Latest Stories from National Geographic

How NASA protects the Artemis II crew from deadly space weather

Adam Mann — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 13:29:15 GMT

Another space weather feature, coronal mass ejections (shown above) send plasma and magnetic field material from the sun's corona into space and can trigger geomagnetic storms when they hit Earth.

Solar storm tech on Artemis II will help protect humans traveling even deeper into space.

In October 1989, a blast from the sun flung out a stream of super-powered protons. This solar storm lasted for days and forced astronauts working in low-Earth orbit, aboard NASA’s Atlantis space shuttle, to retreat to a shielded storm shelter in the farthest interior of the craft.

Even while hunkered down, some of the crew reported seeing flashes of light as high-energy particles struck their retinas. It remains one of the biggest solar proton floods ever observed. A NASA researcher later estimated that, if the astronauts had been outside of our planet’s protective magnetic field instead of in low orbit, they would have had a 10 percent chance of dying during the solar storm.

Such storms and other hazardous radiation threats fall under a broader umbrella called space weather. Over the last week, NASA’s Artemis II crew has ventured far beyond the safety of our planet’s magnetic field, where solar storms pose even more serious threats. Even as the threat of space weather remains. But researchers have learned some tricks about how to handle these dangers since the 1989 storm.

The Artemis II crew’s vessel, Orion, is the first vehicle designed explicitly to deal with risks like high-energy proton flurries. The uncrewed Artemis I mission, which flew around the moon in 2022, carried sensors that measured radiation levels all over the craft, providing potentially life-saving information during its sojourn through space. Orion was designed with both a dedicated storm shelter and special shielding to absorb radiation, and sensors onboard the spacecraft are measuring radiation levels throughout the mission.

“We gained a lot of confidence in our models and systems,” says Stuart George, a physicist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston who helps to measure and mitigate space weather effects. “It's a really good vehicle from a radiation point of view.”

The Orion spacecraft is facing three types of space radiation as it travels from the earth to the moon and back. Such radiation acts as subatomic shrapnel, shredding human tissue and DNA and leaving behind ions that can cause molecular chaos inside the body.

Even before they left the part of space dominated by Earth’s magnetic field, the Artemis II crew passed through the Van Allen Belts, two donut-shaped regions extending between 600 to 60,000 kilometers above the planet (that’s higher than the International Space Station flies). These belts are filled with fast-moving protons and electrons trapped by the Earth’s magnetic field. While such particles can be as harmful as those encountered during a big solar storm, Orion zipped through the belts in less than an hour, limiting the crew’s exposure.

The second hazard comes from galactic cosmic rays—atomic nuclei, protons, and electrons jetting through space at significant fractions of light speed. Thought to be expelled by distant exploding stars, cosmic rays are especially dangerous because shielding against them only makes things worse. As these ultra-fast thermonuclear bullets slam into the body of a spacecraft, they cause tiny explosions and unleash a cascade of additional energetic particles, each of which can damage human tissue.

(How do cosmic rays affect us on Earth?)

The only way to mitigate against such radiation is to travel during periods of high solar activity, since the stream of charged particles surging off the sun creates a protective bubble, much as the Earth’s magnetic field shields against solar threats. Artemis II is flying a short time after the most recent peak in the sun’s 11-year cycle in late 2024.

Just before Halloween in 2003, a solar flare erupted from a dot of magnetic activity on the sun's surface. When the space weather hit Earth, it disrupted satellites and produced aurorae; the crew on the International Space Station (ISS) had to shelter from the radiation.

The Solar Orbiter mission, led by the European Space Agency, captured this dazzling solar flare in 2024.

But this also introduces the final form of space radiation, energetic particle events, flares, and mass ejections from the sun. These become far more likely during solar maximum. Yet because of the danger from unstoppable galactic cosmic rays, it’s still safer to travel at such periods than when the sun is quieter.

NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) operate several satellites that monitor the sun, looking out for large events like the powerful flare that blasted out just before Artemis II launched. One of the main workhorses is the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR), situated about 1.6 million kilometers sunward. DSCOVR records solar activity and provides between 15 and 60 minutes of advanced warning before a particle storm hits the Earth.

And in September 2025, the agencies launched three new satellites to monitor different types of solar activity—the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe (IMAP), Carruthers Geocorona Observatory, and SOLAR-1. Each reached their final position near DSCOVR in January, and SOLAR-1 in particular is poised to provide 24/7 observations of flares and eruptions. Data from all these observatories is fed into sophisticated forecasting software that tries to determine when inclement space weather is imminent.

Researchers focus on active regions of the sun, areas full of complex magnetic twists that tend to contain sunspots and are prone to launching streams of particles. “It's very similar to a paper airplane with a rubber band,” says Patricia Reiff, a space physicist at Rice University in Texas. “The more you wind that rubber band, the more kinks you have [and] the more energy you put in.” Let go of the band and it will violently unravel, launching the paper airplane. Likewise, the kinks in the sun’s magnetic field lines get so twisted that they can bend no further, forcefully snapping apart and propelling charged particles and radiation into space.

Much like extreme weather events here on earth, such outbursts happen randomly. Scientists might be able to infer when energy is building up in active regions on the sun based on sunspots and other data, raising the probability that a storm could be unleashed. But there’s no way to perfectly predict when a burst will occur.

(Future lunar explorers might take shelter in the moon’s caves.)

Last year, officials from NASA, NOAA, and space industry experts gathered in Boulder, Colorado to simulate how to forecast space weather using the latest models and respond to a potential emergency during Artemis II. Participants monitored fake events based on past data, relayed vital information to one another, and figured out what guidance to give astronauts beyond Earth’s magnetic field. The event was “eye-opening” and extremely useful, says Shawn Dahl, a forecaster at NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Colorado. If a solar storm were to happen during a deep space mission, these early warning systems would be critical.

Thanks to advanced satellite warning, officials have at least a short window for figuring out how a storm’s danger level. If forecasts suggest the astronauts may be in peril, they will be ordered to move to Orion’s storm shelter. This is a tiny area at the base of the spacecraft where each astronaut has essentially a small locker that they can stuff themselves into. They will place additional padding and material over their heads to hunker down.

Yet a solar tempest can last many days, and the mission designers didn’t want to trap the Artemis II astronauts in a cramped space forever. So, the spacecraft’s walls contain aluminum and high-density polyethylene to absorb some radiation. The crew can also build a special emergency shelter using storage and waste bags—basically anything they can get their hands on and place against the interior walls of the ship. “A colleague described it as ‘an innovative use of available materials,’” says George. (The DIY shelter has also been likened to “a pillow fort.”)

As more humans journey to the moon and perhaps one day Mars, efforts to predict and react to space weather will be vital—and Artemis II’s data and tech are just the first step.

Would you adopt a lab animal?

Melanie D.G. Kaplan — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Callaway, a beagle retired from long-term flea and tick studies, ventures outside for the first time after arriving at Kindness Ranch Animal Sanctuary. The Wyoming-based organization finds homes for an average of 250 beagles, and a third as many cats, each year.

Scientists have found post-research homes for dogs, cats, rats, and many other kinds of animals, but adopting them out does come with challenges.

Six years ago, Mallory Cormier adopted a three-month-old New Zealand white rabbit with ears as long as celery stalks and a mohawk-like cowlick on his forehead. Cormier named him Chickpea, and when she moved him from a temporary dog crate to a larger pen in her living room, he began leaping from one side of the enclosure to the other, enjoying a freedom he’d never known.

Chickpea, like millions of other animals in the U.S., began his life in a research lab. An acquaintance of Cormier’s worked in that lab, and told her that the young rabbit would be euthanized because of a leg injury. Instead, Cormier took him home.

Now, Cormier delights in watching the rabbit jumping to his heart's content. “At the lab, his housing allowed him to turn around and lie down, but it wasn’t tall enough for him to jump,” says Cormier, who works in veterinary medicine in Connecticut. “Seeing him finally move freely was incredible.”

Animals used in scientific experiments live lives largely unseen, hidden from the public behind laboratory doors. By one estimate, more than 100 million animals—mice and rats make up the vast majority—are used each year for research in the U.S. Among these, according to United States Department of Agriculture reports for 2024, are more than 12,000 cats, 40,000 dogs, and 100,000 primates.

Nearly all lab animals are killed at the end of studies so that scientists can examine their organs and tissues and collect data. But others—those subjected to minimally invasive studies, kept as breeders, or used in control groups—sometimes have a second chance at life.

I shared a decade with one of these animals, starting in 2013, when I adopted a beagle who’d spent nearly four years in a lab in Virginia. I knew nothing else about Hammy’s past, but we bonded quickly and I worked hard to make him feel safe and comfortable in our Washington, D.C. home. As I watched Hammy find his footing in a world beyond the confinement he once knew, I began to wonder about other lab animals. Why aren’t more adopted? Are there organizations working to find them new homes? And just how hard is it for other species to transition from subject to pet?

(You can clone your pet—but it won't have the same personality)

Historically, some universities have allowed lab animals to be adopted by staff, students, and neighbors. In the last 12 years, 17 U.S. states passed laws requiring labs to make healthy dogs and cats available for adoption after testing is completed. And in 2022, more than 4,000 beagles were adopted by families across the country after Envigo RMS, a research breeding facility in Virginia, shut its operation (this came after the United States sued the company, alleging animal welfare violations). For the last few years, Kindness Ranch, a Wyoming sanctuary for former research animals, has found homes for an average of 250 beagles, and a third as many cats, each year.

But traditional companion animals aren’t the only ones living new lives outside of labs. Among the 130 non-human residents of Kindness Ranch are llamas, horses, cows, goats, sheep and pigs, most of whom were used in veterinary training or nutrition studies. Other sanctuaries, including Peaceable Primate Sanctuary in Indiana and Project Chimps in Georgia, provide homes for former research primates. (While the U.S. National Institutes of Health stopped funding biomedical research on chimpanzees in 2015, many remain in labs, awaiting sanctuary homes.)

Labs have found post-research homes for ferrets, chinchillas, skinks, voles, fish, birds, and even tarantulas. Veterinarians and animal technicians in labs say knowing that their charges—some of whom they grow attached to—get to live out their lives in homes boosts morale in a line of work that can be stressful, even traumatic.

One of the greatest challenges among those working to rehome former research animals is earning the trust of science institution staff, who want to avoid inviting attention to their animal research operations. That’s less of an issue when the person coordinating the adoptions is on the inside.

Holly Nguyen has a degree in zoology and is a prostate cancer researcher at the University of Washington. Over the years, Nguyen has seen many potentially adoptable lab animals—especially rats and mice—killed at the end of studies.

“I had an issue with this, like many people,” she says. “And I decided to do something about it.” She founded Washington Adoption Center for Retired Research Animals (WACRRA) and in August 2024 adopted out her first critters, a pair of 1-year-old rats named Fritz and Ernst.

A family halfway across Washington state adopted these rodent littermates. “I thought they’d be perfect for my boys, who were 3 and 5,” says Elizabeth Hamilton. She appreciates Nguyen's efforts to create a new standard practice for lab animals: what Hamilton calls “retirement, not disposal.”

Hamilton’s family quickly learned that the rats were curious, smart and sweet—and had their own unique personalities. Sadly, Fritz died less than a year later; he now has a special place in their backyard.

WACRRA has partnerships with six institutions in the Seattle area, whose staff contact Nguyen when they have adoptable animals. As part of the arrangement, she agrees to keep confidential the names of the institutions. So far she’s found homes for around 400 mice, rats, hamsters, guinea pigs, and ferrets and has adopted one herself, a Syrian hamster named Marble, who was used in vision research.

“I have a couple rooms in my house dedicated to fostering these animals, with species-specific habitats,” Nguyen says. She often finds free supplies and housing through her local buy-nothing group, and the labs donate the animals’ food. Nguyen enjoys seeing the adoptees have room to explore, dig in deep bedding and swing in hammocks. She hopes to expand her reach beyond the Pacific Northwest and believes it’s important to have groups like hers dedicated to these efforts.

“Everyone adores the mission and they feel really good about being able to give these animals a life outside the lab,” she says.

In Virginia, Eva Cross runs Second Chance Heroes Rat Adoptions. Among the 800 rats she’s rehomed, more than 100 have been from labs, some as far away as Wisconsin. “People want to adopt former lab animals,” says Cross. “I think it’s maybe less known that rats can be good pets and companions.”

In some cases, adopted lab animals still contribute to science. Soon after starting her nonprofit six years ago, Cross re-read The Lab Rat Chronicles by Kelly Lambert, a professor at the University of Richmond who studies positive emotions in rats to learn about human behavior. Cross reached out to Lambert, and they began a conversation that led to rehoming 18 young rats through Second Chance Heroes in 2024. Lambert and her team were eager to learn how her subjects fared in homes, so they began surveying adopters periodically about each rat’s diet, weight, temperament, personality, socialization, and preferred activities. This “citizen science” effort allows research to continue while the rats live in a more comfortable, non-clinical environment.

(Your dog really might be addicted to that toy)

The ease of transition to home life depends on an animal’s age, personality, and experience in the lab. Younger animals generally acclimate faster to new environments. Those who were poked and prodded and who didn’t receive much, if any, individual attention, might have a harder time relaxing, trusting, and adapting. And just like humans, some animals are more adventurous and love new experiences while others are more fearful.

Cross says that no matter the lab animal’s background, it’s important to transition them to a home slowly. “This is a whole new world for them,” she says. “Every experience they’re having is something they’ve never had before. Patience will help them more than anything.”

Living in D.C. with me, my beagle Hammy was scared of many everyday sounds and sights for most of his first year out of the lab. But during our 10 years together, he became braver and more self-assured (as did I). I grew to know him as an individual and did my best to let him make decisions about how to interact, where to sleep, and when to eat—which was, in true beagle fashion, as often as possible.

As for Cormier’s rabbit Chickpea—known now as Chickie— he has become quite territorial and a bit of a “guard dog,” Cormier says, waking her at night when he hears sounds outdoors. He loves salad and expresses his dislikes with grunts, like when Cormier wore fluffy socks around him. He’s on the smaller side, just 8 pounds, but his legacy is large: He inspired Cormier to start Save the Buns, a nonprofit that partners with local laboratories to rehome research bunnies.

Cormier has now brought 17 rabbits out of research, including a second one that is now her pet, named Crouton. Seven of the bunnies live in a small, heated barn on Cormier’s property. There, waiting to be adopted, they have fleece blankets, cardboard tunnels, daily salads, dried apple snacks, and unlimited hay. Sunlight streams in from multiple windows, and relaxing music plays throughout the day. And there in the barn, they have room to leap.

Melanie D.G. Kaplan is a D.C.-based independent journalist. Her first book, Lab Dog: A Beagle and His Human Investigate the Surprising World of Animal Research, was published by Hachette in 2025.

7 of the best U.S. state parks to visit in spring

Liz Brumer-Smith — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Nothing feels better than spending time outdoors after months of snow, grey skies, and frigid weather. Spring is a special season, no matter where you are, but in some areas of the country, the landscape blossoms to life with particular brilliance.

Green overtakes the once barren trees, colorful wildflowers pop up in hills and valleys, and waterfalls rage from snowmelt. The north often takes longer to reach its peak season, but many state parks in the south and southwest are in their prime season from February to May.

If you want a natural escape this spring, consider visiting one of these seven stunning state parks while they are ripe with beauty.

(Fifty of our favorite U.S. state parks.)

Sunrise lights up the eroded hills at Picacho State Recreation Area in the California Desert.

Arizona Picacho Cactus in Picacho Peak State Park can grow over 50 feet tall and live for 200 years.

Picacho Peak is one of Arizona’s iconic landmarks. Positioned halfway between Phoenix and Tucson along Highway 10, its impressive peak is easy to spot as you’re driving. Especially during the spring bloom when the hillside is covered in vibrant yellow California poppies and purple lupins.

Spring in Arizona arrives earlier than in other parts of the country. Visitors can expect spring-like weather between February and March, making it the perfect time to go hiking. Summiting Picacho’s 1,500-foot peak via the Hunter Trail or Sunset Vista Trail during Arizona’s intense heat from April through summer is inadvisable.

“The peak can be intimidating to novice hikers. It uses a series of cables, and you want to come well prepared with gloves, sun protection, water, and snacks,” explains Elisabeth Haugan, communications manager for Arizona State Parks and Trails.

“For a more leisure hike, the nature trail is a half-mile loop with interpretive signs to learn about the native animals and plants you’ll see,” she says.

(Nevada’s state parks shine even brighter than the Strip.)

Anza-Borrego Desert State Park is one of Southern California’s hidden gems. It’s the largest state park in California in the western Colorado Desert, just east of San Diego and south of Palm Springs.

“It’s approximately 650,000 acres, just about the size of Delaware,” says Dan McCamish, the senior environmental scientist for California State Parks. Its sprawling boundaries mean there is something for everyone, including backcountry exploring, horseback riding, camping, stargazing, hiking, and natural hot springs.

“The weather in the Anza Borrego region is pretty heavenly October through March, but our winter annual flowers begin to pop up mid-February into March,” says McCamish. People flock from all over to admire the spring blooms.

Another California state park that blooms to life in spring is the Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve. Located about two hours north of Los Angeles, it’s the perfect place for a day trip to see miles and miles of stunning poppy flowers.

The State Natural Reserve is California’s most persistent poppy-bearing land, which means each spring, you are virtually guaranteed to have a colorful show. The poppies are usually most vibrant between late March and late April, but it’s best to check the live poppy cam provided by the state park to ensure it’s ideal viewing before driving out there.

(Eight underrated state parks that deliver the awe without the crowds.)

Big Bend Ranch State Park is roughly three and a half hours west of Big Bend National Park, along the border of Mexico and the United States. “The weather attracts a lot of people in the spring, but the wildflowers also bring people here to see the desert come to life with color,” says Aaron Garza, the public relations representative for Visit Big Bend.

“Late February is when the wildflowers bloom, but it can last through April or even May, depending on how much rain we received that year,” adds Garza. Big Bend Ranch State Park is massive, “all other Texas state parks could fit within its boundaries,” explains Garza.

Mountain biking, birding, hiking, and paddling on the Rio Grande are some of the top activities to do here. But if you visit in spring, keep an eye out for bluebonnets, gorgeous red flowers on the wiry ocotillo cactus, and hummingbirds buzzing around the tall stocks shooting up from the century agave plants.

Located about a two-hour drive from Nashville, Cummins Falls State Park is home to one of the most beautiful waterfalls in Tennessee, and the perfect place to cool off on a hot summer day. But what makes spring the favorable time to visit is the intensity of the waterfall from winter snowmelt.

Water rushes over the cliff’s edge at a ferocity you won’t see later on in the year. If you visit in May, it’s often warm enough to want to go for a dip. Not to mention having fewer crowds in spring gives you a better chance of securing a Gorge Access permit, which is required to access the base of the falls. The park issues 200 permits a day, which can be purchased in advance and require a one- to 1.5-mile out-and-back hike into the gorge.

Spring in the Blue Ridge Mountains is spectacular. The weather is mild and picturesque for hiking, and there are over 100 wildflower species. One of the best state parks to enjoy the magic of spring here is Grandfather Mountain State Park, which spans three counties in North Carolina.

Wildflowers pop up in mid-April as the area sees more rain. Blooms typically last until late May, just before the area warms up, says Amelia Gallina, a park ranger at Grandfather Mountain State Park. "One of my favorite hikes is the Nuwati Trail. It’s a pretty mild trail, 1.2 miles out and 2 miles back. There are no ladders or cables like with other trails in Grandfather Mountain, so it’s one most people can do,” she explains.

Just outside of Austin in the heart of Texas Hill Country is Enchanted Rock State Park. Loved by locals, this state park is a fantastic spot for hiking, admiring wildflowers, and basking in a dark sky before the brutal summer heat arrives.

Rock climbing and hiking are the most popular activities here. The 0.8-mile Summit Trail up the peculiar-looking exfoliation dome is one of the best to do, but in spring, take the longer 4.6-mile Loop Trail to see bluebonnets, bright red Indian paintbrush, and the gorgeous purple basin bellflower.

(Nine spectacular state parks to visit this winter.)

Liz Brumer-Smith is a Florida-based freelance writer and travel creator behind the channel Eat See TV. In 2017, she and her husband hit the road full-time in their RV with their two cats, exploring North America and documenting their adventures on YouTube and their blog. Today, Liz shares stories of food, culture, and destinations around the globe.

Learn how to find Orion's Belt

Stephanie Vermillion — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:00:00 GMT

National Geographic's Wonder Lessons will teach you how to navigate the stars, spot cloud types, recognize common trees, and identify different kinds of rocks. Today, we're learning how to spot the constellation of Orion.

https://interactives.natgeofe.com/high-touch/ngm-2604-wonder-nav/builds/main/html/_graphic5.html

The easiest way to find Orion, known as the Hunter, is to search for the constellation’s three-dot belt.

This trio of stars appears almost perfectly aligned in the night sky. The stars Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka form the belt dots. From late fall to early spring, Orion’s waist is one of the most recognizable sights in the sky during the transition from dusk to night.

We’ll look for Orion in the southwestern sky, where it’s most visible an hour or two after the sun sets.

https://interactives.natgeofe.com/high-touch/ngm-2604-wonder-fact-box/builds/main/html/_graphic4.html

Look for this constellation before Earth’s orbit makes it difficult to spot. By May these stars will be very low on the horizon and difficult to view by the time the sun sets. Beginning in late July and early August, Orion will become visible just before sunrise.

https://interactives.natgeofe.com/high-touch/ngm-2604-q1-wonder/builds/main/html/_graphic23.html

Want to experience more wonder? National Geographic's Wonder List features playful prompts and activities that turn everyday moments into wonder-filled discoveries—for families, anywhere, every day.

Star maps: Matthew W. Chwastyk, NG Staff.
Sources: Tycho Catalog Skymap, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

A once-banned Mexican American tradition is making a comeback

Zoey Goto — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Drivers take great pride in their cars, like this 1960 Chevy Impala.

Lowriding had been outlawed across the U.S. Now, it’s making a comeback — and nowhere more fashionably than in Albuquerque, thanks to a passionate group of locals.

This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).

The 1961 Chevrolet Impala leaps skyward with a bounce, chrome flashing in the New Mexico sun. At the wheel, Angelica Griego presses a switch on the dash and again sends the car bunny-hopping, leaping a couple of feet clear off the ground. Her window is down, two-inch hot pink nails resting casually on the doorframe, strands of cherry-red tinsel glinting in her hair. In the back seat, I grip the plush leather and do my best to look unfazed.

“Nice car!” hollers a man from across the street, followed by a long, appreciative whistle. Behind oversized sunglasses, Angelica remains cool as a cucumber, the honeyed tones of 1960s crooner Brenton Wood drifting through her speakers. We’ve been cruising through the heart of Albuquerque along Central Avenue, home to the longest urban stretch of Route 66, for barely 10 minutes and already he’s the third such vocal admirer. Others snap photos, eager to capture a fleeting glimpse of pure Americana rolling past.

I’ve come to the state’s largest city to delve into the world of lowriding, a tradition of driving low-slung cars, often intricately customised and lavished in symbolism, that’s part of Mexican American culture. It first emerged in the 1940s in the South West, among communities who faced social marginalisation and drew on the bright colours and intricate designs of traditional Mexican aesthetics. In New Mexico, where nearly half the population identifies as of Mexican descent — the highest percentage of Hispanic residents in the US — it became as much a state symbol as green chilli.

But from around the post-war period, lowriding spent decades under heavy regulation, dismissed as a public nuisance and associated with gang activity. This was particularly true in the South West and along the Pacific Coast, where ordinances banning cruises — where souped-up cars roll leisurely in caravan formation — were common; in Albuquerque, they were banned until 2018. In more recent years, with restrictions lifting, perceptions have changed — and with the centenary of Route 66 coming up, the revival of this motor tradition seems perfectly timed.

Today, the city’s Sunday evening cruise through downtown draws a lively mix of locals and tourists. The Albuquerque Lowrider Super Show, a showcase of spectacular cars held each June at the city’s convention centre, is a major event attracting 15,000 attendees. There’s even talk of the lowrider becoming New Mexico’s official state vehicle. This year, events planned for Route 66’s centennial include the Route 66 Summerfest, a gathering of local bands, food trucks and modified classic cars planned for July along Central Avenue.

This sun-bleached corridor saw a boom in Atomic Age motels and restaurants after the Mother Road was realigned in 1937 to pass directly through the high-desert city. Much of that mid-century architecture remains, Angelica points out as we glide through her hometown. One moment we’re passing the zigzagging facade of the KiMo Theatre, its art deco details mixed with Indigenous Pueblo motifs; the next, we’re soaking in the flicker of the vintage sign outside the 1959 Imperial Motel. Think of classic Route 66, and chances are it looks like this car-crazed city, providing the perfect backdrop for riding in Angelica’s mint-condition convertible.

“You get a lot of attention as a woman in a car like this,” she calls over her shoulder as the craggy outline of the Sandia Mountains begins to fill the windscreen, rising steadily to the east of the city. She tells me she got her first set of wheels at age 15, having grown up in a family of car enthusiasts with her head under the bonnet. “When I first came into the scene, it was all very masculine, and I was one of about three girls. Now, loads of women are getting interested in lowriding.”

Even as lowriding becomes more inclusive, Angelica remains one of the few women on the competitive circuit. Since buying her Chevy four years ago, she’s transformed it into a gliding showpiece, with a chrome undercarriage, custom interiors, and hand-painted murals that map key moments in her life. Her creativity has earned her a spot across the country’s car shows, where owners put their tricked-out rides on display.

Lowriding has always been a spectacle, but here in Albuquerque, women like Angelica are steering it to stylish new heights. “I’ve also added hydraulics to make the car jump up and down and side to side,” she says. Moments later, the Impala shimmies back into dance mode, and we bounce past Central Avenue’s chorus line of diners, drive-ins and dives — a stretch of road built for showing off.

undefined

Behind every lowrider’s gleaming ride lie hours of painstaking artistry, and in Albuquerque none have shaped this visual language more than Rob Vanderslice. The following morning, I head to the red-brick suburban home of the man who’s carved a niche as the Pablo Picasso of the lowriding world. His garage at the back of the house does feel more like a painter’s studio than a workshop, only here the canvas comes on four wheels.

The walls are lined with a rainbow of spray paints and pots of metal flake, twinkling under fluorescent lights. Showing me around, Rob is quick to explain that his fate was sealed early on, having been raised by a hot rod-obsessed father. “My first word wasn’t ‘mom’ or ‘dad’, it was ‘car’,” he says with a laugh. Dressed in the unofficial lowrider uniform of a baggy T-shirt, paint-splattered Dickies cargo trousers and a long beard neatly bound with elastic bands, he looks every inch the elder statesman of his community.

Over his 40-year career, Rob has watched lowriding shift gears, emerging from the underground into the mainstream. A turning point, he says, came in 2015 with a landmark exhibition of juiced-up vehicles and photos of hoppers, hod rods and lowrider cars at Santa Fe’s New Mexico History Museum, which began to peel away the long-held stigma surrounding the movement. Rob’s own creations have since found their way into major institutions, including the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. These days, he’s working on large-scale installations for the centenary of Route 66, including a trippy, gravity-defying display of lowrider cars suspended from the ceiling of Albuquerque’s airport.

In demand for his maximalist spray-paint style, known as a ‘Rob job’, the artist is giving me a taste of the weekend workshops he now occasionally leads, passing on his airbrushing techniques to a new generation. He’s been running them since 2019 and says he has noticed an uptick in interest post-pandemic. He demonstrates the process on a skateboard deck, swirling his spray gun with the control of a surgeon wielding a scalpel. I hold my breath as I try to mirror the motion. There’s an instant satisfaction to the whole thing: psychedelic shapes blooming from the nozzle in brilliant gradients of colour.

Practise enough, and you might hope to one day achieve something like Rob’s more-is-more masterpiece, a modified 1996 Cadillac Fleetwood parked on his driveway. He’s been working on it for the past 18 years: the seats are cloaked in touch-me crushed velvet, the bodywork licked with blazing flames of red and magenta, and LED lights hidden in the exterior paintwork mean the car can light up like a Christmas tree after dark.

You might assume this outrageous head-turner is reserved for special occasions, but it’s Rob’s daily drive, used for the grocery run. “This car is like the inside of my mind: colourful, shocking and loud,” he says. “My work is all about self-expression. If people think it’s too much, I must be doing something right.”

The air is thick with petrol fumes and the sweet smell of churros frying at the roadside in Barelas. Outside the car window, families line the pavement: grandparents unfolding deckchairs, toddlers perched on shoulders, wide-eyed children craning for a better view as a stream of glinting cars parades by at a snail’s pace. “Lowriding is trending right now,” says Jessica Roybal at the wheel, wearing a strappy sundress and statement silver hoop earrings, nodding as we pass a spectator in billowing zoot trousers, braces and a fedora.

This bumper-to-bumper procession is held every few months in Albuquerque’s oldest neighbourhood, a mostly Hispanic inner-city enclave, attracting between 300 and 500 people. An elevated muscle truck rolls past on cartoonishly large wheels, followed by a mint-condition Pontiac Bonneville, its fins and fenders bedazzled in crystals. Jessica’s sleek 1980 Pontiac Grand Prix, with a V8 engine purring under the bonnet, fits right in.

A trained architect, she first joined the lowriding scene by photographing drivers but soon caught the bug herself. But despite the growing international attention — lowriding is huge in Japan, where enthusiasts dress in imitation of the Cholo subculture — the practice in this city remains firmly rooted in its origins, Jessica tells me. “It’s working-class pride,” she says, tapping the steering wheel. Ahead, a vehicle lifts and tilts on its suspension, like a ballerina teetering on pointe. “You work all week, then on your day off, you tinker with your car and show what you’ve built.”

As the cruise winds down, we roll back through the city. “We’re fortunate to have Route 66, and there’s definitely a connection between the streetscape and the cars,” says Jessica. “When you’re cruising in a convertible at night and pass a vintage sign all lit up, it makes you stop in your tracks and just appreciate the beauty of that moment.”

Recently revamped, El Vado Motel on Central Avenue is one of New Mexico’s original Route 66 motor-court hotels. From $110 (£88).

This story was created with the support of Brand USA and New Mexico Tourism.

Published in the USA guide, available with the Jan/Feb 2026 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK).

To subscribe to National Geographic Traveller (UK) magazine click here. (Available in select countries only).

Artemis II captured a jaw-dropping 'Earthset'

Brian Resnick — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 14:33:16 GMT

Earthset captured through the Orion spacecraft window during the Artemis II crew’s flyby of the moon. The dark portion of Earth is experiencing nighttime. On Earth’s day side, swirling clouds are visible over Australia and Oceania. In the foreground, Ohm crater on the moon has terraced edges and a flat floor interrupted by central peaks.

After traveling a record distance from Earth, the Artemis II crew saw incredible things. “This continues to be unreal,” pilot Victor Glover said.

Artemis II’s historic lunar flyby on Monday was one of new milestones and spaceflight records, but it was also deeply resonant with the past. After flying farther beyond the Earth than any human has ever been before—beating the record set in 1970 during Apollo 13 by about 4,102 miles—and seeing parts of the moon no humans had ever witnessed, the crew recreated “Earthrise,” one of the most famous photographs of all time, with a small twist.

Instead of Earthrise, the Artemis II photo is of Earthset, capturing the surface of the moon and the crescent-lit Earth setting beyond it in the same frame.

In 1968, a year of global political unrest, the crew of Apollo 8 was on a similar flight around the moon, on a test of a spacecraft that would be used for future lunar landings. In an unplanned moment, crew member William “Bill” Anders snapped a photo of the Earth and the moon in the same frame. The photo, called “Earthrise,” would become iconic—inspiring the global environmental movement in the years before the establishment of Earth Day in 1970.

The Artemis II crew recreated that shot from a more distant vantage point than their predecessors. As National Geographic contributor Swapna Krishna explained, that’s because Artemis II flew around 4,000 miles above the surface of the moon, as opposed to Apollo 8 at around 60 miles high.

Then, shortly after Earthset, the Artemis II crew witnessed something extraordinary: a solar eclipse, from the vantage point of the far side of the moon. Because Artemis II launched on the night of a full moon, much of the far side of the moon was still dark by the time the crew reached it on their sixth day of the mission. In their incredible image, the moon blocks out the light of the sun, exposing the ethereal solar corona (i.e. the solar atmosphere). NASA even provided the crew with special eclipse glasses to take in the view before and after totality.

(Watch Artemis II blast off in stunning slow motion)

According to NASA, a solar eclipse so close to the moon has never been seen by human eyes before. “This continues to be unreal,” Artemis II pilot Victor Glover said as the solar corona formed a halo around the moon. “We just went sci-fi.”

Glover poetically described the color of the moon during the eclipse as “the gray that blends and drifts into the blackness,” remarking in awe that the crew could still make out features on the lunar surface with the sun completely behind it, because it was partially lit by the light of the Earth. “It’s the strangest looking thing—that you can see so much on the surface,” he said. “Humans probably have not evolved to see what we're seeing. It is truly hard to describe. It is amazing”

The new image is also reminiscent of when the Apollo 12 crew observed the Earth blocking the light of the sun.

Moments to honor the past infused the entire day of the lunar flyby, the sixth of the mission. Upon waking, the crew heard a message from Jim Lovell, the astronaut who piloted Apollo 8 and commanded Apollo 13, and who recorded the missive for Artemis II before his death in August 2025. “Welcome to my old neighborhood!” Lovell said. “When Frank Borman, Bill Anders, and I orbited the moon on Apollo 8, we got humanity’s first up-close look at the moon and got a view of the home planet that inspired and united people around the world. I’m proud to pass that torch on to you.”

And in a particularly heartfelt moment, shortly after the crew reached the farthest point ever traveled in space, Canadian Astronaut Jeremy Hansen communicated the crew’s desire to name a crater close to the moon’s nearside-farside boundary after Commander Reid Wiseman’s late wife, Carroll Wiseman who died from cancer in 2020. “It’s a bright spot on the moon,” Hansen said. “We would like to call it Carroll.” And then the crew embraced.

Follow along with National Geographic’s continued coverage of Artemis II here.

Before going to sleep on flight day 5, the Artemis II crew snapped one more photo of the moon.

The Artemis II crew became the first humans to see the moon's Orientale basin, a nearly 600-mile-wide crater, visible in the bottom half of this image.

What is Songkran? The meaning behind Thailand’s water festival

Erin Blakemore — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:00:00 GMT

A child splashes water on another child in celebration of the Songkran festival in Ayutthaya, Thailand. Songkran is the traditional Thai New Year and the festival is celebrated through a mix of traditional Buddhist rituals and nationwide water fights—washing away bad luck from the previous year.

Rooted in Buddhist traditions, the new year celebration sparks massive water fights nationwide.

Every April, the arrival of traditional Thai New Year, also known as Songkran, turns the nation into a nationwide water festival as revelers grab squirt guns, buckets, and plenty of H₂O in a bid to celebrate new beginnings.

Similar watery new year’s festivals are also celebrated in South Asian countries such as Cambodia, China, Laos, Nepal, and others. But Songkran is best known for its incarnation in Thailand, where it is a national holiday.

But Songkran goes far beyond water fights. Deeply rooted in Buddhist traditions of renewal and cleansing, it’s a chance to pursue purification, wash off the past, and generate good luck for the coming year.

Here’s what to know about the holiday and its wild, wet rituals.

The festival’s name means “astrological passage” or “movement” in Thai, referring to a Sanskrit word for the sun’s transit through the Thai zodiac. Once calculated by royal astrologers, the modern festival usually kicks off on April 13, the day the sun enters Aries in Thai astrology, and continues through April 15, the official start of the new year. However, the festival’s dates can vary from year to year, as the national holiday’s dates are set by Thai officials.

The holiday is rooted in Buddhist folk traditions—traditions that run so deep that the festival is now considered a part of the world’s intangible cultural heritage by the United Nations cultural agency, UNESCO. Songkran is thought to have been inspired by similar Hindu festivals such as Holi, and scholars believe it evolved over the years as a celebration of the rice harvest, which peaks in Thailand every April.

The holiday was the official start of the Thai new year until 1888, when Siam (now Thailand) adopted a solar calendar similar to the internationally used Gregorian calendar, whose new year begins January 1. That solar calendar’s new year began April 1. In 1939, as the nation switched from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional one and began to claim its place on the international stage, Siam renamed itself Thailand. The next year, 1940, the country adopted January 1 as the first day of its year.

(Visit this island to dodge Thailand's 'The White Lotus' boom)

These Thai calendar moves could have doomed the traditional Songkran celebrations, but the festival endured. Today it’s a national holiday and a mostly secular one, featuring rituals that, in the words of religious historian Klemens Karlsson, fall “somewhere between a staged play, community theater, a festival, and a religious ritual or ceremony.”

Though Songkran traditions vary locally, the holiday generally starts April 13 and plays out over multiple days. The celebration centers around water—seen as a way to purify oneself and earn merit while clearing the way for a prosperous new year. The day before the festival, Thai people spring clean their homes and some public spaces—a reflection of the previous year being “washed away” to make room for the new. On April 13, they visit Buddhist temples. Here, the “spring cleaning” is extended to the Buddha himself as people sprinkle water over statues of the enlightened one.

(20 of the world’s most beautiful Buddhist temples)

Some also make offerings to their town or village’s preferred guardian deities in an attempt to garner favor for the new year. Monks and elderly people also get “cleaned” as their acolytes and loved ones sprinkle scented water over their hands or wash their feet—gestures of respect and caretaking. People show their devotion with ceremonial drums and frog symbols—considered auspicious in part because frogs’ croaking indicates coming rain in a landscape that relies on monsoons.

The remainder of the modern holiday belongs to revelers, many clad in bright Hawaiian shirts, who take the ritual pouring of water to a fun extreme with massive water fights. Local merchants sell bags of water and buckets of ice. Large crowds of revelers fling water on one another using buckets, bottles, and even water guns, chasing one another in a bid to dunk, saturate, and sprinkle everyone they can. The festivities—which include parades, music festivals, and vendors selling grilled frogs to eat in a nod to the Songkran symbol—now draw large numbers of tourists, generating significant tourist revenue and publicity in Thailand and beyond.

(Some of the best cheese in the world is in Thailand)

The modern ritual is praised for bringing prosperity and international attention to Thailand and its people. But it can also stretch locales to their limits because of the sheer volume of refuse—and water waste—generated by revelers.

Each year, the water fights are followed by huge clean-up efforts aimed at removing the trash and cleaning up local landmarks. Water usage rises dramatically during the festival—according to the Nation Thailand, average water use adds another 100,000 cubic meters of water usage per day in Bangkok alone. This has sparked past restrictions on Songkran celebrations in some parts of Thailand.

Other unintended consequences of the festival include effects on fuel availability and concerns about excessive alcohol consumption at massive Songkran events.

Water availability has cast a shadow over Songkran for years as Thailand grapples with climate change and drought. In 2024, drought conditions were so bad that the festivities were canceled in some locations, while a magnitude 7.7 earthquake hampered some celebrations in 2025.

This year, however, the festival is a go—and Thailand is ready to party. “We want to be clear: Songkran 2026 will take place as planned across every region of Thailand,” said Thapanee Kiatphaibool, who leads the Tourism Authority of Thailand, in a March 2026 statement. “The spirit of this festival and Thailand’s welcome remains unchanged.”

10 wineries that prove this U.S. region is the next Champagne

Casey Hatfield-Chiotti — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Oregon’s Willamette Valley features green, rolling hills covered with moss-draped trees, and a patchwork of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay vineyards. The region is home to 11 designated U.S. grape-growing regions, known as American Viticultural Areas (AVAs). Stretching from Portland to Eugene, the valley is sometimes compared to Burgundy, France.

Lately, parallels are drawn with another famous French wine region, Champagne. Bordered by the Pacific Coastal Range to the west, the Willamette Valley’s cool nights and warm summer days create the right conditions for wine with bright acidity, a key component of top-notch sparkling wines. All Champagne’s noble varieties are represented and thriving in the valley, including Pinot Meunier and Pinot Blanc, in addition to Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.

Sparkling wine production in Oregon has increased by 25 to 30 percent in the last four years, and more than 100 wineries produce sparkling wine in the state, according to Method Oregon. The non-profit organization founded by Oregon sparkling winemakers will host the second Method Oregon Grand Tasting Weekend in the Willamette Valley in July—an annual celebration of Oregon’s traditional method sparkling wine.

The traditional method, or méthode champenois, is the painstaking process used in Champagne that includes a natural secondary fermentation in a bottle rather than a tank or through forced carbonation. To carry the Method Oregon mark, wines must be 100 percent produced in Oregon, use the traditional method, and be aged a minimum of 24 months en tirage, the crucial stage where wines are aged on yeast, which eventually adds flavor and texture.

Andrew Davis, the director of winemaking at Lytle-Barnett, a Willamette Valley winery that exclusively produces sparkling wines, says practically every wine region in the world produces a little sparkling wine. However, no one has truly tried to become the new world equivalent of Champagne. “I sincerely believe that we can be that place, and we're just now getting that story started,” says Davis.

Method Oregon has also launched a trail map to help visitors easily find tasting rooms featuring Method Oregon sparkling wines across the Willamette Valley and the state.

Here are 10 Willamette Valley wineries producing exceptional bottles, as well as where you should stay and eat.

(Here's why stargazers are flocking to the Oregon Outback.)

Corollary Wines’ angular, hilltop tasting room, with a red powder-coated exterior, makes a striking statement atop a hill in Eola-Amity Hills. Guests can make an appointment for seated tastings of new spring releases, such as the mineral 2021 X-Omni Blanc de Blancs. Corollary specializes in single-vineyard traditional-method sparkling wines and often sources fruit from vineyards that don’t ripen enough for still wine.

Corollary co-owners and winemakers Jeanne Feldkamp and Dan Diephouse also make a carbonic-fermented sparkling rosé in which the grapes are submerged in CO2, which kicks off fermentation and produces fruity, food-friendly flavors. “People really love them [sparkling wines], but they don't understand them a lot yet; a lot of what we do in the tasting room is education,” says Diephouse.

So, what makes a sparkling wine stand out? At the independent wine brand Arabilis, which released three new sparkling wines in April 2026 (spring is the unofficial “new bubbles” season in the Willamette Valley), owners Kenny and Allison McMahon say carbonation can amplify faults, so they are extremely careful during primary fermentation.

“We are making wine first. It must be clean and the best,” says Kenny McMahon, who has a doctorate in sparkling wine. Arabilis’ 2021 Johan Vineyard Blanc de Noirs is an elegant sparkling with citrus aromas and fine bead-like bubbles.

The couple regularly travels to Champagne to study directly with leading sparkling wine producers. In the winemaking facility in downtown Amity, a historic farming town known for spring daffodils and hazelnut trees, visitors can make an appointment for a private tasting and tour with Kenny, who keeps tastings fun and approachable by using reference points like Sour Patch Kids to describe a wine’s complexity.

In 1997, Tony Soter took a risk and launched his wine brand, not with a still Pinot Noir, but with two sparkling wines: a brut rosé and a blanc de blancs. Using only estate-grown fruit and making the wine fully in-house, Soter Vineyards was one of Oregon’s first true grower‑producers.

In a story-book workshop, the winemaker and cellar master draw from dozens of reserve wines (dating back to 2011) and spend hours blending and hand-riddling, the process of periodically rotating a bottle and tilting it so sediment slides down to the neck, up to 7,000 bottles a day. Every bottle is disgorged, a process where the yeast sediment is removed after secondary fermentation and finished in-house. Tastings at Soter’s biodynamic farm, vineyard, and tasting room are true culinary experiences and can include local cheese pairings or a chef-curated lunch featuring farm-grown ingredients.

While the lounge-like tasting room is in Dundee, Lytle-Barnett grows and sources grapes almost exclusively from the Eola-Amity Hills. The AVA experiences direct maritime influence from winds blowing from the coast through the Van Duzer Corridor.

Winemaking director Andrew Davis founded The Radiant Sparkling Wine Company in 2014. The mobile service is widely credited with enabling small producers to make sparkling wines in the Willamette Valley. At Lytle Barnett, he focuses solely on vintage-dated wines aged a minimum of three years before release (and often much longer), such as the 2014 Brut Extended Tirage, which exhibits yeasty brioche character and complexity. “There's the magic of time and aging and slow evolution of this wine towards something pretty magical,” says Davis.

For an adventurous wine country experience, Equestrian Wine Tours offers two-and-a-half-hour rides on Tennessee walking horses through Dundee’s russet hillsides. Tours usually stop at Winter’s Hill and Durant vineyards, also home to the Durant Olive Mill. Many of the horses are rescues, and custom saddlebags make purchasing and transporting bottles a breeze.

It’s easy to tick off many tastings in Dundee, with its abundant restaurants and tasting rooms. Family-owned Granville Wine Co. hosts tastings by appointment at its tasting house on Jory Lane. To obtain the proper aromatics out of sparkling wine, ditch the Champagne flute in favor of a white wine glass, says winery co-founder Jackson Holstein. The second-generation Oregon winemaker grew up watching his viticulturist father help establish Argyle Winery. “Sparkling wine is meant to be consumed similarly to your Bourgogne blancs,” says Holstein.

He believes Willamette Valley sparkling wines can achieve consistency without dosage, because of its climate. Dosage is the final step in Champagne production, where a small amount of sugar and reserve wine is added to a bottle just before corking to balance the wine’s acidity. Holstein's 2021 Blanc de Noirs and 2021 Blanc de Blancs, to be released this summer, are pure and natural, with no dosage.

Break up wine tasting stops in Dundee with visits to the Red Hills Market for farm-to-table fare and Briar Rose Creamery, which makes small batch cheeses by hand.

The history of sparkling wine-making in Oregon dates back to the 1980s, when Argyle founder Rollin Soles took a chance and began making traditional method sparkling wine in 1987. Under the leadership of winemaker Kate Payne Brown, offerings include extended tirage bruts (the word brut is used to classify very dry Champagne and sparkling wine), vintage blanc de blancs and blanc de noirs, as well as brut rosés. Blanc de blancs is a sparkling wine produced from white grapes. Blanc de noirs, French for white from black, is a wine made from red grapes like Pinot Noir or Pinot Meunier.

In the heart of Dundee, a town in the Willamette Valley’s north end, Argyle’s barn-like Tasting House is easy to spot on OR-99W. In the space made of reclaimed materials, visitors can see the winery’s four original fermentation tanks, stroll through gardens, and make reservations for a variety of tasting experiences from a deep dive into sparkling wines to a Library Experience that includes trying rare, aged wines alongside current releases. Walk-ins are accepted at the Tasting House, subject to availability.

Relatively new to sparkling wine, Goodfellow Family Cellars has been producing still wines for over two decades, but its first traditional method sparkling wines were disgorged in April of 2024. The winery works with some of the oldest sustainably farmed vineyards in the valley.

Goodfellow welcomes guests in its McMinnville cellar on select days by appointment. There’s much to do in McMinnville before and after a tasting, from exploring the shops and restaurants on historic Third Street to visiting the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum. The Smithsonian-affiliated museum has dozens of civilian and military aircraft on display, including Howard Hughes’ designed Spruce Goose.

News of the first Korean American-owned winery in Oregon quickly spread after Lois and Dave Cho’s wines were featured on Wine Enthusiast’s Top 100 Wine List in 2022 and 2024, including a brut rosé and blanc de noirs. On a high peak in the Chehalem Mountains, Cho Wines’ light-filled tasting room with a large terrace overlooks the Wapato Lake Wildlife Refuge, where hikers are likely to spot black-tailed deer, bald eagles, red-tailed hawks, and migrating tundra swans.

Tastings include a sparkling wine flight featuring traditional-method sparkling wines and undisgorged brut-style wines. Cho Wines produces everything from an award-winning blanc de noirs featuring fruit from the Laurelwood Vineyard with tart berry and orange notes to a fun and funky unfiltered Pinot Gris pet-nat.

Wine de Roads cycling tours, offered from late April through October, might include a full-day jaunt through the Chehalem Valley with three winery visits and a picnic lunch. The terrain is mainly flat roads with some rolling hills. On frequent stops, guides impart wisdom about the region’s history and, of course, the wines.

Perlée, a collaboration between some well-known names in the valley, is opening in June 2026 in the Dundee Hills. The first release, a 2022 Blanc de Blancs, contains fruit from the estate Foothills Vineyard, which is surrounded by oak trees, rare in the Willamette Valley. Yeast from the oak trees was banked and propagated for the wine’s fermentation. “Yeast plays a special role in expressing the terroir of a vineyard,” says co-founder Tiffany Austin.

In a tasting room with charred shou sugi ban walls, Italian-made light fixtures, and stone accents, visitors can reserve intimate seating tasting experiences featuring bites from a Michelin-starred chef paired with Perlée wines, other organically farmed sparkling wines in the valley, and even international producers.

Southeast of Dundee, Champoeg State Heritage Area is on the National Register of Historic Places. Pioneers voted to form Oregon's first provisional government on the site, which today is a green oasis for recreation and wildlife with abundant birds and paved walking and biking trails along the Willamette River.

At Gran Moraine, where Chardonnay is the star of the show, winemaker Shane Moore crafts high-quality sparkling wines in an open-air winery. By combining cool-climate Yamhill-Carlton terroir with an early-picking strategy, Moore’s traditional-method sparkling wines emphasize acidity, tension, minerality, and umami character. The Non-Vintage Yamhill Carlton Brut Rosé is a blend of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Pinot Meunier, with aromas of strawberry shortcake and bright nectarine notes.

Gran Moraine has a variety of wine-tasting experiences, from flights paired with black-truffle popcorn and caviar to sparkling-wine-focused brunches.

Where to eat
Fine food with global influences and local ingredients can be found throughout the valley. Anthology offers a lively and interactive 10-course tasting menu experience nightly, Thursday through Sunday. While seated at a counter, guests can watch Chef Chase Williams and Sous Chef Zack Ehrlich prepare seasonal dishes and hear the inspiration behind the preparations, like a farmer’s breakfast-inspired savory egg dish in a hollowed-out eggshell with maple bacon and Fresno chilis.

Inspired by a worldly traveler, the décor at Hayward in Carlton (vibrant textiles and earth-toned ceramics) transports visitors to Tangier. Dishes are full of flavor, like a smoked pork chop with bagna cauda, brussels sprouts, and Meyer lemon. Chef and owner Kari Shaughnessy is a James Beard award semifinalist. Okta Farm & Kitchen in McMinnville offers an approachable tasting menu featuring ingredients cultivated on its Willamette Valley farm.

Where to stay
New boutique hotels and recently renovated resorts are making the Willamette Valley an increasingly comfortable getaway. The Grange Estate, on the same property as the Black Walnut Inn, feels like a Scandinavian farmhouse. Large guest rooms offer approachable, Oregon-style luxury with tiled fireplaces and plush velvet sofas.

The Allison Inn & Spa, with a large spa and indoor swimming pool beneath a large skylight, unveiled brighter social spaces in shades of sage green, burgundy, and blush, inspired by the region’s plants and animals, and a new tasting menu concept at JORY in 2025. The nine-course Native Foods Experience celebrates the indigenous culinary traditions of the Pacific Northwest.

Casey Hatfield-Chiotti is a West Coast-based writer and editor who covers outdoor adventure, design, and family travel. Follow her on Instagram.

Artemis II kicks off a space food revolution

Marina Koren — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Inside a kitchen at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, Xulei Wu has prepared a multicourse meal for my visit. There’s barbecued beef brisket, as well as chicken in salsa, with a tortilla on the side. Creamy macaroni and cheese and braised red cabbage. Cherry and blueberry cobbler for dessert, and hot coffee. The food is artfully arranged on dinnerware bearing the space agency’s famous logo. It’s an appetizing spread, but the dining experience is not quite what the chef intended. “They don’t really have plates in microgravity,” Wu says.

This is 21st-century astronaut food, and it is best enjoyed while levitating in a spaceship, hurtling at thousands of miles an hour, with glorious, otherworldly views. Wu is the manager of NASA’s Space Food Systems lab, which provides catering for cosmic endeavors. Fifteen minutes ago, this meal was sealed in an assortment of airtight pouches, freeze-dried and preserved to perfection. Wu reanimated the contents by adding water and heat, careful not to tear the tops of the packaging all the way off—an astronaut custom, to prevent pieces of trash from floating away.

What does astronaut food taste like?

Making breakfast in space comes with a lot of limitations. We tried making a breakfast taco, as astronauts do aboard the ISS. Here’s what it tasted like.

We’re sitting at the same table where the Artemis II astronauts sampled space-ready dishes, picking favorites to take with them on their historic lunar journey—the first mission of its kind in more than 50 years. They blasted off last week for a 10-day expedition around the moon and back, in the style of the early Apollo missions that preceded the triumphant 1969 moon landing. A high-stakes operation, Artemis II involves new spacecraft and rocket technology that had never carried a human crew before and that required enormous technical preparation and training. And what’s on the menu matters too.

Astronaut food has been a serious subject since the beginning of the space age, due in part to the obvious keeping-people-alive-and-well reasons. One of the first things that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did after touching down on the lunar surface was eat (a meal that included cubed bacon and coffee). “Ground Control permitted the lunar explorers to forego the scheduled rest period, but not that meal,” NASA food scientists wrote in the journal Nutrition Today in 1969. “To walk on the moon, the astronauts needed the energy the food supplied.” Those scientists also understood, as scientists today do, that a variety of flavorful dishes can nourish not only astronauts’ bodies but their minds too, creating a sense of normalcy in conditions that are positively unearthly.

Space fare has improved significantly in the past few decades; no one has to squeeze lukewarm, pureed meat into their mouths from aluminum tubes. “We do have to eat our vegetables even in space, but don't worry, they do give us mac and cheese,” Christina Koch, a mission specialist on Artemis II, told a group of Canadian children on day four of the mission. Indeed, the Artemis II crew set off with the latest dishes on the space food menu and a new kitchen gadget designed to heat their meals.

But beyond the first Artemis missions, scientists and engineers at NASA and other institutions are still experimenting with cosmic cuisine, pushing foods to last longer and laying the groundwork for extraterrestrial farming. They’ll need to whip up new ideas to meet the needs of a grander space vision: a permanent base on the moon, a months-long journey to Mars, a habitat on the red planet. Future astronauts may 3D-print snacks, grow produce in AI-powered greenhouses, and haul buckets of extraterrestrial soil into their indoor farms. Humankind is leaping into what may be the most delicious era in its spacefaring history.

Back at Johnson, I dig in. The mac and cheese in question tastes like the comforting boxed stuff, though much less salty. (Astronauts eat low-sodium diets to protect bone health in microgravity.) I’m most impressed by the instant coffee, which I expected to taste like stale diner coffee, with notes of burnt rubber and disappointment. Instead, it’s smooth and kind of delicious. For a spacefaring civilization with big dreams, coffee is probably going to be important, even mission critical.

On Christmas Day in 1968, the Apollo 8 astronauts, on their way back to Earth after circling the moon, gently knocked their in-flight menu during a live broadcast for all the world to hear. “The food is varied, generally pretty good. If that doesn’t sound like a rousing endorsement, it isn’t,” Mission Commander Frank Borman said. They’d been eating mostly lukewarm compressed cubes of meat, bread, and fruit that, after being rehydrated, tended to taste more like the wrapping than the food. But when the crew opened their holiday dinners, they found a delightful surprise spread of real turkey, brown gravy, and cranberry applesauce—a meal that suggested a tastier future was possible.

Today the pantry on the International Space Station (ISS) is sourced from 200 food and beverage options designed to stay palatable, safe, and nutritious for one to three years. Some cosmic travelers have reported that food tastes different in space; researchers have posited that microgravity can mess with an astronaut’s sense of smell—a key component in perceiving flavor—when bodily fluids float toward the head and cause congestion. Wu’s team surveys all astronauts upon their return about what foods they liked and didn’t like. (It recently discontinued cheese grits after poor reviews.) “It’s mission impossible to establish a standard menu that everybody would love, but there’s always room to improve,” Wu says.

(What toll does spaceflight take on astronauts?)

Bread remains an uncrackable recipe; floating crumbs could mess with spacecraft gadgetry, so astronauts eat tortillas and flatbreads instead. When NASA chefs recently tried to make beef teriyaki, they found that one of their usual preservation processes—thermostabilization, or subjecting food to high heat—turned the meat tough. So they decided to zap the dish with gamma rays, a common technique for killing spoilage-causing microorganisms. But the dish had pineapple, which contains a particular enzyme that the radiation didn’t touch. “The finished product tastes amazing, but two years into shelf life, that enzyme just continues to break down the meat texture,” Wu says. “The beef texture eventually becomes so horrible and disgusting.”

Even though the Artemis II mission is just 10 days, the astronauts sampled all 200 offerings, spread out over four one-hour sessions before their flight, Wu says. Escaping Earth’s gravity demands packing light, and Wu didn’t want to send anything the crewmembers wouldn’t eat on the flight. (Any vegetarians should shoot for the moon instead of the space station; while Artemis astronauts can customize their inventory, ISS residents can’t hoard all the veggie courses.)

Space living doesn’t allow for cooking over an open flame, so the crew will heat up their meals using a new device custom-made for Orion, their tiny, gumdrop-shaped spacecraft. I’m inside the Orion flight simulator at Johnson when Wyeth McKinley, an Artemis crew instructor, arrives with a mock-up version of the food warmer. McKinley looks as if he’s just swiped it from James Bond; from the outside, the food warmer resembles a top-secret briefcase, silver and sleek.

McKinley clicks open the latches to reveal a metallic plate crossed with springy straps on either side. He slips an assortment of packets beneath the straps: tomato basil soup, split pea soup, Indian fish curry, bread pudding. The plate reaches 185 degrees Fahrenheit, and heats food and drink items to 155 to 175 degrees Fahrenheit—a nice upgrade from the Apollo days, when astronauts reheated foods with hot-water guns. Toasty provisions can be ready within 15 minutes, or under an hour if the warmer is stuffed to the max capacity of 12 packets.

The Artemis II crew is using a food warmer shaped like a metal briefcase to heat up their meals. Photos: Chris Gunn

Astronauts can warm up to 12 packages of food, all at the same time, in under an hour.

When NASA began developing the device in 2018, Orion managers planned for the crew to turn on the food warmer for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and keep it stowed the rest of the time, says Paul Boehm, the crew systems manager for Orion. The astronauts, however, wanted snacks whenever the cravings hit. This presented an operational challenge: A perpetually plugged-in warmer eats into the capsule’s power supply, Boehm says, and “when the crew opens it up every time, they introduce heat into the cabin, and we have to cool the cabin.” But engineers made the necessary recalculations, and the crew can fire up the food warmer first thing in the morning and leave it running until lights-out.

Earlier in the mission prep, planners had also suggested, with mass limits for what Orion can carry in mind, that the crew could subsist mostly on food bars that contained a meal’s worth of calories and nutrients, Boehm says. Wu’s team developed bars in several flavors, including ginger vanilla, honey nut, and banana nut, and invited Johnson staff to try them. Taste testers liked them enough but balked at the thought of replacing entire meals with them, Wu says. “Most people would still prefer real foods.”

That will be a prime challenge for deep-space journeys to Mars, which will require shelf stability of five to seven years, says Suresh Pillai, a microbiology professor and director of the National Center for Electron Beam Research at Texas A&M University, which produces thermostabilized foods for NASA. Researchers here are experimenting with another method to preserve taste and quality using beams of electrons. While I’m touring his lab on A&M’s campus, Pillai leads me down to a winding cellar enclosed with cement walls, where fast-moving electrons rush out from a big metal hood in the low ceiling and sterilize food products as they pass on a conveyor belt below. “When you prevent microbial proliferation, you automatically extend the shelf life,” Pillai says. So far, in preliminary experiments, the technique seems to preserve food samples for four years, but more formal experiments will try to push that maximum to seven years.

Back upstairs, the air is scented with something delicious. In an industrial kitchen, undergraduate food-science students, dressed in lab coats and hairnets, weigh portions of hot space food. “Indian fish curry,” one of them explains. In the next decade, lunar explorers might inhale the same aroma inside a cozy moon base. At first, they’ll be out of reach of resupply missions that deliver fresh fruits and vegetables, which space station dwellers say provide “profound psychological benefits.” Eventually, these astronauts will have to live off the land.

(Everyone wants a piece of the moon. What could go wrong?)

Anna-Lisa Paul and Rob Ferl’s biology lab at the University of Florida in Gainesville is sprinkled with tiny green plants with fuzzy leaves and angel-hair stems. They sprout in petri dishes, spin inside a slowly rotating chamber, and rise out of thimble-size pots, the tallest ones ending in delicate white blossoms. Arabidopsis thaliana is an unassuming-looking weed commonly used in plant biology research, but in 2022, the species accomplished a miraculous first for plant life on Earth: It took root in moon material collected during the Apollo missions and grew.

The rocky, dusty surface layer of the moon, known as regolith, is composed of exceptionally sharp and jagged bits of rock. Paul, Ferl, and their team had spent years practicing with artificial regolith designed to mimic its composition. But when they got a chance to use the real stuff—sourced from NASA’s Apollo 11, 12, and 17 mission collections—in 2022, it refused to soak up water. Droplets of liquid sat still on the surface, dusted with fine, extraterrestrial powder, so Paul and Ferl decided to try mixing the soil around.“It crawled up the surface of that stirrer, that little pipette tip, and it looked like something that was alive,” Paul recalls now. “It was very freaky.” When the regolith was sufficiently moistened a few minutes later, the Arabidopsis seeds were tucked in.

Two days later, Paul and Ferl stepped through the door of their growing room and cracked open the universe. “To see all those little green shoots—every seed that we had put in there had grown, every one—that was like, OK, we’re going to Mars, we’re going to the moon,” Paul says. Here was proof that astronauts could take earthly flora into the solar system and start a garden.

Paul and Ferl had previously dispatched Arabidopsis on other cosmic adventures, on NASA space shuttles and the ISS. They learned, by studying its genetic material after it returned to Earth, that plants kind of hate outer space. In microgravity, Arabidopsis activates genes associated with repairing its cell walls, a response that, on the ground, kicks in when the plant is under threat from bacteria or fungi. “If you’re in an environment that is completely outside your experience, you might try things that you think are going to work to make you feel better,” Paul says.

Last year, Ferl made the trip skyward himself, flying on a suborbital Blue Origin mission with tiny greenhouses designed to snapshot the genetic activity of the Arabidopsis seedlings inside. The researchers found that “within minutes, plants are seriously adapting their metabolism,” Ferl says. They reacted differently during each phase of the experience, sensing the specific conditions of launch, weightlessness, and landing.

undefined

In the lunar regolith, Arabidopsis also detected the strangeness. “They were turning on all these genes that are just screaming, I don’t like what I’m growing in,” Paul says. They grew slower than they do in terrestrial soil, and some stayed small while others turned depressingly purple. The shoots growing in soil gathered during Apollo 11 struggled the most, perhaps because the terrain at that landing site was significantly older and more sunblasted than the locations of Apollo 12 and 17.

After removing and analyzing their first batch of moon plants, Paul and Ferl continued to plant seeds in the regolith. Each cycle of plants transformed the material, creating a more Earthlike soil. By the third round, Arabidopsis was nearly thriving. Regolith, it turns out, can become soil when “biology interacts with it,” Paul says. The research behind this discovery has not yet been published, but it has extraordinary implications: If future spacefaring botanists can mitigate the damaging aspects of the moon soil this way, “you can get plants to grow in lunar regolith just fine,” Paul says.

Arabidopsis itself isn’t particularly scrumptious or nutritious. Future space farmers will need to plant more substantial crops—and some labs are already taking steps toward cultivating the universe’s first extraterrestrial farm-to-table operation.

(Here’s how a lab in Antarctica is preparing to grow food on Mars.)

A small garden of sweet potato plants, their young leaves curling around wooden stakes in the soil, fills a refrigerator-size container in Carlos Hotta’s lab at the University of São Paulo in Brazil. One of the pots previously sat in a dark corner of a room for months before moving into the high-tech grow tent, with a shiny, silver interior meant to maximize artificial light, and the plant had seemed perfectly content. “Low light, high light, low water, high water—it’s always growing and trying to conquer everything,” says Hotta, a biochemistry professor. “They’re going to be great for space.”

Hotta is a member of Brazil’s new project on space farming, funded in part by Brazil’s agricultural agency Embrapa and aimed at growing food in alien places and discovering new approaches to earthbound agriculture along the way. Plants have been cultivated in space for human consumption before, including lettuce, cabbage, and kale on the ISS. But the network of Brazilian researchers from more than a dozen institutions want to focus on heartier fare. Chickpeas are protein rich, and sweet potatoes are extremely versatile—every part of the plant is edible, from the leaves and stems to the tuberous roots.

Hotta studies the plant circadian clock, an internal mechanism that is synchronized with environmental changes and helps guide plant physiological responses. By tuning in to this invisible timer, future farmers could encourage productivity and stress tolerance in their crops; they can conduct horticultural care when plants will be most receptive to it, and adjust the artificial environment to better synchronize with those internal rhythms.

Scientists could even genetically modify the circadian clock itself, Hotta says. Plants rely on the mechanism to regulate systems that protect their DNA from the worst of the ultraviolet radiation emitted by the sun. Some plants, for example, absorb less light around noon to reduce their exposure. The sun is far dimmer on Mars, but the red planet lacks a protective ozone layer, which means that the surface is constantly slathered in harmful radiation. Earth plants cultivated on Mars will need to seriously shield themselves. "The idea is to keep systems like DNA repair working for the whole daytime, instead of having them show a peak of activity for a few hours in the day," Hotta says.

undefined

Clinostats simulate microgravity right here on Earth, as researchers experiment on plants that could one day grow in space and on distant planets.

Last year, the Brazil researchers sent sweet potato seedlings and chickpea seeds to the edge of space with Blue Origin, exposing them to several minutes of microgravity (and Katy Perry’s singing). Paulo Hercílio Rodrigues, a professor of flowers at the Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture, has continued that research by conjuring his own pockets of outer space in his lab in Piracicaba, in southeast Brazil, using a machine called a clinostat. The clinostat keeps small growth chambers in a perpetual churn, simulating a microgravity environment for the captive plant tissue.

When Rodrigues and his colleagues subjected baby sweet potato plants to this experience for 30 days, they found that the plants grew thicker stems than their static counterparts. They weren’t more photosynthetically productive, though, which means that in the absence of the familiar pull of gravity, the sweet potatoes may have allocated more energy to fortifying their bodies than feeding themselves. The sweet potatoes also grew well under blue light, suggesting that the wavelength eased some of the plants’ stress, Rodrigues says.

Rodrigues’s lab is filled with dozens of plastic mason jars, foggy and flecked with condensation, containing seedlings of edible crops all growing happily on the only planet they’re supposed to experience. Cosmic farming will require a keen understanding of what crops might need to thrive in alien realms, whether they’re growing inside a fast-moving spaceship, a lunar greenhouse, or a Martian greenhouse. Rodrigues says that experimenting with chickpea and sweet potato seeds in different conditions now—tinkering not only with gravity but also with variables like light, water, nutrition, and humidity as the plants take root and grow—will help future astronauts know what to do to ease the biological homesickness of their crops.

Back in São Paulo, Hotta and I have dinner at A Casa Do Porco, where the head chef, Jefferson Rueda, has been tasked with developing space-friendly recipes using sweet potatoes and chickpeas. Last year, Rueda developed a space-friendly take on a sonho, a Portuguese fried, brioche-like pastry usually filled with cream or dulce de leche and coated with sugar. The experimental version featured sweet potato dough and silky chickpea cream—and, critically, minimal crumbs. Hotta and I feast on some less space-friendly dishes at the restaurant—tuna tartare in coconut milk, oysters in guava sauce, steamed buns with red cabbage and watercress, nettle sorbet with wasabi marshmallow, corn ice cream—that would be rather unwieldy in microgravity. And we discuss the deep future of space cuisine.

Hotta invokes the writer Douglas Adams’s philosophy on the progression of galactic civilizations: Simple survival will dictate food culture first, but eventually, “we will need something else, something that will bring people comfort or bring people together,” Hotta says. Every time a new course arrives, I can’t help picturing astronauts gathered around a table on another world, enjoying a banquet of their own, with some ingredients they carried there with them and others that they grew themselves, far from the warmth of their life-giving star. There won’t be a restaurant on Mars for some time, and that dreamy scene is even a huge leap from what the Artemis II crew are eating as they slingshot around the moon. But as they sit down for dinner in the dusky light of a blue-streaked Martian sunset—a quirk of sunlight filtering through atmospheric dust—those astronauts will probably enjoy some mac and cheese. A cosmic mission isn’t complete without a taste of home.

Why eight hours of sleep may not be enough anymore

Emaan Adeel — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:00:00 GMT

Using a tablet at night may feel like rest, but exposure to light and ongoing stimulation can keep the brain in a state of alertness, even as the body winds down.

New research suggests modern life is disrupting the body's ability to truly rest.

For many people, rest no longer marks the end of the day—it interrupts it. Work slows, notifications quiet, and the body finally stops moving. Yet sleep arrives lightly, if at all, and morning brings the same dull fatigue as the night before.

In sleep laboratories, researchers are seeing a pattern: reduced time spent in slow-wave sleep—the stage most closely linked to cellular repair and metabolic recovery—despite normal total sleep duration. Eight hours in bed no longer guarantees that the body has fully reset.

It’s tempting to frame this as a personal failure: too much screen time, an inability to unplug. But sleep scientists say the problem runs deeper. “You may end your day,” says Orfeu Buxton, a sleep researcher at Pennsylvania State University, “but your brain hasn’t received the hormonal and neural signals that it’s safe to let go—cortisol declining, parasympathetic pathways activating, and the circadian clock shifting fully into night mode.”

In Dopamine Nation, Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke writes that constant digital stimulation pushes the brain’s reward system toward craving, leaving it restless even after the screen goes dark.

Emerging research supports that shift. A 2025 study in Frontiers in Psychiatry found that higher levels of smartphone dependence were strongly associated with poorer sleep quality and greater psychological distress—even among people who deliberately carved out time to rest. The problem isn’t simply that screens push bedtime later. It’s that even when we protect eight hours and the lights go out on schedule, the physiology of restoration may fail to engage.

To understand why that signal is breaking down, researchers are now looking beyond bedtime and into the biology of how the body recognizes that it’s safe to let go.

The stress system is designed to remain active in the presence of unfinished demands. Recovery occurs only after the brain disengages its monitoring systems. When that disengagement doesn’t happen, the body may be inactive, but physiological recovery remains incomplete.

In laboratory settings, that incomplete recovery is measurable. Nighttime cortisol declines more slowly, heart rate variability stays suppressed—signaling reduced parasympathetic activity. Even neuroimaging studies show sustained activation in the brain’s salience network, the circuitry responsible for detecting threat and unresolved demands, even in the absence of immediate stimuli.

(Urgency culture might lead you to burnout. How can you combat it?)

Modern digital life makes that neurological shift harder to achieve. “When we’re caught in the digital vortex, we’re in a constant state of reactivity,” says Lembke, prolonging vigilance even after work has stopped.

Buxton describes this state as “human fracking.” The digital economy, he says, is built to extract attention through high-pressure engagement that is both addictive and exhausting — our vigilance becoming the resource being mined. The consequence is not just later bedtimes, but disruption of what researchers now call “sleep health”—timing, regularity, and depth, not merely hours logged.

Artificial light at night does more than delay circadian rhythms. It also activates non-circadian alerting pathways in the brain, increasing cortisol and temporarily masking sleepiness. A person may feel alert enough to keep scrolling even as homeostatic sleep pressure builds beneath the surface. When notifications, feeds, and unresolved demands repeatedly pull attention back into circulation, the nervous system receives no unambiguous signal that the threat-scanning phase has ended.

Sleep is gated by time. The brain follows an internal schedule that expects sleep during a specific biological window. Outside that window, sleep becomes harder to enter and easier to disrupt.

Circadian rhythms set that internal timing. You can be in bed at a reasonable hour while your brain is still operating in “day mode.” What many people interpret as insomnia is often mistimed sleep: the clock says it’s late, but the body has not yet entered its biological night.

“When we talk about feeling rested, when you sleep matters as much as how long you sleep,” says Kristen Knutson, a sleep researcher at Northwestern University. Sleep taken at the wrong biological time, she explains, is often shallower and less restorative.

(When you go to bed may matter more than how long you sleep.)

One common pattern is social jetlag: waking early on weekdays, shifting later on weekends, then resetting again. Biologically, it resembles crossing time zones every few days. The clock never stabilizes. Many people aren’t failing to sleep enough; they’re trying to sleep while their biology is still misaligned. Over time, that repeated misalignment has been associated with increased cardiometabolic risk.

Sleep unfolds through a tightly timed hormonal sequence. Cortisol—the body’s primary alertness hormone—peaks before waking and declines toward night, opening a window for slow-wave sleep, the stage most closely linked to cellular repair and metabolic recovery. But emerging evidence suggests that even subtle disruptions to that evening decline—from stress or late light exposure—can blunt slow-wave intensity without shortening total sleep time, altering restoration in ways researchers are still working to understand fully.

Slow-wave sleep also supports the brain’s glymphatic system, which clears metabolic waste accumulated during waking hours. When cortisol remains elevated and deep sleep is disrupted, that clearance becomes less efficient—another reason sleep can feel unrefreshing even when duration looks adequate.

(Your brain ‘washes’ itself at night. Sleep aids may get in the way.)

Light does more than reset the clock. Signals from the retina not only shift circadian timing but also activate alerting circuits. As Buxton explains, evening artificial light can both delay sleep phase and increase arousal, meaning the same screen glow that pushes bedtime later may also keep the brain physiologically vigilant.

Wendy Troxel, senior behavioral scientist at RAND and board-certified in behavioral sleep medicine, argues the deeper issue isn’t stress alone but the erosion of clear psychological boundaries. “I may be asleep, but my mind never truly shuts off,” her patients tell her. Without predictable cues that the day has ended, the brain never fully registers safety. Sleep fragments, slow-wave and REM stages become thin, and recovery depends less on hours logged than on whether the nervous system is allowed to stand down.

Lembke argues that constant, high-intensity digital input reshapes not only attention but also expectations. Much of what keeps us scrolling is not pleasure itself but the brain’s constant search for relevance: What’s next? What matters? Who needs me? When that stream stops, the loss is not only stimulation but orientation. The mind, accustomed to continuous cues of urgency and feedback, can experience quiet as dislocation rather than relief.

Research suggests restoring sensitivity is less about eliminating screens than about rebuilding clear psychological endpoints. Buxton points to “detachment”—the felt sense that demands have truly ended—as a predictor of sleep recovery.

(There's a better way to wake up. Here's what experts advise.)

Researchers say that the process doesn’t require perfect habits, but it does depend on clearer boundaries. Consistent sleep and wake times help stabilize the circadian system. Reducing evening bright light exposure allows cortisol to decline and melatonin to rise. And small, repeatable cues—closing a laptop, dimming lights, stepping away from notifications—can act as signals that the day is complete.

When that signal is consistent, vigilance subsides, parasympathetic tone strengthens, and the brain’s reward system gradually recalibrates.

My sleepless night in a chimpanzee nest

Robert Moor — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:00:00 GMT

A chimpanzee female (<i>Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii</i>) sleeps in a nest built in a tree in Uganda's Kibale National Park. The origins of human evolution might lie, in part, in the ancient transition from dozing in trees to snuggling in a group on the ground.

Unraveling the mystery of human evolution, thirty-five feet in the air.

One night in the sparse forests of eastern Tanzania, I stood in the viridian twilight and watched a troop of chimpanzees make their beds. Standing in a tangle of underbrush, I listened to the sounds of rustling as the dark, distant bodies deftly wove their nests, rapidly bending and tucking the springy branches—a flurry of haphazard-looking movement that resulted, within minutes, in something startlingly intricate, much as a magician’s frantic gestures give birth (et voilà!) to a balloon animal.

I was visiting the research camp, known as the Greater Mahale Ecosystem Research and Conservation area (GMERC), which was run by a primatologist named Fiona Stewart. Among her colleagues, Stewart was revered for an audacious series of experiments she once conducted in Fongoli, Senegal. Curious to know why chimpanzees prefer to sleep in nests, she spent five full nights sleeping in a chimpanzee nest. Then she spent five more nights sleeping on the ground, without any sleeping bag or tent. Throughout the night, she took her temperature, counted her insect bites, and marked down how many times her sleep was disturbed. In effect, she turned her body into a scientific instrument.

What Stewart discovered is that in the nest, she was woken up far less often than on the ground, where roaming animals frequently startled her. She also discovered that she was bitten by fewer insects in the nest, even though mosquitoes are perfectly capable of flying that high; she theorized that the broken branches emitted a scent that acted as a natural insect repellant. A nest, in other words, is an intricately engineered sleep machine. Indeed, since our arboreal ancestors also built nests, the aerial sleeping platform may well be the very earliest form of human technology—a technology older than humanity itself.

Watching the chimps bunk down for the evening, I felt a sudden urge to join them. I was curious if, like Fiona, sleeping in a nest might teach me something about human evolution that my mind, in reading stacks of research and conjecture, had missed. Plus, I was just curious to see what it felt like.

I ran this unusual proposition by Fiona.

“I don’t see why not,” she said. After all, chimpanzees abandon their nests after only one night. (Making a new nest each evening, Fiona informed me, is only a little bit more onerous to them than making the bed each morning is for us. They prefer fresh nests, which, being made of green branches, are stronger, safer and, presumably, more comfortable to sleep in.) She assured me I wouldn’t be bothering them, only inconveniencing myself.

(Read Jane Goodall's iconic 1963 article on the chimpanzees of Gombe Stream Game Reserve)

One of the great mysteries of human evolution resides in a dark, amnesiac realm: the enigma of sleep. Studies show that getting a better night’s sleep improves our memory, creativity, immune response, metabolism, and emotional regulation. And yet, spending eight hours or so each night in a state of bodily paralysis and mental hallucination leaves us open to attack, both from predators and from other humans. And the deeper we sleep, the deeper the risk. One of the peculiarities of our species is that we sleep for fewer hours overall than any other primate, but we spend more time in the phase of deep sleep known as REM, when the body is immobilized. Evolutionarily speaking, this is somewhat baffling. ‘Sleeping like a log,’ as my grandpa used to say, would have left our early ground-sleeping ancestors profoundly vulnerable to attack. A nest lifts the sleeper above any ground-dwelling predators and provides her with a kind of natural alarm system; any large predator that attempts to sneak up on her will jostle the branch, startling her awake. On solid ground, this alarm system is disabled. So how, evolutionary biologists wonder, did humans come to feel safe enough to sleep so deeply on the ground, surrounded by predators?

(Meet Tatu and Loulis—the last of the 'talking' chimpanzees)

The anthropologist David Samson has dedicated much of his life to solving this riddle. He began his career by studying the sleeping habits of chimpanzees; his fieldwork included climbing into 72 nests in order to study their construction. He then moved onto orangutans, and then human hunter gatherers, namely the Hadza people of Tanzania. In his papers, he highlights the fact that building nests was a major step in the evolution of apes (compared to, say, monkeys, who sleep on bare branches, and who, perhaps not coincidentally, exhibit the skittery irritability of the perpetually sleep-deprived). But early humans, by abandoning nests and learning to sleep on solid ground, made an even greater breakthrough.

The most common explanation for the origins of human ground-sleeping is that by that point in our evolutionary history we had already mastered fire, which would have provided heat and deterred predators. But this theory faces a major challenge: wielding fire undoubtedly allowed us to become a smarter species, but how did humans become smart enough to master fire? Anthropologists sometimes refer to this Catch-22 as the “gray ceiling,” a reference to the brain’s gray matter. Samson suggests an elegant solution: it could be that mastering the art of sleeping on the ground, over the course of many generations, gave us the increased cognition necessary to master fire—among a thousand other innovations unique to our species of ape.

Still, the central question remains: without fire, how did the earliest humans manage to leave the nest?

Samson has a theory about that, too.

The following evening, I packed my gear and hiked with my husband, Remi, down to a nearby river, about 30 minutes outside of camp, where there was a Brachystegia tree with a big, fresh, comfortable-looking nest that an adult male chimp had built the night before. With relatively little effort, I managed to anchor a climbing rope to a branch just above the nest, which meant that all I needed to do was to climb up the rope, using mechanical ascenders, and then lower myself into it. In theory at least, it was dead easy.

With us that day was Pascal Gagneux, a lean, leathery, alert-eyed, voluminously talkative evolutionary biologist. During one phase of his research he had climbed into more than 300 chimp nests to collect samples of their DNA. Pascal gave me three warnings: First, he warned that, as I ascended, I should take care not to jostle the nest too hard, or else it could “explode” in my face. Second, he pointed out that chimpanzees frequently soil their nests in the morning, so I should be sure to check it for droppings. Third, he said that while I was up there, I should be ready to come down at a moment’s notice. It was not likely, but it was possible that a chimp might not be happy to see me up in their domain. He said that one time while he was climbing into a nest, he had encountered a female chimpanzee carrying the corpse of her recently deceased baby. The mother, in a fit of grief and rage, screamed, threw the baby at him, and then fled.

(These slumbering fish may offer clues to the origins of sleep)

While I prepared my climbing gear, Remi began unpacking the rest of our stuff. He was acting as my support crew for the night, and was armed with a walkie talkie should anything go wrong. Pascal warned Remi that the area was frequented by lions, leopards, and hyenas. Before leaving, he told us a story about a local man, the grandfather of a staff member at the research camp, who had been attacked by a hyena and had half of his face ripped off. “So all his life, to eat, he had to hold one hand against the missing half, to keep the food in,” he said.

Never in all of our years traveling together have I seen Remi set up our tent so quickly.

As the daylight began to dim, I attached my ascenders and inch-wormed up the rope. The nest sat about 35 feet off the ground. I paused for a moment just below it to admire its construction. It resembled a small green cloud. The branches had been woven into an ovoid shape, then lined with an extra layer of fresh leaves. I was somewhat humbled to realize that, if asked to, I, with all of my human intelligence, would have no idea how to replicate it.

Once I was above the nest, I switched over to my rappel device and lowered myself down into it. It sank beneath my weight, with a sickening softness. For a moment, I worried I would fall right through the bottom. But then the layers of branches compressed into a kind of net, gained tension, and held me. I slacked out my rope completely, so that all of my weight was resting on the nest. It was comfortable, in a tenuous kind of way. The only problem was that my legs—those wonderful, quintessentially human appendages—are much longer than a chimp’s legs. When chimps sleep, they tend to lie on their backs and fold their short legs up, frog-like, with their heels near their crotch. I was too tall and too inflexible to do that, so my legs dangled in the open air. The blood began to pool in my feet. After only a few minutes, it was clear that this would be a very uncomfortable night.

Down below, in the tent, I could hear Remi inventorying all of his cozy accouterments.

“Okay, I’ve got my pillow, I’ve got my sleeping mat, I’ve got my sleeping bag…” he muttered to himself. A few minutes later, I heard him sighing contentedly as he settled into his soft, crinkly, synthetic little nest. Then he went quiet.

(Exploring the mesmerizing physics of animal locomotion)

Night spread; the sky turned lilac, then indigo, and a single fiery orange star appeared through the branches.

Down below, I heard Remi gasp.

“Oh my god,” he said. “The ground is alive.” He’d unzipped the door to his tent for a moment, to adjust something, and within that brief window of time, dozens of bugs had gotten in; I could hear him down there, hunting down the infiltrators. “They’re everywhere!” he yelled, slapping the sides of the tent.

From her studies, Fiona concluded that the relative absence of creepy-crawlies was the biggest reason chimpanzees build nests. When she slept on the bare ground, she found that just after sunset it became a single crawling, slithering, hopping carpet of insects, which continually interrupted her sleep. “It was unbearable,” she said.

Fifteen minutes later, Remi, having evicted the last remaining insects, was softly snoring. For the next few hours, I lay there in the dark, growing increasingly bored and miserable. My dangling legs caused my lower back to arch, which caused it to cramp up, so I tried propping them up on a branch, but each time I drifted off to sleep, they would slip off and I would jolt awake with that terrible plummeting sensation familiar to anyone who has tried to sleep on an airplane. This phenomenon, known as a “hypnic jerk,” is surprisingly common; it is estimated that 70 percent of people experience it at some point. It might well be an ancient holdover from our arboreal past, a time when the act of sleeping and a fear of falling were deeply intertwined.

Hours passed, a small eternity. I fished out my phone to check the time, thinking it must be only a few hours from dawn, at which point I could climb down and stretch out on the ground.

The clock read 11:04 p.m.

By this point, I had been aloft for five hours. My lower back was already so badly cramped that I was afraid I would soon become trapped in the nest. What’s more, every time I shifted my weight or repositioned my legs in an attempt to find a more comfortable position, I could feel the twigs below me sproinging loose, which meant that my sleeping platform was gradually disintegrating; I recalled Pascal’s warning that with too much jostling, the nest could simply explode.

Utterly defeated, I heaved myself upright, crawled out, rappelled down to the ground, and, glancing about warily for hyenas, slipped into the tent beside Remi. My camp-bed—nothing more than a stinky old sleeping bag and a mouse-chewed foam pad—suddenly felt like the pinnacle of human innovation.

(Inside the hunt for the 'other humans')

Fire, it turns out, is not as essential to sleeping comfortably outdoors as it might seem. Studies of the Hadza, a group of modern hunter-gatherers living in the Central Rift Valley, show that what seems to most reliably ward off lions are large numbers of humans in a tight formation, ideally in a hut or fenced-in area, with at least one individual serving as a sentinel in shifts throughout the night. Samson believes our early ancestors learned to sleep in precisely this manner around 1.8 million years ago, which is what allowed us to safely leave the nest. If true, this would make literal the maxim, put forward by Martin Nowak and Roger Highfield, that life is not just a “struggle for existence”; it was also a “snuggle for existence.”

This theory meshes nicely with other recent findings in evolutionary science, which emphasize the necessity of cooperation among even the earliest human ancestors. In 2021, the paleoanthropologist Jeremy DeSilva published a book entitled First Steps. While studying various hominin fossils around the world, he had noticed that they often showed signs of injury. (Lucy, for example, likely had both an injured back and an infected femur.) This was not surprising; sprinting away from predators on two spindly legs is inherently risky. What surprised DeSilva was how often those same injured bones—what in many cases should have been life-ending injuries—had healed. In order to survive, DeSilva surmises, our early ancestors would have needed friends and family members to help care for them when injured. We could not afford to be lone wolves or petty tyrants. “Bipedalism in an overly aggressive ape with purely selfish tendencies and a low tolerance for other group members would have been a recipe for extinction,” he writes.

Cooperation functions as a kind of evolutionary skeleton key, unlocking many of the constraints on the growth of human intelligence. Social sleeping may have given us that key. It would have created a feedback loop between increased group cohesion, increased emotional regulation, and increased cognitive capacity: in other words, we got calmer, kinder, and smarter, the one feeding into the next in a virtuous circle. It also would have created a negative selective pressure against psychopathically dominant individuals, who couldn’t be trusted to watch one another’s backs. Nestled together like a pack of dogs, dreaming alongside one another, early humans would have quickly become tightly bonded in ways no other apes are.

Once individuals or families cohere into tribes, their collective abilities mushroom. The invention of cooperative parenting, for example—where extended family and community members occasionally pitch in to help with the burden of child-rearing, a practice human communities almost universally share, but chimpanzees altogether lack—allowed mothers to participate in more aspects of social life and be more productive while still nursing their infants. It also allowed those infants to explore, play, and learn from various adults, before finally setting about the hard work of gathering food for themselves.

Indeed one of my favorite theories of the origin of language is that it emerged not among adults, but among children, who had both open minds and free time, allowing them to experiment with sounds until they began to formulate humanity’s first words. Once language was invented—once our thoughts and dreams could be shared to create entire conceptual worlds—humanity acquired a power to coordinate our actions and achieve complex tasks no other animal could even imagine. We became, in the words of the anthropologist Loren Eiseley, “a dream animal.”

Robert Moor is the bestselling author of On Trails and In Trees. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New York Times, Outside, Emergence, Granta, GQ, and n+1, among other publications. He lives in Halfmoon Bay, British Columbia.

Learn how to find Polaris, our North Star

Stephanie Vermillion — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 11:00:00 GMT

National Geographic's Wonder Lessons will teach you how to navigate the stars, spot cloud types, recognize common trees, and identify different kinds of rocks. Today, we're learning how to find the North Star.

https://interactives.natgeofe.com/high-touch/ngm-2604-wonder-nav/builds/main/html/_graphic5.html

Yesterday you learned how to find the Big Dipper. Tonight let’s find one of the most important stars in our northern sky: Polaris, also known as the North Star.

Polaris lies in the direction of true geographic north, roughly above Earth’s North Pole, and it stays close to the same spot all year.

Look for this star in the northern sky.

https://interactives.natgeofe.com/high-touch/ngm-2604-wonder-fact-box/builds/main/html/_graphic3.html

While Polaris isn’t the brightest star in the sky, it is visible to the naked eye, even in light-polluted cities. And Polaris is invaluable because it serves as a natural compass. See if you can find Polaris on our map below.

https://interactives.natgeofe.com/high-touch/ngm-2604-q1-wonder/builds/main/html/_graphic22.html

Star maps: Matthew W. Chwastyk, NG Staff.
Sources: Tycho Catalog Skymap, NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

This once-lawless UK island is now a place to disconnect

Freya Bromley — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 08:00:00 GMT

Lundy sits in the Bristol Channel and its name is thought to mean ‘puffin island’ in Old Norse.

The remote island of Lundy, off the coast of North Devon, offers the chance to disconnect — and shows Freya Bromley why isolation can be a good thing.

This article was produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).

‘Lundy high, it’ll be dry. Lundy low, it’ll be snow. Lundy plain, it’ll be rain. Lundy in haze, fine for days.’ My friend Kirstie taught me this rhyme in 2022 as we sat on Hartland beach in North Devon, looking towards an island in the Atlantic. From that distance, Lundy was just a smudge on the horizon. Kirstie grew up in nearby Bideford and told me stories of the island’s puffins and remote pub that never shuts. I found myself drawn to the idea of a place where the rest of the world simply stops at its shores. That afternoon, we planned our first visit together — now it’s an annual tradition.

Lundy is three miles long, half a mile wide and 12 miles off the coast of England. It’s one of the UK’s most remote inhabited islands — continue west and the next land mass is Canada. There are no roads, no cars and therefore no pollution. There are no street lights and the electricity turns off at midnight, plunging the island into a kind of darkness that’s almost extinct on the mainland. Constellations spill across the sky and the evening orchestra is amplified: wind, waves and the rasping cries of Manx shearwaters that once made seafarers think islands like Lundy were haunted. With sparse internet and phone signal, it’s like the world vanishes. Lundy offers a rare peace.

Getting there is part of the adventure. In winter, a helicopter makes the seven-minute flight, while in summer, the MS Oldenburg completes the two-hour crossing from Bideford or Ilfracombe. The Bristol Channel is unpredictable and crossings can be cancelled. In 2024, we were temporarily stranded.

The landscape is windswept. In the deepest valley is a wooded copse, but most of the island is salt-lashed with little vegetation over hip-height. Above the harbour is a cluster of granite buildings: a church, pub, shop and just 23 holiday properties, from fisherman’s huts to radio rooms.

There are no roads and no cars. The electricity turns off at midnight, plunging Lundy into a kind of darkness that’s almost extinct on the mainland.

Being so remote, days revolve around simple pleasures. On our last trip, we spent one afternoon on the pebble beach eating oranges, another taking a picnic to the crumbling quarry ruins to the east, where wild ponies took an interest in our pasties. You can walk the whole island in a day, so we usually dedicate afternoons to different corners: the westward cliffs of Jenny’s Cove, looking down on a shipwreck; Long Roost’s abandoned copper mine.

Every Thursday, the island’s wardens host a nature talk in the Marisco Tavern, Lundy’s pub. It’s the only building on the island to have lighting after the generators stop and it never closes, serving as a sanctuary in storms. Visitors gather in the wood-panelled bar to hear about conservation projects. What makes Lundy remarkable isn’t just its isolation, but what that isolation enables.

Being so self-contained, Lundy is the perfect testing ground for ecological interventions. Every variable can be controlled — grazing patterns, visitor access — to see how the ecosystem responds. Rats were eradicated in 2009 and seabird colonies now thrive. There were five puffins on Lundy before this effort; by 2023, the population had grown to 1,335. Walk to the Old Battery in spring and you may spot them waddling between burrows. Conservation here is grassroots; many people volunteer to do practical work during their holidays. For 25 years, many have been line-searching hillsides for invasive rhododendron seedlings that were introduced in the 1920s and once threatened endemic plants such as the yellow-flowering Lundy cabbage. Where dense, dark canopies prevented anything from growing, native plants now thrive.

One evening at the Marisco, Tara McEvoy-Wilding, the assistant warden, invited us to join a bird-ringing project the next morning. “A lot of places have lost any sense of community,” she told me, explaining why she enjoys living on the island. “I like that I know all my neighbours and there’s never anywhere pressing you’ve got to be.” Tara’s right that time seems different on Lundy. It’s that feeling of being both away from everything and truly connected to what matters most that first captured my heart.

Freya Bromley is a writer who lives in London. Her upcoming novel A Real Piece of Work is set in her beloved Lundy (June 2026).

Published in the April 2026 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK).

To subscribe to National Geographic Traveller (UK) magazine click here. (Available in select countries only).

We depend on plastic. Now we’re drowning in it.

Laura Parker, Randy Olson — Wed, 16 May 2018 04:01:57 GMT

This story originally published in the June 2018 issue of National Geographic magazine. See more digitized stories from our archives here.

If plastic had been invented when the Pilgrims sailed from Plymouth, England, to North America—and the Mayflower had been stocked with bottled water and plastic-wrapped snacks—their plastic trash would likely still be around, four centuries later.

If the Pilgrims had been like many people today and simply tossed their empty bottles and wrappers over the side, Atlantic waves and sunlight would have worn all that plastic into tiny bits. And those bits might still be floating around the world’s oceans today, sponging up toxins to add to the ones already in them, waiting to be eaten by some hapless fish or oyster, and ultimately perhaps by one of us.

We should give thanks that the Pilgrims didn’t have plastic, I thought recently as I rode a train to Plymouth along England’s south coast. I was on my way to see a man who would help me make sense of the whole mess we’ve made with plastic, especially in the ocean.

Because plastic wasn’t invented until the late 19th century, and production really only took off around 1950, we have a mere 9.2 billion tons of the stuff to deal with. Of that, more than 6.9 billion tons have become waste. And of that waste, a staggering 6.3 billion tons never made it to a recycling bin—a figure that stunned the scientists who crunched the numbers in 2017.

No one knows how much unrecycled plastic waste ends up in the ocean, Earth’s last sink. In 2015, Jenna Jambeck, a University of Georgia engineering professor, caught everyone’s attention with a rough estimate: between 5.3 million and 14 million tons each year just from coastal regions. Most of it isn’t thrown off ships, she and her colleagues say, but is dumped carelessly on land or in rivers, mostly in Asia. It’s then blown or washed into the sea. Imagine five plastic grocery bags stuffed with plastic trash, Jambeck says, sitting on every foot of coastline around the world—that would correspond to about 8.8 million tons, her middle-of-the-road estimate of what the ocean gets from us annually. It’s unclear how long it will take for that plastic to completely biodegrade into its constituent molecules. Estimates range from 450 years to never.

Meanwhile, ocean plastic is estimated to kill millions of marine animals every year. Nearly 700 species, including endangered ones, are known to have been affected by it. Some are harmed visibly—strangled by abandoned fishing nets or discarded six-pack rings. Many more are probably harmed invisibly. Marine species of all sizes, from zooplankton to whales, now eat microplastics, the bits smaller than one-fifth of an inch across. On Hawaii’s Big Island, on a beach that seemingly should have been pristine—no paved road leads to it—I walked ankle-deep through microplastics. They crunched like Rice Krispies under my feet. After that, I could understand why some people see ocean plastic as a looming catastrophe, worth mentioning in the same breath as climate change. At a global summit in Nairobi last December, the head of the United Nations Environment Programme spoke of an “ocean Armageddon.”

And yet there’s a key difference: Ocean plastic is not as complicated as climate change. There are no ocean trash deniers, at least so far. To do something about it, we don’t have to remake our planet’s entire energy system.

“This isn’t a problem where we don’t know what the solution is,” says Ted Siegler, a Vermont resource economist who has spent more than 25 years working with developing nations on garbage. “We know how to pick up garbage. Anyone can do it. We know how to dispose of it. We know how to recycle.” It’s a matter of building the necessary institutions and systems, he says—ideally before the ocean turns, irretrievably and for centuries to come, into a thin soup of plastic.

In Plymouth, under the gray gloom of an English autumn, Richard Thompson waited in a yellow slicker outside Plymouth University’s Coxside Marine Station, at the edge of the harbor. A lean man of 54, with a smooth pate rimmed with gray hair, Thompson was headed for an ordinary career as a marine ecologist in 1993—he was working on a Ph.D. on limpets and microalgae that grow on coastal rocks—when he participated in his first beach cleanup, on the Isle of Man. While other volunteers zoomed in on the plastic bottles and bags and nets, Thompson focused on the small stuff, the tiny particles that lay underfoot, ignored, at the high tide line. At first he wasn’t even sure they were plastic. He had to consult forensic chemists to confirm it.

There was a real mystery to be solved back then, at least in academic circles: Scientists wondered why they weren’t finding even more plastic in the sea. World production has increased exponentially—from 2.3 million tons in 1950, it grew to 162 million in 1993 and to 448 million by 2015—but the amount of plastic drifting on the ocean and washing up on beaches, alarming as it was, didn’t seem to be rising as fast. “That begs the question: Where is it?” Thompson said. “We can’t establish harm to the environment unless we know where it is.”

In the years since his first beach cleanup, Thompson has helped provide the beginnings of an answer: The missing plastic is getting broken into pieces so small they’re hard to see. In a 2004 paper, Thompson coined the term “microplastics” for these small bits, predicting—accurately, as it turned out—that they had “potential for large-scale accumulation” in the ocean.

When we met in Plymouth last fall, Thompson and two of his students had just completed a study that indicated it’s not just waves and sunlight that break down plastic. In lab tests, they’d watched amphipods of the species Orchestia gammarellus—tiny shrimplike crustaceans that are common in European coastal waters—devour pieces of plastic bags and determined they could shred a single bag into 1.75 million microscopic fragments. The little creatures chewed through plastic especially fast, Thompson’s team found, when it was coated with the microbial slime that is their normal food. They spat out or eventually excreted the plastic bits.

Microplastics have been found everywhere in the ocean that people have looked, from sediments on the deepest seafloor to ice floating in the Arctic—which, as it melts over the next decade, could release more than a trillion bits of plastic into the water, according to one estimate. On some beaches on the Big Island of Hawaii, as much as 15 percent of the sand is actually grains of microplastic. Kamilo Point Beach, the one I walked on, catches plastic from the North Pacific gyre, the trashiest of five swirling current systems that transport garbage around the ocean basins and concentrate it in great patches. At Kamilo Point the beach is piled with laundry baskets, bottles, and containers with labels in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, English, and occasionally, Russian. On Henderson Island, an uninhabited coral island in the South Pacific, researchers have found an astonishing volume of plastic from South America, Asia, New Zealand, Russia, and as far away as Scotland.

As Thompson and I talked about all this, a day boat called the Dolphin was carrying us through a light chop in the Sound, off Plymouth. Thompson reeled out a fine-mesh net called a manta trawl, usually used for studying plankton. We were close to the spot where, a few years earlier, other researchers had collected 504 fish of 10 species and given them to Thompson. Dissecting the fish, he was surprised to find microplastics in the guts of more than one-third of them. The finding made international headlines.

After we’d steamed along for a while, Thompson reeled the manta trawl back in. There was a smattering of colored plastic confetti at the bottom. Thompson himself doesn’t worry much about microplastics in his fish and chips—there’s little evidence yet that they pass from the gut of a fish into the flesh we actually eat. He worries more about the things that none of us can see—the chemicals added to plastics to give them desirable properties, such as malleability, and the even tinier nanoplastics that microplastics presumably degrade into. Those might pass into the tissues of fish and humans.

(We know plastic is harming marine life. What about us?)

“We do know the concentrations of chemicals at the time of manufacture in some cases are very high,” Thompson said. “We don’t know how much additive is left in the plastic by the time it becomes bite-size to a fish.

“Nobody has found nanoparticles in the environment—they’re below the level of detection for analytical equipment. People think they are out there. They have the potential to be sequestered in tissue, and that could be a game changer.”

Thompson is careful not to get ahead of the science on his subject. He’s far from an alarmist—but he’s also convinced that plastic trash in the ocean is far more than an aesthetic problem. “I don’t think we should be waiting for a key finding of whether or not fish are hazardous to eat,” he said. “We have enough evidence to act.”

How did we get here? When did the dark side of the miracle of plastic first show itself? It’s a question that can be asked about many of the marvels of our technological world. Since helping the Allies win World War II—think of nylon parachutes or lightweight airplane parts—plastics have transformed all our lives as few other inventions have, mostly for the better. They’ve eased travel into space and revolutionized medicine. They lighten every car and jumbo jet today, saving fuel—and pollution. In the form of clingy, light-as-air wraps, they extend the life of fresh food. In airbags, incubators, helmets, or simply by delivering clean drinking water to poor people in those now demonized disposable bottles, plastics save lives daily.

In one of their early applications, they saved wildlife. In the mid-1800s, piano keys, billiard balls, combs, and all manner of trinkets were made of a scarce natural material: elephant ivory. With the elephant population at risk and ivory expensive and scarce, a billiards company in New York City offered a $10,000 reward to anyone who could come up with an alternative.

As Susan Freinkel tells the tale in her book, Plastic: A Toxic Love Story, an amateur inventor named John Wesley Hyatt took up the challenge. His new material, celluloid, was made of cellulose, the polymer found in all plants. Hyatt’s company boasted that it would eliminate the need “to ransack the Earth in pursuit of substances which are constantly growing scarcer.” Besides sparing at least some elephants, celluloid also helped change billiards from solely an aristocratic pastime to one that working people play in bars.

A Brief History of How Plastic Has Changed Our World

We’re addicted to plastic. But how did the world become so dependent on it in the first place?

That’s a trivial example of a profound revolution ushered in by plastic—an era of material abundance. The revolution accelerated in the early 20th century, once plastics began to be made from the same stuff that was giving us abundant, cheap energy: petroleum. Oil companies had waste gases like ethylene coming out the stacks of their refineries. Chemists discovered they could use those gases as building blocks, or monomers, to create all sorts of novel polymers—polyethylene terephthalate, for example, or PET—instead of working only with polymers that already existed in nature. A world of possibilities opened up. Anything and everything could be made of plastic, and so it was, because plastics were cheap.

They were so cheap, we began to make things we never intended to keep. In 1955 Life magazine celebrated the liberation of the American housewife from drudgery. Under the headline “Throwaway Living,” a photograph showed a family flinging plates, cups, and cutlery into the air. The items would take 40 hours to clean, the text noted—“except that no housewife need bother.” When did plastics start to show their dark side? You might say it was when the junk in that photo hit the ground.

Six decades later, roughly 40 percent of the now more than 448 million tons of plastic produced every year is disposable, much of it used as packaging intended to be discarded within minutes after purchase. Production has grown at such a breakneck pace that virtually half the plastic ever manufactured has been made in the past 15 years. Last year the Coca-Cola Company, perhaps the world’s largest producer of plastic bottles, acknowledged for the first time just how many it makes: 128 billion a year. Nestlé, PepsiCo, and others also churn out torrents of bottles.

The growth of plastic production has far outstripped the ability of waste management to keep up: That’s why the oceans are under assault. “It’s not surprising that we broke the system,” Jambeck says. “That kind of increase would break any system not prepared for it.” In 2013 a group of scientists issued a new assessment of throwaway living. Writing in Nature magazine, they declared that disposable plastic should be classified, not as a housewife’s friend, but as a hazardous material.

In recent years the surge in production has been driven largely by the expanded use of disposable plastic packaging in the growing economies of Asia—where garbage collection systems may be underdeveloped or nonexistent. In 2010, according to an estimate by Jambeck, half the world’s mismanaged plastic waste was generated by just five Asian countries: China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka.

“Let’s say you recycle 100 percent in all of North America and Europe,” says Ramani Narayan, a chemical engineering professor at Michigan State University who also works in his native India. “You still would not make a dent on the plastics released into the oceans. If you want to do something about this, you have to go there, to these countries, and deal with the mismanaged waste.”

Recology’s largest San Francisco recycling plant handles 500 to 600 tons daily. One of the few plants in the U.S. that accept shopping bags, it has more than doubled the tonnage it recycles in the past 20 years. The conveyor belt is carrying mixed plastic to an optical sorter.

Nestlé Waters, which supplies 11 percent of the world’s bottled water, says it has reduced the plastic in its half-liter bottles by 62 percent since 1994. The Poland Spring plant in Hollis, Maine, is the company’s largest in North America.

The Pasig River once flowed majestically through downtown Manila, capital of the Philippines, and emptied into pristine Manila Bay. It was a treasured waterway and civic point of pride. It’s now listed among the top 10 rivers in the world that convey plastic waste to the sea. As many as 72,000 tons flow downstream each year, mostly during the monsoon. In 1990 the Pasig was declared biologically dead.

The Pasig River Rehabilitation Commission, established in 1999, is working to clean up the river, with some signs of success. Jose Antonio Goitia, the commission’s executive director, says he is optimistic that the Pasig could be restored someday, although he acknowledges he has no easy way of doing that. “Maybe the best thing to do is ban plastic bags,” he says.

The remaining challenges are clearly visible every day. The river is fed by 51 tributaries, some of them overflowing with plastic waste from squatter settlements that cantilever precariously over creek banks. A tributary near Chinatown, where rickety shanties are wedged between modern buildings, is so choked with plastic debris you can walk across it, forgoing the footbridge. Manila Bay’s beaches, once recreational respites for greater Manila’s 13 million residents, are littered with garbage, much of it plastic. Last fall Break Free From Plastic, a coalition including Greenpeace and other groups, cleaned a beach on Freedom Island, which is advertised as an ecotourism district; volunteers picked up 54,260 pieces of plastic, from shoes to food containers. By the time I visited a few weeks later, the beach was littered again with bottles, wrappers, and shopping bags.

The scene in Manila is typical of large, overcrowded urban centers across Asia. The Philippines is a densely populated nation of 105 million people that is still struggling with the most basic public health issues, including waterborne diseases such as typhoid and bacterial diarrhea. It’s no surprise that it has trouble managing the explosion of plastic garbage. Manila has a metropolitan garbage collection system that stretches across 17 separate local governments—a source of chaos and inefficiency. In 2004 the region was already running out of land to safely dump garbage. The shortage of landfill space, and thus the crisis, continues today.

A small part of the slack is taken up by Manila’s informal recycling industry, which consists of thousands of waste pickers. Armando Siena, 34, is one of them. He and his wife, Angie, 31, have lived their entire lives surrounded by trash. They were born on Smokey Mountain, an internationally notorious dump that was officially closed in the 1990s. They now live with their three children near Manila’s waterfront in a one-room flat lit by a single bulb, furnished with a pair of plastic chairs, and lacking plumbing, bedding, or refrigeration. The flat is in a garbage-filled slum named Aroma, next to another slum named Happyland.

Every day Siena rides a rickety bicycle beyond Aroma’s boundaries, scanning the streets for recyclable rubbish that he can stuff into his sidecar. Plastic soup containers are high-value finds, paying 20 pesos (38 cents) a kilogram. Siena sorts and sells his load to a junk shop owned by his uncle, who trucks the waste to recycling plants on the outskirts of Manila.

Waste pickers like Siena are part of the solution, some activists argue; they just need a living wage. In the Baseco waterfront slum in Manila, a tiny recycling shop operated by the Plastic Bank of Vancouver, British Columbia, pays a premium for bottles and hard plastic collected by waste pickers. It then sells that plastic at a higher price to multinationals, which market their recycled products as socially responsible.

Siegler, the Vermont economist, has worked in enough countries and run enough numbers to be skeptical of such schemes. “There is not enough value in plastics to make that work,” he says. “It’s cheaper to fund a solid waste management system than to subsidize collecting plastic.”

The waste that clogs Manila’s beaches and waterways reinforces Siegler’s point. Much of it consists of sachets—tear-off packets that once held a single serving of shampoo, toothpaste, coffee, condiments, or other products. They are sold by the millions to poor people like Siena and his family, who can’t afford to buy more than one serving at a time. Sachets blow around Manila like leaves falling from trees. They’re not recyclable, so no waste picker will retrieve them. Crispian Lao, a member of the National Solid Waste Management Commission, says, “This segment of packaging is growing, and it has become a real challenge for solid waste management.”

When Greenpeace cleaned the Freedom Island beach, it posted a tally of the brand names of the sachets its volunteers had collected. Nestlé ranked first, Unilever second. Litterbugs aren’t the only ones at fault, says Greenpeace’s Abigail Aguilar: “We believe that the ones producing and promoting the use of single-use plastics have a major role in the whole problem.” A Unilever spokeswoman in Manila told me the company is developing a recyclable sachet.

After Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared from radar screens in March 2014 while on its way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, the search for it extended from Indonesia to the southern Indian Ocean. It captivated a global audience for weeks. No sign of the wreckage appeared. On several occasions, when satellite images revealed collections of objects floating on the sea surface, hopes soared that they would turn out to be aircraft parts. They weren’t. It was all trash—pieces of broken shipping containers, abandoned fishing gear, and of course, plastic shopping bags.

Kathleen Dohan, a scientist and the president of Earth and Space Research in Seattle, saw opportunity in the horror: The images from space were pushing a problem into view that had long been neglected. “This is the first time the whole world is watching,” she told me at the time. “It’s a good time for people to understand that our oceans are garbage dumps.” Dohan sensed a tipping point in public awareness—and the events since suggest she may have been right.

At Dow Chemical’s giant plant in Freeport, Texas, large hydrocarbon molecules from fossil fuels are cracked at high temperature to produce 1.65 million tons a year of ethylene—the building block of polyethylene, one of the most widely used plastics.

The hull of a Boeing 787 Dreamliner is inspected before electronics are added. Almost half of the airframe is constructed of carbon fiber–reinforced plastic and other composites, which make it lighter and more fuel efficient than aluminum airframes.

The most heartening thing about the plastic waste problem is the recent explosion of attention to it, and even of serious, if scattered, efforts to address it. A partial list of the good news since 2014 would include, in no particular order: Kenya joined a growing list of nations that have banned plastic bags, imposing steep fines and jail time on violators. France said it would ban plastic plates and cups by 2020. Bans on plastic microbeads in cosmetics (they’re exfoliants) take effect this year in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and four other countries. The industry is phasing them out.

Corporations are responding to public opinion. Coca-Cola, which also produces Dasani water, announced a goal to “collect and recycle the equivalent of” 100 percent of its packaging by 2030. It and other multinationals, including PepsiCo, Amcor, and Unilever, have pledged to convert to 100 percent reusable, recyclable, or compostable packaging by 2025. And Johnson & Johnson is switching from plastic back to paper stems on its cotton swabs.

Individuals are making a difference too. Ellen MacArthur, a British yachtswoman, has created a foundation to promote the vision of a “circular economy,” in which all materials, including plastics, are designed to be reused or recycled, not dumped. Actor Adrian Grenier has lent his celebrity to the campaign against the plastic drinking straw. And Boyan Slat, 23, from the Netherlands, is charging ahead with his teenage vow to clean up the largest garbage patch in the North Pacific. His organization has raised more than $30 million to construct an ocean-sweeping machine that is still under development.

All of these measures help at some level—even beach cleanups, futile as they sometimes seem. A beach cleanup hooked Richard Thompson on the plastic problem a quarter century ago. But the real solution, he now thinks, is to stop plastic from entering the ocean in the first place—and then to rethink our whole approach to the amazing stuff. “We’ve done a lot of work making sure plastic does its job, but very little amount of work on what happens to that product at the end of its lifetime,” he says. “I’m not saying plastics are the enemy, but there is a lot the industry can do to help solve the problem.”

There are two fundamental ways industry can help, if it wants or is forced to. First, along with academic scientists such as Jambeck, it can design new plastics and new plastic products that are either biodegradable or more recyclable. New materials and more recycling, along with simply avoiding unnecessary uses of the stuff, are the long-term solutions to the plastic waste problem. But the fastest way to make a big difference, Siegler says, is low tech. It’s more garbage trucks and landfills.

(You can help turn the tide on plastic. Here’s how.)

“Everyone wants a sexy answer,” he says. “The reality is, we need to just collect the trash. Most countries that I work in, you can’t even get it off the street. We need garbage trucks and help institutionalizing the fact that this waste needs to be collected on a regular basis and landfilled, recycled, or burned so that it doesn’t end up going all over the place.”

That’s the second way industry could help: It could pony up. Siegler has proposed a worldwide tax of a penny on every pound of plastic resin manufactured. The tax would raise roughly six billion dollars a year that could be used to finance garbage collection systems in developing nations. The idea never caught on. In the fall of 2017, though, a group of scientists revived the concept of a global fund. The group called for an international agreement patterned after the Paris climate accord.

At the Nairobi meeting in December, 193 nations, including the U.S., actually passed one. The United Nations Clean Seas agreement doesn’t impose a tax on plastic. It’s nonbinding and toothless. It’s really just a declaration of a good intention—the intention to end ocean plastic pollution. In that way it’s less like the Paris Agreement and more like the Rio de Janeiro treaty, in which the world pledged to combat dangerous climate change—back in 1992. Norway’s environment minister, Vidar Helgesen, called this new agreement a strong first step.

Staff writer Laura Parker and photographer Randy Olson last worked together on a feature on the vanishing Ogallala aquifer, which was published in the August 2016 issue.

This story appeared in the June 2018 issue of National Geographic magazine.