Posted by Ground control to Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield: Your videos from the space station really make the grade, especially your music video in which you sing David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” and send your guitar for a floating journey. And the papers want to know: “What other videos have you made?” Here are some of my favorites:…
What do you do if you find a tiger in the bathroom? That was a plot point in the first Hangover movie, and now it’s a real-life story. The Salina Journal reports that last Saturday, a woman who’d gone to the circus went to the bathroom … and there was a tiger “at most two…
HBO is offering “An Apology to Elephants.” That’s the name of a documentary premiering on Earth Day – April 22 – at 7 p.m. The film looks at how humans have mistreated elephants: captured, crated to zoos and circuses (where they are roped and prodded with sharp metal “bull hooks” to force them to do…
Copernicus got a Google Doodle! The late, great astronomer, whose birthday is today, February 19, would perhaps be puzzled by Google – but only for a second. Nicolaus Copernicus was never one to shy away from new ideas (get a modern astronomer’s take on Copernicus). If you’d like a little primer on why Copernicus deserves…
In the ultimate test of true love on last night’s episode of The Bachelor, Sean Lowe challenged some of his bachelorettes to plunge into a Canadian lake where the temperature sat just above freezing. With the exception of one (sensible) woman, the ladies stripped down to bathing suits for a complete (and quick) total immersion,…
Some people watch for the game. And others tune in for the ads. Indeed, Super Bowl commercials are a show unto themselves. This year’s batch, airing during the Sunday night broadcast but already available online, raise a number of questions that are in National Geographic’s areas of expertise. Here’s our take. Product: Skechers GOrun2 shoes…
Film director David M. Reynolds is obsessed with the fabled island of Atlantis. He’s so obsessed that he spent the past two years working practically nonstop (and with barely any budget) on five short films collectively called The Underwater Realm. In each of these four-to-five minute shorts, humans come into contact with Atlanteans, from a…
“He knows when you’ve been sleeping, he knows when you’re awake. He knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake…” Who knows? Well, Santa of course! But how can he possibly keep up with every kid’s behavior record. According to some sources, he gets that information from a middleman: the…
At first everyone thought it was real: a viral video showing a bird of prey, allegedly a golden eagle, swooping down in a Montreal park to pick up a baby, then dropping the kid and flying away. Now the verdict is in: It was a hoax, concocted as an art project. Yet even a fake…
In Breaking Dawn—Part 2, the big-screen finale for the “Twilight” series, fans must bid goodbye to a cast of characters that includes an Indian tribe full of werewolves. Even devotees of the saga might not be aware that the Quileute tribe actually exists. The real-life Quileute Nation faces more risk from flooding and tsunamis than…
Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey takes place 60 years before the events in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy but returns to the same setting: Middle-earth. J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books, famously created a complex world for his novels, dreaming up languages and detailed histories…
By Sasha Ingber The insurance industry will be dealing with fallout from Sandy for months to come. To learn more about the storm’s impact, we spoke to Franklin Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America. How much will Hurricane Sandy cost? The estimates that have been released by a disaster-modeling firm [AIR Worldwide] for…
By Sasha Ingber We’ll be interviewing various experts about the impact of Hurricane Sandy and what lies ahead. For the big picture about hurricanes, we spoke to Jim Kossin, atmospheric research scientist in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center. Could Hurricane Sandy be the result of climate change? It’s not fair…
Vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan is among those who enjoy what’s known as noodling for catfish. What is noodling, and how does it affect the catfish?
Thank you for being a friend, Betty White. “I’ve subscribed [to National Geographic magazine] for 60 years,” the 90-year-old actress told us on the eve of visiting Washington, D.C., for a Smithsonian Associates lecture and a book-signing at the National Zoo (her latest work is Betty & Friends: My Life at the Zoo).
If you saw the Super Bowl halftime show, you probably wondered, “Who’s that guy in a toga bouncing crazily on a rope next to Madonna? And how’s he doing it?” The guy was Andy Lewis, a slacklining champion from California, and he did it after many, many years of practice. Slacklining is different from tightrope…
In Breaking Dawn, Part 1, vampire Edward and human Bella make a baby. The fetus needs blood for nourishment, matures at an accelerated rate (from conception to birth in less than a month), and threatens to crush Bella “from the inside out.” This made us wonder: In the folklore of vampires, are there human-vampire hybrids?…
Honey badger don’t care. That is the catch phrase from a viral YouTube video that uses National Geographic Wild tv footage with new, smart aleck (and occasionally vulgar) narration to go along with scenes of the honey badger running backwards, chasing a jackal, and eating a cobra that stings it (“oh, the honey badgers are…
In the film 50/50, a 27-year-old man is diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, called Schwannoma neurofibrosarcoma. His odds of survival: 50 percent. Medical experts, family, friends—even WebMD—proceed to offer the patient a whirlwind of scientific data, raising more questions than answers about the nature of cancer. We contacted Anna Franklin, medical director of…
As we’ve mentioned before, some of us at National Geographic are fans of the globe-trotting television series The Amazing Race. In this season’s premiere, passports played a starring role. A team of former Vegas showgirls stopped at a gas station in Los Angeles to get directions to the airport. After driving off, one of them…
Our Idiot Brother,starring Paul Rudd as the idiot, is actually full of idiots. Rudd’s character Ned is an organic farmer. One of his fellow (idiot) farmers oversleeps one day and blames the rooster at the farm, claiming that it did not crow, probably because it was “depressed.” This made us wonder: Do roosters always crow…
Do alligators really eat marshmallows? We had to find out after watching True Blood. For the uninitiated, True Blood is an HBO television series wherein vampires coexist with humans in a town called Bon Temps, La. In Sunday’s episode, Tommy kills his parents and, with the help of his brother Sam, disposes of them in…
So far, we all have to admit, it’s been a dark and stormy summer. Murderous tornadoes, devastating floods, fierce storms, blasts of lightning. Some might wax poetic and say there are monsters in the air. Feels something like it might have in 1816, when the eruption of Tamboro, an Indonesian volcano, spewed ash into the…
Even if you—like many of us—have never heard of Cambodian psych-pop, you may have heard some recently. A song by the California-based band Dengue Fever, 1000 Tears of a Tarantula, is featured in the soundtrack of the new movie The Hangover: Part Two. Where did this trippy music come from? East meeting west. As the…
What better way to start off the day after World Oceans Day than with the world premiere of the underwater video for a previously unreleased Paul McCartney song? The song, composed in the 1980s, is called Blue Sway, and that’s exactly the feeling in the imagery created by noted surf filmmaker Jack McCoy. Using a…
