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re Engineer Beer by Adam Rogers. Fir Streppen wants to rescue non alcoholic wine too, And after that I tasted a formula he's working on for non alcoholic gin. It was close down to the warming sensation. The model gave us components that I wouldn't have thought about. He says, sure, I say, but the warming thing, it's the pain and heat sensors in the trigeminal nerve. I venture a guess that he did it with. Cap says, in, which is what makes chili peppers hot? Astreppin hesitates, there are millions

of dollars at stake here. He says only that it's not chili pepper, and then he clams up. He's at the world's only yeast whisperer. After all, big commodity yeast companies, Yes, that's a thing, sell maltose negative strains. Similar to Smart Yeast, a California start up offers genetically engineered versions that could add even more bespoke flavors to a beer or wine while cutting out the alcohol. The non alcoholic beers that emerge will be something wholly new, may be even something

delicious and wildly popular. But then is it really still beer. That's something Debates hinted at Over Drink, said Brasserie de les sene. I really believe that alcohol belongs to beer, he said, there is no beer without alcohol. Obviously, Debates acknowledged alcohol can be addictive and has all kinds of potential societal costs. But for millennia, humans have enjoyed having conversations with each other while their minds are slightly altered,

a little less suspicious, a little more relaxed. And we need them now as much as ever. You see what we're living in today, he said, The world is a catastrophe. We need to rebuild those high quality connections. Of course, the people eagerly downing na beers in bars and at parties probably feel the quality of their connection is just fine, and people who don't drink alcohol for health or religious reasons deserve a beer like product that actually tastes good.

The market wants what it wants. I left Belgium with a souvenir a bottle of smart Yeast Negra Modella from the table in that ab Imbev tasting room. I carried it home in my luggage, wrapped in t shirts on a warm afternoon. A couple of weeks later, I cracked it open and it was still good. I still liked it. I wasn't trying to fix our dystopia. I was just

having a cold beer next. Texas horned lizards are everywhere except where they belong by asher elbine, habitat loss and invasive predators have decimated their population, but an unlikely coalition of scientists and ranchers is working to bring the grumpy faced animals back from the brink. Out of state visitors may not know what they're looking at, but fans of Texas Christian University TCU get fired up when Superfrog runs

onto the football field. Human size and gray with pointy protrusions on its head and spiky popeye like forearms Superfrog is the school's mascot, meant to induce fear in the hearts of opposing teams. Superfrog's real life inspiration, though, isn't nearly as intimidating. TCU's mascot is based on a creature that's at most four inches long and almost comically sedate, with a pancake shaped body and grumpy face under thorny crowns. It's not even technically a frog, or, as many Texans

refer to it, a horned toad. It's a Texas horned lizard, and the rest of the state loves the real thing just as much as TCU loves Superfrog. While not a keystone species, horned lizards might be considered charismatic microfauna so culturally significant that losing them would be like losing a crucial piece of what makes Texas Texas. These prehistoric looking wildlife celebrities adorn airplane tails and license plates, murals, and postcards.

They've been the official state reptiles since nineteen ninety three. In the town of Eastland, population three thousand, six hundred thirteen. You can even visit the tiny tomb of Texas's most famous horned lizard over rip as in rip van Winkle, who inspired the Looney Tunes dancing Frog character and supposedly survived thirty one years in a time capsule. Despite their cult status and cultural presence, horned lizards are increasingly rare

to come by in the wild. As a kid in the nineteen seventies, Texan Wade Smith grew up playing with horned lizards and says children could find the baby dinosaurs as he thought of them, all over the land. During the past several decades, however, the lizards have largely vanished from their territory across most of the state. Their habitats have been devoured by urban expansion, in hospitable grasses, and

invasive fire ants, decimating their food supply. Smith is one of a number of nostalgic ranchers in Texas now volunteering their properties to be part of the lizard's big return. But before that can happen, researchers need to figure out how to help Texas's reptilian icons survive in a rapidly changing environment. On a bright fall day, Diane Barber drives a truck deep into the heart of the Texas hill Country in the bed two hundred twenty seven baby lizards

in massive coolers. She's coming from Fort Worth Zoo's Reptile Lab, a stone walled greenhouse tucked into the Zoo's Texas Wild attraction that showcases animals from different echo regions across the state. There rubber tubs filled with sand, cork, bark, and prickly pear house curious horned lizards peeking out from under grass clumps.

Twenty five years ago, Fort Worth Zoo became the first in the country to determine the precise combination of temperature and humidity required to successfully breed Texas horned lizards, among the largest of twenty one species of horned lizards native to the United States. Since twenty seventeen, the zoo has reintroduced around sixteen hundred fifty hatchlings into the wild, with

support from other Texas zoos and state funding. Much of that effort has been overseed by Barber fort Worth Zoo's senior Curator of Ectotherms, who moved from the ESCA in two thousand and one to supervise the institution's collection. At first, she was caught off guard by the intense reverence from

locals for a creature so small and unassuming. It's a rarity to see that kind of connection between a reptile and people, Barber says, but they are definitely charismatic enough to where you start to almost feel like you have a little bond with them. By keeping the lizards indoors under ultraviolet light and matching individuals carefully based on genetics to avoid inbreeding, Barber can now reliably hatch hundreds in

a year. She's helped by the fact that females can lay fifteen to forty five eggs at a time and sometimes produce multiple clutches, which take about two months to hatch in a year. Baby horned lizards, she's learned, are a bit particular. They require temperatures in the mid eighties, need to be fed four times a day, and are surprisingly prone to dehydration, so their tanks must be misted regularly.

The hatched horned lizards, about as big as a penny, stay at the zoo for several weeks until the mature enough to be released at the Mason Mountain Wildlife Management Area, a stretch of government owned prairie land in central Texas. The fifty five hundred acre property about a three and a half hour drive southwest from Fort Worth is a postcard come to life, with ancient oak groves and giant

pink granite outcrops. The horned lizards are less interested in the view and more appreciative that the area is filled with their favorite food. Red harvester ants also native to the region. Harvester Ants help aerate the soil with their extensive tunnels and send to foraging caravans to collect and in the process disperse the seeds of native grasses that

become coveted horned lizard habitats. Over the years, the ant's numbers have declined across the state, due in large part to invasive fire ants, but May Mountain's control program aims to grow the population, which means happier horned blizzards. Barber's exactingly bred and painstakingly nurtured lizards don't get sent out

into the wild completely naked. Researchers from TCU's biology program glue harmonic tags onto the backs of the lizards, making it easier to locate them in the wild and determine the most viable areas for reintroduction. When you're a small lizard, you need to be put in the right spot early on, explains Kira Gangpin, a pH d student studying horned lizard ecology.

Gangbin and her fellow researchers will wander the grounds of Mason Mountain with radio receivers, playing a game of hot and cold with the little lizards until they find finally find one bearing witness to the release of two hundred twenty seven baby horned lizards. I can see why Texans

have fallen head over heels for these frowny faced round blobs. Barber, Gangbin and other researchers line up in a stretch of Mason Mountain with Deli cups, gently placing hatchlings one by one on the ground among tufts of wild flowers and blooming cacti. Some sit frozen, while others take off immediately, waddling determinedly into the cover of the grass. Despite the months of hard work leading up to this moment, the

entire release takes only about fifteen minutes. In the ensuing days and weeks, many of Barber's lizards will be hard to track, some will be picked off by predators like coach whip snakes, road runners, and skunks, and others will shed their tags or otherwise become untraceable, but the ones that survive will grow quickly. Gangbin plans to return daily over the next couple of months to track how many remain before their first winter torpur. So far, the results

have been encouraging. At least twenty five new hatchlings have been documented since releases began at Mason Mountain in twenty seventeen, suggesting that reintroduced horned lizards are beginning to breed naturally. It's just amazing to be able to be part of that, says Barber, her voice breaking. Rancher Smith understands the affectionate attachment. They're sentimental, he says, speaking up for Texans across the state who remember the lizards from real life, not just

college games or souvenir mugs. Eventually, Barber hopes to expand releases beyond Mason Mountain and onto private land, which makes up the majority of the Texas horned lizard's original habitat. Plenty of ranchers, like Smith want them reintroduced on their properties, so many, Barber says that there's a waiting list, but there is still a lot to learn about habitat requirements and management techniques. Before the fort Worth Zoo can take

them up on the offer. Until then, Smith has added his name to the list, joining everyone else in the hope that Texas is living. Mascot makes its big comeback next, the mission to keep the border Lands wild. In the rugged terrain where Mexico and the United States meet, a border wall is just the latest obstacle fragmenting habitats and disrupting migration paths. Here's how a cadre of conservationists is

trying to get animals moving. To appreciate how the Mandarin Sky Islands earn their nickname, it helps to imagine the hawk's eye view looking down over the border lands that stretch out across Arizona and New Mexico and the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua, you would see a wide swath of desert scattered with more than fifty small rugged mountain ranges an archipelago of green on either side of

the international border. These high country oases help make the Sky Islands region one of the world's most spectacularly biodiverse, a place where a fleet footed mammal might wander among five different biomes in the day. From dusty desert scrub to lush pine and fir forests. Millennia, wild creatures of all sorts, javelinas and prong horn, coyotes and ocelots, black bears and jaguars have moved across this land by following the ridge lines and waterways, a network of cool, wet

corridors where vegetation thrives. From above, it's easy to trace these time worn roots, green ribbons against the tawny earth. He would also notice intrusions, roads and highways, irrigated farm fields, ranch fences stretched across rangelands where grazing and erosion have stripped the soil, and along the international border, the patchy black line of an immense wall, some two hundred and fifty miles of which have been built through the heart

of the Sky Island since twenty seventeen. All of these are potential interruptions to the ancient arteries that lead animals through the border lands, routes that photographer and National Geographic

Explorer Jimmie Roho knows well. A former project director for a Mexican conservation organization, Roho has spent the past two years documenting the myriad ways that human development fragments wildlife habitat in the Sky Islands, disrupting animals, annual animals annual and seasonal movement, and hindering access to food, water, and mates. Along the way. He has also seen firsthand how a remarkable coalition is working on both sides of the border

to preserve and restore the region's ecological integrity. It's a group that includes scientists monitoring the limited wildlife passages in the border wall, private ranchers reintroducing native plants and animals to their lands, and indigenous leaders reclaiming stewardship of sacred

and ancestral territory. Among the defenders are pioneers like Valor Clark, eighty five year old founder of the nonprofit Kuencha vos oschos Ohos, who has spent decades stacking rocks in dusty washes, repairing stream beds, and restoring vegetation on erosion scar ranch lands. Also researchers like National Geographic explorer Ganesh Marin, who has logged countless back country miles, installing motion sensing wildlife cameras and gathering vital data about the movement patterns of animals

like black bears, javelinas, and elusive jaguars. They are all pragmatic and realistic, rojosays, and their common thread is that they all are in love with the Sky Islands. Today, as construction continues on a border wall that already bisects much of the region, many of these partners find themselves more separated than ever and seeking new ways to collaborate to ensure some of the continent's oldest animal migrations don't vanish completely. This article by Brian Kevin, can doggy doors

help animals cross the border? Smaller animals might pass through the border wall using openings by the size of a standard sheet of paper that some have likened to doggy doors. Border officials say over fifty such openings were installed across Arizona between twenty seventeen and twenty twenty, with more added since. Emon Heridy, who monitors wildlife crossings for the Sky Island Alliance, says his organization counts thirty along some one hundred and

fifty miles of border in the Sky Islands region. How obstacles hinder wildlife movement in the borderlands. For larger mammals like black bears, which cover vast areas in search of food and mates. The border wall is simply the most conspicuous of the barriers that might prevent travel along the

streams and ridge lines of the Sky Islands. Other human made obstructions, such as roads and ranch fences, can also be restrictive, as shown by the movement of GPS collared bears tracked by National Geographic explorer Ganesh Maran making the perfect photograph at ten thousand feet. It took two years and a rare streak of good weather to document a historic winter climb of Serro. The Southern Patagonian ice field, on the border of Argentina and Chile is remote, windy,

and bitterly cold. Last September I slept cameras and camping gear by ski and sled across thirty miles of unforgiving terrain to document climber Colin Hayley's attempt to make the first solo winter ascent of ten thousand, two hundred sixty two foot Sero Torre. We kept in constant radio contact, and while Colin made his way over a crevice in the glacier and up to a bivouac a couple of rope lengths below the summit, I hauled nearly eighty pounds of gear to the base of the mountain and set

up my own camp. As he approached the final rhyme formations that in case the peak, I launched my drone to capture a series of images showing him alone on the world's wildest tower of stone and ice. Photograph and words by Tyler Lecky. Next How Brazil Went Country by Mac Margolis. An agricultural boom sweeps the nation. A homegrown musical style and a new kind of cowboy flare is moving from its rural roots to the center of the

popular culture. The band was still tuning up when the first screams peeled through the crowded fairgrounds in Cuiaba, a regional capital in Brazil's farm belt. A few feet from the stage, a ten year old girl in a spangled black cowboy hat, sequin jeans and embroidered leather boots added hers to the mix. Her cheeks wet with happy tears, her eyes were locked on Anna Costella, the reigning star of Brazilian country music, as she owned the main stage

at the ex Poagro. She is incredible, wonderful, the young girl gushed afterwards. She's perfect. Castella, a twenty two year old velvet voiced pop diva with a Latin Grammy in her saddle bag and fifteen point four million monthly listeners on Spotify. Is the latest idol from Brazil's homegrown style

of music called sertinejo. The folk music began in the certaio, the country's hard scrabble backlands, but has since modernized, electrified, and taken over the charts, with everything from torch songs to subgenres like agrono, and with its odes to big agriculture as one hit song's lyrics go hey hey Hey,

sprang poison from the plane. Today, the most popular sound in Brazilian music exalts as saddles and pickups, spirit buoyed by the conversion of forests, prairies and savannahs into commodity crops, livestock ranches and a trade surplus. Half of the music consumed in Brazil today is certeino. The other half is something else, said former president of Sony Music Brazil, Paolo Junquerraro,

who helps oversee the explosion of country music. So we are talking about a genre that represents half the output of all new artists. No rodeo or farm expo, and there are hundreds across Brazil. Every year is complete without a line up of Certa Neajo artists crooning to stadium

size crowds. Here in Cuyaba, capital of Mato Grosso State, the epicenter of the country's richest farm land, the city's annual expo Agro, is part trade fair and part Coachella, where Certa Neejo fans sport fringe jackets and belt buckles. The size of houp gaps, bull riding and heavy machinery

showcases fill the schedule. Executive jets streak overhead, shuttling farm moguls from deal to deal, while all while Castella delivers her twenty twenty five hit Oja hon de Euto Look where I Am, with a defiant chorus that sinks he wanted me to move from the country. He told me to choose between rodeo and love. Behind this Certa Naho boom is an economic and demographic upheaval that is turning

Latin America's largest country inside out. Agrabusiness, which drives about twenty nine percent of GDP, has shifted population, power and wealth inland. Brazil is now the world's leading exporter of soybeans, coffee, beef, sugar and more. Certain Nejo represents this part of Brazil that works, which is led by Brazilian agribusiness, says Mato

Grosso Governor Maro Mendays. But how did country music take over one of Latin America's most urbanized nations, particularly one known for a stylish cool emanating from cultural epicenters like Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. As Brazil's ranchers and planters prospered, their scions moved to the cities to study. Bringing their guitars, they blended rock and pop and cranked the volume to eleven. The result university Sara certain Naho,

an eclectic subject that's now ubiquitous on the airwaves. Certanejo is the Brazilian popular music nowadays, says Wander Oliviera, managing partner of Work Show, the nation's leading producer of country music.

That explains why acclaimed three hundred thousand, three hundred thousand came to the Expo Agro in Cuyaba this past July, and why two million revelers gathered in downtown South Paulo, Latin America's financial center, to hear country duo Bruno and Morone ring in New Year twenty twenty five, and also why when fabled balladeer Marilia Mendonza was killed in a plane crash in twenty twenty one at the age of

twenty six, her funeral Cortege in Guayana, was broadcast nationwide. Paradoxically, the music is inspired by cherished pastoral traditions and pristine landscapes, both of which are receding with every harvest as cowboys are increasingly replaced by machines. But that's not yet the

concern of Certinejo. When it's not full throated agro Neho, Brazil's biggest pop music is all about jilted lovers, longing and heartbreak, composed to bring even country roughs to tears, and what was once a con conservative genre has loosened with the times women Mendosa, Matella Simone Mendes dominate the charts. Some of the star cowgirls runa Viola compoorste Rana Prado

prefer other cowgirls. Twin sister act Mariya and Marisa helped break the ceiling for the women of Certanejo, writing in their words about kachaka and romanticism, infidelity and passion men's stuff. Certainejo has come a long way since first being dismissed by urbanites as lullabies for kaipira's or yokels. Country music headliners produced nine of the ten most popular albums on Brazilian Spotify from twenty fourteen to twenty twenty three. If

there's one more accolade to earn its global recognition. For all its stardom and radio dominance, Certinejo remains largely landlocked. Sung exclusively in Portuguese, it has not swept the international stage for now. Its superstars are plenty busy in Brazil crooning for cowboys and ten year old girls and everyone in between, oh while fueling the biggest pop music playlist the rest of the world has yet to hear. Next.

Can the basilica that inspired a Notre Dame return to glory by Robert Kunzig inside a one hundred eighty year quest to restore the world's first Gothic church. The Basilica of Sandini, just north of Paris, attracts few visitors considering its profound historical import. Not only is it the final resting place for dozens of Frons, French kings and queens, it's often called the Royal Necropolis of France. Sandny is

also the birthplace of Gothic architecture. The pointed arches, the lofty ribbed ceiling vaults, the light pouring in through tall stained glass windows. All of those innovations first came together here in the twelfth century. Soon they were imitated at churches across France and Europe, most famously at Notre Dame,

six miles to the south. They still can be admired to this day at San Denis, but the basilica's most prominent Gothic feature cannot the bell tower at its north front corner, Topped by a stone spire that once soared to nearly three hundred feet. It's a scalped monuments. As eminent historian Jean Miquel Lenyaud, author of several books on Saan Deny, for nearly one hundred eighty years, both the church and the town of Saan Denis have been without

that landmark steeple. Damaged by storms. It was dismantled in eighteen forty seven, supposedly so that it could be built back better. That never happen. The French government's Historic Monuments Service also found it had more urgent demands on its funds. Even as a succession of Sandini mayor's pleaded for help. The loss of that tower has remained in the town's memory like an amputation, says historic monuments architect Jacques Mulain. Now, thanks to a plan devised by Moulin, the wound is

being healed from a shed behind the basilica. The thump and clang of mallet on chisel and chisel on stone echo off the ancient walls inside. Artisans carved building blocks by hand. High up on the front facade, on the stump of the vanished tower, masons lay the first blocks of what is meant to be as authentic a replica as possible. By twenty thirty or so, Sandinis should have its spire back. The new tower will survey a vastly

changed landscape. Sandinis, once a village centered on its namesake Abbey, is now a working class suburb with a large population of immigrants, many of them Muslim. But the basilica remains the town's central attraction, a potential economic engine as well

as a spiritual sanctuary. With no financing available from the French national government, which owns the building, Sandinese current mayor Mathieu Hanouten has drawn mostly on regional government support to cobble together a thirty eight million euro budget for the new tower and visitor center. We are doing what we always should have done, says architectural historian Matteau Lures, just one hundred eighty years late. This concludes readings from National

Geographic Magazine for today. Your reader has been Marcia. Thank you for listening. Keep on listening and have a great day.