Two thousand feet down lurks the baffling barreleye. What look to be its eyes are nostrils. Its real eyes are tubes topped by green lenses adapted to catch light and let the fish judge the gap from mouth to meal. (The pigment filters downwelling light, making prey easier to see.) On top, a fluid-filled dome shields the eyes from stinging animals without blocking the view.

Years ago I attended a grammar workshop that discussed the use of “they” as a neutral substitute for the more gender-specific singular pronouns “she” and “he.” There were few editors at that meeting comfortable with using “they” in a singular sense in order to avoid saying “she or he.” I wonder what that same group would say today.

            

Not too long ago, senior design editor John Baxter designed souvenir programs for the Ringling Bros. circus. "Step right up!" his booklets proclaimed. "See the Human Comet! Bareback Jugglers! Elephants! The Globe of Death!"

The other day I asked if his time under the big top inspired his design for our July story on America's state fairs (above). "I suppose it did," he said. "It's an old circus billboard technique: shout with big type, then explain with small."

John came to this solution in a roundabout way.

Underwater photographer David Doubilet in his studio, prepping and packing for an assignment

Hi everyone. This is an invite to join me on an assignment that will take our team on an unusual underwater road trip along the continental shelf of the eastern and southern United States. The assignment actually started with a short few days underwater in late May in Florida, but now we kick off the major stretch of work that will find us in southern coastal waters moving around in planes, trains, and automobiles ... and of course dive boats.

To paraphrase Heidi Klum of Project Runway, in the world of dog breeds, one day you’re in, the next day you’re out. Or vice versa. In the sixth edition of the World Atlas of Dog Breeds, a three-years-in-the-making revision of the original 1989 volume, some canines are added to the mix. Some are still waiting for a spot, like the winsome labradoodle, pictured above. And others, sadly, get an arf wiedersehen.

Heather Russell-Revesz, a senior editor at TFH Publications and one of the book's three primary authors, gave us the rundown on four changes.

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UNESCO’s Index Translationum speaks volumes about topics and authors of global appeal. The bibliography of translations lists some 1.7 million books from 130 countries in 820 languages. Along with the authors above, works by Walt Disney Productions and the Old and New Testament are among the most widely translated. J. K. Rowling hasn’t cracked the top 50—yet. But lots of U.S. authors have. “Translation from other languages into American English,” says Rainer Schulte, of the Center for Translation Studies at the University of Texas, Dallas, “is limited in comparison to what gets translated from English into other languages.” —Diane Cole


Graphic: Oliver Uberti, NG Staff. Photo: Rebecca Hale, NG Staff

The Vietnamese used to hate motorcycle helmets. They called them "rice cookers"—hot and heavy on the head. They were not fans of helmet hair. In a nation of 26 million motorbikes, maybe one in three riders buckled in. That was before a December 2007 law levied fines of up to $12 on helmetless heads. Today most adult riders are helmeted; traffic fatalities fell by 1,400 in the first year of enforcement. Tran Le Tra, 37, of Hanoi, misses the wind in his hair but admits, "I feel safer."

Vanilla is definitely not plain. In fact, it's full of surprises. For instance, says economic botanist Pesach Lubinsky, a wild vanilla orchid flower "actually smells like cinnamon." Then there’s pollination. Only one Central American bee is thought to do it; everywhere else people move the pollen by hand.

They’re fuzzy, white, and vocal, but maybe the most remarkable thing about them, says primatologist Erik Patel, is how few there are. He’s talking about the silky sifaka, a lemur that lives in only a few patches of high-altitude forest on Madagascar. Patel has found that fewer than a thousand remain. Like other lemurs, the silky sifaka is hunted for meat and is seeing its habitat slashed and burned to clear space for rice fields. Patel hopes that 12 new bungalows near the sifakas’ territory in Marojejy National Park will attract tourists—and that the money visitors bring will get locals excited about protecting lemurs too. —Helen Fields

Photo: Iñaki Relanzon.

If we don’t cut fossil fuels fast enough, global warming may get out of hand. Some scientists say we need a plan B: a giant sunshade that would cool the whole planet.

“If a country starts thinking it’s in their vital interests to do this, and they have the power, I find it hard to imagine them not doing it,” says Ken Caldeira, a climate expert at the Carnegie Institution.

Sockeye salmon shoot up the rapids and flip in midair. I see their mirror-bright sides catch and scatter the sun. Propelled by instinct, they return to their birthplace to spawn. Commercial fishermen caught 90 percent of these fish’s mates even before the salmon began their odyssey up British Columbia’s Fraser River. The ones left have beaten the odds so far. But their journey isn’t over, as I found out many years ago on an early assignment for the Geographic. I watch as 13-year-old Gordon Alec (above), of the Lillooet tribe, dips his net in the rapids and pirouettes to his left with a captured fish. The ritual of netting salmon is Gordon’s ancestral legacy. Drying racks line the Fraser’s banks. Young and old camp out under the summer sky and celebrate the catch. But regret is expressed too, as elders recount how diminished the run has become in their lifetime.

A Dog of Flanders tells the moving story of a boy in a funny hat and his faithful pooch, played by the star of Old Yeller.

Almost 50 years after it debuted in theaters, the 1960 version of A Dog of Flanders, starring Spike (of Old Yeller fame) as the rescued pet "Patrasche," is back as a digitally restored and remastered DVD. The question I asked myself as I began to watch with my five-year-old daughter and ten-year-old son: Would my 21st-century kids, who had just been watching a Malcolm in the Middle rerun, sit still for an earnest, heart-warming tale of a boy with a funny-looking cap (not the baseball kind) in a part of Europe they've never heard of? Answer: They would.

When Los Angeles attorney Sean Farrell plunged into the numbing ocean off the Antarctic Peninsula in 2007 (above), the view was just what he had hoped: a vast white wilderness. But every few days Farrell, who was on a chartered yacht, spied tourist boats in the distance. A spike in visitors to Antarctica— up 250 percent during the past decade to 46,000—has Farrell wondering if the great white continent wouldn’t be better off if he’d stayed home. “Everybody wants to see natural beauty,” he says. “But even the most conscientious traveler will have an impact.” 

The new movie Moon is a sci-fi throwback—a simple, hermetic story of isolation, identity, and (in)sanity.

In a matter of minutes, the 2001-indebted scene is set: It’s the near future, and a guy named Sam Bell (played by Sam Rockwell) is toiling alone in a mining station on the moon, where he harvests a clean-energy substance called Helium-3 to power a depleted Earth. His only company is a HAL-like robot called GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey). His only goal is to play out the last two weeks of his three-year contract.

Even though the film is set in the future, some things about the space station look familiar to children of the television age. When Sam gets a haircut, GERTY uses a gadget that looks a lot like a Flowbee.

It illuminated the Titanic, discovered hydrothermal vents on the seafloor, even located a lost hydrogen bomb. Now Alvin is ready for a new adventure: a major makeover. After 45 years and 4,500 dives, America’s hardest working, deepest descending submersible is slated for its biggest overhaul since 1973. According to Anthony Tarantino of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which operates the Navy-owned vessel, the upgrades will occur in two phases over several years, as funding permits. Those changes (left) will let the nimble, small-truck-size sub, which transports a pilot and two scientists, do more things better—like dive four miles instead of 2.8, and survey 99 percent of the ocean bottom versus 63. So don’t think of it as a midlife crisis; consider it Alvin 2.0, retrofitted for 21st-century exploration. —Jeremy Berlin

Click illustration to enlarge.

Art: Don Foley. Photograph by Dan Fornari, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Just to be clear, this blog post does not endorse the movie Bruno. In fact, this photo depicts a beloved (and now stufffed) German bear named Bruno so no one will think that we are in Bruno's camp—not that there's anything wrong with that.

Love him or loathe him, provocateur Sacha Baron Cohen's latest creation arrives in American theaters this weekend with the subtlety of a (sequined) anvil tossed to the (well-coiffed) head. I found the movie to be utterly tasteless, offensive, vulgar, and completely cringe-inducing. Needless to say, I loved it. And as a National Geographic employee, I would be remiss to send those who wish/dare to see this film into it without a short geographic and cultural glossary. After the jump, we offer terms that highlight some of the film's finer/horrifying moments. 

It was mostly mouth and belly, this amphibious beast from about 65 million years ago. Thick-skulled, ten-pound Beelzebufo ampinga (“armored frog from hell”) was one of the most massive frogs ever; today’s biggest is the seven-pound Conraua goliath. The ambush predator lived on Madagascar, where David Krause of Stony Brook University and his team began finding bone bits in 1993. Susan Evans of University College London and others shaped 15 years’ worth of fossils (72 fragments in all) into frog form. “When we scaled the bones against modern skulls, we saw just how big this thing could get,” Evans says. “It was a monster.” Many geologists believe Madagascar became geographically isolated some 88 million years ago, but Beelzebufo’s closest living kin are in South America. One theory is that the two landmasses remained linked via Antarctica longer than was thought. 

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“Listen carefully to the patients, and they’ll tell you the diagnosis,” a medical maxim advises. But what if the patient’s been dead for a millennium? 

If you live in Colorado, say, or Maine, maybe you’ve noticed a new kind of traffic: Amish horse buggies. They’re appearing in areas they’ve never been (or haven’t been for a very long time), as Amish farming communities take root in states far beyond their traditional heartland of Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Ohio.

The latest news on Doctor Danger (July 6):

Intestines? Who needs ‘em? Despite losing about 2/3 of his in surgery after a car stunt gone bad, Doc Danger is on the mend and ready to work.

“People get hurt on the job every day. This was my day.”

It was during his latest suicide car jump: The car he was driving, a little too fast, crashed into the stack of cars as planned, but then flew past its mark and fell 80 feet to the ground. Unfortunately, on the landing his body slid beneath his seatbelt in a way that severely damaged his insides. As the strap dug into him, “I felt more pain than I ever had in my life,” he recalls. Fortunately, a surgical team was able to put him back together, but first they had to remove a large section of his intestines. “I’m still learning how my new body works—some things just don’t go through me the way they used to,” he says. “But I’ve had my whisky drink, and so far so good.”

Doc says he’s overwhelmed by the response to his accident from family, friends, fans, and strangers. “You go through life thinking people don’t give a damn, but they do, in a big way. It’s an amazing thing.”

Though he’ll hand over the keys to the suicide jump car, at least for now, “I’ll go right back to doing my fire stunts,” he says. “I’m disappointed—I like crashing the car. You’re never quite as alive as when you’re near death.” But it’s time to heal, and maybe time to put other priorities on top, he says. Meanwhile, if you’re lucky, he might just show you his scar.

—Jennifer S. Holland

While writing the June issue’s “Flashback” column on Automats, I was tickled to learn that a real live automat still exists in New York City-—not part of the original Horn & Hardart empire but a modern-day effort to re-create the joy of buying prepackaged food stored in tiny compartments.

Alas, BAMN! Automat, as it was called, is no more! Just as the issue came out, I discovered that New York’s only automat had served its last meal.

Automats do still thrive in Amsterdam. But that’s a long way to go for prefab food.

Yet there is a way that 21st-century American foodies can experience the taste sensations of the original Automat, if not the ambience. Marianne Hardart, great great-granddaughter of Automat co-founder Frank Hardart, shares some of the dishes in her book The Automat: the History, Recipes, and Allure of Horn & Hardart’s Masterpiece.

The animated adventure Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs is bound to mislead countless youth when it comes to dinosaur history. Dinosaurs were long gone by the time the Ice Age rolled around. At least Manny the wooly mammoth, the movie’s reluctant hero, pays lip service to that fact. He says to one rampaging dino: “I liked you better when you were extinct!”

And when did the dinosaurs make their final goodbye? To get the scoop, we spoke to our Land of the Lost expert Thomas R. Holtz Jr., a paleontologist at the University of Maryland’s Department of Geology who specializes in carnivorous dinosaur evolution and adaptation and focuses on Tyrannosaurus rex and its relatives.