Plus, a shedding Halley’s Comet, new mussels in Appalachia
| | Wednesday, October 19, 2022 | | | | |
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Writer Mary Elizabeth Williams knows better than most of us what a brilliant machine our body is—but not all the time. “Sometimes, the system glitches,” she writes for Nat Geo.
And then? “Cancer happens.”
She spoke with experts, including the doctor who treated her cancer, on why the body can be an open door to cancer—or fail to stop an elusive tumor. What can we do to better protect ourselves?
Read her full story here.
Please consider getting our full digital report and magazine by subscribing here. | | | |
 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY LYNN JOHNSON, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION | |
What you can do: In the image at top, a woman performs a breast self-examination to check for changes in the tissue. Self-examination accounts for about 65 percent of breast cancer discoveries. Pictured above, Nat Geo Explorer Lynn Johnson shows a dragon boat team of breast cancer survivors, called Pink Steel, practicing in Pittsburgh for a festival. Read more. | | | |
 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY HARRY BURTON | | | |
 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY STUART PALLEY, NAT GEO IMAGE COLLECTION | | | Wildfires intensify faraway storms: A giant wildfire kicked off in California. Days later, a massive storm pummeled states like Wyoming and Colorado with flooding rains, baseball-sized hail, and 90 mph gusts, writes Nat Geo’s Alejandra Borunda. Researchers wondered if the two events could be connected—and despite the distance, it turns out they were. Wildfires (like the one in Calistoga, California, above) can make storms as much as 38 percent more intense. | | | |
| Maiden voyage: Female olive ridley turtles can lay about a hundred eggs up to three times a year, but their numbers are still declining worldwide. The ridley hatchlings pictured above from our Instagram, jostled their way to the sea in the Philippines. “Witnessing moments like this expands my understanding of what it means to call these islands and waters home, and who I share it with. And it is a joy sharing it with these tiny ones,” says photographer and Nat Geo Explorer Hannah Reyes Morales.
Related: How turtle-watching tours can actually help conservation
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 | | ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREW FAZEKAS | | Watch bits of Halley’s Comet rain down: As meteor showers go, Friday night’s peak of the Orionid shower is more of a sprinkle—perhaps 10 or 20 an hour. However, the debris is part of that shed from the most famous of all icy visitors, Halley’s Comet, on its 76-year journey around the sun. Late-night meteor watching should be ideal because the crescent moon rises only a few hours before sunrise.— Andrew Fazekas
Fascinated with the night sky? Catch the new Nat Geo Stargazer's Atlas, available here.
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 | | PHOTOGRAPH BY JOEL SARTORE | | Disappearing bivalves: It’s one of the rarest creatures in the world. To find just nine monkeyface mussels, researchers searched Appalachian rivers for more than 1,100 hours over four years. Through clever breeding techniques, conservationists successfully released a new batch of the critically endangered bivalves into the wild. Mysteries about the health of freshwater mussels remain, though, Nat Geo reports.
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We asked, you answered: Our item yesterday on pickleball’s growth prompted readers such as Christina O’Sullivan to write in. “Love it! Have courts across the street and play regularly,” she emailed. Cliff Durlacher wondered if pickleball has an unacknowledged debt to platform tennis: “Invented in the 1920's with the exact same size court, and is not considered a forerunner to pickleball? I don't understand.” Volley your thoughts and ideas our way at david.beard@natgeo.com. And thanks!
This newsletter has been curated and edited by Jen Tse, Sydney Combs, David Beard, and Heather Kim. See you tomorrow. | | | |
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