National Geographic Magazine

FOR MANY OF US, museums have played major roles in our lives. When I was a kid, our family visits to places such as the Milwaukee Public Museum and Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History were my favorite outings. I’ve been fortunate to visit some of the world’s great museums on my travels and to live near institutions with rich collections (my preferred way to end a workweek in New York was a Friday evening stop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art). There’s something about seeing art and artifacts with our own eyes that helps us understand history and culture in a palpable way. And of course great curators can draw connections among objects that let us perceive the world in a whole new light. Many museums, however, have items that were…

A camera-equipped microscope and plenty of patience help to expose a dazzling side of some common chemicals.…

WHAT DO YOU SEE in these images? A palm-frond jungle? Bright bird feathers? Taking the Rorschach test that is Peter Woitschikowski’s photomicrography, viewers often compare the shapes with the natural world. But he asks them to embrace the abstract instead—to see something entirely new. “The hope is to turn the fantasy on,” he says. In the 1980s, Woitschikowski, who lives in Germany, bought a microscope after seeing a magazine spread of microcrystal photography. He wanted to reveal this wondrous world that’s invisible to the unaided eye. The shapes are formed on glass lab plates by heating chemicals, such as acetaminophen (above), or mixing them with water or alcohol. As the substances cool or dry, crystals appear. When illuminated by polarized light, some seem to leap into a ballet of form and…

IN THIS SECTION Shell-Slinging Octopuses Climate Change Rainbows Bats and Agaves Household Water Reuse ILLUMINATING THE MYSTERIES—AND WONDERS—ALL AROUND US EVERY DAY WITHOUT ITS RINGS, SATURN LOOKS REALLY BORING. Super blah. Erase those bangles—as blogger Jason Kottke did (left) from a NASA photo—and the planet is the blandest sphere in our solar system. Sure, a hexagonal vortex and some cool cyclones appear at the planet’s poles—but its vanilla face lacks the pizzazz of Jupiter’s watercolored bands, the spicy blue of Neptune, the suffocating murk of Venus. Even rusty Mars looks more interesting. Thankfully, at some point in the past 4.5 billion years, the cosmos gave Earth’s neighborhood an upgrade: It put a big, bright, icy ring system around Saturn. But scientists don’t agree on when Saturn’s rings formed—or how the bangles even came to be. And that’s been…

Planets move in predictable orbits, constellations rise and fall on schedule, time’s passage can be marked by the shifting lunar face. This is comforting because it means that, adrift on a verdant island in an infinite cosmic sea, small creatures like us have achieved some degree of celestial knowing. We have deciphered the harmonies of planetary motion; we can calculate, with precision, the appearance of something as magical as a blackened midday sun; and we know, to some degree, how everything came to be (except ourselves). In a bottomless universe, we cling to what we know. “Your mind just wants things to be stable and permanent,” says NASA’s Jeff Cuzzi. “Celestial things are supposed to not be changing in front of our eyes. But that’s one thing [the Cassini probe] showed…

For its novel way of maintaining boundaries, consider Octopus tetricus, also known as the gloomy octopus and the common Sydney octopus. If another creature gets too close, it may respond by throwing things, according to a study published recently in the journal PLOS One. The cephalopods, native to seas off New Zealand and eastern Australia, were caught on camera throwing shells, silt, and algae, which sometimes hit animals that came too near their dens. The recipients included various fish, other gloomy octopuses—and even the underwater cameras. This is the first time a throwing behavior has been reported among octopuses. Though scientists aren’t certain of the motivation, it may have something to do with “the octopus equivalent of personal space,” says the study’s lead author, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a professor at the…