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printed material. Please join me now for the article I began last time, entitled Where ice Cream Is King by Brian Kavin babaut Reischand, who's made a vocation out of recording YouTube's marketing videos for Gangapour's tempo shops, says the city has more than two hundred of them, double what it had three years ago, servicing clients from as far

away as Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Nepal. Shah meanwhile estimates that Gangapour has turned out four hundred thousand to five hundred thousand ice cream tempos in the past ten years, of which he has made about eighty having opened his own fabrication shop four years ago to capitalize on the boom when he's not bending into summer. If there's a ceiling on the sub continent's appetite for ice cream, Ashish Suwalka

doesn't see it. Another Gangapur native from a farming family, he now lives in Ua Dapur, a city of about half a million in southern Rajasthan. At twenty four, he owns three ice cream tempos and employs a small crew to staff them. The population is growing, Zuwalka says, and everyone wants dessert. Next the last swordsmiths of Japan. There were once thousands of artisans crafting traditional katana blades. Today

only a small number remain. By Ellen Himmelfarbe, in a converted barn on a residential lane on Japan's Tango Peninsula, some seventy five miles north of Kyoto, three men are playing with fire while robust flames lick the edges of a twenty three hundred degree furnace. Kosuke Yamazoe uses a fifteen pound hammer on a mass of white hot steel, flattening it beat by beat in a hypnotic rhythm. Behind the shower of embers raining down on the earthen floor.

Tomoyuki Miyagi grips the steel with a pair of iron tongs and bangs a smaller mallet in a melodic counterpoint. Nearby, a small stove next to a soot covered wall. Tomoki Kloramoto is making tea. This is the headquarters of Nippan gan Shosa, one of the few remaining katana foundries in the world. For hundreds of years, experts swordsmith's forge blades

for Japan's warriors, including the famed Samurai. Early records show craftsmen's names in the thousands, but a decline of the art began in eighteen seventy six with the outlaw of open kiri. After World War II, the occupying forces in Japan then banned the production of katanas, resulting in additional lost works and livelihoods. Today, it is believed there may

be some two hundred licensed makers left, not all active. Yamazoi, Miyagji and Kuumoto are the only katana artisans in a region that's home to one of the oldest blacksmithing workshops in all Japan. There is a sadness that it's dying out as a craft, Kurumoto tells me through an interpreter. But together they are honoring and elevating the vanishing art.

The men, now in their thirties, met during a hard sought ten year apprenticeship in Tokyo with Yoshi Kazu Yoshi Hara and his father, Yoshindo Yoshihara, two of Japan's most illustrious sortsmiths. The elder Yoshihara's work is in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Arts collection. He himself was the grandson of a celebrity sortsmith of the Showa period. In

the early nineteen hundreds. After a brief stint working on their own, Kamazoi, Miyagi and Kromoto joined forces in twenty nineteen and launched Nipon Gangshosha from an abandoned barn owned by Kamzoi's grandparents. Sword making has long been an art form in Japan, and experts can date a blade much as a porcelain appraiser can date a oz or an arborist a tree. Nipon Ganshosha's swords are entirely hand built, average around fifteen thousand dollars and are sought after by collectors.

As with most katanyas, they they are made from tamahangane, a type of steel that comes from iron sand mined in the Shamane Prefecture north of Hiroshima. The five figure price tag is a result of the laborious fabrication process, which can take a year or more. It begins with three days of round the clock smelting in the clay furnace.

The technique of heating and methodical hammering helps draw out the slag, the waste product that results from smelting, and purify the steel, which is fused and folded into hundreds of fine layers. The hard steel is then worked into shape and the razor edge of the blade is refined much of a swords. A lure lies in the way the surface of the blade catches and throws the light.

Instead of reflecting a clear beam of light, one solid beam, it will be speckled or broken up, says Koromoto, twisting a newly buffed blade in the sunlight as it pours through a window. But while they work to keep an h old art form alive, the partners are fighting in uphill battle. Demand for high dollar a katanas is waning, and the success of Nippon Genshosha depends on finding and developing a new generation of collectors, not just appealing to

existing ones. To that end, the men have begun taking liberties with the hamon the pattern etched along the blade edge Traditionally, a smith designs a unique hman, often featuring landscape patterns tied to the area where the sword is manufactured. But says Kumoto, if someone from the United States once a scene from their front window, they can send a panoramic photo and we can reproduce it. They've also pioneered a method of encasing blades in a sealed, transparent resin

block rather than a traditional wooden sheath. The idea, says Kumoto, was that this would allow people to appreciate Japanese swords safely and thus focus more on their beauty. What is the point of art if you can't see it in a country reverential of long held traditions, The swordsmiths are striking a delicate balance. It seems that ordinary people have fewer opportunities to come into contact with Japanese art, says Kuamoto, But today, as an art piece, swords have a place

in modern culture. Next finding Tranquility in Transylvania in a corner of rural Romania a Byukalagwey of life is safeguardar by a community preserving its ancient ways and offering a template for a richer way of Living by Brett Martin. On a chilly twilight evening, three men sit around a wood table in the parsonage of a thirteenth century church in Transylvania. Outside our ducks be hives, and a shaggy white dog that we can hear barking at something in

the growing dark. Warmed by a wood burning stove, the men sip tea and nibbles savory pretzel shaped cookies and talk about their home, Karashkobalva, Transylvania. Is there a better known place name and lesser known place, perhaps Timbuctoo. Even when all of Europe was wilder, Transylvania stood for its wildest edge. This is why Bramstokers ofw fit to use it as a setting for Dracula, despite never setting foot there.

It's a place where Saxons, huns, Turks, Tartars, and a dozen less famous tribes are still talked about as if they may have passed through just last week. A place

where the forests are still filled with bears. Now that Europe, for all its charms, can sometimes seem like a continent of mobile phone executives, it feels even more thrilling and unlikely to find oneself in a pocket as remote and in many ways untouched as this village in the valley of the Hamarod River, like about eighty five percent of the people who live in this region of rural central Romania.

The men in the parsonage table speak in Hungarian. They are Zichhilles, ethnic Hungarians who have lived here for at least a thousand years. At the head of the table, with a short gray beard and bright, mischievous eyes, is a seventy year old Orbon Saba, the man whose vision is helping preserve this distant place even as the modern world presses at its borders. Orban and Hungarian family names come before given names, does so as the leader of

the Kurbitusac, the village's governing body. It's the centuries old form of communal landownership and management that has helped make this place so singular. The Kuzbir tokos shagh It helps if you take a running start, manages the water, woods and pastures, splitting their use, resources and income among three hundred forty seven shareholders. Though time warn the system of governance is remarkably sturdy, Orbon points out, and capable of

meeting the needs of the people here. When winter comes, he says, everybody has enough wood that it exists at all is a testament to Orban's vision. For the decades that Romania was under communist rule, the Kosburiserhagh was lost. Indeed, the infamous dictator Nikolai Chochescu aimed to wipe out places like Kokashafalva and their way of life. He failed. Communism fell, and the village regained communal control of some twenty seven

hundred acres of land in two thousand. Key to the Korbusu Trazog restoration were written records of the intricate system through which land rights had been passed down for generations. Orban opens a leather valise and carefully lifts out a thick folder of papers. Each page contains two columns of neatly written names with numbers next to them. A nineteen thirty six record of the shareholders of Karatschefalvas Horzobas Salkog.

It was pages like these, hidden away in houses and buried in archives that aided the long legal fight of Orbon and other Kubritish Sokog leaders to reclaim their villages after Churchescu's overthrow in nineteen eighty nine. Orbon remembers sifting through a mountain of documents in a government office and coming upon the list. It was like thunder, he says, Not even in our deepest dreams have could we have hoped to restore what we had. Joining Orban at the

table is Ampali Geza seventy five. He is a lay leader of the Unitarian Church. The younger man sitting next to him, Benedict Mihali, is its minister. Or Bond finds a page from a second list of names, this one from nineteen forty six, and points to line one hundred sixty five inscribed there is the name of Zempali's grandfather. When I look around the table, all three men are

blinking back tears. Karsavalva Kushino in Romanian is tucked within rolling Tuscany like hills and swaths of deep forests, part of a string of villages, each marked by the needle like spire of a Unitarian church. His houses are topped with roofs of rust colored tile. Many feature so called Sekelli gates, elaborately carved wooden entrances that depicts Zekelli iconography and ruins, and are capped with structures reminiscent of a Japanese pagoda. From the courtyards within you can hear bleats

of sheep and squawking of chickens. Most families do at least some subsistence farming. Electrical poles are topped by the doughnut shaped hats of storknests. One afternoon, I step aside as a raucous herd of cows is paraded down the middle of the street, spurred on by young men with sticks and shouts. It should also be noted that the village has faster internet and generally better roads than I

do at home in New Orleans. Orban Saba commands obvious respect throughout the village, but is also considered something of an eccentric. The heads of other corbetous Saugjas can often be identified by their expensive cars and big shot attitudes, orbon drives, a beat up hatchback and dreams up projects. There is the traditional open air bath that he renovated in twenty nineteen as a gathering place, complete with a

medicinal herb garden and fire pit for making tea. Across the village, in the shadow of the forest is the sweet chestnut orchard, where he organizes an angul annual chestnut festival. And there's the Corbetushar Community Center, where on a Saturday afternoon, while I am there, the village gathers in traditional dress to enact a children's wedding in which a local girl and boy play bride and groom before a great feast.

Orbon's car is in a constant state of reminding him to buckle his seat belt as he careenes down dirt roads from one place to the next. All of the projects, he says, are attempts to maintain the traditions of this place while also cautiously opening it to the possibilities of eco tourism. Orban often explains this careful balancing act through an emblem depicting the Zachelli sun and moon standing independent

within the European Union's Circle of Stars. Above all, the Kurtzbetursag acts as a steward of the village's most important resource, the forest, which is both a source of crucial fuel as a few nervous nights feeding a guest house woodstove drives home, and fragile biodiversity. On a rainy day, I am taken into the woods by a hunter and ingenious tinker named Oksi Machas. He's invited me to tag along on his daily visit to check the three motion activated

cameras he uses to monitor wildlife. We bounce up a down deeply rutted trails in an all terrain vehicle he has fashioned from an old land rover, and then hike in silence, trailed by a stout fox that Okshee has grown to know and has named Vuki. Aside from songbirds, Vuki is the only living thing we encounter. But back at Okshee's home, while my boots dry over the woodstove, we review the photos he has retrieved. They show deer, wild boars, all manner of small mammals, and many many bears.

A shiver thinking of them all having been hidden around us as we moved through their woodland home. What especial here is that the community owns the land, says Za Kelly kinga RecA, a Unitarian minister several villages away. Nobody can get too wealthy that they make other people suffer. The irony, of course, is that such principles resemble nothing so much as those of communism. With a small sea we hate that word, but it's true. Ze Kelly admits,

we already had that system for a thousand years. We didn't need them to come tell us. I met sze Kelly's home for the annual ritual of slaughtering a pig to be eaten over the course of the rest of the year. By the time I arrived, the animal's still steaming body has been splayed across a table outside. A round faced butcher deftly works at disassembling it. Prime cuts go into the brine, later to be smoked, while organs another oval head to a temporary sausage factory set up

in the dining room. Excess sausages will be distributed among neighbors, who in turn will share their own surplus when the time comes. Skelly's husband, Zoltsava, a computer coder, distributes mourning shots of Pelinka, a homemade brandy they've prepared from plums. My generation is the last one that understands the meaning of butchering. The pegy laments, what is the meaning? I

ask that you eat what you grow. He says that you know where it comes from, that you are connected on this Kelly's walls in many homes in the region hangs a map showing Transylvania as part of the Greater Austria Hungarian Empire. It's a good reminder that, as this place knows all too well, there is no hiding from the tides of history. Winters are getting warmer. The past

two summers have been brought drought. A new Romanian nationalism is on the rise, potentially threatening the country's ethnic minorities. In the villages of the Homarud Valley you see children and older people, but few in between. Many adults have left in search of jobs, or pH ds, or just an easier life than farming. Zickell's Zoltz Kazaba has been forced to bring in Napoleese workers to help staff one

of the small groceries he owns. In the face of all that, what Orbon Ksaba and the Corbitzer Cossac do is a model of tending one's own garden, an attempt to protect and sustain family, community and the gifts of this small corner of the planet that they know better than anybody else. At the parsonage table, Orbon packs up his stack of documents and places them carefully back in their valise. He pats it lovingly and puts it under his arm. It would be nice to know who is

going to hold this next, he says. Next, how a super tiny crustacean makes life work in the Southern Ocean. Marine ecologist Kim Bernard is charting the huge impact of an Antarctic krill by Tristram Corton one night last December, National Geographic explorer Kim Bernard was stirring her earl gray tea in the galley of a research ship off the coast of Antarctica, preparing for a long night of observing a remotely operated vehicle as it surveyed the sea floor.

When the Marina cologist looked up to a monitor showing a live video feed sent by the ro V from a depth of more than three thousand feet in the Southern Ocean's murky waters, something caught her attention. I see this tiny little thing come in on the right hand side of the screen and dart out, she said to the other scientists abroad. Probably aboard it probably looked like

organic debris lofting down. But Bernard, forty six, has been studying krill for fifteen years and knows how the shrimp like crustaceans twirl in the water column and bolt backward. When startled. That familiar movement sent her running down two

flights of stairs to the ship's control room. When she arrived, she saw the action on the sea floor being broadcast on a large bank of monitors, and she spouted a handful of individual krills spread out on a hydro thermal vent, a fissure in the ocean crust where hot magma and sea water meat and create a mineral rich environment that attracts a host of organisms. For Bernard, a professor of biological oceanography at Oregon State University, finding krill here represented

a momentous discovery. I kind of lost my mind, she recalled. It was the first time the animal had been observed on a vent Antarctic Krill are a keystone species that allows everything else in the Southern Ocean to flourish. If Bernard could learn more about their habitat on the sea floor, her research could inform our understanding of virtually every predator on this hard to reach continent, from emperor penguins to

blue whales. Any new behavior from such a foundational animal has the potential to effect the entire food above it. That night, in the control room aboard the research vessel from Schmidt Ocean Institute. Bernard soon realized all the krill were females carrying eggs. The species usually release eggs higher in the water column. What makes it worth the risk to travel so far at this stage in reproduction? Were

they feeding on the bacteria covering the vent? She asked the operator to use the rob's special suction arm and gather a few of the crustaceans. This was also a first. Bernard isn't aware of any researchers who have collected specimens at that depth. She has since sent stomach and tissue samples out for analysis. Bernard's work on the expedition, which was supported by the National Geographic Society and Role's Perpetual Planet Expeditions, is part of an ambitious project that sending

nearly two dozen scientists to all five oceans. Their efforts will be the subject of a series of stories in National Geographic as they searched for new insights, like say, the presence of krill in under explored places in Antarctica. The species is more than just a vital part of the food chain. Krill are also a carbon sink, eating phytoplankton that have absorbed CO two and then excreting pellets to the seafloor, where it can take thousands of years

for the absorbed carbon to resurface. However, there are new pressures on the species from both humans and climate change. Krill are increasingly harvested as aquaculture feed, and the animal's oil is highly sought after as a dietary supplement. Meanwhile, as sea ice continues to melt, larval krill are losing an important habitat where they can hide from predators, find food,

and develop into adults. Bernard hopes her ongoing research and future insights from this discovery will protect this tiny animal that so much life relies on. There's a thriving mass of life down there, she said, and all up it depends on krill. Next, seeing a glacier through a prehistoric lens, a photographer uses Arctic ice and a unique technique to offer a fresh perspective on a world transformed by climate change. Glacial ice is formed from snow accumulating and compacting over millennia.

As the pressure increases, crystalline layers are smoothed into one of the clearest substances found in nature. That alchemy and the knowledge that climate change is causing glaciers to rapidly disappear inspired forty four year old artist Tristan Duke to create a photo lens out of glacial ice. I just felt this real sense of urgency, Duke says he wanted to capture a glacier through its own eyes. He puts

it like a self portrait. In the spring of twenty twenty two, Duke called dozens of pounds of gear to Spalbarred, Norway, including a giant tent camera that he designed himself, and molds for shaping the ice into lenses. The tent functioned like a camera of skura. Duke would place a palm sized piece of ice in a hole in the canvas, projecting an image of the landscape inside the tent that would then be captured on a forty two by one

hundred inch negative. Some of the photographs were clearer than he expected, but as the lenses melted, the accumulation of water produced its own effect. People have told me that it looks like the world blurred through tears, he says. To contain contact, to contrast this arctic sublime against a world on fire, he traveled through the American West to document wildfires and energy infrastructure with lenses created from locally

sourced ice. He wants to invert the romantic gaze. We see a sort of fragile nature bearing witness to the unbridled and cataclysmic power of the human world. This article by Megan Brown next The City of seven hundred Languages. It's been four hundred years since New York City was founded as the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam. Back then, some thirty European and native languages were spoken there. To day,

that number surpasses seven hundred. That's more than ten percent of the world's nearly seven thousand languages, making New York the most linguistically diverse city to ever exist. Can it stay that way? A four hundred years of immigration loaded New York with languages before Europeans arrived, and estimated fifteen thousand Lennapis speakers may have lived in Lenapehuking, a region

that includes present day New York City. In sixteen twenty four, the Dutch West India Company founded the city of New Amsterdam on the site. By the mid sixteen seventies, it was under British control and would be until the American Revolution. Built on waves of immigration, it is now home to the largest foreign born population of any major metropolitan in the world. Those eras of immigration are envisioned here as the rings of a growing tree. Each dot represents one

hundred immigrants each ring a decade. The result is a snapshot of New York City's diverse ethnic populations over time, from just a few hundred European settlers to three point two million immigrants today, most from Latin America and Asia. What New York City loses when languages vanish? By Ross Perlin. Seca is an endangered language originally spoken in five villages of northern Nepal, but its future may depend on a handful of vertical villages apartment buildings in the middle of Brooklyn,

New York. How did a little documented, oral only language used by no more than seven hundred people in the High Himalaya come to the concrete jungle? Rasmena Gourung in her twenties, one of Seka's youngest speakers, learned the language from her grandmother in the village, but soon to the country's capital, Katmandu, and eventually New York, where she estimates at least a quarter of her pupil have ended up here.

They joined speakers of dozens of other endangered languages from across the Himalaya, all forming new communities while getting by in an ever evolving mix of Nepali, Tibetan, English, and their own embattled mother tongues. But New York City, the most linguistically diverse city in the history of the world, may be hitting peak diversity. Its seven hundred plus languages

represent over ten percent of the global total. Though largely indivisible, invisible and inaudible to outsiders, the city's languages are from all over. Many immigrants have arrived in just the past few decades from linguistic hotspots such as the Himalaya, West Africa,

insular Southeast Asia, and heavily indigenous zones of Latin America. Today, however, many of the forces that brought people together are beginning to pull them upon art Given accelerating language laws even in the language's home lands, threats to immigration, and the rising costs of city life, time may be running out. The remarkable linguistic convergence in New York and similar cities could vanish fast before there has even been time to

document or support it. This urgency is what drives the work of the Endangered Language Alliance, the organization i Codirect, which has started to map this landscape. At stake is an unprecedented set of cultural, scientific, educational, and even economic possibilities. Never before have linguists and speakers been so well positioned to document languages from which few, if any, records exists, while also pushing for their maintenance and revitalization. This concludes

readings from National Geographic Magazine for to day. Your reader has been Marsha. Thank you for listening, Keep on listening and have a great day.