Charged with protecting U.S. ocean treasures, 12 national marine sanctuaries encompass 18,000 square miles (46,620 square kilometers) of coral reefs, elephant seal rookeries, kelp forests, and whale feeding grounds. Douglas H. Chadwick, a wildlife biologist and journalist, took scuba lessons to prepare for this coverage of issues facing the United States’ federally protected waters. Photographs by David Doubilet and Flip Nicklin.

To learn more about marine sanctuaries, visit Frontiers in the Sea from Radio Expeditions, a partnership between National Public Radio and the National Geographic Society.

A city schooled in passion, chaos, and the art of making do, the Italian metropolis embraces its virtues and grapples with its problems without apology. “This is a city in which living on the brink of collapse is normal,” writes Erla Zwingle, a former NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC editor who now lives in Venice. Photographs by David Alan Harvey.

Microscopic life-forms, our planet’s pioneer inhabitants, bequeathed the oxygen we breathe, the DNA and proteins that drive our cells, and the photosynthesis that feeds us. Author Richard Monastersky reports on the latest scientific theories about the first living organisms on Earth. Photographs by O. Louis Mazzatenta.

Richard Monastersky takes a slightly different angle on the origins of life and questions the ethics of creating life in a tube. Join our forum and offer your thoughts.

The National Road, part of today’s Route 40, was built between 1811 and 1838 to connect the port of Baltimore to the Mississippi River. Staff writer William R. Newcott drives the 591-mile (366-kilometer) stretch of road from Maryland to Illinois and captures the character—past and present—of the first federal interstate. While covering the story, photographer Melissa Farlow was swept back in time to her small-town girlhood home in Indiana.

From humble ladybugs to brilliant scarabs, beetles both help and bedevil us. A third of the world’s identified insects are beetles, and they are everywhere. Author Douglas H. Chadwick brings us an informative—yet lighthearted—account of one of the greatest success stories in the long history of life. Photographs by Mark W. Moffett.

Having endured the communist collectivization of their reindeer herds, these nomads now face capitalist development of the huge gas fields underlying their pasturelands. “What’s remarkable about these people is not that they are some ancient tribe just discovered in the wilds of the Russian Arctic, but that they have survived the modern era—and communism—virtually intact,” writes Fen Montaigne who, along with photographer Maria Stenzel, accompanied a Nenets family of reindeer herders in their annual migration from Russia’s taiga to the Yamal Peninsula.

Explore the Nenets’ world in our new Geoguide.