How much thought goes on behind those eyes? A lot, in this case. Six-year-old "Betsy" can put names to objects faster than a great ape, and her vocabulary is at 340 words and counting. Her smarts showed up early: At ten weeks she would sit on command and was soon picking up on names of items and rushing to retrieve them—ball, rope, paper, box, keys, and dozens more. She now knows at least 15 people by name, and in scientific tests she's proved skilled at linking photographs with the objects they represent. Says her owner, "She's a dog in a human [pack]. We're learning her language, and she's learning ours."
Young Kanzi began picking up language on his own—observing scientists trying to train his mother. At 27, the bonobo "talks" using more than 360 keyboard symbols and understands thousands of spoken words. He forms sentences, follows novel instructions, and crafts stone tools—altering his technique depending on a stone's hardness. He even plays piano (he once jammed with Peter Gabriel). Lodge us together with bonobos for 15 generations, says Great Ape Trust's William Fields, "and the bonobos would become less bonobo, the people less human. We aren't really that different." Case in point, Fields is now analyzing Kanzi's vocalizations: "We think he may be speaking English words, just too fast and high-pitched for us to decode."
On Easter Island, also called Rapa Nui, mysterious statues stand sentinel as the Milky Way spins cold and bright above. The giant moai may represent ancestors who ruled here after Polynesians discovered the island some thousand years ago during a wave of exploration that has been compared in its boldness to modern space voyages.
Common marmosets, as infants, learn what to eat by watching elders and, like apes, can imitate others' actions—one of the most complex forms of learning. (They even have a sense of "object permanence"—knowing that something out of sight still exists.) But, says Friederike Range of the University of Vienna, the primates' short attention spans may keep them from developing more complex behaviors.
Iceland's highest paying jobs and two-thirds of its people are packed in and around Reykjavík, the only city and the center for environmental activism.
Avian king of the rain forest canopy, the Philippine eagle is defenseless against logging and land clearing. Its precarious population status, estimated at fewer than a thousand individuals, makes it one of the world's rarest raptors.
Hazara potato farmers in Bamian Province head to work beneath a gaping reminder of things lost. Towering 1,500-year-old stone Buddhas, possibly carved by Hazara ancestors, once stood sentry in the limestone. The Taliban demolished them in 2001.
Centuries after Nubia lost control of Egypt, it continued to follow its neighbor's tradition of marking royal tombs with pyramids, like these restored at Meroë. Today Sudan has more pyramids than Egypt.
A statue of the Buddha commands the central shrine of the ornately decorated Cave 2 at Ajanta, India
Himalayan peaks frame the whitewashed gompa, or monastery, at Alchi in Ladakh, a region in the high-altitude state of Jammu and Kashmir. Alchi's temples house a spectacular collection of 11th- or 12th-century murals.
Butterflies spatter the shoreline of the Juruena River in Brazil's new 4.7-million-acre (2 million hectares) Juruena National Park. Several different species flock to the riverbanks to sip mineral salts from the sand.
No bigger than a quarter, a Glaucus nudibranch preys on toxic Portuguese men-of-war, appropriating their stinging cells for its own defense. Camouflaged in blue and silver, this sea slug was caught off Hawaii but drifts in mild waters worldwide.
Every chute in these bone-dry badlands was dug by downpours—torrents of water rushing over easily eroded mudstone. Here and everywhere else in Death Valley, geology runs wild.
This jellyfish relative called a blue button isn't one organism but many, joined at the gas-filled hub that keeps the colony afloat. Each tentacle has a specialized role in the cooperative—catching prey, digesting, or reproducing. The pigment blocks ultraviolet rays.
A lone barracuda insinuates itself into a school of bluetail unicornfish. These fish congregate by the hundreds, following currents at the edge of reef drop-offs.
Jungled karst islands form the magical maze of Wayag at the northern reach of the Raja Ampat Islands. Its baroque geography is a microcosm of the archipelago.
A glittering, feather-swathed dancer rides a huge hummingbird in Rio de Janeiro's Carnival parade competition. She is one of thousands of Beija-Flor samba school members who captured the 2007 championship.
Chandeliers and pillars of stone, their edges and shadows doubled in the glass-smooth surface of an underground pool, have awed visitors to the Reed Flute Cave in China's Guangxi Zhuangzu region for more than a thousand years.
Sparkling like underwater fireworks, this six-inch-wide (15 centimeters) Olindias jellyfish at California's Monterey Bay Aquarium displays an extravagantly curled and colored armament of tentacles loaded with stinging cells.
A red bird of paradise, Paradisaea rubra, spreads its wings elegantly in a New Guinea mountain forest.
A tree ablaze with fireflies in Indonesia blinks on and off as each insect adjusts its flashes to match the others. Such self-organized behavior resembles the synchronized firing of heart muscle cells or the rhythmic applause of a crowd—but seems more mysterious.
A ringed seal scans for polar bears before snatching a breath. Stealthy bears grab seals at these icy holes.
Spix's disk-winged bats, Thyroptera tricolor, have suction cups that enable them to grip the inside of a smooth furled leaf and scuttle in and out of its protective confines.
Its image mirrored in icy water, a polar bear travels submerged—a tactic often used to surprise prey. Scientists fear global warming could drive bears to extinction sometime this century.
The underside of a skate shimmers off the coast of Spain in the Mediterranean Sea. Related to rays, skates look similar but don't have the ray's barbed tail and are harmless to humans.
To supply the world's sushi markets, the magnificent giant bluefin tuna is fished in the Mediterranean at four times the sustainable rate. These bluefin are being fattened off Spain at one of 69 ranches that have sprung up in the Mediterranean in the past decade, demolishing stocks of the fish.
Hooked without a permit, a dorado—sold as mahi-mahi—was caught on an illegal longline off Mexico. With thousands of baited hooks, longlines extend for miles, often snaring fish unintentionally, notably sharks, as well as hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, marine mammals, and seabirds every year. In longline fishing, eventually discarded bycatch makes up nearly 30 percent of the take.
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