Tabla de contenidos para March 2023 en National Geographic Magazine

FOR MANY OF US, museums have played major roles in our lives. When I was a kid, our family visits to places such as the Milwaukee Public Museum and Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History were my favorite outings. I’ve been fortunate to visit some of the world’s great museums on my travels and to live near institutions with rich collections (my preferred way to end a workweek in New York was a Friday evening stop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). There’s something about seeing art and artifacts with our own eyes that helps us understand history and culture in a palpable way. And of course great curators can draw connections among objects that let us perceive the world in a whole new light. Many museums, however, have items…

Over 6,000 people a year die in the U.S. waiting for an organ transplant. But a new research finding from Yale—that tissue death can be stopped and maybe even reversed—could dramatically enlarge the donor pool. Researchers infused pig cadavers with a blue solution of amino acids, vitamins, and other compounds (below) to restore function to organs hours after cardiac arrest. Next: transplanting rescued organs into pigs to assess function.…

GRIEF RAN THROUGH the first decade of my career. I photographed stories about devastating topics: sexual violence, migration, religious conflict, war. On the cover of my notebook in 2019, I wrote a quote from the Bhagavad Gita: “The soul is neither born, and nor does it die.” It was intended to remind me to play more and take myself less seriously. Sometimes I’d get the rare assignment where I could breathe—for example, photographing an article on teas for an airline magazine. I was in the Darjeeling area of north India, at the foothills of the Himalaya, a region known for producing the “Champagne of teas.” I took the job hoping to make playful, almost cinematic images, but at the end of the day, I found I’d made nothing of the…

Perched on a hill high above Athens, the Parthenon was the ancient city’s most important temple, decorated with marble statues and a sculpted frieze depicting a festival in honor of the goddess Athena and featuring heroes and gods in procession. Greece was under Ottoman control in the early 1800s when British ambassador and Earl of Elgin Thomas Bruce was granted permission to remove “some pieces of stone with old inscriptions, and figures.” Lord Elgin took about half the surviving sculptures and much of the frieze and shipped them to London. Greece has long demanded their return, arguing that Elgin’s deal with an occupying power was illegitimate.…

THE JANUARY BREEZE WAS AS SHARP AS MY GRIEF. A muted winter sun shimmered off the snow-draped mountains cradling my mother’s hometown in northern Lebanon as the cemetery gates creaked open, and I placed my mum’s portrait with her ancestors. She was home, at least symbolically. She had passed away unexpectedly in November on a random Thursday morning in Australia, where she had lived for many years. My mother’s end was bookmarked at her beginning, in a motherland she never truly left. There are parts of this country we carry with us, even if, like me, we were not born here. We carry them in our names, in our food, in our stories, and in our family bonds that transcend time, distance, and generations, drawing us back. There is a…

On a lake that’s notoriously harsh to humans, the Apostle Islands are a relatively sheltered place. But that doesn’t mean they’re safe. “This is no place for amateurs,” says Dave Cooper. He’s piloting the Ardea, a 25-foot aluminum landing craft typically built for the Pacific Ocean, through Lake Superior’s choppy waters on the way back from Devils Island, 14 miles offshore. Today the wind is blowing from the northeast at 20 to 25 knots and the waves are five feet high. Cooper, the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore’s cultural resource manager, is running the troughs and surfing the crests. “It’s like riding a horse,” he says. “I’m just trying to make it a smooth ride.” Over the course of three decades working as an archaeologist on Lake Superior, Cooper has participated…

WHO A United States–based Asia specialist who’s also a volunteer firefighter WHERE East Java, Indonesia WHAT Canon EOS with a 70-200mm lens and Kodachrome film Sulfur has conspicuous qualities: a rotten-egg odor, a bright yellow color. Less known perhaps are its many uses—for cosmetics, explosives, batteries, fertilizers—and how it’s obtained. While on assignment in Indonesia, Yamashita visited the Ijen volcano, where molten sulfur seeps from pipes embedded in the vents and then hardens. Amid the fumes, workers sort sulfur blocks and carry backbreaking loads up the sides of the crater. “This has to be one of the world’s toughest jobs,” he says. National Geographic is the most popular brand on Instagram, with more than 328 million followers. This page showcases images from our accounts: @natgeo, @natgeotravel, @natgeointhefield, @natgeoadventure, @natgeoyourshot. Subscriptions…

A camera-equipped microscope and plenty of patience help to expose a dazzling side of some common chemicals.…

Pressure to produce Good for business, bad for bats A natural but nonflowering alternative to seed propagation is clonal propagation, a method exploited by farmers to speed production and maximize the concentration of sugars for distilling. Demand drives production In 2022 two billion tons of plants were harvested to make more than 140 million gallons of tequila, double the 2010 output. Two-thirds of it was for export, primarily to the United States. Efforts to conserve State governments and tequila-certifying programs, such as Bat Friendly, encourage producers to allow 2 to 5 percent of their agaves to bloom. Many ejidos, parcels farmed by local communities, are sustainably restoring agaves. Fragile balance Their massive colonies make lesser long-nosed bats the easiest to study; they were taken off the endangered species list in 2018.…

IN FEBRUARY, FINE RED DUST borne by winds from the far-off Sahara coats everything in Foumban, a town of about 100,000 in Cameroon. In a month the spring rains will start, but for now every day feels the same—hazy sun, dry heat, and on the main road through town, a cacophony of honking horns and buzzing motorcycles. For a few decades this part of Africa was a colony of Germany, whose brief but brutal rule lasted from 1884 until 1916. Like other colonial powers, Germany established ethnological collections to conserve, study, and display cultural artifacts from its new colonies. Though collecting is an impulse with deep roots in human history, museums as we know them are mostly a 19th-century invention, designed to share the fruits of European exploration and conquest.…

To the people of the Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico, wooden statues called ahayu:da represent supernatural twin brothers and protectors. During the 19th and 20th centuries, many were stolen and sold to collectors and museums. Zuni leaders in the 1970s began pressing for their return, making an ethical case that became a model for successful repatriation claims. Secret shrines house ahayu:da on Dowa Yalanne, or Old Mountain (below), a plateau overlooking the Zuni Pueblo.…

Violence affecting civilians The number of riots and attacks by armed groups, including Hezbollah and the Islamic State, rose in the three years after the economy collapsed in October 2019 compared with the three years before. Beirut blast On August 4, 2020, a stockpile of ammonium nitrate in a port warehouse exploded with a force equivalent to two million pounds of dynamite, devastating a swath of a city already grappling with rising violence. Refugee haven Syria’s civil war has driven some two million people into Lebanon since 2011, joining more than 200,000 long-displaced Palestinians. Lebanon has one of the highest numbers of refugees per capita in the world. MATTHEW W. CHWASTYK, NGM STAFF; KELSEY NOWAKOWSKI SOURCES: ARMED CONFLICT LOCATION & EVENT DATA PROJECT; UN HIGH COMMISSION ON REFUGEES; UN ECONOMIC…

Crags and crevices The harsh winds and waves of Lake Superior—the largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area—carved the Apostle Islands from sandstone. Some have lofty caves held up by delicate arches. Ancient isles Madeline Island, the largest of the Apostle Islands, was exposed by the last retreating ice age glacier some 15,000 years ago. The islands have been inhabited for thousands of years. Madeline plays an important part in the Ojibwe migration story, and remains a spiritual and cultural hub for the tribe today. SOREN WALLJASPER, NGM STAFF SOURCES: NATIONAL PARK SERVICE; WISCONSIN DEPARTMENT OF NATURAL RESOURCES; NOAA; GUYAUSHK JAMES E. PETE…

WHAT DO YOU SEE in these images? A palm-frond jungle? Bright bird feathers? Taking the Rorschach test that is Peter Woitschikowski’s photomicrography, viewers often compare the shapes with the natural world. But he asks them to embrace the abstract instead—to see something entirely new. “The hope is to turn the fantasy on,” he says. In the 1980s, Woitschikowski, who lives in Germany, bought a microscope after seeing a magazine spread of microcrystal photography. He wanted to reveal this wondrous world that’s invisible to the unaided eye. The shapes are formed on glass lab plates by heating chemicals, such as acetaminophen (above), or mixing them with water or alcohol. As the substances cool or dry, crystals appear. When illuminated by polarized light, some seem to leap into a ballet of form…

For its novel way of maintaining boundaries, consider Octopus tetricus, also known as the gloomy octopus and the common Sydney octopus. If another creature gets too close, it may respond by throwing things, according to a study published recently in the journal PLOS One. The cephalopods, native to seas off New Zealand and eastern Australia, were caught on camera throwing shells, silt, and algae, which sometimes hit animals that came too near their dens. The recipients included various fish, other gloomy octopuses—and even the underwater cameras. This is the first time a throwing behavior has been reported among octopuses. Though scientists aren’t certain of the motivation, it may have something to do with “the octopus equivalent of personal space,” says the study’s lead author, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a professor at the…

Elaborately beaded and decorated with valuable cowrie shells, the Mandu Yenu throne was a symbol of authority in the Bamum kingdom before Germany claimed part of modern-day Cameroon as a colony in 1884. And while the Bamum ruler at the time was a German ally, receiving military assistance and trade goods from German authorities, his descendants say he was pressured to give his throne to the German emperor as a birthday present in 1908. After more than a century, they want it back. “The throne is not just an object,” Njoya’s great-grandson Nabil says. “It is an object through which the king connects with his ancestors.”…

THE WORLD PARTITIONED Modern colonialism began in the 15th century and peaked in 1914, when Europeans ruled a majority of the world’s countries. Decolonization began after World War I and accelerated following World War II. Many present-day boundaries were set during the colonial era. Indigenous heritage Museums and universities around the world hold sizable collections of pre-Columbian Indigenous American artifacts, acquired through conquests or archaeological expeditions. Landmark legislation Native American activism in the 1970s led to U.S. laws requiring the repatriation of human remains and sacred items to tribes. The tribal claims process, however, is slow and complex. Carving up a continent During the so-called Scramble for Africa from 1884 to 1914, European powers colonized most of the continent and made off with much of its cultural patrimony. Museum boom…

THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS ARE A SMOOTH, GLACIATED LANDSCAPE, scoured by ice and rock over millions of years. Mountains lift their rounded backs. Bowl-shaped hollows known as corries nestle within curving ridgelines. The land has two faces. In late summer the terrain is shrouded in heather, threaded with the royal purple of its tiny blooms, along with delicate leaves of creeping willow and bog myrtle, soft beads of blaeberries, and red-glowing lingonberries. But within a few short weeks these same uplands might be swathed in snow: drifts banked high, gales whipping through the wind-carved ice at a hundred miles an hour. This is the domain of the mountain hare. These little mammals are also found in tundra, alpine, and boreal regions across Eurasia. An estimated 99 percent of mountain hares in…

SPIDERS ARE REMARKABLY DIVERSE: There are more than 50,000 known species, including diving bell spiders that live mostly underwater, arctic wolf spiders that can thrive north of the Arctic Circle, and giant spiny trapdoor spiders that can reach the ripe old age of 43. But many people never give arachnids a chance. “When people think about spiders, they think of something creepy,” says Javier Aznar, a Madrid-based biologist and photographer who has built up an impressive kaleidoscope of spider images, particularly from the rainforests of Ecuador, where he lived for three years. “But when you look closer, you will see an amazing world.” Take the bold jumping spider (Phidippus audax), the charismatic arachnid staring you down from the opposite page. Aznar says these spiders, which can be found throughout North…