Innehållsförteckning för May 2024 från National Geographic Magazine

I’D NEVER MET anyone like Athena before. Though she was an adult, she was only about four feet tall. She weighed a mere 40 pounds. And she was unusual in several other respects. She could change color and shape, taste with her skin, drool venom, spit ink, and jet about by squirting water through a siphon on the side of her head. Not to mention pour her baggy, boneless body through an opening the size of an orange. Her head wasn’t even on top of her body, like mine. That spot was occupied by a body part known as the mantle, containing the organs of respiration, digestion, and reproduction. Her head was where you’d expect to find a torso. And her mouth was in her armpit. Athena was a giant…

LONG BEFORE Switzerland began issuing “Swiss army knives” in the 19th century, a skilled artisan in the Roman Empire made a similar device containing not only a blade but also a spoon, fork, pick, spatula, and spike. It’s “one of the most complicated” folding utensils that we have today from the Roman Empire, says Anastasia Christophilopoulou, senior curator at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, England. When the tool was acquired in the 1990s, parts of its story were incomplete. Later analysis revealed the tool was at least 1,700 years old. Most ancient Roman folding knives are made of bronze, but this one contains silver, a soft metal, suggesting it was a luxury item and used sparingly. “We think this was something that a person would have used in the context…

Step into the water of an English chalk stream, two or three feet deep, shaded by willows and alders, and you feel the pressure and cold of it around your knees and thighs. THE GRAVEL UNDERFOOT IS DAPPLED with sunlight reaching down to the river floor. All around you the motion of the water is sustained and untroubled, the current never urgent. Because chalk streams are spring fed and little silt finds its way into them, visibility is aquarium clear. The trout within them seem to hang in air. These streams take their quality from the rock over which they run: alkaline, mineral rich, with dissolved calcium carbonate but almost no sediment, flowing to the sea over many miles of clean flint-gravel bed. Bubbling up from springs that emerge from…

ANIMALS “Watching these great frigatebirds showing off to passing females made me think of guys STRUTTING THEIR STUFF in a dance hall to attract a potential partner.” DAVID TIPLING, Photographer ADVENTURE “I’ve been learning to re-embrace time to be bored, as it’s in these moments that my mind can REST AND WANDER through a myriad of ideas. The idea behind this image came from boredom.” KRYSTLE WRIGHT, Photographer OCEANS “Reefs are stunning at a distance, with a blizzard of COLORFUL FISH swarming over different shaped corals, but the closer you look, the more beauty and life is revealed.” ALEX MUSTARD, Photographer CULTURE “As a child growing up in the U.S., I was taught to think of rocks as INANIMATE. But the Indigenous people of the Sierra Nevada consider rocks to be as…

OCTOPUS SUPERPOWERS In Earth’s oceans, from coastal waters to extreme depths, some 300 known species of octopus thrive. The earliest ancestors of today’s cephalopods appeared about 530 million years ago, uniquely evolving into highly intelligent creatures with complex behaviors and skills. OCTOPODA Suborder Cirrata Elusive and difficult to study, many of these octopuses can be found at depths reaching 23,000 feet. 45 species Suborder Incirrata It contains the majority of known octopus species, most of which live in coastal areas. 255 species NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC’S EMMY AWARD–WINNING SERIE SIS BACK WITH SECRETS OF THE OCTOPUS, FEATURING MARINE BIOLOGIST ALEX SCHNELL. THE THREE EPISODES ARE STREAMING APRIL 22 on DiSNEp and HULU…

JUPITER BY THE NUMBERS Length of day: 9 hours, 56 minutes Rotational speed: 28,273 mph at equator Temperature at upper layer of atmosphere: -258°F CONTAINED CHAOS Jupiter’s rotation, the fastest of the eight planets, projects immense energy into the atmosphere. Zonal wind speeds can top 300 mph. Zones Light stripes show cooler, rising gases with high clouds of tiny ammonia ice crystals. Belts These darker bands of sinking atmosphere provide a view into Jupiter’s deeper layers.…

“THIS IS HOW I got my eye amoeba,” Cortni Borgerson says, staring up into the massive branches of a 100-foot-tall tree in search of a rare red ruffed lemur, a cat-size primate that lives only in this area of north-eastern Madagascar. She and Pascal Elison, a Masoala National Park tour guide, had raced to the area a few minutes earlier, as the animal’s roar-shriek echoed through the forest. Dodging face-size leaves, scurrying over slippery tree roots, and carefully avoiding any vines that might be thorny, poisonous, or both, they ran while scanning the canopy above them for glimpses of reddish brown fur. Suddenly, there’s a sound like the patter of rain on leaves, and then a loud crack as something hits the ground nearby. “Lemur diarrhea,” says Borgerson, a primatologist…

ONE UNUSUAL TEAM joining National Geographic’s two-year exploration of the Amazon River Basin: scientist Ruthmery Pillco Huarcaya and her canine tracking companion. The two first set eyes on each other at an animal shelter in Cusco, a historic city perched in the Peruvian Andes. Something about this mutt reminded Pillco of herself—whippet-thin, tough, persistent. A family had already expressed interest in the dog, but Pillco won her case. With an important new job, the shelter’s dog would help the cause of Amazonian conservation in Peru. “She’s going to be a hero,” Pillco promised. She took the dog home to her apartment, where she began teaching Ukuku—the name she chose—how to sniff out bear scat on mountain trails. Ukuku is a word for “bear” in Quechua, the Indigenous language of Pillco’s…

WITH THEIR BULBOUS MANTLES, squirming arms, and clouds of ink, it’s no wonder that octopuses—from the kraken to Ursula in The Little Mermaid—have inspired folklore for centuries. But in reality, these cephalopods are smart, curious, and full of personality. For these images, photographer David Liittschwager spent weeks at Roger Hanlon’s laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and at Anna Di Cosmo’s laboratory at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy, where he documented octopuses changing the color and texture of their skin, choosing meals, and exploring their tanks. He learned their skin is sensitive to light, and they can taste and “smell” with their eight arms, which can have hundreds of suckers each. “Can you imagine what that might be like,” he asks, “to have skin that can see and…

BOW RESPECTFULLY at the temple gate. Cleanse hands and mouth at the fountain. Sound the bell. Leave a name slip with your wish in the main hall, light a candle and three sticks of incense, toss coins in the offering box, and chant sutras. Get your pilgrimage book stamped. Exit the gate, and bow again. Follow the red markers to the next temple. Repeat 87 times. Or not. On the Shikoku Henro, one of the longest pilgrim routes in Japan, there are many ancient customs but few hard-and-fast rules. You don’t even have to walk it: Many Japanese now take cars or bus tours; others ride trains or bikes. You can tackle the trail counterclockwise instead of clockwise. Or break the circuit into segments. You can wear the traditional white…

Early one morning last December, Aaria Boomla rose from her hard guesthouse bed in the small coastal town of Udvada, India. It was nothing like her soft bed at home, seven hours away in Pune. She dressed and brushed carefully around her two missing front teeth while silently practicing the lines of scripture she’d been memorizing for months. At age seven, the elder of two children, she was about to join her family as a follower of one of the world’s oldest religions. The sun came up hot and hazy as Aaria and her family and friends walked along a dirt road to the Iranshah Atash Bahram, a large white stone-and-wood temple complex enclosed behind high walls. The entrance gate, flanked by two enormous sculptures of human-headed, winged bulls, was…

Three Rivers Petroglyph 800-1, 400 YEARS AGO, NEW MEXICO Created by the Jornada Mogollon people, this carving, thought to be of a large cat with a rattlesnake tail, is one of 21,000 densely packed petroglyphs spanning one mile of basaltic ridge set against the picturesque Sierra Blanca. Sego Canyon Pictographs 300-2,000 YEARS AGO, UTAH “This awe-inspiring place has three major, distinct panels, each from a different cultural and temporal time period, including Barrier Canyon, Fremont, and Ute,” says former state archaeologist Kevin Jones. These richly colored paintings—some depicting oversize ghostly figures and others minute animal-like attendants—reflect the Barrier Canyon people’s sophisticated use of long-lasting polychromatic pigments. Sadly, the site has been subject to gunshots and graffiti over the years, though conservators have tried to minimize the damage. ‘None of us…

LIKES 83,380+ WHERE Gothenburg, Sweden ONCE A MONTH Gothenburg’s Capitol, an art house cinema, opens its doors to a canine audience. Dogs enter free with their owners; blankets and treats are provided. For Nora Lorek, who normally focuses on migration and human rights, the scene was irresistible. She set up a studio light between showings, and those who wanted a portrait of their pups got in line. Among the posers: Cloé, a Chihuahua, and her best friend, Eonni, a pug. “It felt better than the red carpet at the Oscars,” Lorek says. KIDS You can share wonders of the world with the next generation through National Geographic Kids magazine, whose current issue features fascinating facts about octopuses. Subscribe at natgeokids.com. BOOKS In this guidebook, find more than 100 destinations that…