January 2011
25 posts
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What's in a Surname? →
A new view of the United States based on the distribution of common last names shows centuries of history and echoes some of America’s great immigration sagas. To compile this data, geographers at University College London used phone directories to find the predominant surnames in each state. Software then identified the probable provenances of the 181 names that emerged.
Many of these...
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Tough Road to Getting LED Lights on the Streets
Ann Arbor, Michigan has been a leader in converting streetlights to LEDs, but the city has had to work out some kinks along the way.
Photograph by Tom Drew
By Josie Garthwaite
For National Geographic News
Published January 20, 2011
This story is part of a special series that explores energy issues. For more, visit The Great Energy Challenge.
Power plants may not spring to mind during an...
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Descent Into Paris
Visiting Paris’s vast underground network is essentially interdit (forbidden, for those of you who were not French majors). But a handful of legal entrées provides a glimpse of this underbelly of darkness, where history, mystique, and ghoulish underpinnings collide. By Barbara Noe
Photograph by Stephen Alvarez
Les Égouts de Paris
This popular underground museum brings you into a portion of the...
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UNLIKELY ANIMAL FRIENDS 2 →
NEXT AIRING
Fri Jan 14 5P
An elephant calf and a sheep form a surprising bond in an African nature reserve.
Read more: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/unlikely-animal-friends-2-5165/Overview#tab-Videos/09447_00#ixzz1AygWHokS
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Cavern of Crystal Giants
Crystal Palace Cavers in Mexico confront extreme conditions and find extraordinary beauty.
By Neil Shea
National Geographic Staff
Photograph by Carsten Peter, Speleoresearch & Films
In a nearly empty cantina in a dark desert town, the short, drunk man makes his pitch. Beside him on the billiards table sits a chunk of rock the size of home plate. Dozens of purple and white crystals push up...
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7 Billion | By 2045 global population is projected...
By Robert Kunzig Photograph by Randy Olson
One day in Delft in the fall of 1677, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, a cloth merchant who is said to have been the long-haired model for two paintings by Johannes Vermeer—“The Astronomer” and “The Geographer”—abruptly stopped what he was doing with his wife and rushed to his worktable. Cloth was Leeuwenhoek’s business but microscopy his passion. He’d had five...
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Why Are Birds Falling From the Sky? | The ground...
Rescue chief Christer Olofsson holds one of many dead birds that fell onto a Swedish street Wednesday. Photograph by Bjorn Larsson Rosvall, AP
Charles Choi
for National Geographic News
Published January 6, 2011
A mysterious rain of thousands of dead birds darkened New Year’s Eve in Arkansas, and this week similar reports streamed in from Louisiana, Sweden, and elsewhere. (See pictures...
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Big Bad Bizarre Dinosaurs
Extreme Dinosaurs
A bizarre gallery of Mesozoic monsters prompts John Updike to ask: What has evolution wrought? By John Updike
Art by Pixeldust Studios
Before the 19th century, when dinosaur bones turned up they were taken as evidence of dragons, ogres, or giant victims of Noah’s Flood.
After two centuries of paleontological harvest, the evidence seems stranger than any fable, and...
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