos two boxes, one with the membrane and one without. Here too the birds prevailed, sometimes picking up and setting down each tool as they weighed which was needed before settling on the proper stick for the job. Finally the researchers added obstacles between…

Humans can survive longer without food than without water: significantly longer. It’s one of the harsh realities that makes the dry deserts of Saudi Arabia such a challenging place to live. Then there’s the searing heat in a landscape that offers little shade, and the often infertile sands in which plants struggle to grow. It seems an unlikely place for farms, cities, and civilizations to emerge, but that’s what happened in the AlUla valley between the foothills of Saudi Arabia’s Hijaz Mountains. Because even in the desert, there are places where water can be found to nurture life and allow plants, animals, and humans to thrive. The AlUla valley cradles an oasis, an island of habitable land amid Saudi Arabia’s vast seas of sand, a haven that can support communities…

1. Sylvia Earle beams from a submersible as a diver unfurls the National Geographic Society flag. One of the world’s leading ocean experts, Earle has logged more than 7,000 hours underwater, working to inspire people to protect marine life: “If people do not know,” she says, “they cannot care.” 2. National Geographic teamed up with the U.S. Army Air Corps in the 1930s to send gas balloons into the stratosphere. The effort set a record height for crewed flight (72,395 feet) and produced the first photograph of the curvature of the Earth. 3. Since 1974, archaeologists have uncovered thousands of terra-cotta soldiers placed in defense of the burial mound of China’s first emperor. Sculptors 2,200 years ago gave each warrior a unique combination of hair, headgear, and facial features. 4.…

“I THINK WE SHOULD stop the excavation,” I said. As I gestured at the ghostly image on the computer screen, I looked over at Keneiloe Molopyane, an archaeologist and forensic scientist known on our team as Bones. We were watching a live stream of two colleagues, archaeologists Marina Elliott and Becca Peixotto, digging around a hundred feet beneath us. Bones leaned in to look at the screen as the light from the excavators’ head lamps darted around the chamber. “Why stop?” she asked. It was November 2018, and we were sitting at our team’s “command center” in South Africa’s Rising Star cave system, which comprises nearly two and a half miles of interlaced passages, descending in some places more than 130 feet underground. Occasionally, you might find a chamber in…

TWO CHILDREN CARRYING shopping bags left their home in Taliban-occupied Kabul. The older one wore a burka, the short-haired one wore pants—a sister and brother running errands, any observer would think. They took a different route each day. When they reached their destination, they made sure no one was watching before they ducked through a doorway. They were going to school. It was the fall of 1996, and girls’ education had just been outlawed; teachers and parents risked death if they were caught allowing girls to attend school. The younger child, six-year-old Shabana Basij-Rasikh, dressed as a boy to pose as her sister’s mandatory male chaperone. They’d hidden books in their bags for classes taught in secrecy. One day, suspecting they’d been followed, the sisters begged their parents to stop…

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC VOL. 244 NO. 1 LOOKING AT THE EARTH FROM EVERY POSSIBLE ANGLE I would like to introduce you to the storytelling that I grew up with in Nigeria. It was from a television show called Tales by Moonlight, where an elder would sit under a tree and tell stories, an on-air version of the age-old oral tradition. In earlier days, the ideal light sources were the full moon and the stars, casting a silver-blue illumination on the faces of eager children and adults alike. There also might have been the sound of crickets not far off and a soft breeze rustling the leaves of the trees. I come from a family of storytellers. In our home during the evenings, my father would recount how as a young boy…

For anyone who’s lost a ring down the drain, there’s hope in history. Archaeologists in Carlisle, England, recently discovered a remarkable trove of ancient gems that likely belonged to wealthy patrons of a lavish bathhouse on the remote fringes of the Roman Empire. The researchers uncovered a stone-lined drainage system containing dozens of engraved agates, jaspers, and other gemstones that once graced fancy rings in the third and early fourth centuries A.D.—until the heat and humidity of the baths loosened their glued settings and sent them tumbling into the drains. The 36 intaglios present a unique snapshot into the beliefs of the period’s Roman elite, says Frank Giecco, lead archaeologist on the project. Some bear likenesses of the goddess Fortuna—luck—or Diana, who protected women during childbirth; others found at this…

For a pharaoh who probably had everything: 2,000 mummified rams’ heads. Now fleshless skulls, the heads may have been an offering to Egypt’s Ramses II, aka Ramses the Great, in the afterlife. They were found in a previously unknown part of a temple complex, some 270 miles south of Cairo, that was built to honor the long-reigning ruler. Researchers who unearthed the heads estimate they were left there roughly a thousand years after Ramses II died around 1213 B.C.…

1 HIDDEN FIGURES War at the Door With explosive sounds and shaking floors, the immersive centerpiece of Gettysburg’s newest museum imagines what it might’ve been like for civilians of this Pennsylvania town (such as the boy in the tintype above) to find themselves in the midst of the American Civil War for three infamous days in July 1863. The Beyond the Battle Museum focuses less on troop movements and more on those who fed soldiers, nursed the wounded, and buried the dead. 2 PURPLE REIGN A FRENCH INITIATIVE AIMS TO SAVE THE FAMED LAVENDER FIELDS OF PROVENCE FROM THREATS SUCH AS DROUGHT AND DISEASE. ONE STEP: PLANTING OTHER FLORA BETWEEN THE ROWS OF BUSHES TO ENRICH THE SOIL. 3 ON TREND AFRO-FUTURIST EXPRESSIONS From Wakanda Forever to Vogue, styles that…

IN THIS SECTION Cockatoo Tool Set Skills Roman Bath Baubles Gettysburg Revisited Sea Snake Sex Woes ILLUMINATING THE MYSTERIES—AND WONDERS—ALL AROUND US EVERY DAY NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC VOL. 244 NO. 1 THE TASMANIAN TIGER is alive. Not literally alive—there hasn’t been a verified sighting of Australia’s iconic marsupial predator for close to a century—but alive in imagination, in memory, in cultural recognition, and in collective regret over its extinction. Alive, too, in the quest of a handful of scientists and entrepreneurs to “de-extinct” the species and bring it back to the wild. The first thing to say about the Tasmanian tiger is that it wasn’t a tiger and it didn’t live only in Tasmania. In its existence as in its demise, the animal also known as the thylacine was a victim of…

SEX INVOLVES A LOT of trial and error for olive sea snakes. These highly venomous reptiles have poor eyesight, and males have been known to mistake sea cucumbers, loose strands of rope, and even the fins of scuba divers for potential mates. When a male finally manages to locate a female, he will nudge her head in a plea for consent. Such requests are usually rejected, forcing the suitor to start his partner search anew. However, if a female accepts an offer, the male must find a way to insert one of his two penises into the female’s cloaca, which for a creature with lousy vision and no limbs is “very tricky,” says Claire Goiran, a University of New Caledonia marine biologist who studies sea snakes. Males coil around their…

“I often find myself underground,” says Keneiloe Molopyane (left), a South African archaeologist and paleoanthropologist, “excavating fossil remains that tell the story of our deep human journey.” The principal investigator at Gladysvale Cave, an important early hominin site in South Africa, she still thrills to the memory of finding a skull fragment one day, then finding a second and a third fragment the following day, to form an almost complete skull. A scientist and conservationist from Kenya, Gibbs Kuguru studies the DNA of sharks to understand how humans have affected their biology. Kuguru spent his early 20s hanging out with juvenile sharks in the water every day, which “still feels surreal,” he says. Now he can be found in shark cages—his “field office”—collecting tissue samples from great whites or perhaps…