Innehållsförteckning för August 2024 från National Geographic Magazine

Not everyone falls in love with bats, but those who do fall hard. AS A YOUNG SCIENTIST, Sharon Swartz studied gibbons. But she was intrigued by the fine skeletal structure of bat wings and by the evolutionary trade-offs necessary for mammals to take flight. So she took a detour from her primate research and traveled to Australia to study the large bats known as flying foxes. She recalled one evening when she visited a suburban golf course where roosting bats filled the trees. First one, then a few more, then hundreds of the creatures lifted off as the sun set until, she said, there was “a river of bats in the sky.” The next night Swartz, now a professor of biology and engineering at Brown University, and her colleague trapped…

1 BAGGING A BAT Epauletted fruit bats hang in cheesecloth bags after being trapped near the village of Kanabu in northwestern Uganda. These bats seem to be able to survive Ebola virus infections, which can kill other mammals. Scientists want to find out how. 2 PREPPING FOR TRANSPORT DeeAnn Reeder of Bucknell University works with her team to bag and label the bats. The bats spend a few nights in a screen tent flight cage before they are transferred to enclosures at Muni University in Arua, a two-hour drive away. 3 REST AND RECOVERY Before leaving the field camp, the research team transfers the bats to large tents where they are free to fly. As part of the protocol, says Reeder, “we give them a little mango juice.” Researchers are…

The Seine and the sea As the health of the river improves, a nature reserve at the estuary, in an area surrounded by industry, is welcoming seals and 350 species of birds. A port for the centuries Rouen, the farthest inland that oceangoing vessels can travel, has been a shipping hub since the age of the Romans. Proximity to agricultural fields makes it a key port for farmers. Paris: city of abundance Rome’s Lutetia Parisiorum developed into the capital city in the middle of the Seine’s drainage network, part of one of western Europe’s most fertile regions. Feeding into the Seine The easily navigable Seine is joined by 45 tributaries along its 483-mile length, the largest of which are the Aube, Marne, Oise, and powerful Yonne. Owning the source Bubbling…

DILATING AND COILING The nautilus’s shell is an example of the most fundamental processes of growth. As with all mollusks, the shell coils, typically clockwise, around its middle, expanding outward. TWISTING The shell of this giant African land snail dilates and coils much like the nautilus’s does. But it is also shaped by a third force, twisting around its central axis of rotation. COMPRESSION If a mantle and hardened shell mismatch, the resulting force can cause ridges. Mantle properties and degree of mismatch determine the number of ridges. GROWTH SPURT A sudden burst of mantle secretion can amplify a pattern of ridges, creating spines. The faster the growth spurt, the taller and pointier the spines. ANTISYMMETRY The processes that create ridges and spines can also lead to antisymmetric forms, such…

INTRODUCTION Inflammation gets a bad rap. Consider the various anti-inflammatory diets, supplements, medications, and lifestyle tips aimed at providing some degree of relief from uncomfortable symptoms like redness, pain, heat, or swelling from an injury or infection. “People definitely associate [inflammation] with something that’s negative,” says Wolfgang Marx, a senior research fellow and expert in nutritional psychiatry at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. But the truth is far more complicated—and potentially beneficial. After centuries of debate and research, scientists now know that inflammation is as much a hero as it is an enemy. Ideally, the physiological process conquers infections, prevents cancer from taking hold, allows injuries to heal, turns vaccines into long-lasting disease protection, and more. In fact, we could not survive without the many roles that inflammation plays in…

SUFFERING FROM a chronic illness can obviously alter your mental health. Not surprisingly, depression affects over 40 percent of cancer and rheumatoid arthritis patients, and nearly 30 percent of those with diabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But there is another factor that these and other severe diseases have in common: inflammation. Scientists now believe that in many cases, inflammation may exacerbate mental health conditions. Their work is leading to new medications and insights for treatment. “All along the pathway of that clinical course of depression, inflammation seems to play at least some sort of role,” says Marx of Deakin University. For a long time, researchers considered depression to be a simple story of neurotransmitters gone wrong, Marx says. Serotonin and dopamine are two particularly important…

ENVIRONMENT “I was grateful for the opportunity and luck to enjoy such A UNIQUE MOMENT and to be in this fantastic place under a starry sky without light pollution.”MARCIO ESTEVES CABRAL, Photographer ANIMALS “After a week of checking out multiple sea fans for the best examples of pygmy seahorses and coral polyps, I shot this photo at 6 a.m. That’s when everything FINALLY CAME TOGETHER.”BYRON CONROY, Photographer SCIENCE “This image is a celebration of the often OVERLOOKED BEAUTY in the simplest things around us. Who knew sugar syrup could look like an abstract painting in a museum of modern art?”DIEGO GARCÍA, Photographer CULTURE “Branding at Forty Mile Colony is ABSOLUTE ORGANIZED CHAOS. Men and women weave around each other—as well as the horses, cattle, ropes, and red-hot brands—in harmony to…

EXTREME LONGEVITY Although they’re some of the smallest mammals, bats can live up to 10 times longer than expected for their body size. They also almost never get cancer. An ability to shut down their metabolism when at rest is one factor that may boost longevity. TURBOCHARGED METABOLISM Different bat species have different appetites, ranging from insects, fruit, and blood to small animals, including other bats. Pallas’s long-tongued bat has the fastest metabolism recorded in any mammal, burning through more than half its fat stores every day. MAMMALIAN FLIGHT Since the age of dinosaurs, bat wings have developed to fit myriad environments. Short wings are good for hovering in forests; long wings, such as those of Brazilian free-tailed bats, enable these mammals to fly at speeds of up to 99…

“IT'S ELEGANT and powerful—and also kind of dangerous,” says photographer Constance Jaeggi, describing escaramuza charra, an all-female Mexican rodeo event popular in communities across North America. Riders known as escaramuzas sit sidesaddle in colorful dresses inspired by fighters of the Mexican Revolution. In teams of eight, they perform veritable ballets on horseback—frequently at a gallop. Growing up in Switzerland, Jaeggi adored horses and learned to ride at age 14. Nearly two decades later while living on a Texas ranch, she competed in equestrian contests and became fascinated with escaramuzas, seeing them as kindred cowgirls. After traveling the United States to interview and photograph them, she began to see how the sport offers Mexican American women a sense of connection to their heritage.…

THE AMAZON IS a realm of contrasts, and Jennifer Angel-Amaya says she can hear them all around her. For more than two years, the Colombian geologist and National Geographic Explorer has been doing fieldwork in the Peruvian part of the rainforest, and she’s noticed the sounds of gold miners getting closer and louder, as if competing with the calls of birds and monkeys. Angel-Amaya focuses on Madre de Dios, the region of Peru most affected by illegal gold mining. As part of the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Amazon Expedition—a series of research projects spanning the Amazon Basin—she studies the impacts of gold mining on waterways. She’s monitoring three sites: one where gold mining is sanctioned and conducted with heavy machinery, a second where illegal mining is extensive, and…

IT HAPPENS to everyone. With age come achy joints and a rising risk for cancer, heart disease, dementia, arthritis, and other illnesses. Those changes follow an uptick in inflammatory molecules over the course of a lifetime so common it has a scientific name: inflammaging. Now researchers are racing to unravel how the inflammatory process changes over our lifespan, what instigates the shift, and how it might be possible to interfere with it. As people age, increasing amounts of pro-inflammatory cytokines and other inflammation-related molecules circulate in the blood. When the shift occurs depends on the person, says Ron DePinho, a cancer biology and aging researcher at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. But 50 is generally when inflammation starts to increase, with a dramatic shift after…

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC EXPLORERS These contributors have received funding from the National Geographic Society, which is committed to illuminating and protecting the wonder of our world. Nichole Sobecki, p.16 An Explorer since 2021, the Nairobibased photographer specializes in humanity’s connection to the natural world. She documented cheetah trafficking through Somaliland for our August 2021 issue and Sudan’s ancient past and uncertain future for the January 2022 magazine. This month her feature spotlights the mysterious world of bats. Tomas van Houtryve, p. 5 8 His work spans photography, filmmaking, and art installations. Based in Paris, he’s focused recently on the Seine, for this issue, and the rebuilding of Notre Dame, the subject of his 2022 cover story. He became an Explorer this year. Mary Winston Nicklin, p. 5 8 “The Seine’s stories…

A MAN CLIMBS OVER THE RAIL of the Pont des Arts in Paris. Below, the Nesquik-colored currents of the Seine, swollen from recent rain, sluice past the Louvre Museum. A crowd of spectators gathers and gawks. And then he jumps. Thomas is one of the elite Paris firefighters stationed at the La Monnaie Rescue Center, a floating fire station in central Paris. (Official policy requires the omission of last names for security.) He bobs in the river for a matter of seconds before fellow firefighters fish him out of the 37-degree water and into a waiting rescue boat. Training exercises complete, the pilot speeds back to their base—a converted 1927 cargo boat that’s kitted out with a gym, an aquarium, and an outdoor shower with the prettiest views in Paris.…

YOU CAN SEE IT IN THE logarithmic whorl of a nautilus. The milky iridescence of an abalone. The spiked turret of a queen conch. Precision, elegance, strength. The seashell is a consonance of form and function that both rivals and guides human creativity. From Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” to Frank Lloyd Wright’s design for the Guggenheim Museum in New York, shells have inspired artists and architects throughout history. Our admiration for seashells even predates writing. Archaeologists in Israel recently unearthed the remains of a clamshell necklace made about 120,000 years ago. As enduring as our fascination with seashells are the mysteries they hold. How did such complex and beautiful structures come into existence? Evolution by natural selection can help explain why shells became widespread among mollusks, but it cannot fully…

IN RECENT YEARS, excavations in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii have uncovered a 2,000-year-old laundromat, a bedroom used by slaves, and a fresco depicting an early iteration of pizza (minus the tomatoes—those wouldn’t come to Europe for at least another 10 centuries). None of those discoveries, however, stemmed from new digs into the roughly 20-foot layer of ash that encased the city after Mount Vesuvius’s eruption in A.D. 79. For decades, the Italian government had a moratorium on any additional excavations in Pompeii. That means most of the finds are by-products of efforts to preserve and restore what’s already been unearthed, according to Steven Ellis, a professor of Roman archaeology at the University of Cincinnati who worked on excavating Pompeii’s Porta Stabia neighborhood. “When they dug [the city] out,…

AS AN ATHLETIC teenager in Ireland, Joseph Costello often followed hard Gaelic football sessions with ice baths. By the time he was a graduate student, he had found a more extreme method to chill the sore muscles and joints that come with exercise-induced inflammation: standing in a chamber cooled to minus 110°C (-166°F) for a few minutes at a time. The experience was equal parts excruciating and invigorating, says Costello, now an exercise and environmental physiologist at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom. “It was literally out of this world,” he says. “The coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was about 20 degrees Celsius warmer than this.” Ice plunges and cold showers are trendier than ever as strategies for battling inflammation, but they are not the only ways…

TELEVISION DIVE INTO National Geographic’s 12th annual SharkFest, which features surprising shark behavior around the world, some of it quite close to people. In Baby Sharks in the City, biologists reveal a nursery of Atlantic great whites just off the coast of New York and deploy a camera tag to show the life of a pup. In Shark Beach With Anthony Mackie, the Marvel star investigates the increase in shark sightings near his hometown of New Orleans, which may be related to environmental issues across the greater Gulf of Mexico. These shows—as well as Attack of the Red Sea Sharks, Man vs. Shark With Ross Edgley (pictured above), Sharks Gone Viral, Supersized Sharks, and Shark Attack 360—are streaming now on Disney+. MAGAZINE The July/August issue of National Geographic History shares…