Usually when I walk by the office of senior graphics editor Fernando Baptista, I see him hunkered over a drafting table, sketching in pencil or watercolor. A few months ago, I saw him sculpting in clay. What exactly? I didn't know. The forms looked like decomposing brownies. Fernando saw something different: five stages in the formation of Tsingy de Bemaraha, Madagascar's limestone forest.

Fernando has used this process before to depict squid, barnacled whales, and a baby mammoth, but this was his first landscape. When I asked him, "Why clay?" I expected to hear how working in three dimensions adds mass and realism to his work. Instead, he said, "because it's fun!"

Here's how Fernando built a stone forest in 5 simple steps:

The antlered animals weren’t made for this—to stumble onto a boat in the middle of an autumn night and bump and sway on the water for six hours until they attain solid ground again and resume their overland migration to a winter refuge. In Norway, both reindeer and their seminomadic herders, members of the indigenous Sami, are struggling to find their balance as development intrudes on traditional grazing lands, changing the way humans and animals move.

Why are some loons acting so, well, loony? Mercury. Long-term studies of common loons in the United States and Canada reveal that the toxic stuff is invading birds’ brains and bodies in dangerous concentrations. It’s disrupting behavior and physiology—and could put loon populations in peril.

In the National Arboretum’s parched herbarium, where dried plants date to the 1790s, Alan Whittemore is providing needed acorn perspective. A year after few fell in parts of the U.S., the botanist says hungry squirrels and an anxious press—which breathlessly wondered, Is it climate change?—can relax.

I wasn’t expecting to find a tempest in a stockpot in Crimea, where I recently spent a month covering a story on that part of southern Ukraine. But that’s what happened when I met Galina Onischenko, a devoutly pro-Russian citizen of Sevastopol. Galina invited me over for lunch at her fifth-floor walk-up apartment and served borscht. Even before my spoon hit the soup, she wanted me to know that her borscht was Russian. Her tone implied that borscht from any other Slavic country was not even worth mentioning.

There are no political boundaries when it comes to recipes, but no surprise, either, to food being a sticking point (dare we say a flashpoint in a pan?) for nationalist rivalries and tension. Think of the culinary kafuffle of 2003 when U.S. conservatives renamed French fries “freedom fries” to express anti-French sentiment during international debate over the launch of the Iraq invasion. And so it is with borscht. Just ask Galina.

Is it?

The November issue of National Geographic magazine features a moving photograph of chimpanzees watching as one of their own is wheeled to her burial. Since it was published, the picture and story have gone viral, turning up on websites and TV shows and in newspapers around the world. For readers who’d like to know more, here’s what I learned when I interviewed the photographer, Monica Szczupider.

On September 23, 2008, Dorothy, a female chimpanzee in her late 40s, died of congestive heart failure. A maternal and beloved figure, Dorothy had spent eight years at Cameroon’s Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center, which houses and rehabilitates chimps victimized by habitat loss and the illegal African bushmeat trade.

To find out, we asked the folks at sortprice.com, a price-comparison site that covers merchants who sell Halloween costumes—and that has seen 1.2 million costume searches this month.

Here are the top animal costumes this year. And then for the heck of it, here are seven popular costumes for animals.

10. The number of featured musicians from the video kicking off a 23-date North American tour to promote “peace and community and mindful joy” through music.

6. The number of songs Mark Johnson, co-founder of Playing for Change, the grassroots organization behind the song and tour, listed when asked for his top five songs of all time.

On the eve of the tour I asked Johnson to talk about the group he founded in 2001 and how his effort differs from the time at camp when we all had to hold hands and sing “Kumbaya.”

Grab a bitter leaf and chew. Then take another and another, letting the wad rest in your cheek. Soon you’ll feel less hungry, more alert, a little euphoric. That’s qat (pronounced cot, often spelled khat), a stimulant used for centuries in Yemen and Africa’s Horn by laborers for energy and by men to while away afternoons. Today, with increased urbanism, easier access to cash, and relaxed social mores, it’s taking deeper root. “People chew it in the early morning, on the street,” says psychologist Michael Odenwald. “Children and breast-feeding women chew it.”

Photo: After defoliating trees, caterpillars turned their attention to something less edible in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Bushes, trees, an entire car shrouded in a ghostly white web—the sights last spring in the Dutch city of Rotterdam were like something from a horror film. People were “peering into the hedgerow expecting the mother of all spiders to emerge,” says Stuart Hine, a British Natural History Museum entomologist. What was responsible for this spooky mess? 

In the movie Amelia, famed aviator Amelia Earhart is depicted as a heroic woman with the adventurous spirit and fearlessness of a ten-year-old. But the nitty-gritty of her flights and her passion for adventure don't get nearly as much attention as her love affairs, ideas of open marriage, or her fame as a celebrity of the ‘30s.

The movie begins in 1937 with the breathtaking face of Earhart (Hilary Swank) sitting in the cockpit of her Electra, navigating her way around the world. It then flashes back to her childhood in Kansas, then forward to 1928, when she meets Mr. Putnam (Richard Gere). Gere asks Swank why she wants to fly, and she responds, “Why does a man ride a horse?” Of course, the answer is “to be free.” I hoped this answer would be the baseline of the film, but Earhart’s freedom is short-lived. Soon she is selling clothing, posing for pictures, and doing commercials for waffle irons.

Amelia, which earned mixed reviews and had a less-than-heroic opening weekend, also neglected to mention one part of Earhart’s extraordinary life: her strong connection with National Geographic. In May 1932  she was awarded the National Geographic Society’s gold medal, presented by President Herbert Hoover (photo, above). And three years later  she contributed an article to the magazine titled “My Flight From Hawaii.” Here are some excerpts that fill in several of the movie gaps and give a bit of insight into what it was like to be a pioneering flyer in the 1930s.

It began with a book. Not a famous book or a best seller but a science textbook, on the shelf of a community library in Malawi—one of 300,000 volumes donated to locations across Africa through the American Institutes for Research. Using Energy, by Professor Mary Atwater of the University of Georgia, had a picture on its cover that captured a 14-year-old William Kamkwanba's imagination, inspiring him to feats of invention. It was the image of a windmill.

In 2002 Kamkwamba had gone to the library in a stubborn attempt to continue his education. A drought had cut his family's food supply so he couldn't afford the fees necessary to enroll in secondary school. He knew little English and couldn't read most of Using Energy. But being the kind of guy who takes apart broken radios and fixes them, he was able to learn a great deal from the illustrations. He was sure he could build his own windmill using scrap from junkyards—an old bicycle frame, PVC pipes for blades. And he did.

To the amazement of fellow residents in the little town of Wimbe, when Kamkwamba hooked his windmill to a dynamo of the sort used to run a bicycle light off a rider's pedaling, his invention generated electricity.

Soon, Kamkwamba built another windmill to pump water from underground. A newspaper noticed. Then a blogger (although Wimbe did not have Internet access, and Kamkwamba had yet to learn the meaning of the world "Google"). Kamkwanba was invited to a TED conference and then himself became the subject of a new book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, written with journalist Bryan Mealer.

When Louisiana lawmakers named the brown pelican the state bird, they missed an important point: There were no brown pelicans left there. That was in 1966, after years of pesticide runoff had ruined eggs and silenced once teeming coastal rookeries. Not long after the legislative gaffe, biologists set about reviving the state’s nesting colonies, relocating young birds from Florida. It was a huge success: 350,000 pelicans were born in Louisiana after 1971. Then came the hurricanes.