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.

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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

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.

Earth may get more moon rocks in 2018, when NASA plans a manned lunar landing. Until then, as scientists and collectors know, supply and demand are worlds apart. The only sources? Rare lunar meteorites, soil from Soviet probes, and the 842 pounds of rubble carted back by Apollo astronauts from 1969 to 1972. NASA keeps most of its 1,500-rock cache in Houston, lending out 400 samples a year for research and display. Presidents Nixon and Ford gave pea-size “goodwill” slivers to 134 countries, 50 states, and Puerto Rico. For other interested parties, auctions can be a legal option—if the rock for sale isn’t U.S. government property. At Sotheby’s in 1993, a Soviet sample fetched $442,500. On eBay, a meteorite cut can go for $40 to $100,000, depending on size, quality, and authentication. Then there’s the black market. Joseph Gutheinz, a former NASA investigator, says Apollo rocks that have vanished over the years can turn up with five-million-dollar tags. “They simply mean more and more as the years go by.” —Jeremy Berlin

Photograph by Tyrone Turner

Majesty alone can’t save them. The world’s top felines—including lions, cheetahs, and leopards—are slipping toward extinction. But an emergency effort to fund on-the-ground conservation projects may help put them back on their feet.

Click to enlarge graphic.

The United States spends more on medical care per person than any country, yet life expectancy is shorter than in most other developed nations and many developing ones. Lack of health insurance is a factor in life span and contributes to an estimated 45,000 deaths a year. Why the high cost? The U.S. has a fee-for-service system—paying medical providers piecemeal for appointments, surgery, and the like. That can lead to unneeded treatment that doesn’t reliably improve a patient’s health. Says Gerard Anderson, a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who studies health insurance worldwide, “More care does not necessarily mean better care.”  —Michelle Andrews 

The perfect sign would have no words and be easy to grasp. “The rational thing is to create standard symbols everybody understands,” says David Gibson, author of The Wayfinding Handbook. He’s one of many designers the world over who work toward uniformity and understandability.

Yet the unconventional sign has undeniable allure. Doug Lansky curated “Signspotting,” an exhibit that drew crowds in Stockholm and Edinburgh and is traveling to other cities. In his show and in public places, signs can entertain with overkill  and fanciful images. They also let travelers see the world through another culture’s eyes. One sign instructs squat-toilet users in Western bathroom etiquette. Says Lansky: “Now I understand why I see footprints on the toilet in an international airport.” —Marc Silver

• Guess the meaning of these signs in our quiz.

A wild Christmas character is making a devilish comeback. Krampus gets his name from a word for “claw.” That’s apt for a demon said to grab naughty children and stuff them in his sack. Popular in Alpine villages centuries ago, Krampus scared kids straight—his long red tongue upped the fear factor—and taught them that evil bows before good. He served Santa’s forerunner, kindly St. Nicholas, who had “the power to send Krampus back to hell,” says Austrian ethnologist Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann. 

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

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.

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.

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.

The antlered animals weren’t made for this—to stumble onto a boat in the middle of an autumn night and bump and sway on the water for six hours until they attain solid ground again and resume their overland migration to a winter refuge. In Norway, both reindeer and their seminomadic herders, members of the indigenous Sami, are struggling to find their balance as development intrudes on traditional grazing lands, changing the way humans and animals move.

Why are some loons acting so, well, loony? Mercury. Long-term studies of common loons in the United States and Canada reveal that the toxic stuff is invading birds’ brains and bodies in dangerous concentrations. It’s disrupting behavior and physiology—and could put loon populations in peril.

Grab a bitter leaf and chew. Then take another and another, letting the wad rest in your cheek. Soon you’ll feel less hungry, more alert, a little euphoric. That’s qat (pronounced cot, often spelled khat), a stimulant used for centuries in Yemen and Africa’s Horn by laborers for energy and by men to while away afternoons. Today, with increased urbanism, easier access to cash, and relaxed social mores, it’s taking deeper root. “People chew it in the early morning, on the street,” says psychologist Michael Odenwald. “Children and breast-feeding women chew it.”

Photo: After defoliating trees, caterpillars turned their attention to something less edible in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Bushes, trees, an entire car shrouded in a ghostly white web—the sights last spring in the Dutch city of Rotterdam were like something from a horror film. People were “peering into the hedgerow expecting the mother of all spiders to emerge,” says Stuart Hine, a British Natural History Museum entomologist. What was responsible for this spooky mess? 

When Louisiana lawmakers named the brown pelican the state bird, they missed an important point: There were no brown pelicans left there. That was in 1966, after years of pesticide runoff had ruined eggs and silenced once teeming coastal rookeries. Not long after the legislative gaffe, biologists set about reviving the state’s nesting colonies, relocating young birds from Florida. It was a huge success: 350,000 pelicans were born in Louisiana after 1971. Then came the hurricanes.

The platypus is so bizarre its discovery was first dismissed as a hoax. After an Australian specimen arrived in London in 1798, biologists had to make a call: reptile or mammal? On the mammal side, it was covered in thick fur and nursed its young—with milky patches on the belly instead of nipples. On the reptile side, it laid eggs. Scientists voted mammal. Now researchers have sequenced the platypus genome, confirming the classification but also finding much reptile-like DNA. 

When it comes to hostile environments, few places can match Chile’s Atacama Desert. It’s one of the most arid places on the planet, moistened by just half an inch of rain a year. So no one thought the region’s 20,000-foot-tall Socompa volcano could sustain much life. In fact, its oxygen-starved atmosphere and intense ultraviolet radiation suggest conditions on Mars.

Recently, though, microbial ecologist Steven Schmidt, a National Geographic grantee, and his team discovered the world’s highest altitude bacteria near the volcano’s summit. It’s not clear how the microbes grow in such inhospitable terrain. But for scientists seeking life signs on Mars, they’re cause for hope. Here on Earth, the bacteria may hold biotechnological promise‚ perhaps providing building blocks for sunscreen compounds. After all, Schmidt says, they “have an amazing ability to resist the sun.”  —Hannah Bloch 

In the world of giant pumpkins, a 500-pounder is a pip-squeak. “People don’t even blink at ’em,” says Danny Dill of Howard Dill Enterprises, which sells seeds whose DNA destines them for hugeness. The record is 1,689 pounds, set in 2007. “Within five years,” predicts Dill, “you’ll see a 2,000-pound pumpkin.”

What is a kilogram? It’s 2.2 pounds, of course. Or is it? The kilo is the only basic international standard pegged to a physical object—a 120-year-old platinum-iridium cylinder kept in a vault outside Paris and known as Le Grand K. In recent years scientists noticed slight variations in the cylinder’s weight. They’ve gone into high gear to redefine the kilo as a universal constant based on nature instead of an object vulnerable to distortion.

Quick, what’s faster than a speeding bullet and isn’t named Superman? The answer is the Bloodhound SuperSonic Car, or soon will be. Now being built in England, the jet-and-rocket-powered ride is designed to go, go, go 1,050 miles an hour. If it succeeds, it’ll blast past the current land speed record of 763 miles an hour, set in 1997 by Andy Green in the jet-propelled Thrust SSC. 

The “star,”  with some 100,000 nerve endings, gives Condylura cristata its sensitive touch. Claws give it scraping power. Photograph by Kenneth Catania

What outlandish snoot is this? A handy one that helps the star-nosed mole clock in as the fastest forager among mammals. As the mole claws at wetland soil or stream sediment, the tentacles about its nose probe up to 13 spots a second for invertebrates, insect larvae, and other prey. Then in 230 milliseconds—quicker than our eyes can flit to a fl ash of light—the mole scrutinizes and devours the edibles. That’s a record for pinpointing and eating food. (Bats are the likely runners-up.)

Steve Holman, 52, is running 124.9 miles in the Sahara desert. All his food for the annual Marathon des Sables is in the 25-pound pack on his back (including potato chips he pulverized with a rolling pin to reduce bulk). In 100°F heat he struggles up a few 200-foot dunes, crawling on hands and knees at times. Alone in a sandstorm one night, not even sure he’s headed in the right direction, he thinks, Yes! This is why I’m here!

To the familiar divides—rich and poor, north and south, modern and traditional—add a new one: young and old. That’s because the average ages of the world’s populations are diverging, as some nations skew up or down. Youth booms persist in poor places like Uganda, where almost half the people (like this Kampala orphan, left) are under 15. Meantime, much of the industrialized world is aging. 

See age pyramids that compare the populations of Uganda and Japan.

Photos: Jessica Cudney (left); David McLain (right). Graphics: Mariel Furlong, NG Staff Sources: United Nations; Population Action International

A 64-year-old Duluth woman fell on the ice last December. Arthritis kept her from getting up. She lay in the snow for hours. Her temperature dipped to 70°F. Her heart stopped. She should have been a goner. But doctors revived her; today she is fine. Medical science is always learning more about how much a body can take. Yet as Duke University physician Claude Piantadosi notes, “At some point it’s impossible to rescue yourself.” —Shelley Sperry

• Take a quiz to test your knowledge of human endurance.

Art: Jason Lee

Most folks know the cheetah’s 
top speed of 70 mph makes it the fastest land animal. But what’s the runner-up? Turns out it’s the pronghorn. The deerlike mammal cruises at 35 mph and can hit 50. Its velocity is thought to have been a defense against cheetahs that lived in North America eons ago. Often overlooked, number twos can show how close the race is—or how far ahead a number one really is. ­—Melody Kramer

Second tallest animal
African elephant (#1: Giraffe)
The heaviest land mammal is the second tallest. Males grow to about 12 feet, females hit 9 feet. But at 15 to 19 feet tall, a grown giraffe could eat beans off an elephant’s head.

Fungi that pop up in the forest are “like CO2 chimneys,” says researcher Steven Allison. Back in 2005 he measured the carbon dioxide emitted by mushrooms after their rootlike mycelia ate carbon from the soil. He was “shocked” by their output—and concerned, since CO2 traps heat in the atmosphere.

Something was messing with Texas in May 2008. A dip in Daisetta, a tiny town near Houston, became a hole the size of two football fields, sucking trucks, trees, and buildings into its 250-foot-deep maw. Residents were shaken; scientists were left shaking their heads. “This exceeds anything I’ve seen or read about,” says the U.S. Geological Survey’s Mark Kasmarek. 

For eight days a year Black Rock City becomes one of Nevada’s biggest towns, with a population rivaling that of the capital, Carson City. It even has an airport and department of motor vehicles. The ad hoc municipality arises in the Black Rock Desert to host 50,000 campers who attend the Burning Man counterculture festival the week before Labor Day. The event began in 1986 as a San Francisco art experiment cum beach party and moved to the desert in 1991 as crowds grew. Despite Burning Man’s tradition of nudity and drugs, police make few arrests. At the center of the five-square-mile city is a 70-foot-tall wooden effigy, set ablaze at week’s end. The town vanishes too, says founder Larry Harvey: “No roads, no buildings, no trash—as if we were never there.” —Peter Gwins

Photo: Nevada’s Black Rock City shapes up as a semicircle (for better desert views) with a five-sided security fence. Ikonos satellite image courtesy Geoeye. 

Count your damaged and unwanted CDs and DVDs. Multiply by millions of folks like you. Add in the business world’s used data CDs and music, video game, and movie returns. The total is billions of trashed discs a year. How do you keep them out of the landfill?

The muskox may look otherworldly, but it’s very much a creature of the Earth. In fact, this 800-pound primal relative of sheep and goats has roamed the Arctic for about a million years, since the Pleistocene. Scientists want to make sure it stays around for a long time to come. 

Call them cougars, mountain lions, or pumas. Americans think they see them everywhere. That’s no surprise in the West; strict management helped the predatory cat make a remarkable recovery after “varmint hunters” took numbers very low by the mid-1900s. Eastbound cougars are also turning up in the Midwest. South Dakota has a breeding population of 200-plus; just last year, Chicago cops cornered and shot one on the North Side.

Few inventors can claim credit for saving more than a million lives, but Nils Bohlin is one of them. Fifty  years ago the Volvo engineer modified an airplane device and came up with the three-point seat belt—one strap across the hips, one across the chest, both anchored to the same point on the car floor.

Just as gas-powered autos depend on oil, the world’s future fleet of electric cars may well depend on an obscure element now mined in only a handful of places: lithium. Because it is the world’s lightest metal and good at holding a charge, lithium in batteries can deliver the energy electric cars need without weighing them down or requiring frequent recharging stops.

Are you a green type? The new Ecofont, from the Dutch marketing firm Spranq, aims to be one. Co-owner Alexander Kraaij says it uses less ink than other typefaces, thus saving money and resources. In fact, he contends, a company with 5,000 workers could trim up to $125,000 a year from its printing costs.

Of all Pisa’s leaning towers—yes, there are several—the famous one is the least likely to topple. That’s because an 11-year restoration effort, involving three years of painstaking soil removal, has successfully steadied the precariously poised campanile. Pisa’s soil is mostly compressible clay and sand, which gives way over time and causes big buildings to shift.

In the early 1800s an Englishman could be hanged for stealing a shirt. By the end of the 1900s, growing concern for individual rights had caused the death penalty to disappear from the United Kingdom and nearly everywhere else in the Western world. Two exceptions are Belarus and the United States, although this year New Mexico became the 15th state to outlaw capital punishment. Death-penalty opponents cite the exoneration of 131 people on death row since 1973 as well as the high cost of capital cases.

Graves laden with luxuries offer a revealing new look at the wealthy military culture that gave birth to Alexander the Great. Excavations in Archontiko have uncovered 450 tombs from the sixth century B.C. Archaeologists Pavlos and Anastasia Chrysostomou, of the Greek Ministry of Culture, describe scores of warriors whose armor, swords, and shoes sparkled with gold and silver as well as noblewomen adorned with gold, silver, amber, and faience. Other funerary items—a scarab from Egypt, ceramics from the eastern Mediterranean—foreshadow the empire that the fabled Macedonian general would conquer 200 years later. —A. R. Williams

Photo: A gold mask and gold-trimmed helmet, seen here on a mannequin, were found in a Macedonian warrior’s grave. Photograph by Gianluca Colla

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.

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.