Plus, climate report’s urgent takeaways; the dinosaurs that didn’t die
 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY GILLIAN LAUB | | By Amy Alipio, assistant managing editor
“The Smokies always call me home,” Dolly Parton told me. “I just think it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world.” Last month, “My Tennessee Mountain Home”—her 1972 homage to the corner of Eastern Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains, where she grew up—was named an official state song. The accolade is the latest recognition of how this region—the epicenter of the Dollyverse—has both inspired and been inspired by her. Her lyrics recall a place where “life is peaceful as a baby’s sigh,” where “crickets sing in the fields nearby.”
The prolific singer-songwriter was born in 1946 “in a little one-room shack on the banks of the Little Pigeon River” and started performing at the age of 10 on regional radio in Knoxville. Although her phenomenal talent and unflagging energy have propelled her around the world and into a variety of roles—garnering her an amazingly diverse and enthusiastic fanbase—Parton’s heart remains in Eastern Tennessee. She has built a hospitality empire here, centered in Pigeon Forge and themed to celebrate the landscape and cultures of the Smokies.
Increasingly, the message she spreads is one of respect—for all people, wildlife, and the environment. “We’re just mistreating Mother Nature,” Parton told me. “That’s like being ugly to your mama.”
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 | | VIDEO BY NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC | | Pictured above, Dolly Parton speaks during a Nat Geo interview in March 2022; at top, a 2008 publicity photo.
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| Fishing by lamplight: In eastern India, villagers trap fish using cone-shaped baskets and solar lanterns. The lights allow them to safely work longer hours to earn more. The solar lanterns provide clean and inexpensive light. This image, which attracted more than 120,000 likes in its first few days on our Instagram page, is part of Nat Geo Explorer Rubén Salgado Escudero’s long-term project, Solar Portraits. The project, featured in a 2015 edition of National Geographic, focuses on electricity access around the world and the impact of solar power on communities.
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| EARTH MONTH: ARTICLE OF THE DAY | |
 | PHOTOGRAPH BY D. KELLEY & M. ELEND, UNIV. WASHINGTON INST. FOR EXPLORATION/
URI-IAO/NOAA/THE LOST CITY SCIENCE TEAM | | ‘Impossible chemistry’: That’s one description of the activity on the ocean floor. Active vents on the seafloor, such as this roughly 100-foot-tall chimney in the Atlantic’s Lost City Hydrothermal Field, rapidly produce simple organic molecules that could have been key to the emergence of life on Earth, Nat Geo reports.
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 | | ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREW FAZEKAS | | The Spring Triangle: As the Northern Hemisphere warms up with the new season, it also brings with it the rise of three luminous stars in the evening sky. The Spring Triangle is created from the brightest stars of three constellations. Look toward the south in the evenings this week for blue star Regulus, from the constellation Leo. Next is the orange Arcturus, followed by Spica. On Saturday and Sunday night watch the moon in the constellation Cancer posing with the Beehive star cluster. By Monday night the moon will be in the mouth of Leo, pairing with Regulus. — Andrew Fazekas
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 | | Places that are unstable have had less scientific work conducted in them and so have more potential for discovery. To leave them behind ... is not just a tragedy for these places, but it is also a tragedy for science. | | | Ella Al-Shamahi
| Paleoanthropologist, Nat Geo Explorer, and stand-up comedian who has conducted fieldwork in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen
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 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT CLARK | | The dinosaurs that didn’t die: Ask any paleontologist and he or she will tell you that some dinosaurs survived the mass extinction. We call them birds. “The evidence is so overwhelming, I would put it next to whether you’re going to question if humans are primates,” Luis Chiappe, director of the Dinosaur Institute, tells Victoria Jaggard in National Geographic. Fossils support that belief. The 52-million-year-old rock layer of Fossil Lake in Wyoming holds abundant, exceptionally preserved fossils, such as an early songbird (pictured above).
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This newsletter has been curated and edited by David Beard, Monica Williams, and Jen Tse. Have an idea, a link, a Dolly Parton story? We'd love to hear from you. | |
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