Kirshtein, 25, who had to pack his knives and go in this week's episode, is the executive chef at Eno, an Atlanta restaurant whose décor is Euro-farmhouse meets urban chic (meaning big paintings of dice on some walls). In case you’re wondering, we ate: superb barley risotto with truffle oil and fennel fritters, sumptuous moist chicken that married beautifully with an array of wild mushrooms, and … a beet parfait, which had earthy undercurrents of flavor but a texture that seemed a bit gelatinous.

The National Geographic Museum is the latest stop in the world tour of China’s terra-cotta warriors. The silent, life-size sentries were built more than 2,000 years ago to protect the Emperor Qin Shi Huang’s throne in the afterlife. Their image projects the grandeur and mystery of ancient China—and clearly resonates in modern-day America. Advance ticket sales topped 90,000. But a visitor to the show won’t see all the terra-cotta warriors.

In China today, these stone soldiers have come to wear quite a few uniforms, and not what you would expect. In the warriors’ hometown of Xian, where I spent a year studying Mandarin, I saw statues recast with playful irreverence by the country’s youth, used as a marketing ploy to appeal to consumers, and displayed as a striking symbol of the “New China.” Clearly, the terra-cotta warriors prove you're never too old for a makeover.

This sometimes silly reinvention is actually part of a serious shift in China, as its leaders seek to shape a modern country capable of supporting 1.3 billion people without losing touch with the lessons of a 5,000-year-old history.

Of course, this would be child's play to Minnesota's Al Franken, who has wowed crowds and won renown with his cartographic renderings. Here's a video of him creating an outline map of the United States at the Minnesota State Fair:

Click to launch our interactive gallery Then grab a pencil and try it yourself.

—Brad Scriber

On a summer Saturday, surfers line up within sight of a city bus stop for a shot at riding a wave. Yet this is Bavaria, in Germany; the nearest ocean is 400 miles away . So where are they going? Here on Munich’s Eisbach stream, the surf is always up. 

The Eisbach wave is artificial. Concrete blocks, placed under the water to calm the river a bit as it emerges from an underground channel, form a permanent three-foot swell as the water rushes up and over them. The water is only four feet  deep, but the current can slam surfers into the concrete-lined banks with a force comparable to a nine-foot ocean wave.

A hot fist of steam and ash punches through the cloud cover above the Sarychev volcano on Matua Island, part of the remote Kuril Islands chain off Russia and Japan. Crew members on the International Space Station captured this image on June 12, 2009, soon after the mountain burst open. Over three days the ash column topped 50,000 feet, diverting air travel as debris and sulfur dioxide belched skyward.

The smooth white cap atop the plume is likely a pileus cloud—a transient puff of condensation that forms when a climbing air mass cools above an ash column. But the cloud peephole is an enigma. It may have resulted from the eruption’s shock wave, or from evaporation as air sank and warmed around the plume. Or perhaps it was simply a lucky window onto the epic blast. —Jennifer S. Holland

Photo: Erupting periodically since 1760, Sarychev Peak is now one of the Kuril Islands’ most active volcanoes.

Photography by Image Science and Analysis Laboratory, NASA/Johnson Space Center

On movie screens around the country, the world is coming to an end.

Hollywood director Roland Emmerich, of Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow notoriety, uses his skill with special effects to depict the end of the world in the new movie 2012.

The 2012 is a reference to the Maya lunar calendar, which allegedly comes to an end on December 21, 2012. Some people think the world will end with it. Maya experts do not agree.

In any case, this is not the first time in recent memory that the end of the world has been said to be nigh. We combed through past headlines to see how print journalism (which is facing its own “end is coming” scenario) announced the imminent demise of our planet. Here are our picks for the outstanding offerings. Let us know if you have any headlines to nominate, old or new.

Writer Matthew Teague photographed these Uygur men, advancing upon Chinese forces, moments before they were shot.

Many people carry cameras  these days. Some have uncommon courage. On page 36 of this issue, in the story “The Other Tibet,” there is a photograph taken with a cell phone. The photographer was not a professional. She was a Uygur woman who documented the shooting of a Uygur man by Chinese security forces on a street in Urumqi, capital of China’s Xinjiang region. She later gave the picture to National Geographic’s photographer Carolyn Drake.

In desert villages in Chile, 250 families are glad to let the sun roast their goat meat. The UN Development Programme paid $110 for the wood to build each solar oven. Fuel is free; pollution is nil. Women can spend time with kids instead of gathering wood. Solar Cookers International estimates one to two million solar ovens are now in villages, refugee camps, and sunny cities.

Solution: Synchrotron imaging, an x-ray technique more powerful than CT scanning and more precise than grindstone cutting. Over three years, French paleontologists Malvina Lak, Paul Tafforeau, and colleagues have used a synchrotron to sift through 25 pounds of 100-million-year-old amber and find 1,000 fossils, including wasps, flies, and spiders. An x-ray beam penetrates the rock-like drippings and pinpoints the encased specimens, which the team builds up as computerized models and produces in 3-D plastic form.

A delivery column on a platform that's routinely cleaned. Photograph by David Doubilet

We've covered a lot of water since our last field dispatch from artificial reefs. We left fisheries biologists using ROVs to estimate fish biomass on artificial reefs off the Pensacola coast and drove west across a still battered Gulf Coast. Hurricane damage was still evident in every direction. We rolled into Lake Charles, Louisiana, late in the evening, bleary-eyed and shaking from an overdose of Starbucks and Redbull. We met our fixers Darrell and Cher Walker (True Blue Watersports), repacked the gear for a few days in the Gulf, and loaded our Sport Fisherman in the dark. Captain Keith Monroe and first mate Eric Larson pulled us off the docks at 2 a.m., and we headed into the Gulf of Mexico. Daybreak gave us a view of a forest of platforms stretching to the horizon–some manned, some not. The water closer to the coast was mud brown, useless for photography, so we pressed deep into the Gulf looking for clear water. 

For tens of thousands of years tuberculosis has been humanity’s unwanted companion. Worse still: The latest form—extensively drug-resistant, or XDR, TB—is the most virulent yet of the airborne, organ-ravaging disease.

According to the World Health Organization, TB bacteria infect a third of the Earth’s population. Most infections are latent, but the disease did kill 1.8 million in 2007, a year that saw 9.3 million new cases, most in developing countries. Individuals with HIV are at extra risk.

Tuberculosis can be cured. But lack of access, poor treatment, and misused medication have allowed it to mutate into aggressive strains that can elude a cure. XDR-TB, the nasty newcomer, is rare but so far has outwitted most remedies. WHO Director-General Margaret Chan has said that if left unchecked, it “could take us back to the treatment era that predates the development of antibiotics.” Yet there is a ray of hope: Stepped-up anti-TB efforts around the globe are reducing the disease’s overall prevalence and mortality. —Hannah Bloch

Photo: A mother cradles her TB-stricken son in Cambodia’s Svay Rieng Provincial Hospital in 2008. The boy later died.

In an early scene of the film, Army General Hopgood, played by Stephen Lang, attempts to walk through a wall. His effort fails. Big time. What is to blame: Bad teaching or real world physical forces? We asked physicist Jeffrey Hazboun, who studies nature’s fundamental forces at Utah State University, about the physical forces governing walls. Here are three things we learned.

There's something growing inside our October issue, and it's not a redwood. It's a pumpkin. And you won't believe how much it weighs now.

To illustrate "Pumped Up," our article on the world's largest pumpkins, we first juxtaposed a seed specially bred to grow giant pumpkins with the garden variety (above left). Photo editor Susan Welchman and I liked the shot, but we thought it would be cooler if the giant seed were sprouting. So we entrusted the seed to Elena Sheveiko, our resident green thumb.

Vernon Yates took one of his 18 tigers to a party—his fee varies by event. “You can’t trust tigers,” a guest said. To prove her wrong, he told her he’d stick his head in the animal’s jaws and tug its tongue for $20. She had to pay up.