Sunday Stills: Explore Pictures We Love, Newly Discovered Earthlike Planets, the 'Disco Clam,' and More

Read: A Fresh View of the Moon’s Surface View in web browser. Sunday Stills ISSUE 31 Sunday, January 11, 2015 Proof Pictures We Love Photograph by Michael Christopher Brown At National Geographic, our photo editors work with thousands of images every year (if not every day), so we asked editors from National Geographic magazine, News, Traveler, Your Shot, and Proof to choose one that stood out for each of them in 2014. It’s not about the “best” photo, but instead the one that resonated the most. “Michael Christopher Brown manages, in a single frame, to reveal the complex layers of a man and a country embroiled in seemingly endless misery and war,” writes assistant photo editor Sherry Brukbacher on her pick, above. “The image, to my eye, conveys a lingering beauty hidden deep inside this country and possibly, likely, this man.” LOOK Video How to Move a Dinosaur “Every time we’d go in we’d find strings of vertebrae, we’d find feet, leg bones, realizing we can’t split it up. And that’s when we made the decision: We have to take out a mammoth block.” —James Kirkland, state paleontologist, Utah Geological Survey Paleontologists anxiously moved a ten-ton mound of fragile dinosaur bones from the top of a steep hillside near Moab, Utah. The remains, discovered a decade ago by a grad student, contain the skeletons of a pack of Utahraptors (cousins of Velociraptors) that may have been trapped in quicksand around 125 million years ago. “Finally getting this thing off the mountain after ten years. This is huge progress,” says state paleontologist James Kirkland. WATCH News NASA Discovers a New Batch of Earthlike Planets PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID A. AGUILAR, HARVARD-SMITHSONIAN CENTER FOR ASTROPHYSICS NASA’s venerable planet-hunter, the Kepler spacecraft, has shaken its one-thousandth planet from the sky. Eight new worlds beyond our solar system, announced Tuesday, boost the number of Kepler’s confirmed planets to 1,004 (if you’re keeping count), including two of the most Earthlike planets discovered so far. Those eight new worlds are each less than 2.7 times the size of Earth. But hiding in the wings, among a group of 554 newly announced planet candidates, is an even more tantalizing set of planets. “These candidates represent the closest analogues to the Earth-sun system found to date,” says Fergal Mullally of the SETI Institute and NASA’s Ames Research Center, “and this is what Kepler has been looking for. We are now closer than we have ever been to finding a twin for Earth around a star.” READ YOUR SHOT Thousands of Perspectives on Adventure Photograph by Rafael Bergstrom To celebrate the tenth anniversary of National Geographic’s Adventurers of the Year, senior producer Mary Anne Potts and photographer Jimmy Chin assigned something special for risktaking photographers out there. “We’d love to see [the] glory shots,” they write. “But we also want to see images that show the behind the scenes of what it takes to summit that mountain, ski that slope, or climb that route. They could be photos that show the personal, transformative, uncomfortable, humorous, and even painful moments of the adventure.” SEE THE EDITORS’ PICKS NEWS Shedding More Light on the ‘Disco Clam’ PHOTOGRAPH BY LINDSEY DOUGHERTY, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY The so-called “disco clam” is one eye-catching mollusk—nestled in coral reefs off Indonesia, the animal generates brilliant flashes of light that earned it its festive name. Though fascinating, this flamboyant bivalve (Ctenoides ales) is still poorly understood, something Lindsey Dougherty, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, is trying to change. “Most animals don’t do something that’s energetically costly unless there’s [a payoff],” says Dougherty. Her team set out to discover why the clam is so brilliant. READ Show Your Support: SHOP DONATE SUBSCRIBE TRAVEL BECOME A MEMBER You are receiving this email because ignoble.experiment@arconati.us is signed up to receive National Geographic communications. If you prefer not to receive emails from us, please unsubscribe. To ensure that you receive your National Geographic emails, please add ngs@e.nationalgeographic.com to your address book now. Learn how. Contact Us | Privacy Policy | About Us | Customer Service National Geographic | 1145 17th Street N.W. | Washington, D.C. 20036 Copyright © 2015 National Geographic Society. All Rights Reserved.