DragonI

Is Your State Consuming More Than Nature Can Provide?

Our never-ending appetite for food, water, and energy is driving the environment into the ground.

Get too far into financial debt and creditors come calling. Fall into debt with nature and the consequences can be even more distressing: Hotter temperatures, shrinking farmland, and dried up reservoirs are only a few of the problems we're grappling with as a result of overtaxing the environment.

Data from a new report by the Global Footprint Network looks at which American states are running into the red with Mother Nature through such activities as burning fossil fuels, overfishing, and chopping down forests.

Ice cave at the Vatnajokull Glacier in Iceland.(Shane Wheel / National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest)

For photography amateurs everywhere, it’s that time of year again: the National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest, now in its 27th year.

Enter your own photo on the National Geographic website. The grand prizeis an eight-day National Geographic photo expedition to Costa Rica and the Panama Canal for two.

“I was out in the Arches National park to take night pictures but the clouds moved in. I waited for about 2 hours in the car and finally the sky cleared and I got this image. This Selfie Image was shot at the windows section.”(Manish Mamtani / National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest)

Giant waves converge and jump together along the napali coast of Kauai. An early season northwest swell and the position of the autumn sun made this shot possible, but what really makes it special to me is the bird flying in the corner of the frame. This little moment of life adds balance to the image and reminds me that the mundane often make the spectacular.(Lee Scott / National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest)

Taken at a Karo Village in the Omo Valley of Ethiopia. The Karo are famous for their body-paint culture and skill. Away from the crowded village square, I found this “make up artist” focused on applying make-up on a young woman. Using a q-tip as a brush he used a Georges Seurat like Pointillism technique ! The calm focused look of the artist is contrasted by the nervous, perspiring client – perhaps unsure about the results (or my camera :-)(S. Ram / National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest)

How much meat, fat, sugar, vegetables, and grain do we eat compared to the rest of the world? You might not want to know.

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This is all information you can explore in National Geographic's incredible interactive data visualization, What The World Eats, designed by Fathom using information from the global food statistics organization FAOSTAT. At first glance it’s a simple collection of donut charts, breaking down daily diets in countries across the world. But you can click into any piece of information for a deeper dive. Tap on Russia, and you zoom into Russians' typical diet. Hover over the dairy and eggs consumed, and you’ll see that same information highlighted for every other country on the page. Click into Russia's dairy and eggs, and you’ll get very specific information, seeing that most Russians drink about 10% of their daily calories in milk.

Why Do People See Faces in the Moon?

Our brains are hard-wired to find meaningful images in random lines and shapes—even if those figures are on the moon.

"LightSource" Young Monk finds a perfect light source to read his book inside of his pagoda - Old Bagan, Burma (Photo and caption by Marcelo Castro / National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest)

"Mirrow Wave" The Wave after a heavy thunderstorm with a small pond granting a perfect mirror for the reflection of the hiker. A calm and solemn place at a perfect day. (Photo and caption by Nicholas Roemmelt / National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest)

"Forest lights" Aurora Borealis over the forest of the Pyhae Luosto National Park, Finland. (Photo and caption by Nicholas Roemmelt / National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest)

Masters of Disguise—Amazing Insect Camouflage

To avoid becoming prey, insects use mimicry to blend into their surroundings.

National Geographic photographer Michael "Nick" Nichols takes his work to new heights, capturing the beauty of a 3,200-year-old, 247-foot-tall sequoia known as the President.

On a gentle slope above a trail junction in Sequoia National Park, about 7,000 feet above sea level in the southern Sierra Nevada, looms a very big tree. Its trunk is rusty red, thickened with deep layers of furrowed bark, and 27 feet in diameter at the base. Its footprint would cover your dining room. Trying to glimpse its tippy top, or craning to see the shape of its crown, could give you a sore neck. That is, this tree is so big you can scarcely look at it all. It has a name, the President, bestowed about 90 years ago by admiring humans. It’s a giant sequoia, a member of Sequoiadendron giganteum, one of several surviving species of redwoods.

During a full moon, the sun, Earth, and the moon are arrayed in a straight line, intensifying their gravitational effects on the planet.

"Both the sun and moon are tugging on Earth," said Rick Luettich, Director of the University of North Carolina Institute for Marine Sciences.

This pull can cause a bulge in the ocean that makes high tides a little higher than at other times of month. These tides are known as "spring" tides, so-called because high tides spring up higher than usual.

But don't blame it just on the moon. Among other factors fueling Hurricane Sandy is a vast high-pressure system over Canada. The system essentially forms a wall blocking Hurricane Sandy from continuing north, as an Atlantic hurricane would typically do-hence the storm's deadly left turn today.

news.nationalgeographic.com

After a faster-than-expected 70-minute ascent, James Cameron's "vertical torpedo" sub exploded up through the surface of the western Pacific minutes ago, carrying the National Geographic explorer and filmmaker back from the Mariana Trench's Challenger Deep—Earth's deepest, and perhaps most alien, realm.

The first human to reach the 6.8-mile-deep (11-kilometer-deep) undersea valley solo, Cameron arrived at the bottom with the tech to collect scientific data, specimens, and visions unthinkable in 1960, when the only other manned Challenger Deep dive took place, according to members of the National Geographic expedition.