We were awakened at 5:30 a.m. this morning for a helicopter briefing. Brilliant weather this morning in Barilari Bay, on the west side of the Antarctic Peninsula. Blue skies—the first in 14 days. Management was determined to make full use of a rare opportunity.

River cooter, Pseudemys concinna, 4 inches across. Photograph by David Liittschwager

Many of nature’s creatures could put on their own version of a Milan fashion show. With their eye-catching coats of fuzzy algae, fluttery tiered layers, star patterns, and delicate crimson strands, they would inspire even the most particular designer.

Art: Brian Rea

Last year the periodic table welcomed the 112th element, a product of nuclear fusion. A German-led team had identified 112, the heaviest element yet, in 1996. They want to dub it copernicium in honor of 16th-century astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, whose sun-centric model of the planetary system mirrors the structure of an atom, with electrons orbiting a nucleus. The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry should sign off on the label this year. Traditionally, scientists named elements more or less at will, favoring planets, mythological figures, or properties like color.

Photo by Alan Highton

Not only can lightning strike the same place twice, but on Lake Maracaibo, at the mouth of the Catatumbo River in northwestern Venezuela, it flashes almost continuously nearly 200 nights (and days) of the year. The ancient Yukpa people believed the bursts of blue, pink, and white light, known as Catatumbo lightning, were sparked when fireflies met ancestral spirits. For centuries mariners navigated by the brilliant discharges, visible up to a hundred miles out at sea. The phenomenon is “beautiful, like fireworks in the middle of the night,” says Ángel G. Muñoz, a scientist at the University of Zulia in Maracaibo.

Students excavate a kiln at Cheung Ek, Cambodia. Photo courtesy of Phon Kaseka

Cheung Ek is infamous for being the site of a Khmer Rouge killing field—some 20,000 Cambodians were murdered here between 1975 and 1979. Yet Cheung Ek also has a much older history, and today a team of archaeologists led by Phon Kaseka of the Royal Academy of Cambodia is investigating what lies beneath this once horrifying landscape.

Our ship sits in Flandres Bay, a deep fjord on the Antarctic Peninsula ringed by mountains whose sheer granite torsos fade, headless, into a ceiling of mist. The air is still. The water is glass. And rain—Who'da thunk it? Rain in Antarctica!—scatters ripples onto the bay.

Today’s muggy 36 degrees Fahrenheit finds me tossing aside my down jacket as I head outside. I walk into the drizzle wearing blue jeans and a light synthetic pullover. From the top deck of the Nathaniel B. Palmer one can see half a dozen humpback whales feeding on swarms of krill. At times, two of them pause and lazily hover side by side—so close they must be touching—just below the water’s surface.

The Palmer sailed for several days to reach this place on the west side of the peninsula, after turning back twice in the face of impassable sea ice on the east side.

The west is a different place. The low-pressure weather systems that sashay in an endless parade around Antarctica dump their full weight of warmth and precipitation on the western edge of the peninsula. Sea ice that forms during winter doesn’t survive summers here; since arriving three days ago, we haven’t seen a speck of it. The heavy snowfall gluts glaciers beyond their capacity. All around us traffic jams of ice blocks tumble out of the mountains, in freeze-frame, down 45-degree chutes to the water's edge. Without any familiar frames of reference such as cars or trees, the mind can scarcely comprehend the size of the scenery. The nearest glacier seems a couple hundred yards away. In fact, it’s more than a mile. Those blocks of ice are as big as houses.

This model of Sinosauropteryx was created for National Geographic magazine in 1996, when this dinosaur was announced as the first to have feathers. The artist, Brian Cooley, worked closely with paleontologist Philip Currie to create this reconstruction. Some banding was visible on the fossil specimen's tail, so the team captured that in this artwork. Otherwise, the colors and pattern were based on a guess at what a small forest-dwelling, carnivorous, birdlike animal might have looked like. Based on today's revelation of the true colors of Sinosauropteryx, Cooley and Currie were not far off. © Lou Mazzatenta/Brian Cooley

When I was growing up as a typical dinosaur-loving kid, I was told that we’d never know the real color of dinosaurs. As an adult and as the art director of National Geographic magazine for many years, I encountered the same answer every time I worked with scientists and artists to depict a scene of prehistoric life. We made do by making informed guesses based on what we saw in living animals.

I feel particularly privileged to have been behind the scenes on the story that broke today showing the first scientifically established color on nonavian dinosaurs. I visited China two times last year to meet Chinese scientists working on this study and visited with Mike Benton of the University of Bristol at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology annual meeting there last winter. These scientists were on the brink of doing something once thought impossible. As we talked, the excitement among them was palpable.

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Map showing the path of the Nathaniel B. Palmer from January 4, when it left the port of Punta Arenas, Chile, at the tip of South America, until January 11. The ship has twice been turned back by impassable sea ice on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula.

We’re now ten days into our 59-day cruise to investigate the breakup of the Larsen B Ice Shelf, and the difficulties of working in Antarctica—even in this day and age—are already apparent. Sea ice has emerged as our prime nemesis. Twice we have tried to limbo our way under the 65-degree latitude line—our goal sits at 66 degrees south—and both times sea ice has blocked our path.

64.28 degrees South latitude
58.86 degrees West longitude

It's a scorching day by Antarctic standards—47 degrees Fahrenheit and a cloudless sky. Two hours ago a helicopter ferried us from the Nathaniel B. Palmer to this rocky nunatak, or mountain, that juts from an apron of glacial ice on the coast of the Antarctic Peninsula. As we hiked, I quickly peeled off my jacket, hat, and gloves and pushed my sleeves up to the elbow.

Greg Balco, a glacial geologist from the Berkeley Geochronology Center in California, strides up a slope of loose scree, steadying himself with trekking poles. Balco is hunting for the perfect rock—one that will reveal the glacial history of this place—but today his job is almost impossible.

Imagine a school of fish weaving through a network of pipelines at the bottom of a bay. Only instead of live fish foraging for food, these are robots patrolling for damage and pollutant leaks. Robo-fish can fit in places divers and submarines can’t. The first robotic fish, built in the 1990s, were around four feet long, had thousands of parts, and cost thousands of dollars. The newest, designed by MIT researchers Kamal Youcef-Toumi and Pablo Valdivia y Alvarado, are five to eighteen inches long, have about ten parts, and cost just hundreds of dollars. These sleek robots are made of a seamless, synthetic compound engineered to be flexible in places where fish bend a lot—the tail—and rigid where they don’t—the midsection. A single motor sends a wave down the interior, and the motion of the material mimics the swimming motion of a real fish. Although the latest robotic fish are pretty close to making a splash, they are not yet swimming in lakes and oceans. It’ll be a few more years before you can tell the story about the robo-fish that got away. —Juli Berwald

Photo: Robotic fish, strung up in an MIT lab, have lasted for four years in tests conducted in tap water. 

Photograph by Tim Laman

The room darkens, and Stephanie Sinclair’s photographs flash on the screen. For months she has been photographing members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the FLDS. Its members are known to most of us because they believe in polygamy, but Stephanie’s photographs tell a deeper, broader story. They are able to do so because FLDS members trust her.

An Asian vine with flowers that smell like grape drink, kudzu enticed Americans at a Philadelphia exhibition in 1876. In the 1930s Southerners started planting it to halt soil erosion. They stopped in the ’50s, when they realized that the hardy perennial, which can spread up to 60 feet a year, was out of control. Since then, the vine has swallowed 150,000 acres a year—eight million U.S. acres total. Eliminating it would require a constant war waged by scythes, grazing cattle, and potent herbicides. That’s not likely to happen.

Designing a graphic is like writing a story. You can't include all your material, nor can you present it with uniform emphasis. To engage readers, you have to selectively edit and then order your information into a narrative. In other words, what is most important for people to see and in what order?

Not every reader will agree with our choices. Our health care graphic from the January issue (left, click to enlarge) has provoked a healthy debate around the blogosphere. Some people love it; others loathe it. The issue isn't just premiums or public options. Many bloggers are talking about our process.

The plump neck on mummy Meresamun (above) made scientists think she had a goiter. Then they examined her with a high-resolution computed tomography (CT) scan and learned the truth: Her mummifiers had inserted a bit of stuffing to enlarge the Theban priestess’ neck.