2Italy’s Olive Trees Are Dying. Can They Be Saved?
THE FIRST WITHERED olive trees appeared near Gallipoli, in the Apulia region of southern Italy. Bunches of leaves turned brown and crunchy around the edges. Then, whole groves started to wane. Farmers whose families had tended olives for generations watched their trees dry up and their businesses plummet.
At first, it wasn’t clear what was causing the decline. Was is a fungus? A virus? Something else entirely? Scientists showed up in the olive groves to sample the trees, urgently trying to find the cause.
One researcher from a local agricultural institute had just come back from a conference in California, where he’d learned about the plant bacterium Xylella fastidiosa. The symptoms the olive growers were seeing, he realized, looked exactly like what seen in the talks he’d attended. Sure enough, when he and his colleagues tested the Italian trees, they found the bacterium lurking in their woody hearts.
3How Killer Whales Went from Hated, to Adored, to Endangered
It was not so long ago that killer whales were reviled as vicious pests, shot, harpooned, and even machine-gunned by whalers, fishermen, and government agencies. Today, the world has come to appreciate these sleek creatures not only as apex predators but also for their complex societies and their ability to feel grief. But as Jason Colby explains in his new book, Orca, our love affair with killer whales may have come too late, as declining fish stocks, marine pollution, and other forces push some of them ever closer to extinction.
When National Geographic caught up with Colby in Hawaii, he explained how orcas display complex social behavior and even grief, why a controversial new pipeline in Canada threatens their survival, and how writing this book was also a redemptive personal journey.
On the night of August 5, a 6.9-magnitude earthquake struck the Indonesian island of Lombok and nearby Bali. The northern area of Lombok was badly affected, with thousands of buildings damaged or destroyed. Indonesian authorities are still working to evacuate and shelter those in need, and have issued varying updates, but at least 250 deaths and many hundreds of injuries have been reported so far, and tens of thousands have been left homeless. The area was hit by a 6.4-magnitude foreshock on July 29, and has experienced a number of aftershocks, including a 5.9-magnitude tremor yesterday.
Across the vastness of Russia—the world’s largest country, at some 6.6 million square miles—and over the span of its long history, countless houses, factories, churches, villages, military bases, and other structures have been built and then left behind: imperial-era palaces, log cabins of pioneers in the Far East, Christian cathedrals, massive Soviet blocks of concrete, speculative-mining camps, and more. For years now, photographers have traveled across Russia finding and photographing these intriguing ghost towns, empty Soviet factories, toppling houses, and crumbling chapels.
The exhibition is a part of PhotoBangkok, Thailand’s largest, homegrown international photography festival
Photography is generally accepted as a medium representing reality, or the idea of that revealing what you see before you, onto a two-dimensional plane.Multiple Planes, an exhibition organised by Thai New Wave Photography, uses its platform to construct works, in terms of materials, processes and notions, that relate to photography through atypical dimensions. “It’s a place where you can expect to see inventive art,” says curator Mary Pansanga.
Works on show were created through the process of associating the structure and elements embedded in both the ideas and physicality of photography and then being expanded and transmitted to mediums such as painting, moving image, sculpture, objects or photography itself. “The aim is to encourage artists to work with new, unusual photographic materials,” she says. “As well, of course, as creating a platform for Thai photographers and artists.”
