National Geographic Magazine June 2022

WE EXPERIENCE THE WORLD through our senses: touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste. Among the five, the sense of touch is singularly important, a growing body of research confirms. As contributing writer Cynthia Gorney explains in this month’s cover story, “Human beings require the physical presence of others, the comforting touch of others, in order to stay healthy.” At the School for Creativity in Andria, Italy, students learn that lesson at an early age. “The culture of touch in that school is daily,” says longtime National Geographic photographer Lynn Johnson. “Moment by moment. It’s very physical. They’re always hugging and kissing.” In the photo above, the children play a game in which a blindfolded student tries to recognize a classmate just by touch. Invariably they got it right, Johnson says. This cover story…

Artists create garb from garbage to stress the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s plight: Rich in resources yet plagued by poverty, it’s a dump for global waste. It started as a countercultural art movement in 2001. After years studying at the Academy of Fine Arts, Kinshasa—following teachers’ advice on creating work with “proper” materials, such as resin and plaster of paris—some students in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) decided to do something different. They created art with what was in their immediate environment, including tires, exhaust pipes, foam, plastic bottles, antennas, tins that had held milk or paint, feathers, CDs, rubber slippers, and other discarded items. This work, the artists believed, felt familiar to a Congolese audience and spoke to a particularly egregious aspect of Congolese life: waste. Waste generated locally by…

IN THIS SECTION Well-Built Water Lilies Trekking Nepal Crags Horseshoes Get Lucky Testing a Cave’s Depths ILLUMINATING THE MYSTERIES—AND WONDERS—ALL AROUND US EVERY DAY I WAS ORDERING A BURGER in Cincinnati the first time I began to sense that the Midwest was somehow familiar to me, which is to say that the Midwest was somehow Latin American. It was a Saturday afternoon, pre-COVID, and people crowded the tables at Zip’s Cafe, a small restaurant whose interior was as dark as it probably had been the first time its doors opened in the 1920s. The waitress wanted to know if someone would be joining me. No, I said, slightly annoyed because I had grown up with a mother and three aunties, all from Colombia, who did not believe that anyone, let alone a woman, should…

DISPATCHES FROM THE FRONT LINES OF SCIENCE AND INNOVATION Call it a net win for marine life Attaching green-colored LEDs to fishing nets called gill nets greatly reduces the amount of marine life caught in them by accident, recent tests showed. Illuminated nets need less repairing because sea turtles, sharks, and other species can see and avoid them. The lights reduce bycatch deaths and don’t hurt hauls of targeted fish. —HW At up to 10 feet in diameter, the floating leaves of giant water lilies (genus Victoria) are the largest on Earth. They are found in South American waterways, where they thrive and crowd out other plants. Some are sturdy enough to support the weight of a small child—a concept that a new paper in Science Advances illustrates literally, with a photo of…

Human vertebrae threaded on sticks may have been Indigenous people’s attempts to reconstruct ancestors’ bodies after graves were looted during Spanish rule in Peru some 500 years ago. Archaeologist Jacob Bongers studied 192 sets of the spine bones; he says dating shows they were first buried in the early 1500s and threaded on sticks about 40 years later. Descendants likely were “picking up the pieces of their dead and trying to put them back together” to restore the integrity of burials or bodies, he says.…

BY THE NUMBERS 26,545 HEIGHT OF ANNAPURNA I, IN FEET 13,550 ALTITUDE AT BASE CAMP, IN FEET 1977 YEAR THE ANNAPURNA REGION OPENED TO FOREIGN TREKKERS COMPARED WITH THE MORE well-known trek to Everest’s Base Camp, the hike to Annapurna’s staging area offers lower elevations and fewer fellow trekkers. And unlike the popular Annapurna Circuit, it allows hikers to head deep into the Annapurna range, rather than going around its perimeter. RETURN TO TOURISM With some of the world’s tallest summits, Nepal is a top trekking destination. A devastating 2015 earthquake and the pandemic have kept travelers away for the past few years, but now adventurers are coming back. “It feels intimate because the mountains feel really close,” says photographer Emily Polar about the Annapurna Base Camp trek, which provides epic views of legendary peaks Dhaulagiri and Machapuchare. THE ROUTE The…