Innehållsförteckning för November 2025 från National Geographic Magazine

REAL STARS, THE ONES IN SPACE, ARE SIMPLE BEASTS. Our sun formed some 4.6 billion years ago from a cloud consisting of essentially one ingredient: hydrogen, the most basic and abundant element in the universe. Gravity kneaded the cloud into a big, rotating ball and kept squeezing from there, density and warmth spiking, until its core reached about 27 million degrees Fahrenheit. Hydrogen crumbles when collisions occur at this temperature and pressure, creating the soupy jumble of atomic parts known as plasma, the fourth state of matter after solid, liquid, and gas. Though rare on Earth outside of lightning bolts and neon signs, plasma accounts for over 99 percent of the solar system’s mass, most of it stored, highly agitated, in the sun. Throughout the sun’s soup, trillions of times…

THE KEEPERS OF A POISON GARDEN on the grounds next to Alnwick Castle in Northumberland, England, anticipate a great many fainters every year. The garden, the largest of its kind, sits behind stately iron gates embellished with skulls and is packed with more than a hundred varieties of plants so deadly that you can’t enter without supervision. As tours set off, guides warn visitors not to touch, lick, or pick as they learn about poisoners from history and see the brews and cuttings that served as their weapons of choice. There’s the Teacup Poisoner, who kicked off his infamous murder spree by dosing his sister with Atropa belladonna. And Doctor Death, a physician convicted of murdering 15 of his patients with a drug derived from the opium poppy. Every so…

THE REALM OF INSECTS is right in front of our eyes, filled with kaleidoscopic characters flaunting vibrant colors and dramatic action. But it’s so minuscule, it’s easy to miss. That’s why several years ago, photographer Takuya Ishiguro began altering his camera, adding a magnifying lens between the sensor and main lens. Such modifications are tricky to pull off, because mispositioning any of the components will ruin the image quality. But once he perfected the setup, he was able to capture the tiny but glorious lives of the insects around the lakes and fields of his home in Osaki, Japan. The new perspective left him with “a deep respect for nature’s inventiveness.” Ishiguro found that the invertebrates displayed a remarkable sense of creativity as they harvested food, mated, and burrowed to…

ON NATGEO.COM AROUND 200 sperm whales make their home in the crystal blue waters off Dominica, in the Caribbean, and swimming alongside them is the kind of unique travel experience that our editors, photographers, and writers have handpicked to help you plan your next trip. Our annual Best of the World list rounds up 25 of the most exciting, wonderprovoking destinations across six continents, from up-and-coming cities to recently designated parklands to pockets of littlevisited countryside that new itineraries are making it easier to appreciate. Each one affords fresh opportunities to explore in the coming year—like Dominica, where the world’s first sperm whale reserve will soon offer travelers a better understanding of (and a close-up look at) the gentle undersea giants. Find the list, along with 25 detailed destination guides,…

WILDLIFE “At first glance, their orange PLUMAGE might seem to make them an easy target for falcons and hawks. But when the birds FORAGE on a field like this, they’re invisible to predators.”MATEUSZ PIESIAK, photographer A brambling feasts on sunflower seeds near Wrocław, Poland. Flooding kept the landowner from mowing, and come winter, thousands of birds descended. LANDSCAPES “We watched her smile bloom where NATURE had been erased. It felt like FUN to her.”MITHAIL AFRIGE CHOWDHURY, photographer In Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, where rapid urbanization has consumed green space, Zarah Jin Nurain (at right) had a school assignment to spend time in nature. With little parkland in the family’s neighborhood, her mother, Nasrine Rahman, set up this rooftop picnic for them instead. OCEANS “Marine iguanas remind me how EVOLUTION sculpts life…

THE BASICS OF FUSING ATOMS To capture the energy released during fusion, a reactor must confine plasma, an ionized gas that occurs when atoms have been stripped of their electrons. Fusion facilities are designed to channel and control that reaction for as long as possible, beginning with a multistep process to generate self-sustaining power. MAGNETIC CONFINEMENT ITER will rely on a large doughnut-shaped machine called a tokamak (below) to induce fusion. A central electromagnet creates an electric current that changes the deuterium and tritium gas into an ionized plasma. Then the electromagnet, working together with 24 other magnets, shapes and holds the plasma in place as it is bombarded with high-energy beams that raise its temperature to 270 million degrees Fahrenheit.…

In the following pages, we explore what science is telling us about how the adult symptoms manifest, what risk factors may be at play, and how one overlooked population—women—is offering a new perspective on how the disorder really works.…

SOME YEARS BACK, a man wandered into Aaron Deter-Wolf’s office in Nashville, at the Tennessee Division of Archaeology, to hand over a two-foot portion of a mastodon tusk. The man had spotted the relic poking out of a riverbank and sawed off the exposed end. Removing the tusk sullied its scientific value, so Deter-Wolf started trotting it out during talks at grade schools—until a kid dropped it and its outer layers shattered. For many archaeologists, that might have marked the end of the tusk’s usefulness, but not for Deter-Wolf. He salvaged a few shards and later transformed them into tattoo needles, carving each with flint and smoothing it on sandstone. But when he tried tattooing a colleague with one, it went poorly. Microfractures in the ivory snagged skin each time…

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MOST APES DON’T know how to dance. But female crested gibbons of the genus Nomascus, the long-limbed primates known for their acrobatic swinging from tree to tree, regularly perform a series of movements that can only be described as “the robot.” Scientists recently analyzed dozens of videos of mature female crested gibbons living in zoos and rescue centers around the world and interviewed researchers who’d observed the dancing in the wilds of China and Vietnam. Their study, released in the journal Primates, found that the dances follow clear, rhythmic patterns. In captivity, the gibbons generally direct their routines at caretakers, most likely to socialize and solicit snacks. In the wild, they seem to dance as a mating invitation. This is “especially puzzling,” says zoologist and study co-author Kai Caspar of…

THE TEST SUBJECT HAD SLIPPED INTO WHAT PHYSICIAN CLIFTON CALLAWAY DESCRIBES AS A‘TWILIGHT KIND OF SLEEP.’ Eighteen hours after Callaway’s team at the University of Pittsburgh’s Applied Physiology Lab started the man on a sedative that suppressed his body’s natural shivering response, his internal temperature had sunk from 98.6°F to 95°F. His heart rate and blood pressure had dropped. His metabolism—and, along with it, his need for food, oxygen, and carbon dioxide removal—had plunged 20 percent. Yet the subject could still rise from his bed, shuffle to the bathroom to empty his bladder, and, when hungry, ring a bell to ask for food or a drink—alleviating the need for a catheter or intravenous lines and ensuring he could still respond and react. The man was one of five exceedingly fit…