National Geographic - January 2025 issue

I don’t usually write about magazines, but they are a part of my regular reading diet. Recently, I picked up the January 2025 issue of National Geographic from a Little Free Library. My family used to have a subscription when I was a kid, and I must have flipped through dozens of issues. It’s nice to see that the magazine has endured, in much the same form as I remember.

Let me give a quick rundown what I found interesting in this issue:

• The wreckage of the Endurance has been discovered under the Antarctic ice. The ship sank in 1915 during a legendary expedition, and the mission to find the wreck, even aided by modern technology like sonar and underwater drones, was just as difficult as the original voyage.

• All tea leaves come from the same species of plant, Camellia sinensis. I always thought that the many varieties of tea—e.g. green tea, oolong, pu’er—were taken from different plants, but it turns out they are all the same leaf, just processed in different ways. Pu’er, the subject of this particular article, can be fermented for up to 10 years or more. On Jingmai Mountain in China, a small indigenous community has been farming an ancient forest for centuries.

• In New Zealand, there’s a conservation project underway to eradicate invasive predators (rats, possums, stoats, etc.), in order to protect the native bird species, like the iconic kiwi. At first glance, it seems brutal and violent to kill millions of animals, but the sad fact is that they should never have been there, since they were brought in by settlers coming from overseas¹. The article describes some cool technological advances—e.g. self-loading traps, computer-aided visual identification of predators—that have helped the project along.