Innehållsförteckning för April 2024 från National Geographic Magazine

A common thread The fungal kingdom encompasses seemingly endless forms, but nearly all its members share one trait: cell walls made of chitin. This solid but flexible substance also makes up exoskeletons in arthropods such as insects and shellfish. Genetic diversity Fungal variety is extreme. For example, the fungus that makes penicillin is as genetically different from the one that ripens blue cheeses as humans are from fish. This may be one reason around 2,000 new species are classified every year. Distant relatives Fungi are biologically closer to animals than they are to plants. Both acquire energy by absorbing or consuming dissolved molecules. A key difference: Animals, including humans, digest food internally, while fungi secrete enzymes to break down food externally. SOURCES: TIMOTHY JAMES, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN; ANTONIS ROKAS, VANDERBILT…

In the Bible, the Prophet Jonah refuses to preach against the sinful city of Nineveh, as God has commanded. Instead, he flees on a ship. God then whips up a violent storm, which threatens to wreck the ship. When Jonah confesses to the crew that the storm must be his fault, they throw him overboard to save their fragile vessel. Underwater, Jonah is swallowed by a big fish, often rendered as a whale. The interpretation at Huqoq, seen here, is the earliest known depiction of this tale in an ancient Jewish context. And it has a twist that appears in later Jewish and Islamic written sources: Jonah is swallowed by a succession of three fish (1). Located in the synagogue’s nave, the panel presents a host of other intriguing details:…

WHAT KIND OF PERSON chases a tornado, or dives among sharks, or travels into a conflict zone, all for a photograph? Jimmy Chin—mountain climber, skier, photographer, filmmaker—wondered this as a child growing up in Minnesota, flipping through the pages of his family’s copies of National Geographic. When he picked up photography in his twenties, his goal was to shoot for the magazine. Joining the ranks of National Geographic photographers in 2002, he has since shown how far—or high—he’ll go for a picture. As his friend and fellow climber Alex Honnold attempted a ropeless ascent of the El Capitan rock formation in Yosemite National Park in 2017, Chin dangled from a safety line nearby, more than 2,000 feet above the valley floor. Honnold’s death-defying feat also became the Oscar-winning National Geographic…

Every fall, whooping cranes undertake an arduous flight from Canada’s subarctic boreal forests to the Texas Gulf Coast and return six months later. The landscape below them, once flush with wetland habitat, now has fewer stopover points because of expanding human development. This map tracks the annual path of 15J, as she headed south in late 2022, then north in mid-2023. Parents often accompany their offspring for most if not all of the trip. Back From the Brink Recovering from a low of just 16 cranes in 1941, the remaining migratory whooping crane population is now above 500. Reintroduced populations have had varying degrees of success and continue to rely on the release of juveniles from captive-breeding programs. Confined to Corridors Whooping cranes once soared across much of North America.…

SCIENCE “The Finding Darwin expedition provided me with a PROFOUND IMMERSION into how he slowly constructed his thoughts and the legacy of scientific knowledge he left in Patagonia.”MARCIO PIMENTA, Photographer and National Geographic Explorer OCEANS “Witnessing the synchronized elegance of thousands of corals creating life NEVER CEASES TO AMAZE. This enchanting phenomenon imparts a unique aesthetic sensation, as if you’re gazing upon an underwater, inverted, colorful snowstorm.”TOM SHLESINGER, Photographer CULTURE “I learned about a group of women dedicated to the EGYPTIAN GODDESS ISIS. Their reverence for the waters of the Nile and its history is representative of the importance of the Nile to Egyptians and the world.” MATT MOYER, Photographer and National Geographic Explorer TRAVEL “I love exploring the city without a set plan and discovering all the interesting scenes…

INSIDE THE DOME of Yerkes Observatory, tucked along the shore of Wisconsin’s Geneva Lake, in the town of Williams Bay, it is emphatically 1897. The still-rotating metal half sphere is dominated by an enormous, lovingly polished refracting telescope—a 60-foot-long, six-ton contraption with two 40-inch lenses at one end and an eyepiece at the other. The thing is almost ridiculously fanciful. If an astronomer or a visitor wants to look through that eyepiece, an operator flips an ancient switch and the dome’s entire circular floor—at 75 feet in diameter, one of the world’s largest elevators—rises 23 feet to give the person access. Then, in a maneuver familiar to any backyard stargazer, the viewer takes hold of the massive telescope with two hands and physically shifts the impeccably balanced device toward the…

WITH A FOURTH Jurassic World movie in the works, our fascination with dinosaurs shows no signs of slowing, especially for series’ superstars Tyrannosaurus rex and other theropods. Ever since these beasts were first unearthed more than a century ago, National Geographic has been reporting on them, pairing the latest science with vivid illustrations. With every new discovery, our depictions must evolve. Starting in 1919, a magazine feature laid the foundation, describing an Albertosaurus as a “powerful flesh-eater” that was “capable of destroying any of its herb-eating relatives.” Twenty-three years later, battling T. rexes appeared in our pages standing some “twenty feet in height.” Three and a half decades after that, a 1978 cover story reported that T. rex was even larger, “fifty feet and six tons of bad news.” Until the…

Traveling north in a 1957 Cessna, from Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, Texas, to Canada’s Wood Buffalo National Park in spring 2022, pilot Christopher Boyer and photographer Michael Forsberg (above) captured the landscape from the aerial perspective of migratory whooping cranes. On the roughly 2,500-mile trek, the transcontinental birds can face strong winds and blizzards, and must choose carefully where to stop for food and rest. In addition to naturally occurring rigors such as bad weather, drought, and predators, these cranes must surmount a host of human-caused environmental threats, from power lines and polluted wetlands to poaching and urban development. The annual journeys—totaling some 5,000 miles—are grueling, and only about one-third of chicks survive to breeding age.…

WHEN ARCHAEOLOGIST JODI MAGNESS climbed to the sunny hilltop overlooking the Sea of Galilee in the summer of 2010, she was unsure what she might find there. An ancient Jewish village known as Huqoq once stood on the site in northeastern Israel, but all that remained above ground was a jumble of centuries-old building stones, modern debris, and wild mustard plants. Magness, a professor of early Judaism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a National Geographic Explorer, had spent years leading excavations in Israel and suspected that this hilltop was worth exploring. By the following summer, she and her team had discovered a stone wall running north to south some seven feet below ground. Several pieces of evidence—including a main doorway oriented toward Jerusalem—revealed that it…

THE ATACAMA DESERT IN NORTHERN CHILE stretches from the Pacific to the Andes across a barren expanse of red-orange rock canyons and peaks. As one of the driest deserts on Earth, it’s a bucket-list destination for stargazing tourists who come for some of the clearest views of the night sky. With its arid, rocky landscape so closely resembling Mars, the desert has even attracted the attention of NASA, which has tested rovers there. But the Atacama has also attained a less wondrous distinction as one of the world’s fast-growing dumps of discarded clothes, thanks to the rapid mass production of inexpensive attire known as fast fashion. The phenomenon has created so much waste that the UN calls it “an environmental and social emergency.” The challenge is turning off that tap.…

WE WERE 800 FEET UP IN THE AIR, FLYING IN A HELICOPTER with an international team of scientists over the vast boreal forest encompassing Canada’s Wood Buffalo National Park, when one of them shouted the alert. “Bird at nine o’clock!” Pilot Paul Spring circled the helicopter left, tilting for a clearer view of one of the countless pools of water stretching to the horizon. Rimmed in sand and tamarack trees, the surface glowed iridescent. In the middle of the wetland, we could make out a pair of snowy white specks, though they stood roughly five feet tall at ground level. “There’s a chick,” said Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC) wildlife biologist John Conkin, training his binoculars on a rust-colored bird, slightly shorter than its parents, high-stepping in the marsh.…

TELEVISION AS CESAR MILLAN likes to say, “I rehabilitate dogs, I train people.” In the new season of his show Better Human Better Dog, the behaviorist dives deep into the human concerns that affect his clients’ relationships with their beloved pups. His favorite method for figuring out what’s wrong is to watch people walk their dogs. Sometimes just a few minutes is enough for Millan to identify the problem. Perhaps a pet owner lacks confidence, and the dog is taking control. Or the owner is scared of other dogs, triggering the pet’s aggression. Whatever the diagnosis, Millan is certain he has the solution: Train people to project calm, assertive energy—an approach that can translate to all facets of life. In this upcoming season, he’s going a step further by playing…