Circles of stalagmite pieces, arranged in a circle 176,500 years ago. (Photo: Etienne FABRE - SSAC)
Approximately 176,500 years ago, in a cave in what is now called France, Neanderthals cut 400 pieces of stalagmite into regular lengths and arranged them in two circles and four piles. In 1990, a teenager and a group of local cavers rediscovered them. Only now, though, have scientists estimated just how old they are—dating well beyond the history of Homo sapiens in this area.
This is the one of the earliest examples of construction ever found, and the first example of Neanderthal construction that scientists have dated. It shows that these early homonins explored underground and could use fire and reveals an unknown aspect of their culture. It’s not clear what the circle of stones was used for, but it’s possible it had a ritual function, since there’s no evidence that anyone actually lived in the cave.
The cave, in Bruniquel, France, a small town in the country’s mountainous southwest, was sealed for many years by a rockslide. In 1990, a 15-year-old boy cleared those rocks enough for cavers to slip inside, where they found evidence that bears had once lived there, along with the circles.
One circle is larger than the other. The smaller is about 6.5 feet in diameter; the larger is more oval-shaped, and its diameter ranges from about 13 to 23 feet. The stalagmite pieces used to form these structures are made from the middle of stalagmite pieces and include neither the tip nor root of the stones. They are standardized in size, with one setaveraging about 11.6 inches and the other about 13.5 inches. Some of the stones set in the circles have others propping them up. Two of the four piles of stones are inside the larger circle.
In this area, there are also bones and evidence of fire. One of these bones, a bear bone, was dated closer to when the cave was first discovered and found, with carbon dating, to be about 47,500 years old. But, as the Atlantic explains, carbon dating only works for objects younger than 50,000 years old. When Sophie Verheyden, a scientist specializing in stalagmites, heard about the cave, she wondered if it was possible that the structures might be much older, given the limits of carbon dating. In this new study, published in Nature, she and colleagues dated the stalagmites using uranium levels to get to the much older age of the structure.
Recent discoveries have recalibrated humans’ understanding of Neanderthals, long portrayed as less intelligent and inferior hominins than us very special hominins. But it’s becoming clear that they had a lot going on as well—they made art, used tools, buried their dead, and interbred with humans. This new finding shows that long before Homo sapiens had ever reached Europe, they were hanging out in caves, burning things, and making rock circles. Sounds like a pretty good time.
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
Graffiti in Québec which roughly translates to "We don't give a fuck about the special law (Bill 78)". (Photo: Gates of Ale/CC BY-SA 3.0)
Québec is bilingual, but reluctantly. As a French province with small pockets of English, and a few larger pockets that will willingly use both languages, the signs, by law, are in French. The language on the street is French. Ordering food or browsing a store will likely involve some amount of standard conversational French, and should you get in trouble with the law, it's going to be time to find a Francophile lawyer.
The profanity, though, is pure Québec.
Québec's swearing vocabulary is one of the weirdest and most entertaining in the entire world. It is almost entirely made up of everyday Catholic terminology—not alternate versions, but straight-up normal words that would be used in Mass to refer to objects or concepts—that have taken on a profane meaning. Many languages have some kind of religious terminology wrapped into profanity (think of English's "damn" or "goddammit"), but Quebec's is taken to a totally different level.
A snowy street in Montréal, looking towards the Notre Dame de Bonsecours Chapel. (Photo: Jazmin Million/CC BY-SA 2.0)
The fact that the region has unique swears is not itself unusual. Expletives are a curiously organic construction; despite the taboos and restrictions around using them, they persist, indicating a weird discrepancy. They are bad, yet we must have them. They change over time; during the age of Shakespeare, the word "bastard" was so foul that it was sometimes censored as “b-d”. Yet now, in the U.S., it's a low-level swear at worst. Different languages and cultures develop their own library of swear words, and just how that happens can tell you quite a bit about that culture.
"I have heard that people swear with the things they are afraid of," says Olivier Bauer, a Swiss professor of religion who taught at the Université de Montréal and lived in the city for a decade. "So for English speaking people it's sex, in Québec it is the church, and in France or Switzerland it is maybe more sexual or scatalogical." Fear and power kind of tie together; swear words tend to be words that invoke something mysterious or scary or uncomfortable, and by using them we can tap into a bit of that power. (Yiddish, the swear words of which I grew up hearing, has about a dozen curses referring to the penis. I'm not sure which category that falls into.)
Québec French is mutually comprehensible with European French, but due to its isolation from Europe and geographical proximity to Anglophone Canada and the U.S. has developed into something a bit different. Without constant interaction with France (or Switzerland or Belgium, for that matter), Québec French has retained French words that have long since gone out of style in France, but has incorporated and mutated many English words that a Frenchman would likely not recognize. In France, a car would be referred to as a voiture, maybe an auto. In Québec, it's a char, an ancient word coming from the same root as the word "chariot."
Similarly, Québec has adopted whole bunches of North American English, but those aren't just English words pronounced with a Québec accent; they are sometimes mutated and their meanings even change. Some are just spelled differently; moppe in Québec French means "mop," and toune can mean a song, or a tune. "The noun blonde can be used on both sides of the Atlantic in the sense of a blonde-haired woman, but in Québec, it has the additional meaning of 'girlfriend,'" says Felix Polesello, the proprietor of Quebec language blog OffQc. "For example, ma blonde means 'my girlfriend.'"
Then there's a phrase like this, which I saw on a friend's neighbor's front door once: "La doorbell est fuckée." The word "fuck," for the record, is fairly common in Québec, but isn't really a swear; it's a mutated form of an English, but it's only barely rude, meaning "broken" or "messed up."
Québec has few swears that you'd also find in France. Merde, maybe. I've heard enculer before, which means something like the verb "to fuck" and is usually paired with something else to enhance it. But the best swears are the sacres.
The sacres is the group of Catholic swears unique to Québec. There are many of them; the most popular are probably tabarnak (tabernacle), osti or hostie or estie (host, the bread used during communion), câlisse (chalice), ciboire (the container that holds the host), and sacrament (sacrament). These usually have some milder forms as well, slightly modified versions that lessen their blow. "For example, tabarnouche and tabarouette are non-vulgar versions of tabarnak, similar to 'shoot' and 'darn' in English," says Polesello.
The sacres typically are interchangeable, rarely having any particular meaning by themselves. Most often you'll hear them used as all-purpose exclamations. If a Québecois stubs his or her toe, the resulting swears might be "tabarnak, tabarnak!" instead of "fuck fuck fuck." They can be inserted into regular sentences the way English swears can to vulgarly emphasize your statement. "For example, un cave means 'an idiot,' but un estie de cave means 'a fucking idiot,'" says Polesello.
Because the words are largely just meaningless statements of rage, there is an interesting ability in Québec French to create fantastic new strings of profanity that are, basically, untranslatable. Essentially you can just list sacres, connecting them with de, forever. Crisse de câlisse de sacrament de tabarnak d'osti de ciboire!, you might say after the Canadiens fail to make the NHL playoffs. The closest English translation would be something like "Fucking fuck shit motherfucker cockface asshole!" Or thereabouts. But strings of profanity like that in American English, though not unheard of, are certainly not common. In Québec, letting loose with a string of angrily shouted Catholic terminology is something you're fairly likely to hear at some point.
So how did Québec end up with such a specific brand of swearing? "Without a doubt, the social institution that exercised the greatest influence, and had the most impact on Québec, was the Roman Catholic Church," writes Claude Bélanger, a historian at Montréal's Marianapolis College. When Québec was founded, in the early 1600s, the French Catholic Church played a huge role in its creation, building cities, forcibly converting the First Nations peoples who lived there, and controlling all community services until France officially made Québec a French province in 1663. Québec was ceded to Great Britain after the Seven Years' War in the mid-1700s, but the people of Québec continued to speak French and to take great pride in their French heritage.
Having a mostly secular government began to erode the popularity of the Catholic Church in Québec, until the Rebellions of 1837-1838. These were not dissimilar to the U.S. War of Independence, with the added wrinkles that English and French Canada were not especially friendly, and that the revolts failed. After the rebellions fell apart, martial law was declared in Montréal, and with turmoil all around them, the Québecois began to look to the organization that had always been there: the Church.
A mailbox with Québec French that roughly translates to "No fucking admail". (Photo: Gates of Ale/CC BY-SA 3.0)
"I think the second half of the 19th century, that's when it became omnipresent," says Bauer. The number of Catholic congregations in Québec skyrocketed. The Church all but took over social services yet again, from education to marriage. The dominance of the Catholic Church in Québec went on far longer than anywhere else in North America, and indeed most places in Europe. Over 90 percent of the Quebec population regularly attended Catholic church services right up until 1960. Catholic newspapers flourished. Catholic schools became the vast majority of the sources of primary education in the province.
In 1960 that all changed; the election of Jean Lesage as the premier of Québec found the province beginning what would come to be known as the Quiet Revolution. Secularization began in earnest as education was wrenched out of the hands of the Church through various means (standardizing curriculums, replacing Catholic secondary education with a pre-college school system known as CEGEP), and industries ranging from energy to mining to forestry were created as public institutions, undermining the Church's power.
This is all to say that the reason Québec developed the sacres is that in few other places was the grip of centralized religion quite so firm. But with the lessening prevalence of Catholicism in Québec, it's not at all clear that the sacres will survive. "It's still there but the young people like to use fuck, or son of a bitch, those are young kind of trendy, American slangs," says Bauer. Even weirder: without the Church in their lives, some young people very literally do not know what the sacres mean. "Among the young generation nobody knows exactly what hostie or tabarnak is, but it's still the heritage in Québec culture." The younger generation may still use the words because their parents and grandparents use them, but some of their power is lost.
That's totally unlike, say, "fuck," which has been a powerful word for hundreds of years. The power of sex never lessens, but the Catholic Church? That can ebb and flow. At a certain point, there's a possibility that the Québecois may decide that there's nothing especially powerful about a tabernacle. And then tabarnak will be nothing more than a box.
This drone has been outfitted with an anti-drone net gun. (Photo: FliteTest/Youtube)
Though they look like something out of a superhero comic book, net launchers and net guns are devices that exist in the real world. They're mainly used to humanely trap wild animals, or, in some cases, humans. Lately, they've taken on a new role: as a weapon in the fight against commercial drones flying in unauthorized airspace, be that over a classified military base or above a Russian ren faire.
Net guns are exactly what they sound like: guns (or similar devices) that fire out a net. While this may sound like something a 10-year-old would make up for Batman to carry around, the technology and industry of net guns has been growing for years. According to Travis Peters, owner of Net Gun Store, one of the leading retailers of net guns, the non-lethal projectiles have been growing in popularity since around 2006.
Homemade or commercial, most net guns work on the same mechanics. The nets that are fired from the guns are usually attached to four small weights at the corners that are propelled from the device using compressed air. The body of the net has to be carefully loaded so that when the weights are fired from the gun, they drag the unfurling net behind them, opening it in the process. Once the net hits its target, the weights naturally swing around, ensnaring whatever the net was fired towards.
Net guns have become a non-lethal alternative to capture, as there is no significant risk to the target, even from the weights. “It will sting for sure! But nothing serious,” says Peters about getting hit with one of the weights. “They are covered in rubber.”
The guns come in a variety of shapes and sizes. The “Standard Net Gun Package” at the Net Gun Store offers a net-firing device that looks like a big, heavy-duty flashlight. This wand-style gun shoots high-tensile nylon nets ranging from six-foot-by-six-foot meshes good for capturing small birds to 10-by-10 nets that can entrap an adult human. There are also net guns that look more like rifles with four barrels—one for each weight—that are used for capturing larger animals.
“By far, my largest demographic is animal rescue," says Peters. "Our net guns are able to help animal rescue/control companies capture wounded and dangerous animals they normally wouldn't be able to help."
The latest use for net guns, however, targets technology rather than wildlife. “About 10 percent of our sales go to law enforcement, anti-drone campaigns and security companies,” says Peters. His company is getting more and more requests to attach net guns to drones for the purpose of capturing other drones that are flying around where they shouldn’t be. Since most commercially available drones take flight using some form of helicopter technology, nets are an ideal capture tool, the rotor blades almost instantly being caught up in the mesh.
Using nets instead of more violent means to take down drones also has other advantages. "I get a lot of inquiries from people who have experienced drones flying on to their properties," says Peters. "It kind of freaks them out so they want a way to stop them without using a real gun. Also, when using the net gun, it allows the user to capture and recover any video recording device that may have been used."
Peters’ store is far from the only one to have discovered that the natural enemy of a drone is a net. Other companies are developing new net-firing technologies aimed specifically at using nets against rogue drones. Some, like the Theiss UAV Solutions’ “Excipio” system, are focusing on how best to attach a net gun straight to drone, so that it can be fired at an opposing drone at any altitude. Then there’s the dystopian “Skywall” system equipped with bulky sci-fi bazookas and turrets that look like they were taken straight out of a video game. You have the fleet of drones used by the Tokyo police, which hang a net from their undercarriage and fly it into other drones. Boston law enforcement were even given net guns to police drones flying over the Boston Marathon in 2015.
Drones might be the future, but not even they can escape an attack from a well-thrown net. Just something to remember, should your neighbor buy a buzzing little quadcopter and hover it outside your window.
A group of archaeologists in Greece say they have found the lost tomb of Aristotle, the Greek philosopher and likely world's first true scientist.
The Greek newspaper Ekathimerinireported Thursday that the finding will be announced at a press conference, as a capstone to a Aristotle-themed conference in Thessaloniki.
The archaeologists had been digging for 20 years at a site in the ancient northern Greece city of Stageira, where Aristotle was born in 384 B.C. Aristotle died 62 years later in Chalcis, about 50 miles north of Athens.
Ahead of the official announcement, the Greek Reporterhas some more details on the tomb, saying that "literary sources" say that Aristotle's ashes were transferred there after his death. It is located near the ancient city's agora, apparently intended to be viewed by the public.
From the Greek Reporter:
The top of the dome is at 10 meters and there is a square floor surrounding a Byzantine tower. A semi-circle wall stands at two-meters in height. A pathway leads to the tomb’s entrance for those that wished to pay their respects. Other findings included ceramics from the royal pottery workshops and fifty coins dated to the time of Alexander the Great.
Not much is known about Aristotle's life, aside from what he left in his own writings. It took over 2,300 years, but at least we're starting to learn more about his death.
Imagine hovering over city streets at 40 miles per hour, zooming past congested traffic and sidewalks filled with pedestrians. That’s how engineering company, Transit Explore Bus, wants to transport people with its Land Airbus—an electric elevated bus that straddles roads on specially made tracks.
The company unveiled a cute mini model of the Land Airbus at the recent International High-Tech Expo in Beijing. In the video, you can see cars enter the mouth of the bus’s cavernous temporary tunnel, and safely come out the other end. The proposed vehicle can span two roads and is elevated so cars shorter than two meters (six-foot-seven) high can drive underneath, China Xinhua News reports in the video.
Om nom nom.
“The bus will save lots of road space,” Song Youzhou, chief engineer of the Land Airbus project, says in the video. “It has the same function as the subway, but costs only 16 percent of what subway costs. Manufacturing and construction are also much shorter than for the subway.”
China Xinhua News also reports that the Land Airbus could replace 40 conventional buses, reduce 800 tons of fuel, and 2,480 tons of carbon emissions annually. In addition to being a greener mode of transportation, the Land Airbus has the capability of drastically changing the way city transit is organized. Since the special rails will be integrated on existing roads and highways, the company is less likely to run into issues with land acquisition and environmental regulations, according to TreeHugger.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
Rhydypandy, a village in south Wales, has a sheep problem. The grazers have been running amok in the village, eating people's gardens and breaking into homes, according to the Telegraph. One of them even died after running into the road. This isn't, in other words, normal sheep behavior.
But what could be the cause? A county official suspects it is marijuana. Ioan Richard, a councillor, told the Telegraph that the discarded remains of an illegal marijuana farm had been unceremoniously dumped on the side of the road. It has since been removed, but did the sheep get to it before authorities did?
Richard says it's possible.
"We could have an outbreak out of psychotic sheep rampaging through the village," Richard told the Telegraph.
But a local bartender told the Daily Beast that reports of stoned sheep were overblown. Sheep have always invaded people's gardens, the bartender said, and, besides, she thinks a stoned sheep would likely just fall asleep.
Stoned sheep or not, Richard took the episode as a chance to rail against illegal dumping, which is frequent in rural Wales. There was no word on whether Richard lectured the sheep on marijuana being a gateway drug.
Joseph Bagley with a handful of 18th and 19th century ceramic shards, unexpectedly unearthed at the Malcolm X House in Roxbury, Massachusetts. (Photo: Joseph Bagley/City of Boston Archaeology Program)
On a recent Thursday afternoon, Joseph Bagley, came striding out from the backyard of 72 Dale Street in Roxbury, a hard hat swinging from his left hand. Steering through the flotsam of the day's efforts—scattered piles of bagged artifacts; perfectly rectangular pits; volunteers sitting on buckets, taking notes—he reached the end of the driveway, where a surveyor stood, waiting for an update. Bagley wiped his brow with a dusty shirt cuff. "Did you hear?" he asked. "We finally found the Irish families!"
As Boston's official City Archaeologist, Bagley is charged with investigating everything from unearthed shipwrecks to historic sites like 72 Dale Street, which is best known to locals as the "Malcolm X House." As a teenager, the future civil rights leader lived here for seven years with his half-sister, Ella Little-Collins. Decades later, the house is vacant and in disrepair. Malcolm's nephew, Rodnell Collins, hopes to restore it to its 1940s glory—ultimately, he wants to transform it into graduate student housing, for scholars of social justice and African-American history.
But before the construction workers can break ground, Bagley has to take a look. So for two weeks this spring, he and his crew of grad students, drop-ins and regular volunteers have spent their days digging up, sorting through, and puzzling out the property's multi-layered history.
When Malcolm X first came to Roxbury in the summer of 1940, he was Malcolm Little, a 15-year-old who had spent much of his life in foster homes in the Midwest.With the help of his half-sister, Ella, whom he described as "a leading light of local so-called 'black society,'" he took in all of Boston: its culture, its history, its class differences. When Malcolm found it difficult to return to Michigan, Ella formally adopted him, and he lived at the Dale Street house with her until he was 21.
Later, he would consider his time there essential to his personal trajectory. "No physical move in my life has been more pivotal and profound in its repercussions," he wrote.
But what is clear in hindsight, or in the pages of a book, is not necessarily quite so visible in an old backyard. "To be honest, I thought this site was going to be a little boring," Bagley says, noting that there was garbage pickup in 1940s Boston, and no real reason for the former inhabitants to leave their belongings laying about. But as soon as he and his team started looking, they began finding traces of their lives: a peach pit, rusty iron jacks, even a folk record from the late 1950s. Most were likely scattered during an incident in the 1970s, when vandals broke in and ransacked the place. "It unfortunately wrecked the house," says Bagley, "but at least we found some of the stuff."
Despite the title of the Malcolm X Dig, archeological protocol requires going deeper, and some further-back finds have proven much more mysterious. Around the corner, against the east wall of the house, Ramona Steele is about three feet into a meticulously dug pit. Steele, an archeology graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Boston, has been digging since Monday, and recently broke through the upper strata of yellow dirt into a rich, brown layer that dates back to the 18th century. Every few minutes, she calls Bagley over and hands him something new—a wineglass stem, a wig curler, a flip-up pewter mug top ("to keep the flies out of your beer," Bagley says).
Ramona Steele takes notes on colonial artifacts she found over the course of the week. (Photo: Atlas Obscura)
These artifacts are totally unexpected. According to all maps and records, this site was straight-up farmland until the house was first built in 1874. But here are the unmistakable trappings of something else: wealthy, colonial domestic life, surfacing over and over again. "I've dug on actual known colonial sites that had less stuff," says Bagley. "We have a big fancy house hiding somewhere here."
Bagley carries Steele's buckets of dirt over to the driveway, where workers pour it through sifting screens. Charles Deknatel, a land planner and frequent Boston City Archeology volunteer, has already found "some very nice smoking pipe pieces," he says. The teenagers at the next station over, who wandered in off the street just this morning, quickly unearthed a lead musket ball the size of a marble. Passing it from person to person, they speculate as to who might have shot it, and why.
Joseph Bagley holds a bottle that once belonged to a 1920s Irish family. (Photo: Atlas Obscura)
Though those specifics are lost to time, the team did solve another mystery today. In between those surprise colonial aristocrats and the Little-Coleman household, records show the space was occupied by a few Irish families, who shared the home during the Great Depression. For days, Bagley could find no sign of them. Today, they finally showed themselves in a trash pit in the backyard, in the form of lobster shells, a false tooth, and an assortment of medicine and perfume bottles. Bagley pulls one out of its plastic storage bag—a seed started growing in it while it was underground, and the roots still show through the mottled glass.
Now that they've been found, bagged, and labeled, all these formerly lively bits and bobs—jacks, pipes, and lobster shells alike—are heading to a lab in West Roxbury to get cleaned, examined, and more precisely dated. After that, they will end up shelved somewhere, available to future scholars. Bagley hopes this final resting place will be close by: "We're trying to keep it in the neighborhood," he says. After all these years, it would be a shame to lose them.
In Pennsylvania, in April, a 49-year-old woman came into an clinic complaining of a urinary tract infection. But what was ailing her was much scarier than a basic UTI. Her urine samples contained E. coli that carried an antibiotic resistance to colistin, a drug that’s been used to kill bacteria that have developed resistance to many of the drugs used to defeat them.
This patient is not the first in the world to harbor bacteria resistant to colistin, but she is the first in the U.S. The resistance gene that these bacteria carry “heralds the emergence of truly pan-drug resistant bacteria,” write the authors of the report on the Pennsylvania case. It had previously be found in people in 20 countries, as well as in pigs.
Colistin has been effective in treating otherwise-resistant diseases because its harsh side effects kept doctors from prescribing it. It has been used more widely in agriculture, though. American researchers have been looking for this resistance since its existence was first announced in November.
The bacteria found in Pennsylvania are still vulnerable to some antibiotics. As reporter Maryn McKenna, who’s long covered superbugs, explains:
Bacteria acquire resistance genes like gamblers amassing a hand of cards, but the way the “cards” arrive is not step-wise—bad resistance, and then worse resistance, and then the worst—but randomly. What that means, in this case, is that the Pennsylvania E. coli possesses ESBL resistance (bad) and colistin resistance (worst)—but it remains susceptible to other intervening categories of drugs.
At some point, though, some lucky bacteria will collect enough resistance genes to make it invulnerable to the treatments we’ve developed.
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
You can almost hear the ship just looking at it. (Photo: Property of Paramount Pictures/Screencap by Eric Grundhauser)
You would think, with the decades of Star Trek film, movies, books, websites, conventions and holidays, there'd be nothing new for a fan to discover in the series. But there hasn't been a Star Trek fan quite like Spike Snell. The YouTuber and noise musician was casually watching the entire run ofStar Trek: The Next Generation for the fourth time in 2011 when he locked in on something that most obsessives took for granted, yet was present in almost every scene.
It was, as he put it, his favorite part of the show. The "ambient engine noise sound."
In the intervening years, Snell has taken it upon himself to sample and loop the ambient hums of dozens of science fiction ships, building an unlikely but sizeable YouTube presence of over nine million views and over a hundred videos. Whether it’s the calming tone created by the USS Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation, or the throbbing pulse of Dr. Who’s Tardis, Snell aims to shine a light on an important element of science fiction that most people don’t often think about—what the spaceships sound like.
“Each spaceship sound in sci-fi culture is unique and has differences in the way that they rumble, and in the subtleties of their atmosphere,” says Snell. The background sound of the ships have done almost as much to build their respective worlds as the sets themselves, even if you don’t normally notice them. Since we don’t actually know what a warp drive would sound like, these hums and drones are created by sound effects editors who take tones from a number of sources to create some of the most recognizable spaceship sounds around.
The making of a spaceship’s ambient sound, which is usually some mix of a room tone and an invented engine noise, among other components, begins with the story. According to Peter Lago, a sound effects editor for Warner Brothers, who has worked in the business for 13 years on such shows as The Shannara Chronicles and Arrow, creating a ship’s sound is all about its character. “My overall approach to building [spaceship sounds], it starts with the direction from the creative people involved, as well as the type of ship or environment you’re building,” says Lago. “The Millennium Falcon is going to sound like the Millennium Falcon. In the movies they call it a piece of junk, so it’s got to sound a bit broken down, but still cool and badass.”
Once the nature of the ship is determined, whether it is a sleek, well-cared for vessel or a janky barge, barely limping through the cosmos, its background hum can be created using anything the sound designer can dream up. “I always try to root sounds in things that are organic, and that make sense,” says Lago. “You can easily jump on a synthesizer and press a bunch of keys, and you’ve got something. But that can be kind of stale.”
Lago recently worked on the CW show The 100, which features a century-old space station called The Ark, a vessel which had been cobbled together by an ancient United Nations, but is, during the time of the show’s story, beginning to fall apart. In creating the ambient sounds for The Ark, the age and impending failure of the station needed to subtly come across in the sounds of the location. For The 100, Lago would sometimes just create sounds from things around the house. “I’d just set some microphones on the ground and drag something slowly. I’d tie a bunch of my kids’ toys together and drag them slowly, and get a nice little recording of some weird sound, and use those pieces in there,” he says.
But even within a larger ship, the sounds can differ from location to location. For instance the peaceful solemnity of a captain’s quarters is probably going to be different from the hustle and bustle of an active cargo bay, requiring similar, but distinctive sounds. “One thing I did for The 100, I was shopping at a Fresh and Easy, and they had this freezer that made this incredible, “OOOOMMMMM,” says Lago. “ So I just stuck my recorder in there and closed it, and just stood outside of the freezer for a minute or so. Then I took that recording, and cleaned it up, and it was kind of elegant.” But a smooth elegant hum wasn’t right for all of the parts of the ratchety, old ark, so Lago used it specifically for the upscale chambers of The Ark’s ruling class, creating a distinctly different atmosphere than in other parts of the ship, while still having it feel like a natural extension of the overall space. The sounds can come from anywhere so long as they help transport the viewer into the world.
For all of the work that goes into creating the unique sound of a given spaceship, the ultimate goal is to make sure that the noise both informs the setting, but also goes unnoticed behind the sounds of dialogue and other active sounds in the world. When this delicate balancing act is achieved, the viewer shouldn’t be actively aware of the tone, “A lot of this stuff happens in the subconscious, or it goes by unknown,” says Lago. “It’s gotta feel so natural that the audience believes that [that is what this spaceship sounds like].” In other words, Firefly’s Serenity needs to sound like Serenity, and not a Starfleet shuttle.
To point out the characteristic differences between spaceship sounds, we got Lago to give us his professional rundown on some famous ship engine sounds:
USS Enterprise (Star Trek: The Next Generation) (1987-1994)
‘This ambient loop feels like a heavily processed recording of an airplane in flight. I don't hear the nuts-and-bolts of the engine components, but rather the smooth, higher and lower airy sounds, which give it a soothing and steady feel. This feels like a practical ship; a working-man's ship, but with a slight hint of something more elegant underneath.”
Klingon Bird of Prey (Star Trek: The Next Generation) (1987-1994)
“This has a heavier, hollow, more sci-fi presence. The loop has a definitive heartbeat of sorts, percussive and militaristic. Appropriately ominous.”
Event Horizon (Event Horizon) (1997)
“This feels like a more modern, heavy LFE (low frequency energy) rumble of modern science fiction films and shows. It's rich, round, steady and badass. I love this stuff.”
“This sound is similar to the Star Trek loop in the sense that it's airy, steady, and urgent. This feels a bit like a processed hot rod/El Camino/Camaro idling, blended with a slightly-flanged air conditioning return. It's not a fancy, romantic sci-fi element, but it's cool!”
International Space Station (Real life) (1998-Current)
“To hear the actual sounds of an actual space station is exciting. Its active, in motion, engaging and real. Steady air flow, high-frequency computer/electrical hums, some kind of rhythmic clanking in the loop... Listen to it long enough and you'll find yourself nodding your head to the beat.”
Snell’s Youtube channel advertises many of the ship sounds he has collected as a sort of relaxing white noise for the geek set, but more than that, each soundscape has the ability to transport the listener right into the ship they are listening to. “My favorite ship sound is still the TNG engine noise,” says Snell. “I'd love to be aboard the ship, and the sound itself is incredibly nostalgic to me.” For all the love fans give to their favorite spaceships, it’s about time they started to realize how great they sound.
Last week, the TSA’s official Instagram account posted a collage of photographs of an unusual object being passed through screening at Atlanta International Airport: a mutilated, decomposing corpse.
Is this why the lines are so long?
Not really. This did not turn out to be someone’s attempt to smuggle a dead body on board. The corpse was a realistic prop from the set of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre II movie and unlike the other illicit items regularly posted to the TSA’s Instagram account, the corpse was permitted to pass through the checkpoint–though it did garner a lot of attention.
“Not only did it turn a lot of heads at the Atlanta TSA checkpoint, but it quickly became our most popular Instagram post with nearly 10,000 likes,” says Bob Burns, the TSA’s social media lead and the person behind the agency's Instagram account.
The account began posting in 2013, and often accompanies its pictures of confiscated items with a surprisingly dry sense of humor. Since then, it has racked up a vast collection of bizarre items, such as concealed knives, shurikens and even a liquor bottle full of dead, endangered seahorses.
Not every confiscated item, of course, goes on the account. Burns has shown a real flair for respecting Instagram decorum of only posting the best shots.
“The most common response we see is something similar to this: ‘OMG!!! I had no idea the TSA was finding all of this stuff! Now I know why the lines are so long…’,” explains Burns. “What they don’t realize is that we’re just posting the best of the best. They’re only seeing an incredibly small percentage of what our officers discover at the checkpoints.”
As Memorial Day weekend approaches, and travelers gear up for ever-worsening TSA lines, you can take a glimpse into what exactly is holding everything up via the TSA’s official Instagram account. And remember–please pack your machetes in your checked bags.
Oregon's Crater Lake is, essentially, a giant, clear-blue puddle, 1,984 feet deep. It's the deepest lake in America, and the seventh deepest in the world. If you plopped One World Trade Center down on the lake's lowest point, its tip would still be under water. The lake's basin crumbled into being 7,700 years ago, when volcanic Mount Mazama collapsed into its empty magma chamber, creating a caldera, a bowl-shaped indent on top of the mountain.
However, its incredible depth is perhaps less important than its clarity. According to the National Park Service, Crater Lake might be the clearest lake in the world—"waters of Crater Lake are actually resetting the standards for the optical properties of 'pure water'." Every other winter or so, the lake undergoes its version of a cleanse. In these “deep ventilation” events, unseen movements of the water carry oxygen downward and bring up nutrients. Deep ventilation feeds what little life there is the lake and move the nutrients and the algae around in ways that spur or inhibit growth. Naturally, because this is how the world works these days, climate change will modify this process.
This is all to say, Crater Lake's future is not clear.
In a study the U.S. Geological Survey released in May, scientists found that as global average temperatures go up, deep ventilation will happen less often at Crater Lake—anywhere from once in three years to once in 7.7 years, depending on the speed and degree that temperatures rise.
Most lakes, fed by rivers and streams, are full of life and particles. Crater Lake, fed only by snow and rain falling into the caldera, has very little in it other than water. That's why it's so clear. At times, it's been possible to see 130 feet down into its depths.
“It’s got this teeny little basin that’s defined by the rim of that crater,” says Tamara Wood, the lead author of the new study and a hydrologist at USGS. There's very little area from which nutrients can run off into the lake—it's almost a closed system. “There's a lot of just moving things around,” she says.
Deep ventilation, a very important part of moving things around, only happens under special circumstances, in which pressure, density and temperature conspire to move water down deeper into the lake than it would normally go. At most times of year, the lake is warmer on the surface, but colder on the bottom. (You understand this if you've swum in a summer lake—it'll be pleasant until you let your toes drop deep, where the water is frigid.)
The cold water at the bottom of the lake stays put, because water is denser when it's colder—up to 4 degrees Celsius. That's the point where water is heaviest; at colder temperatures, it starts becoming less dense again. (Like how ice floats in part because it's less dense than water.) In the winter, when temperatures drop low enough, less dense, very cold water will make up the lake's top layer, and it'll be warmer below.
But pressure changes that equation. In a lake as deep as Crater Lake, there can be a significant change from atmospheric pressure down deep in the lake, and as the pressure increases, the temperature at which water is heaviest drops. When the wind pushes cold surface water down to that warmer, higher pressure layer, all of a sudden it can't float anymore. The water from the surface is still cold, but, under more pressure, temperature translates to greater weight.
The water starts to sink, and it keeps falling, like Alice down the rabbit hole, until it reaches a place where it's as dense as the surrounding water or the bottom of the lake, whichever comes first. There is a small food web in the lake, and this movement brings oxygen down to the microbes living deep down in the water and helps bring nutrients that have settled to bottom of the lake back up, feeding algae on the top.
The correct conditions for deep ventilation don't always come together. Right now, the lake flip-flops its water in this way once every two winters. Wood and her colleagues modeled the process going out to 2100, with the climate changing, and they found that the right alchemy will happen less often in a warmer world.
What does that mean? In the paper, Wood and her colleagues are careful to say that they can't predict how this will affect the growth of algae in the lake or the lake's water clarity. They modeled only the physical changes that might happen, not biological ones. Without the nutrients that mixing provides, the algae on the surface could die, making the lake more clear; warmer temperatures could also affect the ecology of the lake by allowing a longer growing season, though, increasing the amount of algae. When the mixing does happen, it could bring up a feast of nutrients settled on the bottom and feed a population boom in algae, which could create green blooms of life on the lake's surface.
"These linkage between the climate and the freshwater system, they’re intricate and complicated," says Wood. "It’s not obvious how this is all going to play out 600 meters below the surface."
At Lake Tahoe, for example, another deep and very blue lake, climate change is also a concern, and the water at the surface has been less clear in years when deep mixing hasn't happened. Tahoe's clarity started dropping a few decades ago, when fine, inorganic particles started accumulating in the lake. (Once they would have been trapped in the surrounding land but after the area had been more heavily developed, those particles began washing off roads and through drains, into the lake.) Deep ventilation helps because when the less particle-y water comes up from the bottom, it improves clarity at the surface.
If people can keep from adding extra organic matter and particles to the lake, though, the lake will be more resilient to climate changes. "If there's less to stimulate algal growth, the longer the lake can withstand periods of no mixing," says Geoff Schladow, director of the Tahoe Environmental Research Center.
Less frequent ventilation could still dramatically alter circumstances for fish, algae and other tiny lake lovers. For humans, though, any change to the lakes' looks would be subtle. "I don’t want you to think Lake Tahoe is doomed," says Schladow. "It’s not—it’s beautiful out." A visitor to Crater Lake decades in the future might see an algal bloom, but they might not. If there is a change to the lake's clarity, it'll be hard for a visitor to tell, says Wood. Just as it's not always obvious when a person's insides are blocked up, the lakes might still look good on the surface, even if they're suffering inside.
Men in devilish yellow-and-red jumpsuits leaping over tiny, supine babies? If you're in the Spanish village of Castrillo de Murcia this Sunday, you can see this happen live.
Baby-jumping is the main event of El Colacho, an annual festival that takes place in Castrillo de Murcia following the religious feast of Corpus Christi. Town mothers can volunteer infants born in the previous year, putting their trust in the athletic abilities of men masquerading as devils. As the devils leap over them, the babies are swiftly absolved of their original sin.
The devil-men, sometimes sporting masks and carrying whips, menace curious onlookers and then proceed to hurdle over mattresses holding bright-eyed babes, who are generally napping or crying in terror.
It’s unclear when or how exactly the baby jumping began, but the tradition is about four centuries old. If you've been searching for a trust-building community exercise, this may just be it.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
Imagine: it's the tail end of Memorial Day Weekend. All your friends have been posting pictures of themselves laughing it up in various attractive early summer situations. You, on the other hand, have found yourself at a relatively average New England beach—gritty sand, cloudy sky, some water. There is no Instagram filter that can enhance this. How to set yourself apart?
Look! There, down the beach—a lone seal pup, wriggling in the sand. Do you approach the seal? Do you click that little button that switches to the front-facing camera? Do you put your head near the pup's head, as though you are pals, and smile?
No. Do not do it, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association said in a recent press release. Do not take a selfie with the seal.
This is the Ellen DeGeneres At The Oscars of seal selfies in the making, but you must resist. (Photo: skeeze/CC0)
Ours is an age of animal selfie disasters. There are the bison of Yellowstone, violently tired of being photographed. There was the dolphin in Argentina who may or may not have been killed by selfie-happy beachgoers. There is the macaque who, after a protracted court battle, lost the rights to his own self-portrait.
NOAA's message is, essentially, that we don't need to drag seals into this. Seal moms leave their pups alone when they go out hunting—if they come back to see you Snapchatting them, they may abandon them in intergenerational fear. Also, they could bite you: "Seals have powerful jaws, and can leave a lasting impression," NOAA writes.
"As tempting as it might be to get that perfect shot of yourself or your child with an adorable seal pup," they write, "please do the right thing and leave the seal pup alone... No selfie stick is long enough."
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
Saturn as seen from Titan, 1944 (Photo: Reproduced courtesy of Bonestell LLC)
Twenty-five years before Neil Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface, Chesley Bonestell showed humanity a view from Saturn's moon. The image, which showed Earth as a distant speck—or was that just another star?—was an astonishingly beautiful painting titled Saturn as seen from Titan.
Space art had been seen before, but never as cinematically as this. The painting, published in Life, was a sensation, and the man behind it would go on to paint many more inspiring images of the as-yet-unexplored universe.
Saturn as seen from Titan combinedBonestell's long-standing passion for astronomy with his experience as an artist for the silver screen. Born on New Year's Day in 1888, spending his childhood years in San Francisco and looking up at the stars and drawing what he saw. Once, he went to an observatory in San Jose and saw Saturn. Then, as a teen, he drew it.
After attending Columbia University, and leaving without a degree, Bonestell became a working architect, contributing to the Chrysler Building and the Golden Gate Bridge. Before he turned his talents to space art, Bonestell was a matte artist, painting backgrounds for a string of movies in Hollywood's golden age. In our current era of special effects, the art of matte painting is a bit forgotten, but for decades, until at least the late 1990s, it was essential to Hollywood filmmaking. The Death Star's laser tunnel, the Statue of Liberty emerging from the sand in Planet of the Apes, the city of London in the background to a gliding Mary Poppins: all of these were matte paintings.
Bonestell churned out mattes for every major studio in Hollywood, at a time when they were an essential and cost-effective way to build scope. His work can be seen in such cinema classics as 1939's The Hunchback of Notre Dame and 1941's Citizen Kane. (That wide shot of Xanadu? That's Bonestell).
Nearly 40 years after drawing Saturn as a teen, Bonestell drew it again. But this time it wasn't from the perspective of the Earth, but from Titan, Saturn's largest moon. Bonestell submitted the image, unsolicited, to Life magazine. It was published in the May 29, 1944 issue, along with several other Bonestell paintings. Life then was an American institution, with a circulation well over a million, and Bonestell's work hit the public "like an atomic bomb," Bonestell biographer Ron Miller wrote.
How did Bonestell do it? As Miller writes, Saturn was meticulously planned. Bonestell's process started with a sketch, and then a real-life model, which he photographed, enlarged, and used to paint the artwork. As it turned out, the science of the painting was wrong—you'd likely see nothing but a thick haze if you were actually standing on Titan, not a clear view of Saturn—but that hardly mattered. The image blew up.
Bonestell would go on to publish dozens more paintings in various magazines, science fiction or otherwise. In 1949, many of those paintings were compiled into a book: The Conquest of Space, which showed, in 58 illustrations with near photo-realistic detail, astronauts actively exploring our solar system. (That book also helped inspire a movie of the same name.)
In 1952, there came an influential series in the now-defunct magazine Collier's, just before Congress was beginning to think about how to fund the space program. Five years after that, the Soviets launched Sputnik, and the Space Race was on. It's hard to say with any certainty just how influential Bonestell's paintings were in initiating humans' drive to shoot for the stars, but his artwork certainly made an impact on those dreaming of space travel.
"Chesley Bonestell not only changed my life," G. Harry Stine, the creator of amateur model rocketry once said, "but motivated two generations of people to start the human race on its way to ultimate freedom of the stars."
The early 1950s, for Bonestell, was one of the most productive of his career. He produced space painting after space painting, depicting imagined parts of the universe in all its forms, in addition to man's (then still-hypothetical) attempts to explore it. Look, there's a colony on Mars! And, look, the surface of Mercury! And here we have the assembly of "moonships" above Hawaii!
How accurate were these paintings? Bonestell got a few things right; he seemed to know, for example, the importance rockets would have in space travel, in addition to how rockets would burn in stages before separating. And his lunar landers were also reasonably realistic, for having been imagined in 1951. Elsewhere, though, he missed the mark, as with his depiction of a circular space station, or a "baby satellite," that, for some reason, still has a rocket nose cone attached.
Still, Bonestell, who died in 1986 at the age of 98, was an exacting and demanding artist and collaborator, sometimes clashing with those who questioned his vision. He complained bitterly, for example, to the director of 1955's Conquest of Space that the movie's landscape of Mars, a smoothed-out panorama of red dust, was not craggy enough. (The director's vision, in fact, turned out to be closer to reality.)
"My file cabinet is filled with sketches of rocket ships I had prepared to help in his artwork—only to have them returned to me with penetrating, detailed questions or blistering criticism of some inconsistency or oversight," Wernher von Braun, who collaborated with Bonestell on the Collier's series, once said. "I have learned to respect, nay, fear, this wonderful artist's obsession with perfection."
Bonestell is generally credited as the father of modern space art, but he definitely wasn't the first. That title goes to Lucien Rudaux, a French astronomer and space art enthusiast who Bonestell discovered in London in the 1920s, when Bonestell was still a relatively unknown illustrator. But Rudaux's paintings of the Moon, made in the 1920s and the 1930s and compiled into a book called Sur les Autres Mondes (On Other Worlds), might have just been too realistic. While's Bonestell's Moon contained dramatic peaks and valleys, Rudaux's were more restrained, reflecting a surface of the Moon that Rudaux rightly expected was closer to the real thing.
"Rudaux's lunar landscapes might have been more correct scientifically," Ron Miller wrote in A Chesley Bonestell Space Art Chronology (1999), "but they were also, unfortunately, as boring-looking as the Moon itself turned out to be."
In the 1960s, when Bonestell finally saw pictures of the real thing, he was disappointed.
It looks, he said, according to Miller, "for all the world like the Berkeley Hills."
Last year, a group of scientists were asleep on a remote island in the Bahamas when one of them was awakened by a snake: a new species of boa constrictor it turned out, one of several previously undiscovered snakes the scientists later identified.
Scientists so far have seen 20 of them on or near Conception Island in the Bahamas, tagging some to keep track of their movements, according to the Guardian. Chilabothrus argentum, which is silver in appearance, is also critically endangered.
Scientists frequently discover new species of animals and plants, but finding a new snake, at least one expert told the Guardian, was very uncommon.
The snake gets by on a diet of birds, frogs, and rats, killing them like other constrictors, by coiling their bodies around their prey and squeezing.
The scientists have known about the snakes for some time, discovering many of them last year, but they waited for any formal announcement after genetic testing was complete. The scientists found the first in a serendipitous place: slithering up a palm tree. The tree's color? Also silver.
There are cave dwellers, and then there are obligate cave dwellers. Our view of what that means, though, might be totally wrong.
For instance, bats aren’t obligate cave dwellers—they’re troglophiles, which means they can live in caves (maybe they even prefer it), but they can live elsewhere too, and they must leave their subterranean habitat for some biological functions (namely, eating). The obligate cave dwellers, on the other hand, are called troglobionts, or troglobites, and these are the animals who live out their entire lives in caves. Typically, troglobionts have a standard set of adaptations that make them particularly well-suited to a subterranean environment—blindness, lack of skin pigmentation, elongated appendages that pair with sensory adaptations to process their environment without sight, and flightlessness.
Now, a team of scientists from Norway, Germany, and Croatia has made a discovery that challenges the long-held assumption that subterranean species are uniformly flightless; in one of the deepest cave systems in the world, the researchers have discovered a flying subterranean insect.
In a paper recently published in PLOS ONE, the research team explains the circumstances around the discovery.
Croatia’s Velebit mountain range is part of the Dinaric Alps, which is home to over 900 troglobiont species, making it one of the richest areas for cave-dwelling creatures. Within the Velebit lies the Lukina jama—Trojama cave system, the 14th-deepest cave system in the world. Eight hundred meters within the caves, you’ll find Troglocladius hajdi, the scientists’ ground-breaking discovery.
A. SE-NW profile of the Lukina jama—Trojama cave system in the Velebit Mountain, Croatia. Explored by Speleological Committee of the Croatian Mountaineering Association, Croatian Speleological Federation and Slovak Speleological Society; map prepared by Darko Bakšić. Positions of the 3 campsites (First, second and third camp) inside the pit are marked on the map. B. The chamber at 980 m depth, where most of the specimens were caught. C. Newly emerged specimen of Troglocladius hajdi Andersen, Baranov et Hagenlund, gen. n., sp. n., sitting on the cave wall. (Illustration: Anderson, et al. / CC BY-4.0; Photo: J. Bedek / CC BY-4.0)
T. hajdi shares many of the adaptations we expect of obligate cave dwellers, the researchers explain, with one major exception:
The body is pale yellowish….and weakly sclerotized. The eyes are strongly reduced with only 0–4 ommatidia present. The legs are comparatively very long….The antenna appears short, but have few, long setae on segments 4–6 and strong sensilla on segments 1–5. Remarkably however, the wings are well developed, long and broad with an excavated anal lobe, and the halteres are also unusually large.
This combination of reduced eyes and well-developed wings is what makes T. hajdi such a remarkable discovery. As the researchers point out, there are over 21,000 cave-dwelling taxa known in the world, but there’s not one flying troglobiont among them. Researcher Martina Pavlek emphasized the unexpected nature of the discovery to Croatian news agency Hina, “We have been surprised, it was unexpected to have animals able to fly in pitch darkness.”
In fact, the researchers still have some riddles to work out regarding T. hajdi. While the insect’s anatomy indicates that it should be able to fly slowly or hover, the team has yet to witness one of the insects flying first-hand. However, the team asserts, “some of the specimens collected in the sticky traps were sitting in the middle of the strips, suggesting that they fly at least occasionally.”
At least equally mysterious is the fact that the team has so far only collected female specimens, raising the possibility that the insects may be parthenogenetic, or capable of asexual reproduction. Parthenogenesis isn’t uncommon among insects, and is often observed in species that live in harsh or isolated environments — such as a cave 900 meters below ground. So far, however, the scientists have not collected any larvae or pupae specimens to further study the insects’ reproductive cycle, although they suggest specimens may be found in the shallow streams observed in the cave where the adults were collected.
Moving forward, the scientists hope that this new, wholly unique specimen of troglobiont can be studied further, although they hope that scientific study will be balanced against efforts to ensure the potentially small population is protected. Whether this first example of a flying obligate cave-dweller is an anomaly remains to be seen.
The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles have made numerous pop culture contributions over the years—chief among them, making living in the sewers of New York City actually seem cool. Throughout their various comic, cartoon, and film incarnations, the turtles have always used a top-secret sewer hideout as their base of operations, outfitting it with everything a pizza-loving martial arts enthusiast might need.
Hey dudes! Looking for a dojo where you can practice your ninjitsu skills? Our secret lair in Manhattan is THE place to order up a pie, shoot some hoops & chill with your squad. Don't sweat the 10 ...
TMNT fans can emulate their heroes-in-a-half-shell by spending a night or two in the secret Manhattan lair, which features a basketball court, arcade, and free pizza delivery. Three bedrooms sleep six guests, and while drugs and alcohol are prohibited—these are teenage turtles, after all— you’re welcome to show off your unique hotel room to visitors.
For a once-in-a-lifetime stay such as this, you might expect to shell out big bucks, but the reservation is a mere $10. In addition, the turtles are making a donation to PACER's National Bullying Prevention Center on behalf of each guest.
And yes, we at Atlas Obscura realize that the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles aren’t actually real, and while many cool things can be found in Manhattan’s sewers, this AirBnB probably isn’t one of them. The listing was actually organized by Viacom Labs, the entertainment company’s research-and-development arm that focuses on creating promotions that encourage fan interaction with Viacom properties. As Engadget explained when the AirBnB partnership was announced, many entertainment companies and studios are launching R&D labs to explore new ways to promote their properties in an era when social media has made direct interaction between celebrities and their fans a commonplace occurrence.
Reality aside, this is a pretty cool opportunity to have a truly unique NYC vacation. Unfortunately, the AirBnB is currently fully booked, but the listing recommends fans monitor the TMNT Twitter account for vacancy announcements. The lair is open to guests until June 3.
It’s been unseasonably warm this past week in Atlas Obscura’s headquarters New York City, with temperatures about ten degrees higher than average. But that's not really as noteworthy, as say, India recording its hottest day ever, at 123.8º Fahrenheit on May 20th. Globally, 2016 is on track to be the hottest year on record, surpassing the current record-holder, 2015. In fact, since 2014, every successive year has been the “hottest year on record.”
This animated spiral, created by Jay Alder of the U.S. Geological Survey, is an extension of a spiral created earlier this month by climate scientist Ed Hawkins. Hawkins’ original spiral depicted the observed monthly global average temperatures (as presented in the HadCRUT 4 dataset) relative to the mean temperature for 1850-1900. The spiral makes the overall trend of global warming—and particularly the increased pace of warming since 1980—immediately obvious.
Inspired by Hawkins’ novel approach, Alder has expanded the spiral to included predicted temperatures through 2100. It's the opposite of chilling.
To model the future temperatures, Alder used the Community Climate System Model (CCSM4), a global climate model maintained by the National Center for Atmospheric Research and funded by National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy. The CCSM allows researchers to create computer simulations of Earth’s climate states past, present, and future by simultaneously simulating Earth’s atmosphere, ocean, land surface, and sea-ice.
Using the CCSM, Alder used the simulation for the IPCC Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5) emission scenario, which posits that greenhouse gas emissions remain unchecked and rise to a level four times the current atmospheric concentration by 2100. The RCP8.5 is essentially the worst-case scenario—other RCPs assume that emissions will drop substantially at some point in the next century—but the question isn’t whether temperatures (and sea levels) will continue to rise through the end of the century, just how much.
In short, Hawkins and the USGS has provided us with a visually appealing, easy-to-understand graph of our global warming death spiral. You can even pair it with a similarly informative sea ice death spiral!
While the spiral’s implications are alarming, the temperatures predicted aren’t yet guaranteed. Hawkins’ original spiral highlights the 1.5º and 2.0º Celsius temperature increase limits suggested by the recent Paris Climate Agreement. Keeping global warming below 1.5º may already be impossible; a report from Climate Central claims that we actually already surpassed that mark in February, based on data reported by NASA and NOAA. And “three months do not make a year,” as Climate Change puts it, anyway.
But if global emissions can be cut enough to put us on one of the more “optimistic” RCPs, like RCP2.6, we stand a real chance at keeping global temperatures below the 1.5º C threshold. “Humans are largely responsible for past warming," wrote Hawkins put it in the blog post accompanying his original spiral, "so we have control over what happens next.”
The Baltimore Trust Co. building in Downtown Baltimore has a new ground-floor tenant—the Under Armour Performance Center. Finally, you can enjoy the Art Deco aesthetics that became synonymous with 1920s-era banks while you pump iron.
The Baltimore Sun reports that over the past three years, the 50,000-foot former bank lobby has undergone a conversion into a state-of-the-art gym, boasting 74 cardio machines, a salon, spa, physical therapy practice, and café. Gym owner and CEO Nate Costa worked to preserve many of the lobby’s original features, installed in 1929 when the lobby was home to the Baltimore Trust Co. bank.
That includes marble Romanesque columns, iron grates and accents, a 52-foot mosaic ceiling, and ornate chandeliers. “We looked at how to celebrate the space and still make it functional,” Costa explained to the Sun. One of the biggest challenges was incorporating the bank’s vault into the design. According to the Sun, “Workers spent weeks drilling through thick concrete and steel walls. Now, a massive vault door frames the entryway to a members lounge filled with armchairs and flat-screen TVs.”
Despite Costa’s interest in and efforts towards preserving the bank lobby’s original character, some modifications were unavoidable. Specifically, the bank-turned-gym’s marble floors feature mosaic murals created by Maryland artist Hildreth Meière. Meière—who would go on to design the “Song,” “Drama,” and “Dance” rondels at Rockefeller Center, mosaics for the Great Hall dome at the National Academy of Sciences, and other notable murals used figurative and geometric designs inspired by Baltimore’s industries, harbor, and transportation to turn the lobby floor into a work of art.
Unfortunately, marble floors aren’t really the best material to exercise on, and the gym has installed “performance turf” mats over the floor, drawing criticism from some local preservationists who would prefer that all of the original fixtures of Baltimore’s only Art Deco skyscraper remain visible. However, Meière’s granddaughter, Hildreth Meière Dunn, toured the lobby with the gym’s architect and told Baltimore Brew that she was happy the mosaics were being covered up and protected. “At least [Meière’s] work is being saved. Whatever happens to the building, it will still be there,” she said.
So far, about 1,000 people have joined the new gym, with memberships costing $50 a month. If you’d like to enjoy the building’s interior without breaking a sweat, most of the facility will be open to the public. Those of us not in Baltimore will have to content ourselves with the Sun’s video tour and a photo gallery from the Baltimore Business Journal.
During World War II, the Nazi elite used special cipher machines to send coded messages among members of the High Command. One of the great accomplishments of British intelligence during the war was to break this code, the Lorenz cipher.
A volunteer happened to find this Lorenz teleprinter advertised online, and when museum reps went to pick it up, they found it in a garden shed with a bunch of other random stuff. To be fair, even the museum did not originally realize what they had found—they thought they had a commercial teleprinter of the correct model. When they cleaned it up, though, they found a swastika insignia on it and a key specifically designed to type the Waffen-SS insignia.
The teleprinter would have been used to type in messages in uncoded German and would have been attached to a cipher machine that turned the message into code. The museum has (on loan) that cipher machine, too, but it’s missing its motor. If they locate that part, they could get the entire system up and running.
They're also open to tips, if you happen to have a Lorenz cipher machine engine lying around in your own garden shed.
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
