I recently joined Facebook, and, although I swore I'd never get sucked into another social networking site, it's become a minor obsession. The main reason: a quiz called the Traveler IQ Challenge.

Sponsored by the travel website TravelPod, the game shows a map of the world, then gives you a place name and ten seconds to click on its geographic location. You get points based on how close you are to the target and how fast you clicked. The game delivers praise ("Your map IQ is off the charts!") or sarcasm ("This is Earth. You know that, right?) as needed.

With each round, questions get harder—you may feel smart for clicking 90 kilometers from Barcelona, Spain, on Level 1, but wait until the target is Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, or Porto Alegre, Brazil. Those are big countries—you can be off by a long, long way.

The best part is, the more you play, the smarter you get. After many dramatic failures, I now know the location of Mauritius (it's east of Madagascar) and Christmas Island (south of Java). And one of these days, I'll get Lithuania and Latvia straight. On  “The Original World Challenge,” my high score is 610,605, I’ve made it to Level 12, and my Traveler IQ is 133. What's yours? No cheating, now!

— Helen Fields

The ear-friendly tones of Afropop, featuring catchy tunes with bouncy guitars, are a growing presence on the pop landscape. A new album from Zimbabwean singer Oliver Mtukudzi makes a pleasant addition. Tuku, as Zimbabwean fans call him, is a wildly popular singer and songwriter. The oldest of seven children, he left school when his father died to help support his family. Eventually he found his way to a guitar and launched a life in music. This album, Tsimba Itsoka (“No foot, no footprint”), is the 49th in his three-decade career. The title, he says, is about the paths people take through life and the marks they leave behind.

Some tracks meander into easy-listening territory, with a Kenny G-style saxophone, but when the sax gets out of the way, Mtukudzi's husky voice and mellow guitar make a charming, laid-back accompaniment to a day of work, play, or, in my case, writing a story for the December issue of the magazine.

The words have stronger undercurrents, handling topics like violent crime. In “Ungadé We?” (“How would you like it?”), he asks a criminal how he'd feel if someone hurt his child. Other songs lament the difficulties of fame or admonish listeners for lazily waiting to collect their inheritance. But since the lyrics are mostly in Shona, Tuku's mother tongue, to my ears it just sounds cool.

LISTEN: Nzungu Imwe (Download 10_nzungu_imwe.mp3) - this song says that one rotten nut can ruin the taste of a mouthful; behave yourself so you don't spoil the family's image.

— Helen Fields

Here you go: the answers to our Are You Smarter Than the Person Who Writes Questions for "Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?" quiz.

1. A fox calls a den home, but what animal lives in a holt? Hint: It's a good swimmer. (My hint: It's not a walrus or a whale).
Answer: An otter.

2. Count the number of cricket chirps in 14 seconds and add 40 to it to determine what?
Answer: Temperature. Now you may be thinking that this is just ridiculous, but it turns out to be pretty true—although the number to add may be 38, and not 40. That’s what science journalist Robert Krulwich found in a report he filed for ABC.

3. An octopus has 8 arms, but how many arms does a squid have?
Answer: Another instance of how this card game needs to go back to fifth grade and pay more attention. The answer is “10, but two are tentacles.”

4. What's the name of a baby that has a zebra for a dad and a horse for a mom?
Answer: A zorse. No joke. They’re also called zebroids (as in zebra hybrid). A zebroid can be the child of a zebra and a horse or a zebra and anything else that it finds attractive.

5. True or False? Another name for a meteor is a shooting star.
Answer: True.

6. True or False? Only the male turkey gobbles, not the female turkey.
Answer: False

7. Name the only two countries in South America that Brazil does not share a border with.
Answer: Chile and Ecuador

So. Did you get them right? And are tentacles arms, or is that question just silly? Discuss.

The card game version of this TV show just arrived in my office. Naturally, I wanted to embarrass my colleagues (and myself), so we sampled a few questions that any good National Geographic staffer should be able to handle, even a fourth grade dropout. Here they are.

1. A fox calls a den home, but what animal lives in a holt? Hint: It's a good swimmer. (My hint: It's not a walrus or a whale).
2. Count the number of cricket chirps in 14 seconds and add 40 to it to determine what?
3. An octopus has 8 arms, but how many arms does a squid have?
4. What's the name of a baby that has a zebra for a dad and a horse for a mom?
5. True or False? Another name for a meteor is a shooting star.
6. True or False? Only the male turkey gobbles, not the female turkey.
7. Name the only two countries in South America that Brazil does not share a border with.

Okay, Pop Omnivorists -- start guessing (or googling). Or wait until Friday morning when the answers are Officially Posted.

I'm from Albany, NY, where they don't have anything I'd call "local" in the way of food. Growing up, I ate things like spaghetti, steak, pot roast, and chicken hearts (a foodie from the start, I think I'm the only one who ate this last item), and no matter where I went in the USA, these things - ok, not the hearts -  were always on the menu.

But when I started researching my story on regional foods for the September issue, I was surprised at how differently (at least from a gastronomical standpoint) other folks were raised. A friend from Maine told me she remembered her disappointment when, as a little girl, she discovered that they don't sell lobster rolls at every McDonald's. And, while I was busy eating routine chocolate ice cream cones, I had no idea other kids were getting exciting-sounding things like buckeye candies in Ohio and gooey cake in St. Louis. 

So now I know that there's more than one way to eat ravioli and there's more than one word for ground-up pig parts. What was on the table where you grew up? Remember how you felt when you realized that you couldn't find it once you left home? Is it still hard to find, or is it everywhere now? What do you think is the proper way to make it, and eat it?

— Catherine Barker

Jack Bauer. Will save the world. From global warming.

Okay, not quite. But in the new season of 24, the TV series that ticks off the minutes of a terribly tense day in the life of a counterterrorism agent, producers say they’ll be delivering environmental messages as part of the plot “when appropriate” and also improving the TV set’s carbon footprint (buh-bye, limos, hello hybrids).

Now how will that play out in the world of 24?

Picture Jack Bauer strapped to a chair, in handcuffs made of recycled plastic, a very hot and bright light bulb shining in his eyes, as enemy agents shove shoots of bamboo (a totally renewable resource) under his fingernails. He’ll look up, dazed and confused and yet full of love for the planet Earth, and gasp, “Excuse me, but have you considered replacing that bulb with a compact fluorescent?”

We challenge our readers: Can you come up with a scene in which Bauer delivers an “appropriate” anti-global-warming message? We promise to forward the results to the producers of 24.
The countdown starts … now.

— Marc Silver

Near the beginning of the movie Stardust, opening today, a young man is having a champagne picnic with a snooty girl when they see a bright-burning shooting star fall to the earth. To prove to her how much he loves her, he promises to find the star and bring it back to her within a week. First surprise of the movie: the star is not played by a lump of metallic rock. The movie is a silly, fun fairy tale-like romp based on a fantasy novel by Neil Gaiman. The young man and the star meander through a mythical England populated by witches, ship captains, and snarky dead princes.

What we call a “shooting star” has nothing to do with stars. Stars are trillions of miles away; a shooting star is a meteor, a burning piece of debris passing through the Earth’s atmosphere. Most meteors burn up in the atmosphere, but some make it to the ground, where they are called meteorites. These ancient rocks land all over the planet; thousands have been found on Antarctica, where they’re easy to spot on the white surface.

The opening of the movie coincides nicely with the Perseid meteor shower, the biggest of the year. The Perseids peak the night of Sunday, August 12. The shower occurs every August when the Earth passes through a trail of dust left by the comet Swift-Tuttle, which crosses our orbit every 133 years. Bonus: this year's shower coincides with a new moon, so the sky will be dark, making meteors easy to see. But your chances of finding any meteorites from this shower are pretty slim. (And the chances that those meteorites will look like Claire Danes? Even slimmer.) The “stars” we see shooting overhead in the Perseids are tiny pieces of comet debris that burn up in the atmosphere; bigger meteorites normally wander over from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

— Helen Fields

Over at Rogers' Rules of Order, a comment came in from Jessica, taking us to task for the Harry Potter story in the August issue of National Geographic.

She wrote: I have to admit that I was slightly disappointed. Being a major Harry Potter fan, I noticed a mistake in the mandrake section of "Harry Potter's Garden." The mistake is that you said that the mandrake "helps Harry's teacher reverse a turn-to-stone spell." There are two things wrong with this. The first is that it is not Harry's teacher, it is his school's nurse. Secondly, it does not "reverse a turn-to-stone spell." It "returns those who have been petrified to their original state" (this is a quote taken from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets). i have never found a mistake in National Geographic before, but seriously, if you read about two pages of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, or even watched the movie, this could have been corrected. Thank you for reading my comment.

We asked our Potter correspondent, Melody Kramer, to defend the honor of National Geographic. And magically, she did. Her response:

Dear Jessica,
I must admit, I was petrified to receive your note. I’m wearing my pink fluffy earmuffs because comments like this are like the fatal cry of the mandrake … to my ego. But according to Chamber of Secrets, Professor Sprout prepared a draught of mandrake to revive petrification victims. And "reverse a turn-to-stone spell" is another way to say "returns those who have been petrified to their original state,” because people are essentially “turned to stone” when they’re petrified. I hope this clarifies things for you, and I’m glad you’re such a devoted Potter buff.

Melody

— Marc Silver

Forget about American Idol. Afghan Star rocks my world. The program’s most recent season drew 1,000 applicants (if web sites are to be believed, there were 996 men and 4 women). Check out the videos of finalists, who do not sing anything by Whitney Houston or Bon Jovi. See if you can find the Sanjaya of Afghanistan (for those who don’t watch the U.S. version, “Sanjaya” is a generic term referring to a talentless teenager with totally terrific hair). And let’s have our own poll: Who do you think should have been the winner?

— Marc Silver

When I go home from my job as a National Geographic editor and look for some entertainment – a movie, a book, a CD, a TV show – I end up feeling as if I never left the office. The things I think about all day are inevitably part of the mix.

In The Simpsons Movie, Homer dumps pig droppings into the town lake with disastrous ecological effects. Just ask President Schwarzenegger if you don’t believe me.

Prince isn’t singing about a Little Red Corvette anymore. His new CD, Planet Earth, makes this observation in the slow-grind title cut:

“50 years from now what will they say about us here? Did we care for the water and the fragile atmosphere?

Sounds like Purple Rain meets Purple Prose.

And in the first in a series of earth-friendly YouTube videos, “Clean My Ride, Flex My Fuel,” Ben Affleck puts on a husky voice while playing the role of an ear of corn out to bring down Big Oil and promote ethanol. Mildly amusing. What I’d like to know: How many batteries were burned making this minifilm?

The video comes with a warning: “Contains adult content.” No joke: There are a couple of naughty words! If you like dirty videos on the environment, keep an eye out for the Sarah Silverman skit that’s coming up.

In the weeks and months ahead, we’ll be giving you the scoop on the way popular culture presents environmental topics, wild animals, ancient artifacts, and other Geographic concerns.

I’ll be calling on my colleagues, who’ve covered these topics for years, and on experts as well. We’ll try to separate fact from fiction. My first assignment: Find a waste disposal expert who can give us the scoop on pig dung. D’oh!

— Marc Silver