National Geographic magazine, November 2024 Issue

How a technological revolution is fueling a new age of discovery. National Geographic stories take you on a journey that's always enlightening, often surprising and unfailingly fascinating. This month–a new age of discovery is already here.

In this issue: Meet Sturgeon, the AI tool that helps doctors identify brain tumors faster than ever — In the medical field, being fast, efficient, and correct can be the difference between life and death. This game-changing tool is helping cancer researchers and doctors save lives.; Alien life is out there. Can AI find it? — It’s the ultimate game of find a needle in the haystack. One NASA scientist is betting on AI to help expedite the search through billions of planets.; How AI is revealing lost secrets of the Roman Empire — Armed with new tools, scholars are finally able to read papyrus scrolls long deemed too fragile to open. The breakthrough could literally change history.; What are animals saying? AI may help decode their languages — A groundbreaking research project is finally building the tools to translate just how whales and other creatures communicate.; AI is helping seismologists find the next monster earthquake — Some earthquakes are imperceptibly quiet. We may not feel them, but machines might detect them—and they can point scientists to a potential "Big One".; Your biggest AI questions, answered — Will AI always give flawed answers? Can we prevent AI from compounding problems from our past? Four experts weigh in.; Meet Piggy, the most famous rescue pig in China — Abandoned at an airport in China, then adopted by a photographer, Piggy the piglet grew up in front of the camera—and changed everything for his new family.; The surprising tricks cacti use to survive the harshest climates on Earth — We all know cacti store water—but to survive, they migrate their flowers, and so much more. Scientists want to copy the resilient plants' methods to help engineer our future.; A Yellowstone for Europe? Inside the bold effort to rewild the continent — High in Romania's Carpathian Mountains, advocates are pushing to protect one of Europe's last stretches of wilderness and banking on sustainable tourism to revive a struggling rural area.; Why two of the world's best rock climbers decided to make their climb much, much harder — Alex Honnold and Tommy Caldwell are two of the world’s best climbers. Why did they add a 2,600-mile odyssey of biking, boating, rafting, and rowing just to reach one of America’s most formidable mountains?; Bras are older than you think—much older — Underwires and flame resistance are only the latest innovations in a millennia-long struggle to keep the girls in line.