Many a hunter has taken one of their big catches—a 12-point buck, for example, or maybe a moose—to a taxidermist, but not so long ago, you may have also considered taking a different animal: your beloved, recently-deceased horse. 

Stuffed horses might not be as common as they used to be (many a general saw their war horses fit for stuffing), yet you can still find them, living on in perpetuity in a collector's home or perched in a museum, staring at you, waiting to be stared back at. 

Take movie cowboy Roy Rogers, who had both his horse Trigger, who died in 1965, and Dale Evans’ horse Buttermilk, stuffed for display. Trigger was positioned rearing, the way he used to with Rogers aboard, his front legs gently pawing the air. Buttermilk was mounted in a more serene pose, with all four hooves on the ground. When the Roy Rogers museum in Branson, Missouri, closed, the horse sold at auction for $266,000, USA Today reported. The high bidder was Patrick Gottsch, who owns the cable channel RFD-TV. He bought Rogers' stuffed German shepherd, Bullet, too.

Dig a little deeper, and, even within the already-uncanny world of stuffed animals, you'll find that taxidermied horses occupy an even stranger category. They're not hunting trophies, of course, but domestic animals, which means people don't usually see their first horse just because someone preserved one. And they are very big, meaning that stuffing one is no small matter, unlike a Victorian's favorite hound or kitten. (Sometimes, though, people do have just the horse's head and shoulders mounted.) What's not so surprising, then, is that when they're displayed, the horses attract attention.

On Chincoteague Island in Virginia, for example, famous equine residents Misty and her daughter, Stormy, are on display in the Beebe Ranch museum, there to commemorate the inspiration for Marguerite Henry's novel that helped make the island and its ponies famous, 1947's Misty of Chincoteague. Today, visitors come for both the herds of wild ponies on nearby Assateague, as well as the stuffed ones in the museum.

Most stuffed horses, though, are of the battle-hardened variety, warhorses cherished for their survival skills, their loyalty, or merely just for good luck. 

Take Comanche, the horse who was reputed to be the last survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876. Comanche is currently displayed at the University of Kansas' Natural History Museum. His body is saddled and bridled, and he appears to look off into the distance. Another cavalry horse, Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson’s Little Sorrel, is at the Virginia Military Institute. After the war, he spent years touring around, especially throughout the South. Little Sorrel is untacked, and poses with a defiant tilt to his chin. His saddle is in a case nearby. (Robert E. Lee’s horse, Traveller, was preserved as a skeleton, but is now buried.)

Civil War Union general Phil Sheridan’s horse, Rienzi, stands in a case at the Smithsonian, in the National Museum of American History. (The Smithsonian also has a horse hoof that belonged to a heroic fire horse who galloped to a fire on a bloody stump, having lost his foot in an accident on the way.) In 1864, Sheridan, aboard Rienzi, galloped 15 miles from Cedar Creek to Winchester, Virginia, rallying his troops and helping repulse Confederate soldiers.

Thomas Buchanan wrote a poem about the ride: "Be it said, in letters both bold and bright/Here is the steed that saved the day/By carrying Sheridan into the fight/From Winchester--twenty miles away!" After the war, Sheridan kept Rienzi, who was later renamed Winchester. The horse grazed peacefully through his old age, died in 1878, and then Sheridan had him mounted.

At Mount Vernon, a diorama features a George Washington mannequin aboard a taxidermied horse, a substitute for Blueskin, Washington's favorite warhorse, and the big gray who is seen in portrait in many Washington scenes at Valley Forge, including Arnold Friberg's 1975 painting of the general kneeling in the snow, Blueskin at his side. The taxidermist told the Washington Post in 2008 that the substitute horse was in fact an Amish workhorse who died with his thick winter coat, found after he'd put out a call looking for a recently-dead white horse. 

The Blueskin stand-in reveals that, original or not, taxidermy allows us to see nature in a specific way. Or, as the academic John Herron has written, "As a blend of natural science and environmental representation, taxidermy situates the natural world within a human context, and through these posed animals we can make connections between biological processes and our understanding of the human ideal."

Or maybe we just want stuffed creatures there for their novelty. 

Consider General, a horse that is not very famous, save for one thing: General is said to be the one of the heaviest horses that ever lived, according to the West Virginia State Farm museum, where General stands, stuffed and on display. He weighed 2,850 pounds, and is positioned today not in a case but in a little corral, looking out at visitors, his own kind of celebrity.

In April 1918, as American doughboys faced down the Germans in France, California’s schoolchildren were enlisted to open a new Western Front. “We have enemies here at home more destructive, perhaps, than some of the enemies our boys are fighting in the trenches,” state horticulture commissioner George H. Hecke warned in an impassioned call-up for “School Soldiers.” He exhorted children to do their part for Uncle Sam by organizing “a company of soldiers in your class or in your school” and marching out to destroy their foe: “the squirrel army.”    

This children’s crusade was part of Squirrel Week, a seven-day frenzy in which California tried to kill off its ground squirrels. The state’s farmers and ranchers had long struggled to decimate the critters (also known as Otospermophilusbeecheyi), which were seen as pests and a source of pestilence, particularly the bubonic plague. The burrowing foragers—not to be confused with tree squirrels—devoured an estimated $30 million worth of crops annually, about $480 million in current dollars.

Squirrel Week was the state’s first attempt at mass eradication. The anti-rodent campaign was announced in March 1918 at a meeting of the state’s horticultural commissioners as they lunched on grain-fed gophers. (“Liberal portions of beef were served to those who did not like gopher meat,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle.)

California set aside $40,000 from its emergency wartime funds for the campaign, which included an anti-squirrel publicity blitz: the state printed up 34,000 posters and distributed 500,000 leaflets. 

What made Squirrel Week unique was its reliance on kids to succeed where adults had failed. Hecke’s call to arms appeared in a pamphlet titled “Kill the Squirrels,” which sought to stir patriotic youngsters to sprinkle rodenticide outside squirrel burrows. In the pamphlet’s opening illustration, a young woman holding a pail of poison barley invites eager kids to get to work.

“Children, we must kill the squirrels to save food,” she smiles. “But use poisons carefully.” The pamphlet included a recipe for strychnine-laced grain as well as suggestions for other extermination methods, such as shooting, drowning, and poison gas.

Just in case civic duty wasn’t motivation enough, there were also rewards: $50 ($800 today) to each of the elementary and high schools whose pupils killed the most squirrels, and $30 and $20 to the runners-up.  

California’s war on squirrels was framed as an extension of United States’ declaration of war on Germany a year earlier. Part of this was practical: Future president Herbert Hoover, then the United States Food Administrator, offered his “hearty approval” of the effort to save “vast quantities of food which might otherwise be used for support of our armies abroad.”

But it also made for great propaganda. In the corners of the “Kill the Squirrels” cartoon, two members of the squirrel army stood at attention, wearing Pickelhauben—the distinctive spiked helmets of the German army. Another Squirrel Week poster showed a Teutonic squirrel family wearing spiked helmets and Iron Crosses. The father squirrel sported an oddly upturned mustache—just like Kaiser Wilhelm’s.

An article about Squirrel Week in the Lompoc Journal took the martial theme and ran with it, hailing the “growing army” amassing “casualties” in “initial engagements” against the enemy. “All the killing devices of modern warfare will be used in the effort to annihilate the squirrel army, including gas,” it continued. “Don’t wait to be drafted.”

The campaign also enlisted the help of Four-Minute Men—volunteers who delivered short speeches to rally public support for the war effort. Anti-squirrel talking points were issued so they might convince farmers and ranchers to go out and kill the “little ally of the [K]aiser”:

• The BEST squirrel is the dead squirrel.
• The Hotel California board bill for ground squirrels in 1917 […] was $30,000,000—yet unpaid.
• The squirrel does not recognize daylight saving. He uses it all.
• He preys on our crops in countless hordes. He fills the ranks of the killed in true military fashion.
• Why hesitate? We can get ‘em. How? Poison ‘em, gas ‘em, drown em’, shoot ‘em, trap ‘em, submarine ‘em.
• Are you not willing then to give your whole-hearted support to this state-wide movement to KILL THE SQUIRREL?

Children were asked to verify their kills by bringing in squirrel tails to their schools. Some impatient exterminators delivered their trophies directly to Commissioner Hecke even before Squirrel Week kicked off, causing a “pronounced odor” in his office. He requested that children not send him any more tails, and instructed his county commissioners to bury all tails after tallying them.

By the time Squirrel Week ended on May 4, children across the state had turned in 104,509 tails, though this was thought to represent a fraction of the total casualties. Even after the contest ended, the Commission of Horticulture reported that kids’ enthusiasm for killing squirrels continued for “an indefinite period.” During an anti-squirrel campaign in Lassen County later in the year, one girl brought in 3,780 tails; a boy brought in 3,770.

The state considered Squirrel Week a great success: Crop yields reportedly bounced back in areas cleared of ground squirrels. But total victory remained elusive. Nearly a century later, ground squirrels and are still considered prolific, expensive pests.

The militaristic edge of the squirrel war of 1918 hasn’t entirely faded: A contemporary University of California web page about the damage caused by ground squirrels features an image of a squirrel wearing a helmet and taking aim with a bazooka. All is not quiet on this Western Front.

When Lindsay Lohan appeared on camera in October speaking in some kind of pan-European accent, she was subjected to the same form of mockery that generations of American college students who study abroad have experienced. I myself, after attending college in Montreal, returned to the US saying things like “to-more-owe” and “sore-y” and “aboat.” (Not “aboot.”)

The reaction of Americans to a fellow American who, upon returning from extended trips abroad, speaks with an altered accent, can be harsh. “People often don't react well when someone comes back with an accent, like they're putting on airs or trying to be somebody else,” says Jennifer Nycz, a specialist in sociolinguists and phonetic and phonological variation at Georgetown.

But how conscious is this change in speech, really? How much is a natural shift in the way one speaks, and how much is a concerted effort to change one’s accent?

Dialect or accent acquisition is not the most well-studied linguistic field, but for her dissertation, Nycz extensively studied Canadians who had moved to New York for subtle changes in their speech, trying to figure out how, how much, and why people change their accents. Having grown up in New Jersey and moved many times, the ways people change their speech has become a pet project for her.

It is not especially easy to consciously change an accent. Even for, say, newscasters, who are trained to change some of the most telling regionalisms in their accents, a close listen can usually pick out the subtler or less stereotyped regionalisms that remain unchanged. But for people who move around, or who spend a significant amount of time talking to people who speak in a different accent or dialect from their own, patterns of speech and pronunciation can prove strangely fluid. (Accent refers simply to the pronunciation of words; dialect can include changes in vocabulary or sentence structure. Changing “about” to “aboat” is accent, but adding “eh?” to the ends of sentences is dialect.)

What Nycz discovered is that accent acquisition is tremendously complex and hard to predict. “It's not always obvious, but we all make these little shifts depending on who we're talking to, what we're talking about, the way we feel about what we're talking about, and any number of other things,” she says. At a very basic level, research indicates that we tend to like people more when they mirror us in certain ways: posture, facial expression, and accent. The idea is that someone who is more like you is a friendlier entity. And it can be one factor that triggers someone who is spending a lot of time in a different dialect zone to slightly change the way they speak.

One of the most important variables in how quickly a person can acquire a new accent is their age. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a linguist named Arvilla Payne studied families who had recently moved to King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia best known today for having a gigantic mall. King of Prussia natives speak with a Philadelphia accent, one of the weirdest and best-studied accents in North America. (It’s well-studied largely because the godfather of modern linguistics, a guy named Bill Labov, worked at the University of Pennsylvania. Also, because it’s weird.)

Payne studied two elements of the Philadelphia accent. One is well-known, and is referred to as “oh-fronting.” When Philadelphians say words like, well, “hoagie,” that “oh” sound is made with the tongue further forward in the mouth, hence “fronting.” It comes out sounding sort of like “eh-oh.” That’s a classic; if you know a single thing about the Philadelphia accent, it’ll be oh-fronting. Payne found out that children who had recently moved to King of Prussia did indeed use those fronted “oh” sounds, indicating that they’re adopting some of the local accent.

“But there are other changes which are much more complicated,” says Nycz. “Philly has this very intense short ‘a’ system, which involves the sound ‘agh’ in words like ‘cat.’” Sometimes Philadelphians will pronounce that “agh” sound in the same way as someone from Ohio or Nevada or wherever else, but other times it’ll be more complex and sort of Midwest-y, sounding like “ey-yeah.” The rules for when to use which short “a” sound are really difficult to parse: sometimes the sound will change based on what kind of consonant comes after it, but there are also plenty of exceptions. In other words, unlike oh-fronting, this is a non-stereotyped and difficult to reproduce accent quirk. You basically have to be born into it.

Payne found that the King of Prussia kids who had come from elsewhere were not reproducing the short “a” in the same way that a native Philadelphian would. Some of the kids would use it some of the time, but would use it for words a Philadelphian wouldn’t. Some of the kids just didn’t have this feature at all.

What this indicates is that accent acquisition is messy. It’s not just a matter of wholesale adoption. People in a new accent area have to, on some level, understand the changes in order to acquire them, which indicates some sort of agency in the whole process.

Other studies, however, indicate the opposite. When examining the speech of Canadians who had moved to New York, Nycz set out what’s known as a “minimal pairs task.” Essentially, Nycz would have her subjects read many pairs of similar words, and tell her whether those words sounded the same or different. Further, she asked the Canadians whether New Yorkers would think those words sounded different.

The key difference between Canadian English and New York City English that Nycz used is called the cot-caught merger. In Canada, as well as in California, those two vowel sounds are the same, something like “ah.” But in New York City, those words sound very different: “cot” has a flat “ah” sound, but “caught” has a rounder sound, more like “awwuh.” (This is the source of the New York “cawwwfee” stereotype.) The Canadian “ah” sound is somewhere in between the New Yorker’s “ah” and “awwuh.”

She got a wide range of responses to her minimal pairs task; some Canadian New Yorkers could pick out the difference between a Canadian’s “cot-caught” pronunciation from a New Yorker’s, and some couldn’t. Some got some of them right but not others. Some got nothing right.

Nycz also did some careful phonetic measurements to find out exactly how much their cot-caught speech had changed since moving to New York. Previous work, she says, had come to the conclusion that mergers like cot-caught aren’t really ever split, but her work found otherwise: some of those Canadians she measured had begun to make some distinctions between the words that New Yorkers would pronounce with an “ah” and those they’d pronounce with an “awwuh.”

What’s weird is that she then compared how the Canadians did on the minimal pairs task with the results of the phonetic measurements. In other words: does someone with more knowledge of the differences between the New York and Canadian accents more or less likely to have adopted the New York accent?

She found no correlation at all between those two tasks. Her research indicates that what we know about an accent has no relationship at all to whether or not we adopt it. That implies that accent acquisition is pretty much an unconscious thing, something out of our control.

There are other factors that influence how we pick up a new accent. Nycz found that the subject of conversation can have a huge effect on which accent shows up. In her research, she found that when Canadians were talking about Canada, they had a more Canadian-like speech pattern, but when talking about New York, they had more New York-ish variants. That’s simple enough, but it can get even more complicated based on the way a person feels about that subject.

One of Nycz’s subjects was a Canadian from a small town in one of Canada’s sparsely populated prairie provinces. Her accent didn’t follow those patterns, at least not at first: when talking about her hometown, she used distinctly New York pronunciations. When talking about New York, same thing: New York pronunciations.

The only time she used notably Canadian speech was when talking not about her hometown, but about Toronto, where she’d lived for a few years. Further interviewing indicated that she didn’t much like her hometown, couldn’t wait to get out. But she loved Toronto.

Even though you’d expect an accent from the prairies to be stronger than an accent from huge, multicultural Toronto, this subject changed her accent depending on how she felt about each conversational topic. Not a fan of her hometown, not wanting to be associated with it, she spoke in a way that people from that town did not speak. But for Toronto and New York, places she loved, she used the local dialect from each. Perhaps speaking like a local indicates your emotions about that place. You love New York? You consider yourself a New Yorker? You’ll speak like a New Yorker.

Lindsay Lohan told the Daily Mail that her odd new accent is a product of her attempts to learn multiple languages. “It's a mixture of most of the languages I can understand or am trying to learn,” she said. “I've been learning different languages since I was a child. I'm fluent in English and French, can understand Russian and am learning Turkish, Italian and Arabic.”

What Lohan is saying is that her efforts to learn new languages have actually affected the way she speaks English, her native tongue. Is that possible or likely?

Turns out, maybe! In the mid-1990s, a linguist named James Flege attempted to answer that same question. He studied fluent bilingual speakers of French and English: both native English speakers now fluent in French, and native French speakers now fluent in English. One of his most important discoveries comes from measurements of a very wonky linguistic metric called “voice onset time,” or VOT. (Nycz, before she explained VOT to me, excitedly described it as “very fun.”)

VOT is what decides the differences between a few pairs of consonants, namely “p” and “b,” “t” and “d,” and “k” and “g.” Those consonants are extremely similar; your mouth is doing basically the exact same thing in order to create each of those pairs. To make each of those consonants, a speaker has to build up air in the mouth and then suddenly release it. (The release of air is called “aspiration” in linguistics.)

In those pairs, you can measure the exact length of time between when a speaker releases that air and the moment the vocal cords vibrate for the vowel to follow. That amount of time is extremely short, but also very telling. Someone who only speaks English will pronounce “bah” with basically no VOT at all: the release of air from the “b” sound happens at the same time the vocal cords begin vibrating for the “ah” sound. But for “pah,” there’s a tiny tiny gap, maybe 40 milliseconds between the release of the air from the “p” sound until the vocal cords vibrate.

But for someone who speaks only French, well, it’s all very different. A French speaker will actually begin vibrating their vocal cords before they expel the air to make a “b” sound, rather than at the same time. A monolingual French speaker’s “p” sound is made more like an English speaker’s “b” sound, with the air and the vibration happening at the same time. This incredibly subtle and basically inaudible difference means that a French speaker’s pronunciation of “place” will sound like an English speaker’s “blace.”

What Flege found was that by learning another language fluently, the bilingual speakers ended up with VOTs somewhere in the middle between what a monolingual French and monolingual English speaker would have. But he found that effect in both the learned language and the native language. In other words, learning a new language does, even if in a very subtle way, have an effect on the way you speak your native language.

Of course, whether this applies to Lindsay Lohan is anyone’s guess. “These are highly experienced bilingual speakers he was looking at,” says Nycz. “Whether it applies to Lindsay Lohan taking a language class? ...Possibly?”

I had a few questions that Nycz couldn’t really answer. How long does it take an acquired accent to wear off, once a speaker is back home amongst that speaker’s native dialect? “That’s hard to study for stupid practical reasons,” says Nycz. Finding people before they leave, measuring the people they speak to both abroad and at home, and systematically measuring someone’s speech after they return is a very tricky proposition, one potentially laden with variables that could throw off the entire study. “I don’t know that we have systematic empirical data to speak to that,” she says.

Nycz wasn’t sure if the American attitude to an acquired non-American accent is different than it would be in other countries, but it’s not an easy question to answer. Someone who comes back from a study abroad semester in London might feel that speaking in the US with London-inflected speech contributes to the identity they want to put forth. Worldly, maybe. But the reactions can vary. Some Americans might be more interested in someone with a slight British lilt. Others might view that person as, you know, a falsity, an inauthentic poser. But that attitude isn’t necessarily reflected in the research. Adopting a new accent isn’t entirely, or even mostly, a conscious choice. It’s a natural impulse.

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

When you’re looking to plant a fresh urban garden, it’s natural to hit your local store and buy a bunch of tomato seeds, perhaps some carrot seeds, and maybe you’re in the mood for some spice, so you add a couple of habanero seeds to the cart.

Soon, you might plant these seeds in the ground, without even giving a second thought to the fact that you showed your support to the commercial seed industry. It’s a heckuva lot larger than you’d think, bringing in $45 billion globally each year according to the American Seed Trade Association.

Now, you might be wondering to yourself, “Wait, $45 billion? How? Can’t commercial farmers just use the seeds left over by the plants they grow?”

Well, this issue is way more complicated than that. And, largely, you can thank genetically modified crops, and, more specifically, the 1980 Supreme Court case that paved the way for them.

In Diamond v. Chakrabarty, the court then affirmed (in a narrow 5-4 decision) that genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, could be patented, setting the stage for the rise of seed industry giants. 

“While laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas are not patentable, respondent’s claim is not to a hitherto unknown natural phenomenon, but to a non-naturally occurring manufacture or composition of matter—a product of human ingenuity ‘having a distinctive name, character [and] use,” Chief Justice Warren E. Burger wrote.

This decision, while involving a form of bacteria that could break down crude oil, proved a major turning point for the seed industry, and allowed GMOs to propagate widely. This is the seed, in other words, that allowed the agricultural company Monsanto to grow into a multi-national giant. 

It’s also quite the change from the time when the federal government used to seeds away for free.

No, really. They did that. When the American Seed Trade Association got its start in the late 1800s, the seed business was far from the massive success it is today. In fact, prior to its launch, many seed companies went under.

The culprit? The federal government, who spent nearly a century giving away seeds for free through a variety of organizations, starting with the agricultural arm of the U.S. Patent Office, eventually giving way to the USDA upon its 1862 founding.

For nearly a century, the federal government was organized around the reality of the economy, which is that it was still strongly agrarian. Many early post offices were hubs for picking up seeds. It wasn’t a cheap program, either: At one point in the late 1800s, roughly a third of the USDA’s budget was dedicated to distributing seeds around the country. And some political parties wanted the seed program to go even further.

All of this, though, didn’t stop more seed companies from starting up, despite the long odds for success. Eventually, the American Seed Trade Association was formed in 1883, with the free seed program the companies’ primary issue. It took a few decades of lobbying, but in 1924, things finally changed in their favor, when Congress ended the free-seed program.

Around that time, the seed industry came up with its first hybrid corn seed, which helped make the case that the commercial market could create seeds that produced better yields than the federal government. That helped set the stage for the commercial farming and food industry we have today.

To this day, commercial seed-growers understandably see the early period as the "bad old days," and, in modern times, are still fighting for their right to monetize their seeds. Take a 2013 Supreme Court case Bowman v. Monsanto Co., which pitted Monsanto against a farmer who wanted to reuse his genetically modified seeds. The seed industry argued that the government’s free seed program ultimately harmed the seed industry by removing incentives for farmers to develop their seeds, and therefore, their crops.

“Early seed breeders had little incentive to make costly investments in developing more productive plants because the free seed program crowded private breeders from the marketplace,” the brief, filed by 21 different industry organizations, stated. “Additionally, without intellectual property protection, seed breeders had little control over the fate of their genetic material; purchasers were not barred from saving seed or from selling the new seeds they grew to others for planting purposes without compensating the breeder.”

(The Supreme Court ultimately sided with Monsanto in a unanimous decision, finding that seeds remain patented even after you re-grow them.)

We may not have federally mandated free-seed programs anymore, but one thing we do have more of now than we did in 1862? Libraries.

And some of those libraries, more than 300 in the U.S. alone, are in the seed business.

Seed libraries, or grassroots-level seed exchange programs, generally work like this: you pick up the seeds you need, grow something in your garden, then when you’re done, you return some seeds back to the library. It’s a good idea, but the problem is, the practice is illegal in some states due to broadly-written agricultural legislation—legislation that, in many cases, also bans you from exchanging seeds with friends.

There has been at least one case, in fact, where a state agriculture department came down hard on a library for the heinous crime of seed-sharing.

In 2014, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture told a library in Mechanicsburg that they were in violation of a 2004 state law because they allowed people to plant seeds from the library, with the promise that they’d offer up new seeds from fully grown plants later on. The department told the library that this was a bad idea—the seeds had to be tested, had to come directly from commercial seed companies, and at the end of the growing season, all the extra seeds had to be thrown away.

“What they proposed to do at the library fell under the definition of seed distribution, and if you’re a seed distributor, you fall under the provisions of the act,” Deputy Agriculture Secretary Jay Howes told the Wall Street Journal.

When discussing the issue, Cumberland County Commissioner Barbara Cross suggested that the seed library created a legitimate threat to the food supply, and that it was important to get on top of the issue while it was still relatively manageable. She also managed to introduce the word “terrorism” to the conversation.

“Agri-terrorism is a very, very real scenario,” she told the Sentinel. “Protecting and maintaining the food sources of America is an overwhelming challenge … so you’ve got agri-tourism on one side and agri-terrorism on the other.”

Eventually, the library made a deal with the state—it would no longer let gardeners bring seeds back to the library, and would only sell donated seeds from corporations. Crisis averted, apparently.

The thing is, though, is that the controversy highlighted to the public that these laws existed in the first place. And while they were meant to discourage the threat of Frankenseeds and prevent diseased plants for propagating in the commercial farming system (a genuine concern, considering the mess we know that is), there’s evidence that they could have the side effect of putting gardeners on the hook for sharing seeds with their friends.

To the layman, it sounds—what’s a good way to put this?—insane.

Fortunately, there are organizations that have been working on this issue. One of them is the Sustainable Economies Law Center, a legal group focused on environmental issues.

They have been active in lobbying for updated laws and exceptions to the laws currently on the books for seed libraries around the country, particularly in California, where the group worked to get AB 1810 on the books—successfully, as the act was signed into law back in September. The law clarifies that seed sharing laws are not meant to cover non-commercial exchanges like libraries.

As for Pennsylvania, there’s some good news on that front as well: Earlier this year, the state’s agriculture department clarified that non-commercial seed exchanges were not covered by the state’s Seed Act of 2004, which allowed the library in Mechanicsburg can go back to exchanging seeds without any corporate influence.

Brian Snyder, the head of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, welcomed the change of heart by the state. While Snyder said the law had its place, it was necessary to clarify it wasn’t intended for grassroots-level gardeners.

“Seeds are a basic element of human life and wellbeing,” Snyder said. “Without this kind of informal cooperation among neighbors, that well-being is very much at risk.”

If you go into a Lowe’s and buy some seeds, you will most assuredly see the seed packets labeled with such phrases as "GMO-free” and “organic,” two phrases that you would not have seen on seed packets two decades ago.

But we can’t make that assumption anymore. As a culture, we’ve been having a longstanding debate about whether we want our food to have GMOs in it, whether it should be labeled, or even whether it’s a big deal. The federal government’s recent law on this issue, which allows labeling to be hidden behind an electronic code, definitely didn’t make some folks happy, because the devil is in the details, though a few critics out there claim that GMO labeling is a form of fear-mongering, anyway.

The portion of the seed industry that directly targets gardeners, at the very least, seems to have found its line on GMOs: If you care enough about your food that you’re willing to plant it yourself, you don’t want reprogrammed seeds.

The problem is, though, unless you’re a master gardener and living 100 percent farm-to-table, someone else is making that decision for you. 

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

Precipitation2 from Beauty of Science on Vimeo.

After watching this video you will have to eat every word your high school self ever uttered about how boring chemistry was and how lunch couldn’t come fast enough.

We usually think of precipitation as the ever-present meteorological phenomenon that brings water down from the sky in forms such as rain, snow, and diamond dust. This short film, however, focuses on precipitation as it is used in chemistry to condense a solid from a solution.

The process is used for various purposes, like purifying proteins and concentrating DNA. Visually, it is fascinating. The slow-motion twirls and splashes in the video show the grace and beauty of this microscopic reaction.

Precipitation2 is part of a project by Beauty of Science, which releases one video every week to inspire people to notice the wonder of science.

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.

On a snowy night in 1976, a Buick LeSabre was parked outside a White Tower hamburger restaurant in New York's Meatpacking District. For photographer Langdon Clay, armed with a Leica and some Kodachrome film, it was an arresting moment. In Clay’s photograph of the scene, the empty car looks almost forlorn under the neon strip lighting. Around it, the street is empty. The only signs of life are the blurred figures inside the diner, presumably the car’s owners ordering food.

This photograph is just one of many Clay shot between 1974 and 1976. In those years he documented parked cars, in Manhattan and Hoboken, in streets devoid of people and always at night. The title of each image includes the names of the cars, which are themselves evocative: Chevrolet Bel Air, Plymouth Duster, Gran Torino Sport.

So, too, are the backdrops. One photograph shows a Buick Skylark on a shadowy street in Soho in 1976, in front of a small sandwich shop with the sign “Pat’s Hot and Cold Heroes.” Another has a Ford Galaxie 500 parked in front of the Carz-A-Poppin car wash on Houston and Broadway.

Four decades later these lonely cars, and most of the businesses around them, are long gone. But they can be revisited in Clay’s book, Cars – New York City 1974 – 1976, published by Steidl. 

It’s almost impossible to find one of Britain’s secret, underground military bases unless you know what to look for. In the years since they were built, starting in 1940, many of them have collapsed or fallen into disrepair. While the bunkers are no longer camouflaged today, they still guard their secrets. To the untrained eye, their entrances might look like random holes in the ground.

The enthusiasts working to document these bases—and the clandestine Auxiliary Units that manned them—know what they’re looking for, though. The bases are usually located in woody areas convenient to arterial roads, railway lines, and the other domestic infrastructure they were meant to disrupt.

During World War II, the British Army built more than 600 of these underground bunkers—possibly upwards of 1,000—to serve as bases for small groups of fighters who’d be mobilized in the event of a German invasion. These local Auxiliary Units weren’t meant to last more than a few weeks: they might slow the Nazi army down, but they’d likely die fulfilling that mission.

The bases weren’t meant to last, either. After the war, they were supposed to be destroyed, but many were not. For decades, they remained hidden in the woods: the men meant to use them had been told to keep the bases a secret, and they did. One of the only reasons they’re known at all is that historians, enthusiasts, and veteran Auxiliaries has been documenting the history of these covert units and seeking out the remains of their secret underground bases—when they can find them.

“It’s like the jewel in the crown if you find one with the roof still on,” says Tom Sykes, the founder of the British Resistance Archive, a network of researchers documenting this history and its remains.

In 1940, the Nazi Army was sweeping quickly across Europe, into Norway, Denmark, and France. Paris fell in June, and by the end of the summer, German bombers were attacking Britain’s harbors and cities, and it seemed possible that Germany might invade England.

Under these circumstances, the British War Cabinet approved the creation of Auxiliary Units, which would serve as an anti-invasion force, trained by the military to use guerrilla tactics against enemy forces. Each unit of eight or so men had its own operational base, often constructed with the help of the Royal Engineers.

These bases were, in many ways, exactly what you’d imagine a guerrilla base that was literally underground would look like. They had a somewhat standardized form: after digging a giant hole, engineers would lay a concrete floor and roof it with a half-cylinder of corrugated iron.

The bunkers were usually about 12 to 15 feet in length and tall enough to stand up in. At one end there would be an entrance shaft, lined with brick or corrugated steel, and at the other end an escape tunnel, often a tube made of concrete, running 20 to 30 feet away from the base.

These small quarters were furnished with wooden bunk-beds, basic cooking equipment, and chemical toilets. They were reasonably well ventilated and stocked with rations, including rum: one secret document recommended that unit leaders “Be scrupulously fair in its distribution, and not over lavish. Best issued on return from Patrol.”

Some of these bases, though, were more creative in their construction. One was built below the basement of an abandoned, burnt-out manor house. Another was built in a badger’s den; another in an old root cellar. In Scotland, some bases were built in centuries-old rooms dug by Picts, who lived in the region up until the early medieval period. One underground fort, intended for men who’d been routed from their own bases, according to David Lampe, who wrote about the Auxiliary Units in his 1967 book The Last Ditch, could have held 120 people.

Some of the entrances made use of ingenious mechanisms. One, Lampe reported, was hidden below a six-foot tree trunk that could be swung aside to reveal the entrance. Another had a doorbell of sorts—anyone trying to gain entry would have to find a marble left on the ground and send it down a hole that led to a can inside the bunker, alerting the doorkeeper inside. Even the basic entrances had a clever mechanism that lifted the doors up from the ground and allowed them to twist aside.

Because the Germans never invaded, the bases were never used for anything other than training. After the war, they were supposed to be destroyed, but many were simply left to decay. One, for instance, collapsed not long after the war under the weight of a cow.

Researchers with the British Resistance Archive have spent hundreds of hours trying to rediscover the locations of the bases. In most counties in Britain, they’ve found, there are one or two members of Auxiliary units still alive, and they can help locate the bases. If there are no obvious leads, a landowner or farmer in the area might know exactly where to look.

“Nearly all of them are on private land, and we never divulge where the exact locations are,” says Sykes. “We don’t encourage anyone to go looking for them.”

Today, Britain's secret Anti-Nazi resistance bases are quickly disappearing: the archive’s researchers don’t try to preserve the ones they find, just document them so that there’s a record they were there at all, before the earth swallows them all back up for good.

What would you do if you walked by a bucket filled with gold on the street?

One guy in Manhattan decided to just take it.

The bucket of gold, as the New York Times reports, didn’t just magically appear. It was left not by a leprechaun but the guard of an armored truck. The bucket was sitting unattended in the back the truck, along with many other buckets, presumably also filled with gold.

“A guard went to the truck’s cab for a moment, the police said, and the man probably did not know what was in it. But he probably had a suspicion,” the Times reports.

Not to judge the guard too harshly—presumably he had a very good reason to go to the truck’s cab—but if you leave basically anything unattended on the streets of Manhattan, someone’s going to try to take it. If you’re moving worn-out furniture into an apartment for a college student, you need to leave someone to guard the truck.

Of course the gold bucket thief should not have taken the gold. But imagine his face when he opened it up and found 86 pounds of gold flakes inside.

If a sea lion is in a recovery center, how can you make him happy? You can give him some toys to play with, and plenty of water to flop around in. You can house him with a friend, or toss him a fish or two. 

But it turns out there are other options. In a recent study published in the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, Dr. Mystera Samuelson found that sea lions in rehabilitation responded well to a different kind of stimulation—a little bit of aromatherapy.

The wild world is full of fascinating smells. Rehabilitation environments, by contrast, are often pretty sterile. Researchers have long known that, for those species who appreciate it, a bit of olfactory excitement goes a long way. They've also found that, in many situations, catering to a particular animal's natural taste pays off. For example, a rehabbing lion gets more jazzed about urine from a prey animal he might encounter in the wild—say, an okapi or a zebra—than he does about something he wouldn't run into, like a sloth bear, says Samuelson.

The sea lions in this study, who live at the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Gulfport, Mississippi, were much less picky. In a series of half-hour trials, Samuelson spiffed up their enclosures with a variety of scents, some more true-to-life than others. So for one trial, she rubbed a spot on the wall with kelp. The next day, she smeared a banana all over it instead. "I was interested to see, are they pre-wired to be enriched from scents that are from their natural environments?" she says.

The sea lions, like true gourmands, appreciated them all. "The majority of them really loved sardine oil, which wasn't terribly surprising," says Samuelson. They also liked playground sand and potting soil—analogues for the materials wild sea lions encounter on land—and the kelp. They showed their enthusiasm for these scents by sniffing them and continually visiting the spot on the wall where they were located. They also exhibited fewer stress-related behaviors, like repeatedly swimming in the same pattern, suggesting that they found a scented enclosure more enriching overall.

But the more esoteric smells—orange, banana, vanilla, and cinnamon—were hits, too, even though wild sea lions are unlikely to find themselves in situations that smell quite so Christmasy. Particular sea lions even picked favorites. "One individual, Sage, was crazy about cinnamon. Just absolutely crazy about it," says Samuelson. When the cinnamon was on the wall, Sage would act like a preteen with a magazine perfume sample, rubbing as much of her body on it as possible: "I had to start hiding the cinnamon higher on the wall because I was afraid she was going to rub her eyes in it," Samuelson says.

To Samuelson, Sage's newfound passion for cinnamon was one of the most telling parts of the study. "Often, when we think of animals, we like to lump them into a group: sea lions love this, tigers love that," she says. "But really, you need to be focusing on the individual, their own history and preferences." She thinks Sage, who has been in rehab the longest of all the study animals, may have had a positive cinnamon experience in her past. Maybe a beloved trainer loved Big Red.

Other researchers are excited about the implications of this study. Because it's now clear that sea lions can readily distinguish between smells, some experts who work with blind animals are considering using different scents to mark important spots in the enclosure. "If you were to rub cinnamon on the gate, or put orange around the water, maybe the animal could always find its way without being led," says Samuelson. There's also the possibility of rubbing scents on toys, to pump up the fun factor.

But there's one particular takeaway Samuelson wants to emphasize: keep switching it up. "I hope that trainers in other facilities try new things all the time," she says. You never know when a spice-loving sea lion will surprise you.

Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.

A version of this story originally appeared on Muckrock.com.

On what would have been the radical’s 80th birthday, we look back at one of the strangest incidents in Abbie Hoffman’s 13,000 plus page FBI file: when the Bureau tried to bust him for publishing the government’s own records.

In 1969, the Bureau managed to get its hands on a rough draft of Hoffman’s upcoming book, Woodstock Nation, having been tipped off that it was “anti-American.”

The book, written while Hoffman was awaiting trial for the infamous Chicago Seven case, describes Hoffman’s experience at the festival, and was of particular interest to the Bureau due to the chapter on attaching explosives to dogs.

As a side note for those unfamiliar with his work, Hoffman’s narrative style could charitably described as “all over the place.”

The recipe for said explosives came from the Army’s Field Manual 19-30, and the FBI launched an inquiry into whether Hoffman would be violating any Federal laws by publishing it.

That inquiry was almost immediately closed, however, when it was very quickly determined that the manual was a declassified public document literally available to anybody who asked.

Thwarted again by their inability to suppress their own information, the Bureau was powerless to stop the publication of Woodstock Nation a few months later.

The relevant section of Abbie Hoffman’s FBI file has been embedded below.

Bullets fly, the cold creeps in, and your body is so malnourished that you can barely walk. You know that if smallpox gets a hold of you, you don't stand a chance. You look at your fellow soldier's pus-filled lesion and realize there is only one way to survive the smallpox outbreak in your unit. You breathe in deeply, cut your arm open with your rusty pocket knife, and fill the wound with the liquid coming out of your comrade's pustule. 

Strange as it may sound, this was the reality for many Union and Confederate soldiers of the American Civil War. In the 1860s, before germ theory had taken hold in the field of medicine, medical facilities often lacked the necessary hygiene to prevent infections. Because of this, thousands of soldiers were killed by simple infections and diseases we now consider non-threatening or obsolete. Of these, smallpox was perhaps the deadliest and most feared.

Plaguing the world since ancient times, smallpox brought down powerful rulers like Pharaoh Ramses V, and has been credited with aiding the fall of Rome and the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. It also led us to discover vaccination.

By 1861, the year in which the Civil War broke out, the western world had been vaccinating against smallpox for over half a century. This feat is accredited to Edward Jenner, an English scientist who demonstrated that infecting people with the less threatening cowpox disease would result in immunity to smallpox. Injections were yet to come, so doctors' preferred vaccination method was to gather fluid from an active pustule of an infected cow or person and introduce it into the patient's bloodstream by making a cut in the skin. While prone to certain complications, this method proved effective enough to be exported from Europe to the rest of the world. 

During the American Civil War, vaccination was not easily achieved—though it was highly desirable. It was difficult to either find a cow or a suitable person with an active pustule that could be harvested to vaccinate others. Smallpox outbreaks were common on both sides, as were resulting deaths. According to the The Encyclopedia of Civil War Medicine by Glenna R Schroeder-Lein, the most accepted method was to look for small children to infect with cowpox. Once infected, doctors would wait seven or eight days for a pustule to fully form, puncture it, and take the lymph (fluid) from it. Alternatively, they would wait for a scab to form and then take it out.

Depending on whether it was the lymph or the scab, the virus could stay active from a couple of days to two or three weeks. Doctors would deep cut or scrape off the skin of new patients and introduce the lymph or scab directly into their bloodstream. After the virus took hold, the lesions from the newly vaccinated could be used to infect more children and more soldiers, in a never-ending cycle of purposefully transmitting festering body fluids from one person to the next.

But why would doctors specifically target children to help infect soldiers with cowpox? The simple answer lies in one of humanity’s least favorite topics: venereal diseases. Doctors knew that these diseases were common among soldiers, and that there was a risk of transmitting them through this method of vaccination. There was also the fact that smallpox and cowpox lesions look very similar to syphilis lesions, and can be easily confused. Children, then, provided the perfect solution to the risk.

Perhaps in peace time this would have worked, but not in the middle of a war. Joseph Jones, a southern scientist who after the war attempted to recover medical data, calculated that there was one doctor for every 324 soldiers in the south and one for every 133 soldiers in the north. Add to this appalling numerical disparity the shortage of medical supplies, the lack of sanitary conditions, and the high number of wounded soldiers, and you can see how extensive vaccination was almost impossible.

If you were a soldier out on the field, threatened by a smallpox outbreak, practicing arm-to-arm vaccination on yourself often seemed like the best, if not only, solution. After all, this informal method of vaccination seemed like a smaller risk than the ones they faced daily. 

How would soldiers with no medical experience achieve this process? As Margaret Humphreys graphically describes in Marrow of Tragedy: The Health Crisis of the American Civil War, with the doctor too busy or completely absent, soldiers resorted to performing vaccination with whatever they had at hand. Using pocket knives, clothespins, and even rusty nails (again, most people had no concept of germs yet), they would cut themselves to make a deep wound, usually in the arm. They would then puncture their fellow soldier’s pustule and coat their wound with the overflowing lymph. Afterwards they could do nothing but hope for the best.

The best, however, was not very common in this scenario, as it too often led to spurious vaccination, or an attempt at vaccination whose result was unsuccessful or harmful. As common sense in the 21st century dictates, self-inflicted wounds made with unsterilized materials led to infections. While in some cases, the pain ended at that, it sometimes led to serious complications that would cause a need for amputation, and in extreme cases, death.

As if that wasn’t enough, there was also the problem of the commonality of venereal diseases. In the transmission of lymph into the bloodstream, soldiers would often get infected by their fellow soldier’s diseases, particularly syphilis. As you recall, there is an unfortunate similarity between smallpox and syphilis. This meant that some soldiers, untrained in medical matters, could easily confuse a syphilis pustule with a cowpox one. Thinking they could be immune to the terrifying smallpox, many Civil War soldiers accidentally infected themselves with syphilis. 

Certainly, most cases of syphilis contracted during the war were, so to say, orthodox. Sex workers were common in stations and occupied cities, and the last worry on a soldier’s mind in that moment were venereal diseases. There were those unlucky enough, however, to contract the horribly painful disease through a self-inflicted wound rather than carnal pleasure.

If we are intent in finding a lesson to this story, let it be this: Even in the most dire circumstances, don’t cut your own arm and fill the wound with your friend’s infected bodily fluids. The results may surprise you.

When we think about where we live, usually our ideas start with political boundaries—we'd say we live in a particular state, city, or town. Ask about a neighborhood, sports team loyalties, or regions not defined by borders, though, and it might get a little fuzzier. In densely settled places like the East Coast, sprawl can make it hard to draw lines around places, too. Where in New Jersey does the New York City region end and the Philadelphia region begin? 

These larger urban areas are sometimes called "megaregions," and in a new paper, published in PLOS ONE, Garrett Dash Nelson, a historical geographer from Dartmouth, and Alasdair Rae, an urban analyst from the University of Sheffield, teamed up to identify them across the United States, using commuting data and a computational algorithm.

Essentially, they used data describing more than 4 million commutes to look at how small units of place—census tracts—are connected into much larger units of place. One of the results from their algorithm is the map above, which shows how the country is divided into economically entwined regions that don't conform to city or state boundaries. Pittsburgh's region spills into Ohio and West Virginia; Denver's tips over the border into Wyoming; and Oklahoma City's reaches into Missouri and Arkansas.

There are limits to what an algorithm can do, though, the researchers argue. They point to this little isolated region, rendered in green, that floats in eastern Kentucky, near the Virginia and West Virginia borders:

"This area really is coherent and independent in a certain sense, for it has very weak commuter relations with neighboring communities," the researchers write. But, they wonder, does that mean it should be considered its own region, on this basis alone? 

Their conclusion is that the algorithmic, data-driven divisions shouldn't be taken as gospel but can be informed by a human, interpretative understanding of the results. Taking the data-derived regions and massaging them just a little bit, the researchers come up with this map of U.S. megaregions:

It's a coherent view of the country that resonates on an instinctive level, even if some parts remain curious, like the wide region out West that expands over Salt Lake City and sneaks across Idaho and Nevada into California that doesn't get a name. Or the part that's simply labeled Deep South. 

Apparently there are geographical quandaries that even humans and algorithms together can't solve.

In ancient Egypt, where cats were first domesticated, they were often buried in a ritual, religious fashion. The cat burials found on the site of Berenike, an Egyptian town on the Red Sea that thrived 2,000 years ago, were different, though. 

As IBTimes reports, these cats were not mummified or buried with much adornment—only a handful had a trinket found in their graves. Nor were there any signs that the cats had been killed, as in some religious burials. These looked like domestic cats who had died natural deaths.

Writing in the journal Antiquity, the archaeologist Marta Osypińska suggests that these features mean that these cats were not buried as part of "sacred or magical rites." Instead, she writes, this site should be considered "a cemetery of house pets."

For millennia, cats were worshipped in Egypt, one of the earliest places where they were domesticated. But by the beginning of the first millennia A.D., the cult of the cat was falling out of favor. The cat skeletons in Berenike that were found buried with items had either iron collars or ostrich shell beads by their necks. In this one area, 86 cat skeletons were found, and most of them were single burials. The ones that were paired were an adult and a juvenile skeleton, suggesting that they were buried together on purpose.

The other skeletons—nine dogs and four monkeys—discovered in this spot also suggest that it was used as a burial ground for beloved animals. 

As Osypińska writes, all this is unusual. Usually, it's thought that keeping pets and burying them carefully is a modern practice. But in her eyes this "unique site" shows that's not necessarily the right assumption. 

Georgina Spelvin is also known as ME Pearl, a psychic and lover of "lowly life forms." In her series of Proper Opossum Care videos, she extolls the wonders of these nocturnal, trash-eating creatures with all the polish of a 1960s TV hostess channeling the spirit of an all-knowing squirrel named Pearl.

In one video she describes how to identify when your pet opossum is sending you alien alerts; another describes how to read your opossum's past lives. In this video, she offers tips on how to relax your opossum with chakra-aligning boops and baps. Its strangeness invited the question–who is the opossum lady? Is she for real?

In actuality, ME Pearl is a character played by actress Anna Dresdon. The off-the-cuff silliness of her videos is intentionally comedic, and her website provides a link to "Georgina's" YouTube profile. However, ME Pearl has her own robust website complete with a donation button, and the videos themselves offer no hints that they are satirical or fake. They're just good-hearted marsupial fun. 

So perhaps the wisdom of Pearl is genuine? At the very least you now know how to properly massage your opossum.

Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Emailella@atlasobscura.com.

In the middle of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin took a moment to note down one of the natural mysteries that dogged him most. "The Greenland whale is one of the most wonderful animals in the world," he wrote, "and the baleen, or whalebone, one of its greatest peculiarities." He goes on to wonder, on paper, why in the world this strange structure ended up the way it did. Why do whales have these huge rows of hairy protrusions, rather than some more common eating apparatus, like teeth or a beak? 

Thanks to new research from the Museums Victoria and Monash University—and a 25 million year old fossil whale named Alfred, dug up in in Washington State—we're now slightly closer to an answer.  

The researchers, led by Dr. Felix G. March, published their findings earlier this week. In the past, they explain, all whales had sharp, spiky teeth. They used them like your average predator, to tear their food apart. But although toothed whales, like sperms and orcas, stuck to this strategy, other contemporary species, like blues and humpbacks, now feed using baleen, which trap enormous amounts of plankton and other tiny creatures while filtering seawater out.

That means that at some point, an in-mouth switch occurred. For a while, researchers thought that whales probably evolved baleen while they still had teeth, and that the former slowly overtook the latter. 

But Alfred—who is an aetiocetid, an indirect ancestor of today's baleen whales—suggests a different path. When scientists examined his fossilized teeth, they found they were covered in tiny horizontal scratches. This is evidence that Alfred probably fed via suction—using his tongue to slurp in prey, along with some scratchier bycatch like sand and small rocks. (Some animals, like walruses, still feed this way, and have similar tooth grooves as a result.)

Over time, as whales perfected this suction strategy, it became less and less advantageous for them have teeth at all. Eventually, the teeth disappeared. Only then did baleen crop up to replace them, the researchers postulate. And as a result, the whales literally stopped sucking.

Perhaps it was inevitable that as Los Angeles expanded its vestigial subway system into a public transit option worthy of a major city fossils would turn up. Los Angeles was built in a place pockmarked with tar pits, and one of the sites on the extension of the Purple Line is at Wilshire and La Brea, not far from the famous La Brea Tar Pits, which daily yields new finds.

Late in November, construction crews found another one, the Los Angeles Times reports. The first piece of an ancient animal that they discovered was a shattered tusk, three feet long, followed by a mastodon tooth. This week, a specialist who monitors the site for fossil finds located another set of tusks, along with a giant skull.

This second set of fossils looks to be the head of an ancient elephant. This elephant lived back in the Ice Age, the Times reports, but scientists aren't yet sure exactly what type of ancient elephant it was.

Because this area is so rich with fossils, the Metro already has a plan for how to handle such finds—they're already built into the project's timeline, and it's a sure bet that more fossils will turn up. It does make one wonder: what else is hidden beneath the vast expanse of L.A.?

Thailand’s labyrinthine Chatuchak Weekend Market, which spans 27 acres in downtown Bangkok, is one of the largest open-air markets in the world. The maze-like array of stalls and shops is an immersive and often overwhelming experience, especially during the weekend when the market is packed with local shoppers, tourists, and food carts in the ever-present tropical heat. But this extensive warren of shops hides an intriguing secret behind its rows of kitschy souvenirs and knock-off designer bags.

Tucked away just outside the main cluster of the weekend market is a section few Western tourists ever see: Chatuchak’s vast tropical fish and exotic pet market, home to one of the most impressive (and expensive) collections of live aquarium fish anywhere in the world. Disconnected from the main market, and far from the common points of entry for tourists, the fish market hides in plain sight across from a shopping center; even with directions, it can be difficult to locate.

After a short walk, a few outdoor stalls selling enormous koi, some at prices of several thousand U.S. dollars, indicate the market is nearby. These koi shops proudly exhibit trophies and plaques by their entrances indicating champion koi they have raised—much like with purebred dogs, koi are bred for certain characteristics and koi competitions offer prizes in the tens of thousands of dollars.

Passing through the nondescript entrance, the covered market is cavernous, comprised of long stretches of walkways flanked by stalls on both sides, many literally spilling over into the walkways with brightly lit aquariums. Thai culture has a longstanding love affair with pet fish, which were raised and domesticated as pets in the country long before the modern era. The fish, which they pulled from rice field puddles to compete in elaborate “fights” as early as the 13th century, are now known the world over as “Siamese fighting fish” or simply “Bettas.”

In recent years, Thailand has emerged as a center for fish breeding on a commercial scale to supply both a thriving domestic market and huge international demand; aquarium fish consistently rank as one of the nation’s top exports by dollar value.

Chatuchack’s fish market primarily caters to Bangkok’s huge number of aquarium owners—many of whom are wealthy and willing to spend exorbitant sums on their prized aquatic pets. Much of the market is dedicated to pricey, status-symbol fish like the arowana, or dragon fish, which can cost upwards of $20,000 for a quality specimen. Other rarities like freshwater stingrays—some the size of pizzas—and rare catfish species are prominently on display.

Near one of the side entrances to the market, a pair of two-foot-long “platinum” gar (a rare all-white variant of a large, predatory fish originally from North America) cruise menacingly through an enormous aquarium. Doing a quick mental conversion from Baht to U.S. dollars, the asking price for these giants was roughly $10,000 each.

Despite being much, much smaller than the neighboring complex, the fish market sprawls across a surprisingly large area, extending into narrow alleyways and dead-end corridors. Unlike any aquarium shop you’d likely see in the U.S., fish here are densely packed in small aquariums as they are often sold in large quantities, with tanks turning over multiple times per day.

Many of the smaller shops are family breeding concerns, and barely feature aquariums at all—instead, fish are pre-bagged and ready for sale in neat rows. Each tiny shop or stall usually specializes in a particular breed or category of fish or aquarium—some showcasing colorful but delicate discus and angelfish, others displaying a bewildering array of tiny but colorful freshwater shrimps.

Perhaps owing to their long cultural affinity to fishkeeping, Thai breeders specializing in aquarium fish have an international reputation and supply millions of fish to importers and shops in the U.S. and Europe each year. Just as their counterparts in China and Japan took the common goldfish and selectively bred it into dozens of colorful variants, Thai breeders are constantly cultivating new variants of the fish they breed, selecting out traits for color, body shape, or fin configuration.

The Betta is a perfect example of this—having originated with a mostly brown, unremarkable fish, there are now hundreds of varieties in shades of blue, red, pearl white, most sporting elegant flowing fins. For the local market, albinos, platinum, or bright red mutations are in high demand, selling for hundreds or occasionally thousands of dollars.

One particularly popular fish in the Thai market is the Flowerhorn, a man made hybrid fish which sports a remarkable hump on its head, vibrant colors, and a feisty attitude (these fish do not play well with others). Flowerhorns considered to have good markings and shape are thought to be a symbol of prosperity—a living good luck charm—and are often prominently displayed in local businesses.

The fish market, while open to the public most of the week, is most active in the mornings, with most stalls shuttered by the early afternoon. Like Chatuchak itself, activity peaks on the weekends, when the aquarium market can get extremely crowded with local shoppers.

Each Thursday morning, the market turns over into a wholesale market, when breeders, farmers, and fish collectors from the outlying suburbs of Bangkok converge on the market to sell their fish to wholesalers and exporters in huge quantities.

At those times, every open space in the market is carpeted in fish laid out in plastic bags—thousands of guppies, goldfish, cichlids, all ready to be bought up and shipped to a wholesale facility nearby.

This high-energy scene, with its frenzy of activity and breathless negotiations between buyer and seller, seems more akin to Wall Street trading than the normally subdued fish market, but visitors be warned—it is generally not open to the public and foreigners with cameras are looked at with suspicion.

Even for someone not particularly well acquainted with the hundreds of varieties of rare fish on display, Chatuchak’s aquarium fish market is a fascinating destination for anyone looking for a brief escape from the endless, monotonous shops in the market’s more well-known counterpart.

Although the fish market clearly caters to locals and little English is spoken, most shop owners are polite and happy to show off their specialty fish to a curious visitor. It also offers a rare glimpse of a little-known hobby and industry that is a way of life for thousands of Thais.

It was 1925, and pro wrestling was big business. A throng of fans had packed themselves into a Kansas City convention hall, expecting to see champion Ed “Strangler” Lewis easily defeat Wayne “Big” Munn, a noted former NCAA football player. Munn was a newcomer to the wrestling world, and this was his first true test. Surely, fans thought, he would wipe the floor with the novice.

What the fans got instead was an outcome so unthinkable it created a buzz that shot around the arena. The air was electric. After less than 40 minutes, Munn had defeated the great champion, throwing him across the ring and out of it. It was a loss unlike Lewis had ever faced.

The crowd left that night in amazement, with an incredible story to tell: the night Wayne Munn beat Ed Lewis.

But there was a small problem.

“Wayne Munn couldn’t beat Ed ‘Strangler’ Lewis to save his life,” says Kyle Klingman, director of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame Dan Gable Museum in Waterloo, Iowa. “There’s just no way he could beat him.”

Everyone knows pro wrestling today is “a work.” A planned event. A show, no different than a television episode or film.

But it wasn’t always this way. Pro wrestling started in the world of legitimate sport, in the same way boxing did. Legitimate wrestling bouts sold out arenas across the country. In 1911, when Frank Gotch wrestled George Hackenschmidt at the newly-opened Comiskey Park, it was in front of 30,000 people, one of the biggest crowds in sports history at the time.

But professional wrestling began to change in a way unlike anything ever seen in sports history. While boxing had known to be fixed from time to time, and the “Black Sox Scandal” had briefly tarnished Major League Baseball, no legitimate sport had ever made the full transition into what the WWE now calls “sports entertainment”—fully scripted, predetermined matchups, with chosen champions.

That change didn’t happen overnight. But wrestling historians look to one match, which completely altered pro wrestling’s history: Lewis vs. Munn, Kansas City, Miss., Jan. 8, 1925.

“That really kind of put the stamp on it,” Klingman said. “This completely changed the landscape of professional wrestling.”

Pro wrestling in 2016 consists of larger-than-life characters performing gymnastic feats in prefabricated storylines with matches that have predetermined finishes. This is common knowledge, and honestly, it’s a lot of the appeal of modern professional wrestling. It’s evolved from a sport into more of an artform, where storytelling is paramount, both inside the ring and out.

None of that was the case in the early 1900s. Wrestlers were known as “shooters” or “hookers,” skilled mat technicians who could beat nearly anyone in a legitimate fight. Moves weren’t anything spectacular. Ed Lewis was nicknamed “Strangler” because of his patented finishing hold: A headlock.

Not that it wasn’t an impressive headlock. Lewis was a pretty tough guy, and to practice his arm strength, he created a “headlock machine” that he would grind down on for long periods of time. And he was one of the most well-respected mat technicians in the world, having wrestled in more than 6,000 matches during his 44-year career and losing only 32 of them, according to the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. He was a tremendous draw, among the ranks of Babe Ruth and Jack Dempsey in the roaring ‘20s. To put it simply: Ed Lewis was the real deal.

Lewis was so good, in fact, that the matches were starting to get boring. Some could go on forever. Crowds dwindled, and paydays shrunk. In one 1916 match between Lewis and rival Joe Stecher, the match lasted five hours. The matches even received parody in popular culture: In a line from the “The Music Man,” Mayor Shinn notes he hadn’t seen Iowans get so excited for something “since the night Frank Gotch and Strangler Lewis lay on the mat for three and a half hours without moving a muscle.”

It was clear that something had to change, Klingman said.

“It was more of this legitimate style of wrestling, but these matches got unbelievably boring. I mean they were back-and-forth of just nothingness,” Klingman said. “At some point you say, ‘How are you going to make this more entertaining?’”

Lewis, his manager Billy Sandow, and their partner and fellow wrestler Joe “Toots” Mondt—known as “The Gold Dust Trio”—were keenly aware of this, and in 1925, went looking for their new star.

Wayne Munn was a big guy. So big that his nickname was, simply: “Big.”

In the 1936 book, “From Milo to Londos: The Story of Wrestling Through the Ages,” sports journalist Nat Flesicher lists the Kansas-born Munn as six feet six inches tall. He was a college football player at the University of Nebraska from 1916 to 1918, where he was known as “Nebraska’s giant.” Football came naturally to him, thanks to his size and unusual speed, and the school thought of him as “one of the most counted-on men on the team,” according to an old yearbook.

In 1917, Nebraska finished 5-2 and claimed the conference championship. Munn would have been a crucial part of the 1918 team, but left school to join the army. He was a lineman on the Camp Pike football team, and later, served in France before coming back to the United States to sell cars in Omaha.

The Gold Dust Trio saw Munn, and their eyes turned to dollar signs. He had the size, the body, the look—he was everything they wanted for their next star. He just wasn’t very good.

“Munn was a former football player with almost no wrestling background but he had huge name recognition,” said Mike Chapman, author of more than a dozen books on wrestling. “He was a big man, as his title would suggest. Nice looking. And people thought, ‘Here’s our chance to groom this guy, and make a little money off him.’”

Today, this is common. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, one of the most popular professional wrestlers of all time, started as a defensive tackle with the Miami Hurricanes, helping to win the national championship in 1991. Despite going on to become a WWE hall-of-famer, Johnson himself didn’t have any amateur wrestling background. But he was extremely charismatic, and beloved by fans. At the time, though, this was unheard of: Someone without real grappling skill had never been champion.

Munn agreed to the Trio’s plan. He would wrestle around the country, tallying wins against predetermined competitors in on the ruse. Later, he would meet Lewis, who would drop the belt. The big payday would be the rematch.

Lewis, for his part, was fine with losing the belt.

“Ed really did love wrestling, but everybody knew he was the best,” Chapman said. “He wasn’t worried about what the insiders thought, because everybody knew. And he wanted to make a lot of money.”

The one thing he wouldn’t do was lose clean. So the Trio put together an elaborate plan, and on Jan. 8, 1925, the match would get underway in Kansas City, with the winner of two out of three falls taking home the title.

When the match started, it truly didn’t seem like Munn could beat Lewis. Munn had the brute strength, but Lewis was clearly the better wrestler. Yet whenever Lewis would apply a hold, Munn would muscle out of it. Even the patented headlock didn’t work.

To fans’ astonishment, the former football player held his own throughout the match, utilizing a signature football tackle before lifting Lewis high into the air and slamming him to the mat and pinning his shoulders for the first fall at 21 minutes.

Soon after, the two locked up again. This time, Munn lifted Lewis high into the air, and dumped him outside the ring. The crowd was stunned. None of this seemed possible against the great Lewis, but here it was happening in front of their very eyes.

The referee gave the second fall to Lewis, claiming that Munn illegally threw his opponent out of the ring. Sandow pleaded with the ref to end the match and make Lewis the victor. This was illegal, he argued, and his wrestler was injured. The referee didn’t oblige, but gave Lewis 15 minutes to “rest” and come back.

Come back he did, again feigning the injury. Munn quickly lifted Lewis, slammed him again to the mat, and won in less than a minute.

The crowd was ecstatic. They had been rooting for the good-looking footballer to defeat the predictable champion, and had gotten their money’s worth. Lewis was “hospitalized,” and there was word he may never wrestle again.

The Gold Dust Trio had solved two problems: They’d figure out a way to get Munn over despite his lack of wrestling acumen, and they figured out a way for Munn to lose in a way that wasn’t a clean victory.

They didn’t count on problem no. 3: Stan Zbyszko.

Munn would go on a championship tour, defeating Mondt himself, along with Mike Romano, Pat McGill, Wallace Duguid, and Stanislaus Zbyszko. Of all of them, the 46-year-old Zbyszko was the most talented, albeit on the older side.

Zbyszko was a strong wrestler, 5 feet 8 inches tall and 260 pounds. “The King of Poland” spoke 12 languages and had a law degree from the University of Vienna. But his one true love was wrestling.

“He was a gifted man. He could have done anything else,” said wrestling historian John Rauer. “He could have been a politician, he could have been a lawyer, he could have been a judge. But he loved the sport.”

Zbyszko was one of Munn’s first title defenses, and lost to the big man on Feb. 11 of that year in two straight falls, lasting less than 30 minutes total. He was later picked for a rematch on April 15.

During that time, the New York Times reported on Lewis’ condition, as well as a court battle between Lewis and Munn, which was likely entirely planned: Lewis refused to surrender the belt, arguing the match was wrestled under protest.

Munn, meanwhile, was living the life. The same month he won the belt, the Nebraska House voted to honor him for his victory. He received a $100,000 offer to tour Europe. In a publicity stunt, Munn, the untrained grappler, “taught” 1,000 students at Harvard how to wrestle. All of this was building up to the big rematch with Lewis.

On the day Munn had his second bout with Zbyszko, all seemed to be going well. Zbyszko agreed to lose again, and the match would boost Munn’s prestige going into the Lewis fight.

But when the time came, and they stood across from one another, Zbyszko reportedly smiled and said to Munn: “Tonight, we wrestle.”

It was a disaster. Zbyszko legitimately pinned Munn in practically every way possible. The referee, who was in on the finish, refused to count, but fans noticed and screamed for a pin.

After the first fall, Munn’s manager had to think quick. He claimed the wrestler was sick with acute tonsillitis, and tried to talk Zbyszko and the State Athletic Commission into allowing Munn’s sparring partner to finish the match. But it was to no avail.

There was nothing the referee could do. Either he would count the falls, or reveal the “work.” After mere minutes, Zbyszko defeated Munn, took the title, and left the former football player without even his dignity.

“Munn was spoiled by the greatest double cross in the history of professional wrestling,” Rauer said. “There may have been more devious double crosses, but not on such a large national stage, and not with such towering personalities involved as Zbyszko and Lewis.”

Part of the problem was pride. Zbyszko and others objected to the fact that a non-wrestler wore the championship belt. To them, whoever held the title had to be respected by their peers. Munn the football star wasn’t.

Fans didn’t know what to think. Why couldn’t this man, who so handily defeated Ed Lewis, hold his own against Zbyszko? It was a huge blow to Munn’s ego, his reputation, and the business.

“That exposed him,” Chapman said. “As easy as Zbyszko whipped him, it’s tough to talk that away.”

What followed was a series of negotiations and fights, before Lewis finally legitimately brought the belt back into the Trio’s hands. Lewis again fought Munn, this time defeating him easily. Munn’s star was no longer on the rise.

Had Wayne Munn been born 100 years later, he could have been the next Rock. But in the 1920s, in a world of “real” wrestling, he was never the same again. The Gold Dust Trio used him, they all made some good money, and when he wasn’t a draw for them anymore, he left the business.

As for pro wrestling, it kept evolving. Characters became more prevalent, as did the idea of the “heel” and the “babyface”—the bad guy and the good guy. The rivalry, the rematch. Munn’s reign as champion is largely forgettable, but his impact is still felt.

“That did, for all intents and purposes, change the game overnight,” Chapman said.

Early this morning, a LC-130 cargo plane, piloted by an Air National Guard pilot, touched down at the Amundsen-Scott Station in the South Pole for an emergency medical evacuation. But they weren't grabbing just any patient—it was Buzz Aldrin, American folk hero and the second man to walk on the moon. Aldrin was "ailing," the National Science Foundation explained in a brief press release.

Aldrin was at the South Pole with a group called "White Desert," a British company that takes tourists to climb snowy peaks and see emperor penguins. Aldrin, who is 86 years old, travels often doing space-related advocacy work, most recently unveiling a NASA-focused "Get Your Ass To Mars" campaign. Two days ago, he was tweeting excitedly about the trip—which, after all, was nothing compared to his most famous jaunt.

I could be a little underdressed for Antarctica. Although I tend to be hot blooded. pic.twitter.com/iuCozGptxw

— Buzz Aldrin (@TheRealBuzz) November 27, 2016

According to the Washington Post, Aldrin has already been taken from Amundsen-Scott Station to McMurdo, at the tip of the Pole, by an LC-130 cargo plane. Next, he'll go to New Zealand. As of this morning, he was in stable condition, according to White Desert.

2016, please be kind.