During the second World War, at a mental hospital outside of Lund, Sweden, researchers forced a group of patients to ingest 24 pieces of a sticky, light brown substance in a single day. These severely disabled patients were involuntary participants in a long-term study commissioned by the state medical board in cooperation with big industry, and this coerced feeding would continue for three years. The four to six doses that they consumed four times a day over that time were in some ways sweeter than their typical medicines—but also more troubling. No benefit to the patient was ever expected. Rather, the goal was to measure the damage inflicted by the substance over time and determine a dosage safe for public consumption.

The ruinous “treatment” in question was a caramel candy. The corporate underwriters were sugar, chocolate, and candy companies. And the effects of the so-called Vipeholm experiments still reverberate today. In fact, one direct result has become a lasting—even beloved—part of Swedish culture.

In Sweden, Saturday is for sweets. The Swedish custom of lördagsgodis, or Saturday candy, was spurred by the outcomes at Vipeholm, which definitively proved that sugar, particularly between meals, causes tooth decay. The idea behind lördagsgodis is moderation—to limit candy consumption to a weekly, rather than a daily, occurrence.

Once a week, Swedes are given a free pass to indulge in all the gummies, chocolates, and salty liquorice their Nordic hearts desire. (Non-Nordic hearts will most likely take a pass on the salty liquorice.) However, few Swedes standing in line at the supermarket to collect pick-and-mix candy on Saturday morning know that their weekly indulgence has its origins in the sustained mistreatment of 660 psychiatric patients.

Before the Vipeholm experiments, the cause of tooth decay had been a topic of much speculation. People blamed their dental woes on everything from wine and hot foods to masturbation and vitamin deficiency, writes Samira Kawash in her book, Candy: A Century of Panic and Pleasure. By 1938, leading scientists around the world were pointing to either too many carbohydrates or a lack of various vitamins as the source of dental cavities. But there was no definitive proof.

What was evident, however, was that the Swedes were in serious need of a dental intervention.  A study carried out in the 1930s showed that three-year-olds there had cavities in a whopping 83 percent of their teeth, notes Bo Krasse in a paper in the Journal of Dental Research. New laws mandated that municipalities provide dental care to citizens, but there were not enough dentists to meet demand. So a decision was made to shift over to a prevention-focused model, a better use of resources than long waiting lists at doctors’ offices. Problem was, no one knew how to prevent tooth decay yet.

In search of clarity, Sweden's national medical board decided to undertake a long-term nutritional study to determine the root cause of dental cavities once and for all. The most desirable, accurate study, it was determined, would test human subjects. In an ideal test, one would have human subjects whose vital signs could be monitored daily, who would follow a drug or dietary regime without fail, and whose environment could be totally controlled by the researchers.

But where would one find such subjects? For the medical board, the answer was obvious. They had jurisdiction over the state mental institutions.

Of the four state mental institutions in operation at the time, Vipeholm was perhaps the bleakest. It housed the cases deemed fully “uneducable.” Many patients could not dress themselves. Many were tied to their beds. The doors of the hospital were locked at all times and the only private bedroom was an isolation chamber without any furniture, where patients in solitary slept on a bed bolted to the middle of the floor. At mealtimes, there were no knives or forks, only spoons.

After an initial study focused on vitamins, the infamous Carbohydrate Study began in 1946. The 660 Vipeholm patients were chosen to undergo variations on extreme sugar consumption. One group consumed sugar in a solution, one group consumed sugary bread at meals, and the last group consumed special toffees between meals. The caramels had been specially formulated for stickiness, so that they would cling to teeth and gums. When the study ended, 50 of the research subjects had completely ruined teeth.

The Vipeholm study was a success insofar as it positively identified a link between sugar consumption and tooth decay. It was also reprehensible. It was the relative helplessness and immobility of the patients that made them attractive test subjects. In the dogged pursuit of a healthier society, the powers that be sacrificed the health of society’s most vulnerable members.

The Swedes were hardly alone in pursuing highly questionable controlled human experiments at this time. For example, the United States injected radioactive substances into otherwise healthy living subjects as part of the Manhattan Project. And, of course, concurrent to the Vipeholm experiments in Sweden, experimentation on human subjects was reaching its odious zenith in the Third Reich, with prisoners in Nazi concentration camps subjected to some tests so innately depraved that they qualify mostly as blood sport.

In 1947, following the revelations of these practices in the camps, the Counsel for War Crimes adopted the Nuremberg Code, which laid out a comprehensive set of medical and scientific ethics, including the principles of informed consent and nonmaleficence (or “do no harm”). These principles would later be incorporated into the Declaration of Helsinki, the current defining, international document on modern research ethics.

The lasting legacy of Vipeholm, however, turned out to be something a bit sweeter—Saturday candy. In 1957, following publication of the Vipeholm study’s results, a coordinated public health campaign kicked into gear. Radio PSAs, home-delivered pamphlets, and posters in waiting rooms encouraged young Swedes to brush their teeth and eat less sweets. The new message around candy was not prohibition, but moderation. The mantra was “All the sweets you like, but only once a week!”

Even today, you would be hard-pressed to find a Swedish child whose face doesn’t light up at the news that Saturday has arrived. Indeed, data implies that Swedish adults are equally excited. Swedes, it turns out, love candy. They consume more candy per capita than almost anyone else. And annoyingly, they do so while maintaining one of of the highest levels of dental health in the world.

Generations of good teeth and a twee tradition of Saturday sweets are surely the coziest possible outcome of the dark days at Vipeholm. But looking back, it’s hard to sweeten the pill.

In Xinyang, China, archaeologists excavating a tomb that dates back more than two millennia found a sword still sheathed in its scabbard. When they carefully pulled the sword out, they found a shining blade in good condition, even after more than 2,300 years.

The sword is thought to date back to China's Warring States period, which lasted about 250 years, from 475 B.C. to 221 B.C. During this period, the area roughly between Beijing and Shanghai was divided into many smaller states, with seven dominating and one state, Qin, emerging at the end as the ruling power. With all that political turmoil, a sword would have come in handy. 

Wannabe time travelers, start emptying your coffers: Canadiana Village, a massive fake 19th-century town, has gone up for sale. The village, located in Quebec, is 60 hectares of fields, trees, and ghost buildings, and is priced at $2.8 million, the CBC reports.

The village, which is not open to the public, is generally used for weddings, corporate meetings, and movie shoots. A video slideshow reveals an endless array of nostalgic structures, including a saloon, a church, a school, and a blacksmith's shop—all either eerily or charmingly empty, depending on how you feel about such things.

There's a reason for this: The buildings are just for show, says Mary-Catherine Kaija, the broker in charge of the sale. "There's only one liveable home," she told the CBC. (There are, however, real tombstones, moved from a nearby town to the fake church after the town's cemetery ran out of room.)

All this shouldn't be too huge of a problem for the future owner, who is almost certainly going to use the space to live out their own personal Westworld (Northworld?) fantasy. Who needs accommodation for friends when you've got a butter separator all to yourself?

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.

Filled with Japanese tourists in straw hats and a handful of gaijin, or Westerners, the cruise ship plied through the calm waters of the South China Sea. I was on my way to Japan's Hashima Island, a long-abandoned 16-acre island nine miles from Nagasaki. Most people today refer to it as Gunkanjima, or Battleship Island.

Now derelict, Hashima was once a booming undersea coal mining facility that Mitsubishi Corporation developed for nearly 90 years. The city experienced its heyday in the period following World War II, with its population peaking at 5,259 in 1959. But beginning in the 1940s, many workers were not there by choice: they were laborers from Korea who were forced to toil under brutal conditions. 

Surrounded by an ocean in every direction, this dense urban environment consisted of every facility needed to support the population—restaurants, barber shops, schools, swimming pools, even pachinko gambling parlors. Workers returned to looming 10-story concrete apartment blocks at night. 

After skirting Hashima's encircling sea wall, my fellow passengers were taken to an open area for tour guides to explain the history of the island in Japanese and English. We were unfortunately prohibited from going off on our own. 

Due to safety concerns, the walking tour afterward was fairly limited, covering only about 1/10 of the periphery of the island. Slowly scanning the abandoned concrete buildings, crumbling stairs, rusting steel, and decaying streets from the periphery of the island, I wondered about the living conditions of the population there. 

In 1970, only 12 round trips per day to Nagasaki were available. Did inhabitants try to take off to Nagasaki as much as possible? Or did they have to adjust to living within the confines of a 16-acre island?

Hashima’s economic existence ended in 1974 when coal was toppled by petroleum and gas. A rapid exodus followed, and from 1974 to 2009 the island was closed to the public. It opened for tours in 2009, and in 2015 joined the UNESCO World Heritage list as part of the Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining grouping, stirring controversy due to the associated forced labor policy of WWII prisoners.

Many people seem to look past this dark side of Hashima, however, as this island is perhaps most well known as the location of the villain’s lair in the 2012 Bond film Skyfall. 

Walking back towards the ship at the end of the tour, I was surprised at how little nature seems to have reclaimed the urban land over the past decades. The amount of green is not as extensive as I would have thought given more than 40 years in isolation. Though bushes and trees do show up on the few hills around the island, with a few peeking above the roofline of a few buildings, the solid concrete walls still dominate the surroundings.

After boarding the tourist cruise ship for the return trip to Nagasaki, our vessel took a final lap around the island. From a certain perspective, the “battleship” nickname is fitting as the island does resemble a prototypical battleship from the WWII era, turrets being replaced by lone buildings on top of the few hills in the middle of the island. This “battleship” name reportedly arose due to its resemblance to an incomplete Japanese battleship of the 1920s.

Even with the broken window frames and holes in walls showing some sign of decay, Hashima still gives the visual impression of a lonely grey fortress floating adrift in the sea.

In the 18th century during the brisk winter months, Parisians flocked to the glistening frozen fields of La Glaciére, or the Glacier. The grassy terrain, flooded with water and frozen over, was an icy playground for upper-class citizens. And none were more showy than the male ice skaters dressed in bicep-revealing red jackets, tight pants, and graduation caps.

These fraternities of gentlemen showed off with challenging jumps and graceful arm movements—charms that could “seduce weak mortals,” according to the 19th-century French ice skater Jean Garcin. “There are no good skaters anywhere but in Paris,” he boasted. 

Ice skating is a centuries-old pastime. Before bladed skates were invented around the 14th century, people tied bones to their feet and pushed themselves along the ice with poles. It was primarily used as a mode of transportation, but became a popular leisure activity reserved for aristocratic men in France during the late-18th-century reign of Louis XVI. They formed skating clubs or fraternities to practice together, shovel snow off the ice, and protect rinks from hooligans. Women wouldn’t be allowed into clubs until 1833, writes James Hines in Figure Skating in the Formative Years.

During the early 1800s, Jean Garcin was a member of the skating fraternity Gilets Rouge, or red waistcoats, an elite all-male group of skaters whose philosophy valued artistic expression over athleticism. In 1813 book Le vrai patineur, or The True Skater, or Principles of the Art of Skating with Grace, Garcin illustrates the typical uniform of a Gilets Rouge ice skater: a form-fitting embroidered vest or coat, tight pants, and academic caps with a square top and tassel, known as mortarboards, or berets. While it’s unknown what kind of audience Garcin wrote the book for, Hines suggests he may have wrote it specifically for the Gilets Rouge.

 In his book, Garcin argued that the French style of ice skating reigned supreme. Part instructional manual and part treatise, Le vrai patineur was the second book published on ice skating and the first in French. Garcin captured the different kinds of moves often observed on the icy fields of La Glaciére, describing more than 30 figures—each with whimsical names. The book contains color and black-and-white illustrations of various poses, arm positions, and even suggested facial expressions.

“There was a kind of detail to the hand and the fingers, and you see that in these pictures,” says Mary Louise Adams, a sports sociologist at Queen’s University in Ontario. “This was a textbook and it was a treatise to show how French skating was better than these other kinds of skating in other countries where grace was not as important.”

As ice skating spread, countries embraced different techniques and styles. The French blended masculinity and beauty that wasn’t often seen on the rinks in England, Austria, and other countries of Europe. While Garcin thought foreign skaters lacked flare, he believed they could pick up this style, writes Adams in her book Artistic Impressions: Figure Skating, Masculinity and the Limits of Sport, quoting Garcin:

“The Germans, English, Danes and people from other cold places are incapable of skating otherwise, but look at them the first time they show their knowledge here: The body is bent, the arms swinging, the derriere pitches, or straight as a picket, all stiff, inflexible, without grace, without attitude. It is surprising to us, but after a few winters here with our skaters they change … though they are always missing a little softness of their movements and abandon.”

The French also called ice skating “patinage artistique,” or artistic skating, explains Hines. “The French skaters placed their emphasis on artistry, specifically artistry associated with dance,” Hines writes. “Garcin viewed technique as important, but artistic expression as preeminent.”

Garcin dedicated Le vrai patineur to Geniéve Gosselin, the premier dancer at the Academy of Music in Paris, and often employed language used to describe ballet. The elegance in the poise of the body was of utmost importance.

“As to the position of the body,” he wrote. “It should be developed graciously: the head held high, the eyes attentive to the direction of movement, the arms free but comfortably positioned, allowing free movement of the shoulders with each turn of the head.”   

He instructed skaters to pay special attention to the positioning of the arms and hands, writing that delicate placement “contributes to the aplomb and grace of a skater.” If not holding a cane, the palms were both held open, “as if you are representing them to a friend,” and to raise the arms as when “one implores favors from heaven.”

The face was just as important as the fingers—the meaning of a move could be completely altered with a new facial expression.

“What is interesting is that the kind of image he was advising to conduct was built on very fine details, so historically that's very different,” says Adams. “Think about North American physical culture right now. Men are not supposed to pay attention to little details about their bodies.”

Many of the moves were not only challenging and beautiful, but dangerous. Garcin devoted the last chapters to the risks and hazards of ice skating. He described the safest conditions to go out on the ice and gave advice on how to get out of a pond if a skater broke through ice and became submerged waist-deep in frigid water.

Garcin noted the half-revolution three jump of the Saut du Zephyre (the Zephyr’s Leap), a dangerous but spectacular move, and the perilous Pas d’Apollon (the Step of Apollo). Several of the shapes and figures resemble similar moves you would see on the ice today. For example, the Révérence (bow) is a kind of spread-eagle figure, which is a common move, says Adams. “It requires very open hip joints. The person in this image isn’t doing it exactly the same, but it’s the same idea,” she says.

Garcin also documented figure-eight patterns in moves such as Le Courtisan (the courtier)—the pattern a crucial move for the figures seen 80 years later at international competitions, writes Hines.

While there are vestiges of the intricately drawn figures and diligent documentation of Le vrai patineur in today’s ice skating, it’s also evident how much the activity has evolved over the centuries. Garcin was proud of the 17th-century French way of skating, and suggested that elegance and grace strengthened the practice.

“Who knows how many people in France shared Garcin’s views or not,” says Adams. “It was important to construct the French skater as more naturally graceful than his counterparts in other countries, and that was a way of demonstrating superiority.”

Le vrai patineur was translated with the assistance of Mariana Zapata.

In the 18th century during the brisk winter months, Parisians flocked to the glistening frozen fields of La Glaciére, or the Glacier. The grassy terrain, flooded with water and frozen over, was an icy playground for upper-class citizens. And none were more showy than the male ice skaters dressed in bicep-revealing red jackets, tight pants, and graduation caps.

These fraternities of gentlemen showed off with challenging jumps and graceful arm movements—charms that could “seduce weak mortals,” according to the 19th-century French ice skater Jean Garcin. “There are no good skaters anywhere but in Paris,” he boasted. 

Ice skating is a centuries-old pastime. Before bladed skates were invented around the 14th century, people tied bones to their feet and pushed themselves along the ice with poles. It was primarily used as a mode of transportation, but became a popular leisure activity reserved for aristocratic men in France during the late-18th-century reign of Louis XVI. They formed skating clubs or fraternities to practice together, shovel snow off the ice, and protect rinks from hooligans. Women wouldn’t be allowed into clubs until 1833, writes James Hines in Figure Skating in the Formative Years.

During the early 1800s, Jean Garcin was a member of the skating fraternity Gilets Rouge, or red waistcoats, an elite all-male group of skaters whose philosophy valued artistic expression over athleticism. In 1813 book Le vrai patineur, or The True Skater, or Principles of the Art of Skating with Grace, Garcin illustrates the typical uniform of a Gilets Rouge ice skater: a form-fitting embroidered vest or coat, tight pants, and academic caps with a square top and tassel, known as mortarboards, or berets. While it’s unknown what kind of audience Garcin wrote the book for, Hines suggests he may have wrote it specifically for the Gilets Rouge.

 In his book, Garcin argued that the French style of ice skating reigned supreme. Part instructional manual and part treatise, Le vrai patineur was the second book published on ice skating and the first in French. Garcin captured the different kinds of moves often observed on the icy fields of La Glaciére, describing more than 30 figures—each with whimsical names. The book contains color and black-and-white illustrations of various poses, arm positions, and even suggested facial expressions.

“There was a kind of detail to the hand and the fingers, and you see that in these pictures,” says Mary Louise Adams, a sports sociologist at Queen’s University in Ontario. “This was a textbook and it was a treatise to show how French skating was better than these other kinds of skating in other countries where grace was not as important.”

As ice skating spread, countries embraced different techniques and styles. The French blended masculinity and beauty that wasn’t often seen on the rinks in England, Austria, and other countries of Europe. While Garcin thought foreign skaters lacked flare, he believed they could pick up this style, writes Adams in her book Artistic Impressions: Figure Skating, Masculinity and the Limits of Sport, quoting Garcin:

“The Germans, English, Danes and people from other cold places are incapable of skating otherwise, but look at them the first time they show their knowledge here: The body is bent, the arms swinging, the derriere pitches, or straight as a picket, all stiff, inflexible, without grace, without attitude. It is surprising to us, but after a few winters here with our skaters they change … though they are always missing a little softness of their movements and abandon.”

The French also called ice skating “patinage artistique,” or artistic skating, explains Hines. “The French skaters placed their emphasis on artistry, specifically artistry associated with dance,” Hines writes. “Garcin viewed technique as important, but artistic expression as preeminent.”

Garcin dedicated Le vrai patineur to Geniéve Gosselin, the premier dancer at the Academy of Music in Paris, and often employed language used to describe ballet. The elegance in the poise of the body was of utmost importance.

“As to the position of the body,” he wrote. “It should be developed graciously: the head held high, the eyes attentive to the direction of movement, the arms free but comfortably positioned, allowing free movement of the shoulders with each turn of the head.”   

He instructed skaters to pay special attention to the positioning of the arms and hands, writing that delicate placement “contributes to the aplomb and grace of a skater.” If not holding a cane, the palms were both held open, “as if you are representing them to a friend,” and to raise the arms as when “one implores favors from heaven.”

The face was just as important as the fingers—the meaning of a move could be completely altered with a new facial expression.

“What is interesting is that the kind of image he was advising to conduct was built on very fine details, so historically that's very different,” says Adams. “Think about North American physical culture right now. Men are not supposed to pay attention to little details about their bodies.”

Many of the moves were not only challenging and beautiful, but dangerous. Garcin devoted the last chapters to the risks and hazards of ice skating. He described the safest conditions to go out on the ice and gave advice on how to get out of a pond if a skater broke through ice and became submerged waist-deep in frigid water.

Garcin noted the half-revolution three jump of the Saut du Zephyre (the Zephyr’s Leap), a dangerous but spectacular move, and the perilous Pas d’Apollon (the Step of Apollo). Several of the shapes and figures resemble similar moves you would see on the ice today. For example, the Révérence (bow) is a kind of spread-eagle figure, which is a common move, says Adams. “It requires very open hip joints. The person in this image isn’t doing it exactly the same, but it’s the same idea,” she says.

Garcin also documented figure-eight patterns in moves such as Le Courtisan (the courtier)—the pattern a crucial move for the figures seen 80 years later at international competitions, writes Hines.

While there are vestiges of the intricately drawn figures and diligent documentation of Le vrai patineur in today’s ice skating, it’s also evident how much the activity has evolved over the centuries. Garcin was proud of the 18th-century French way of skating, and suggested that elegance and grace strengthened the practice.

“Who knows how many people in France shared Garcin’s views or not,” says Adams. “It was important to construct the French skater as more naturally graceful than his counterparts in other countries, and that was a way of demonstrating superiority.”

Le vrai patineur was translated with the assistance of Mariana Zapata.

In what might be the dork misdeed of the year-so-far (although seriously, at least one person might lose their job), a small cabal of library workers in Florida have been caught juking the check-out stats of some classic books using a made up reader.

According to the Orlando Sentinel, a "reader" by the name of Chuck Finley checked out 2,361 books from the East Lake County Library in Sorrento, Florida over a nine-month period last year. Or at least he would have if he’d actually existed. Finley, with home address, driver’s license number, and all, was the creation of a pair of librarians who were using his check-out record to save classic books from being circulated off the library shelves (the real Chuck Finley was a long-time MLB pitcher).

Under the library’s official policy, books that don’t get checked out for a couple of years are taken off the shelves, and often times have to be repurchased when they are eventually requested again. The library workers’ scheme was uncovered by an internal investigation launched after an anonymous tip.

While this all sounds like low-stakes noir, the fake Finley’s check-out rate actually altered the library’s circulation rate by 3.9 percent, which could have fraudulently buffed the branch’s funding. The culprits have been reprimanded, but no one has yet been fired.

Prince Randian was born without limbs in British Guyana in 1871. Propelled to stardom under P.T. Barnum, he built a comfortable life for himself, his wife, and their four children by making a living as a circus performer.

Randian was billed variously as "The Snake Man", "The Human Worm," "The Human Caterpillar," or "The Living Torso" when appearing in sideshows. He wowed audiences simply by performing the everyday tasks he learned to do out of necessity, such as shaving, painting, and writing. In this short clip from 1932's Freaks, which featured many real sideshow performers, Randian performs one of his most famous acts: rolling and lighting a cigarette with only the use of his mouth.

Aside from his dexterous talents, Randian was pretty witty. At the end of this brief clip, during which a clown has been rambling on about his new act to Randian, "The Human Caterpillar" offers, "Can you do anything about your eyebrows?!"

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

Scientists have long known about the mesentery, a membrane that lines your abdominal cavity and keeps your intestines in place, but until recently, it didn't get the credit it deserved. That's because scientists didn't quite know what it was, having previously thought that the mesentery was a disconnected group of parts. 

But researchers in Ireland said in November that those parts were in fact continuously connected, working to keep the intestines where they should be, according to Science Alert. This means the mesentery is a brand new, classified body organ. 

"We are now saying we have an organ in the body which hasn’t been acknowledged as such to date,” said J. Calvin Coffey, who co-wrote the paper, published in The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology. "This is relevant universally as it affects all of us. Up to now there was no such field as mesenteric science. Now we have established anatomy and the structure. The next step is the function. If you understand the function you can identify abnormal function, and then you have disease."

And while new diseases might seem like a bad thing, in this case, scientists say, deepening our understanding of the mesentery could help us better understand other abdominal diseases, as well as, practically speaking, reduce the number of invasive surgeries. 

In the meantime, if you go look, you can also find the mesentery in Gray's Anatomy, the continuously updated catalogue of our bodies. It was Coffey's research that got it there. 

For much of recorded history the human body was a black box—a highly capable yet mysterious assemblage of organs, muscles and bones. Even Hippocrates, a man who declared anatomy to be the foundation of medicine, had some interestingideas about our insides.  

By the early Renaissance, scientists and artists were chipping away at this anatomical inscrutability, and illustration was proving a particularly effective way to spread what was being learned via human dissection. There remained one nagging issue, however: accurately representing the body's three-dimensional structure on a flat, two-dimensional piece of paper. Some artists relied on creative uses of perspective to solve the problem. Others began using flaps.

The first known anatomical flap prints were produced in Strasbourg, France, in 1538 by Heinrich Vogtherr. The German artist, printer, and poet pieced together multiple layers of pressed linen so that readers could open up his illustrations to reveal the positions of major organs in both male and female figures. While volvelles, or multi-layered, moveable wheel charts, had been used in medieval astronomy and navigational texts, this was the first time a similar idea had been applied to anatomical illustration. 

As it turned out, people were eager to learn about their insides, and early flap anatomies (or "fugitive sheets" as they're now known) proved immensely popular during the 16th century. Many of the loose-leaf prints came with descriptions of individual organs and were ultimately reprinted in a variety of languages. Some were even meant to be paired with separate texts that offered further insights into the body and how to treat various maladies.

"These were very much part of a bigger idea of not only understanding anatomy, but also having a sort of folk remedy available," says Cali Buckley, an art history PhD candidate at Penn State who has studied flap anatomies. "It was very much about public edification."

Still, despite such instructive aims, not all early flap anatomies got everything right. Flip through one of Vogtherr's female illustrations, for example, and you'll find a U-shaped curiosity called the "lacmamil." "It's basically two tubules coming down from the nipples that were thought to turn blood into milk, which is something that obviously does not exist," Buckley says.

While early flap anatomies were aimed at a general public interested in the body's inner workings, it didn't take long for more specialized audiences to emerge. Andreas Vesalius, the Dutchman responsible for two of history's most celebrated anatomical texts, almost certainly knew about flap anatomies when he published his 1543 twin opuses, De Humani Corporis Fabrica ("On the fabric of the human body") and its condensed, much less expensive companion, Epitome. These were both aimed squarely at students of anatomy, with the latter being an attempt at "compressing all the parts of the human body into a few pages of text and pictures," according to the National Library of Medicine's book, "Hidden Treasure."

To that end, students were invited to cut out various anatomical parts from a spare page in Epitome and paste everything together to form their own personal flap anatomy. Vesalius' theory was that this would help them memorize and better understand both the composition and spatial arrangement of the body's internal organs, nerves and muscles.

If Vesalius helped establish a new benchmark for anatomical rigor in flap anatomies, later practitioners like Johann Remmelin combined that precision with artistic flair. His 1619 Catoptrum Microcosmicum features three full-page plates with dozens of detailed anatomical illustrations of both male and female bodies. "They were incredibly complicated, but also accurate and kind of wildly pretentious," says Buckley. Catoptrum Microcosmicum features text in Greek, Latin and Hebrew, and mixes together ideas from literature, poetry and philosophy. It was also "vaguely alchemical," according to Buckley, insofar as it tried to give readers an understanding of the entire universe, using the body as a microcosm.

As printing techniques grew more sophisticated in the 18th and 19th centuries, so too did flap illustrations. Gustave J. Witkowski’s colorful "Human anatomy and physiology" has a multi-layered brain with more than 20 movable parts. Similarly, Eduard Oskar Schmidt's "The anatomy of the human head and neck" features a mustachioed Victorian man, whose head you can peel back to reveal the underlying musculature, nerves, eyes and brain.

Pregnancy, which had always been a preoccupation for male anatomists and physicians, also got the flap treatment. George Spratt’s epically titled 1848 edition of "Obstetric Tables: Comprising Graphic Illustrations with Descriptions and Practical Remarks; Exhibiting on Dissected Plates Many Important Subjects in Midwifery" shows, among other things, the various stages of pregnancy. The preface to Spratt's American edition raved:

The superiority of the present work over any other series of Obstetrical illustrations, is universally admitted. It is a happy combination of the Picture and the Model...To the busy practitioner, who wants something to refresh his memory, it obviates the necessity for continual post mortem examination…To the student it is equivalent to a whole series of practical demonstrations, with the advantage that it can be carried about with him and studied wherever he may desire. 

Eventually, ever larger flap contributions appeared, like “White's Physiological Manikin” in 1886. Produced by James T. White and Co. and "examined and approved by Frank H. Hamilton M.D.," one of the four physicians who tried to save President Garfield, this wall-friendly model was meant for classrooms and doctor's offices. Among other things, it showcased "the form, position, color, and relation of the organs of a healthy body," according to "Hidden Treasures." It also had some morally instructive flaps that depicted "the effects of alcohol and narcotics on the human stomach, and the deformation of the female rib cage caused by corsetry." 

Today, X-ray imaging, sonograms, CT scans, and MRIs let us peek inside the body in ways 16th century anatomists couldn't have dreamed of. But it's worth noting that even with all these technological advances, flap anatomies never really went away. Popular pop-up books like Jonathan Miller’s "The Human Body" are in many ways the modern descendants of flap anatomies. And if you ask a medical or nursing student about their own experiences learning anatomy, you'll likely hear just as much about layered plastic anatomical transparencies as you will about layered computer animations. Turns out, Vesalius was onto something.

On Christmas Eve, Isaac Jones went hiking with his new metal detector, on a trail by the Yuba River, near Nevada City, Calif. It was the first time he had ever used a metal detector, and at the beginning of his walk, he found the sort of small items that metal detectors most often pick up—coins, bits of metal trash and bullet shells, as the Union reports.

After hiking for about a mile, though, he came upon an unusual object. It was a human jawbone, buried in the ground. The metal detector had noticed the three gold teeth embedded in the bone.

The spot where Jones found the jawbone, known as Edward’s Crossing, was a toll road used by miners during the gold rush, when people would pan for gold in the river.

Local authorities will send the jawbone for testing to find out how old it is. It’s possible that it’s a century old, although could also have been buried more recently. “Maybe I can help a family get some closure or potentially help with an unsolved case,” Jones wrote on Facebook.

McDonald's riles cardinals with branch near Vatican https://t.co/qd57dRtZe2pic.twitter.com/tZNZgUfSph

— ABS-CBN News (@ABSCBNNews) January 4, 2017

There are over 30,000 places in the world where you can eat McDonald's. You can buy a vanilla shake in the middle of the Negev Desert. You can get a Happy Meal at Guantanamo Bay.

And now, thanks to the chain's newest conquest, you can grab a Big Mac at the Vatican. According to the Local, a McDonald's has opened just around the corner from St. Peter's Square, on the first floor of a building that houses seven cardinals.

Its new neighbors aren't too happy. "It's a controversial, perverse decision," one cardinal said in October, when the restaurant was first proposed.

But the cardinal in charge of renting out the space—for $33,000 a month—wasn't buying it. "I don't see the scandal," he said. Or maybe he just loves fries.

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.

Vaughan Cornish had come to Canada’s Glacier National Park to look at waves. As a geographer, waves were his great passion. He was fascinated by undulating forms in seas and in deserts, in the movement of the clouds and in the movement of the land during an earthquake. In Canada, he wanted to observe waves of snow.

In December 1900 he and his wife Ellen, an engineer and artist, left Britain and began their three-month journey to cross wintry North America on the Canadian Pacific Railway. In Montreal and Winnipeg and out the window of the train, they had observed fresh fallen snow, and drifts, and the waves Cornish was so drawn to. But when they reached Glacier National Park, they discovered a class of natural snow formations they’d never seen before.

Hovering just above the snowy ground were giant balls of suspended snow, somehow balanced on thick stems. They looked a lot like giant toadstools, and Cornish called them “snow mushrooms.”

Snow mushroom formation begins with a tree, fallen or felled, that leaves behind a wide stump a few feet in height. In the winter, these stumps start accumulating snow. In Glacier National Park, the snow falls heavy and fast—as much as 12 inches an hour, at some times, averaging 48 feet in total over the course of the winter—and the wind is calm. The result is that the snow gathers around the top of the stump.

The resulting snowballs can become giant. Cornish found snow mushrooms as wide as 12 feet in diameter. They were also surprisingly sturdy, as he reported in a 1902 issue of The Geographical Journal:

“When I attempted to detach a small snow-mushroom from its pedestal, I found that it was very firmly fixed. Having driven a long pole into the mass of snow, which was about 4 feet across, I found it to be tough and tenacious, and I was unable to dislodge it…Place my pole against the tree, I gave successive pushes until the tree rocked violently, when at last the snow-cap fell, but as a whole, and it was not broken with its impact with the soft snow beneath."

The effect of the snow mushrooms could be haunting. In some places, there were fields of mushrooms that would spring up above the snow. If the mushroom "stems" were short enough that the accumulation of snow eventually reached the mushroom bottoms, the balls created a undulating field of mysterious bumps.

Glacier was the only place that Cornish found these features in his trek across Canada. But after he wrote in a popular publication about the discovery, he heard about a few other places in the country where these rare formations could be found. The conditions had to be exactly right: stumps big enough and tall enough, snowfall heavy and wet enough, and wind calm enough for the mushroom caps to form.

More than 100 years later, it’s still possible to find snow mushrooms in Glacier National Park, although it seems they are rarer than they once were. On occasion, they pop up elsewhere in the world—here are a few in Japan—and they’re not always large. In this century, though, when there are fewer stumps wide enough to make snow mushrooms, these formations are a rare natural wonder.

During the maple syrup season in spring, maple trees drip their sap into buckets that harvesters haul away so they can boil down the sap into syrup. But before the syrup gets distributed, the hot liquid is drizzled over a finely packed trough of snow, solidifying it into sugary maple toffees.

Making maple toffees, also known as "sugar on snow" candy in the United States and tire d’érable in Canada, is an old tradition of the maple sap harvest. In this 1955 video archived by British Pathé, a large group of eager children and adults huddles around the packed snow and watches as a woman pours the hot syrup. It only takes a couple of seconds until the candy can be rolled, dolloped with popsicle sticks and gobbled up.

The tradition of making these chewy candies goes back to pioneer days, the production of pure maple syrup being one of the oldest agricultural enterprises in the United States. It's a popular treat in regions of maple sap production, including eastern Ontario, New Brunswick, northern New England, and Quebec.

People still carry on the tradition. In New England, communities gather at Sugar On Snow Parties, where the maple toffee is made in large quantities and eaten with sour pickles and doughnuts to contrast the sweetness. In the video below, a maple syrup candy maker in Quebec, Canada has a station where she pours a tin canister of syrup and rolls up little lollipops to sell to customers.

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 bright, clear Fourth of July in 1975, a crowd of onlookers and reporters assembled in the vast parking lot of the Cow Palace, a convention center just outside San Francisco. They had been summoned by a curious press release that read in part: “On July 4, 1975 members of Ant Farm will drive a Phantom Dream Car thru a wall of burning television sets in an event called MEDIA BURN.”

The irreverent Ant Farm art collective had been putting on performances and making attention-grabbing installations since the late 1960s. By 1975 they had already made one of their most iconic pieces, Cadillac Ranch, a sculpture in Amarillo, Texas that consisted of ten Cadillacs sunk nose-first into the earth. (The cars are still standing today, in a cow pasture near interstate 40, and have accumulated a skin of vibrant graffiti.) The group were frequent media critics, and for their latest stunt they would use the media to assist them in the critique.

John Turner, one of the invitees, had just started working for the media in 1975. He was working as a part-time editor for a few news stations in San Francisco; later that year he would become an arts reporter and producer at a local channel. He had also mingled with Ant Farm socially, hanging out at the group’s San Francisco studio. He had some idea of what the collective was planning and knew it would be worth documenting, so he attended with a Pentax camera in hand.

The scene was odd and also festive. Women in hotpants hawked souvenir t-shirts, programs, and posters. Camera crews amassed behind yellow barriers. A Basset hound in a cape wandered around. As promised, a pyramid of old-fashioned television sets was assembled on the concrete, with the largest on the bottom. The group had also set up a grandstand decorated with patriotic regalia.

Turner already had an idea of how things would go down, so he arrived ready to get his shot.

“I scoped it out, and I thought, ‘Well, for me, the best vantage point is probably about twenty five to thirty feet away from the sets,” he told me in an interview. So he claimed a spot, placed the camera on a fast shutter speed, framed his shot, and waited.

Things happened quickly. A car arrived bearing “John F. Kennedy” (artist Doug Hall) and a bevy of faux Secret Service agents. Kennedy/Hall mounted the star-spangled stage and delivered a speech praising the “pioneers” who would pilot the Phantom Dream Car. He asked the audience: “Who can deny that we are a nation addicted to television and the constant flow of media?”

Once the speech had ended and the fake president was spirited away, the Phantom Dream Car was unveiled. A spacey marvel, the modified Cadillac convertible looked like it had arrived from the set of a science fiction film. Where a front windshield would normally be were two clear domes; jutting from the top of the car was a massive fin containing a camera. Once the drivers were in the car, the clear plastic domes would be shrouded in protective black fiberglass. The drivers would pilot their vehicle via the closed-circuit camera, which sent a live feed to a monitor mounted in their dashboard. The pyramid of televisions would then be doused in gasoline and set on fire, and the Phantom Dream Car would plow through them at about 55 miles per hour. 

Turner knew that his success depended on a matter of seconds.

“If I was watching the car coming from behind me, I would have definitely missed the shot or the focus would have been jarred,” said Turner. “So I thought, ‘The easiest way to do this is to just do it by audio.’ So what I did is, when I heard them start the car, I took a look back, and then I turned my head and as I heard the sound getting closer to me, I gauged where the car was and I decided to take the photograph as I saw maybe a fraction of the front of the car enter my camera frame.”

The car slammed into the pyramid of televisions with what Turner described as a “thump,” but he couldn’t tell you what it actually looked like. He was listening so hard trying to get the shot, he said, that he didn’t see the action.

“From the time that the thing was lit to the cars actually hitting the center target or wherever they were aiming for, it was probably under ten seconds,” Turner told me. “So there really wasn’t time for me to get a good waft of the smoke or even see the fire. The part of my brain that was paying attention to audio was on adrenaline.”

Once the smoke and the crowds cleared, Turner sent his Kodak film off to be developed. “It happened so slam-bang I had no idea if I had gotten a useable image,” he said.

In fact, he would find, his audio trick had worked; he managed to capture the Phantom Dream Car at the moment it explosively collided with the television pyramid. The otherworldly vehicle’s nose is submerged in the sets, their neat pyramid only just beginning to cave as vibrant yellow and orange flames spread beneath and above. Behind is the incongruous scenery of rolling hills and green trees. It’s a wonderfully confounding image.

Turner is sanguine about his success; he called it a “lucky shot”, if luck is “skill and opportunity meeting at the same time.” He compared it to a scientific image that captures a specific and fleeting moment, like a bullet shattering on impact.

“There were other people there taking the same photograph and mine just happened to be, through this moment of luck, an interesting view,” said Turner. “Because it gave a sense of location and noise and fire and danger and all these things.”

Turner knew he had a good shot, and he showed it to Chip Lord, one of the founders of Ant Farm. Lord liked it, too, and asked if he could turn it into a postcard. Turner agreed. Suddenly the image had a life of its own.

The postcards were a runaway success; mail art was wildly popular in the 1970s and the bizarre image of a futuristic car ploughing through television sets captivated people who sent them all over the world. Copies are still circulated on eBay, where collectors snap them up.It was a document of an audacious art piece, a visual thumbing of the nose to powers-that-be, and an anarchic celebration of destruction.

“The event was only attended by maybe 300 people, including news media and friends of the artists,” says Turner. “But this postcard had a kind of life, an afterlife, and an after-afterlife, and then it just became like pop culture photography.”

The image proliferated. In addition to the postcards, it appeared in art books around the world, in a pamphlet for an early MTV awards show, on the cover of a German pop album, and in museums. Turner got used to seeing his photo in unlikely places. And in spreading the image of Media Burn far and wide, he also became, in a way, part of the act.

“Though this high-octane performance would appear to be Media Burn, it was, in actuality, not,” writes Constance Lewallen in Ant Farm 1968-1978, a catalog produced for the first major Ant Farm retrospective in 2004. “The performance attained its raison d’etre not in the fiery collision, but in its transformation to an image: it was in that singular moment when the Vidicon tubes blinked that Media Burn occurred—or, perhaps more correctly, when “Media Burn” arrived at Media Burn.”

In other words, the video produced by Ant Farm, the hundreds of photos taken by spectators, and the news reports that were issued afterward became the core of the art project, not the ephemeral stunt itself. And Turner just happened to snap an iconic image of an image-fueled experiment.

In the ensuing years, Turner—who still lives in the Bay Area and still receives requests to use his Media Burn photo—has had a long career in television, written books on seminal folk artists, and made a movie about mysterious musician Korla Pandit. He has also watched the nature of photography shift radically from waiting for Kodak to send images back from the lab, to children snapping hundreds of digital images daily. In his estimation, he told me, this change has been an improvement.

“In today’s day and age of the camera phone, there are so many lucky shots taken every day throughout the world, that capture moments of impact or moments of high emotion,” says Turner. “Just because somebody holds up an instrument and decides to press a button, they get these amazing images and I’m constantly surprised and impressed.”

But even though digital wizardry has ushered in a new era of lucky shots, Turner says he never again got a shot quite so lucky as the one he captured with nothing more than a handheld Pentax, instinct, and the sound of a roaring Phantom Dream Car just outside the frame.

Whether they like it or not, Australians are becoming real cat people. In fact, according to a recently released report, nearly 100% of Australia is now infested with wild cats.

As is being reported in the Guardian, researchers have discovered that Australia has a feral cat density of about one cat per every one and a half square miles. This density exists across 99 percent of the country save for some outlying islands where they have been eliminated and in some cat-free areas that have been fenced off. A collection of nearly 100 wildlife surveys showed that there are between 2-6 million cats occupying the continent, which turns out to be a pretty safe number given that they originally estimated that they would find around 20 million.

Wild cats were first introduced to Australia when it was colonized by Europe, and they have spread out across the entire island, wreaking havoc on the native species. Australia and Antarctica were once the only continents without a native cat population, so their native wildlife evolved without the necessary defenses against felines, making them extremely vulnerable to predation by invasive cats.

Despite outcry from many animal rights supporters, Australian officials are looking into a number of methods of culling the cat population. Unfortunately the wily animals are pretty hard to trap, making more humane methods, such as sterilization, nearly impossible. Fittingly enough, one of the methods being discussed is to release dogs that could hunt down feral cats. So far though, the untamed cats still have the run of the place.    

Mention the word “vineyard” and most people will think of rolling green hillsides or sweeping valley views. Yet few of them would expect to find one right in the heart of one of Berlin's hippest districts, Kreuzberg. A true relic from the Cold War era, this tiny urban vineyard is one of the German capital’s best kept secrets. The vineyard covers a tenth of a hectare and it produces about 350 bottles of wine yearly, called Kreuz-Neroberger. Grapes for the rare wine are grown at the very birthplace of the first programmable computer in the world, which only adds to its mystique. It is notoriously hard to obtain.

Over the last couple of years the secret vineyard has been overseen by Daniel Mayer, a jolly 44-year master oenologist and winemaker. A Berlin native, Mayer worked for many years as a wine buyer before taking control over the small urban vineyard, and pulling the German capital’s little-known but glorious winemaking past into the 21st century.  

“I took over the Kreuzberg vineyard in 2010 when a friend of mine asked me if I would be interested in it,” says Mayer. He wears a T-shirt with an inscription in Latin saying Vinea in Monte Crucis/MCDXXXV Vindemia MMXV (The Vineyard in Kreuzberg, 1435-2015). The text, although ironic, reflects an important historical truth: vines has been grown in this part of Berlin for centuries, with the first vineyard planted on the hills of Kreuzberg more than 580 years ago.

The Kreuzberg vineyard that Mayer is taking care of is not nearly that old. It was planted in 1968, in the midst of the Cold War era, when the district’s twin city of Wiesbaden donated five Riesling vines. Between 1971 and 1973, Bergstraße county, a wine region in the state of Hesse, gifted another 75 vines. In 1975 the town of Ingelheim am Rhein donated 20 Blauer Spätburgunder vines. Today the Kreuzberg vineyard contains 350 vines in total, all of them gifts.   

Like many of the best vineyards, the one in Kreuzberg is planted on a slope, not far from the charming 19th-century idyll of Viktoriapark. But what’s even more unique about the vineyard’s location is that it grows at the very birthplace of Z3—the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer, designed by German engineer Konrad Zuse. Thanks to this machine and its predecessors, Zuse (1910-1995) is often regarded as the inventor of the computer. Unfortunately the machine and its blueprints were destroyed during World War II, in a bombing of Berlin in December of 1943. So was the laboratory of Zuse, as well as the whole block around it, which opened a wide gap in the otherwise densely built urban area.

“A couple of years ago one of the mayoral candidates of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg borough came with a guy from the museum and an architect and said that according to some plans, the cellar of Zuse’s house has never been filled up with earth after the war, so there might still be a computer in there,” laughs Mayer.

The Romans first introduced viticulture to the southernmost area of present-day Germany about 2,000 years ago, and by the early Middle Ages, it was usually being made in monasteries. In fact, Berlin’s Kreuzberg district has older winemaking traditions than more popular regions such as California, Australia and South Africa. But with the rapid expansion of Berlin in the 19th century, many of the vineyards were pulled out and replaced by residential buildings. Yet Berlin and the surrounding Brandenburg area abound with names that are deeply rooted in its glorious winemaking past, like Weinmeisterstraße (Winemaster street), Weinbrennerweg (Wine distiller way), and Weinbergpark (Vineyard park), to name but a few.

“Wine was a big thing here. And sometimes it was cheaper than beer which helped its popularity. The city produced so much of it that they even exported some to Scandinavia and the Baltic republics,” explains Mayer. “But then all this came to an end. One of the reasons was globalization, as it was much easier to get cheaper and better wines via the railway from other parts of Europe.”  

The Kreuzberg vineyard was a project started by then-Mayor of West Berlin, Willy Brandt, in 1966. Its goal was to seal the city partnership between Kreuzberg and Wiesbaden. It was a strong political statement, saying that West Berlin, which existed between 1949 and 1990 as a political enclave surrounded by East Germany, had not been forgotten by West Germany.  The annual harvest was initially modest, with 11 bottles in 1970 and only seven bottles in 1971. The choice of grapes was political, too, but not necessarily the best one for Berlin’s climate.

“Riesling takes a very long time to mature, but back in the 1960s they had different, political reasons. The Riesling vines came from Kreuzberg’s sister city of Wiesbaden, the capital of federal state of Hesse, which is in the Rhine district famous for its white wines,” explains Mayer.

Due to Berlin’s northern continental climate, the grapes planted at that time couldn’t ripen well and the wine was thin and acidic. Or as they used to say, “Brandenburg’s wine goes down one’s throat like a saw.” The wine made in Kreuzberg wasn’t an exception.

But in recent years its quality has improved, thanks to the rising temperature of the city. Berlin’s urban area has a unique microclimate: heat is stored by the city's buildings and pavement, and temperatures inside the city can be 4°C (7 °F) higher than in its surrounding areas. According to Mayer, sometimes as little as half a degree makes a big difference on the grapes’ ripeness.

Two grape varieties are grown—Riesling, the most widely planted of German grapes, and Spätburgunder or "Late Burgundian", as Pinot Noir is known in Germany. The vines are lovingly taken care of all year long by Daniel Mayer and volunteers who help with all the work, including pruning and harvesting. Each one of the 350 vines produces roughly one 0.375 liter bottle of wine which is 100 percent organic, as Mayer uses only copper and sulfur fungicides which are more or less harmless.  

“The vineyard is so small that we do everything by hand. We spend about one hour of work per bottle of wine. Or 350 hours yearly in total. But this is only to produce the grapes. Then we have to bring them to the sister cities which turn them into wine and this adds to the cost of production,” explains Mayer. 

The Kreuz-Neroberger wine is still bottled in the same narrow, oblong, cylindrical bottles made of brown glass that were used for first time in 1970, when the first vintage of it was pressed. But what about the wine itself?

“It’s uncomplicated table wine with floral notes. It has hints of peaches and light citrus notes, a good balance and a medium-long finish,” explains Mayer. 

The Kreuz-Neroberger wine is famously hard to obtain. You won’t find it in the wine lists of the fancy restaurants and you can’t buy it in the shops, not even in the specialized ones. However, a donation of 10 Euros (about $10.60) to the district office of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg will get you a standard 0,375 liter bottle.

The other way of scoring a bottle is a bit trickier: if you reach the ripe old age of 100 years, then you’ll get a bottle of it for your birthday.  

In 1870, artist Robert Bateman painted an unusual scene. In it, a mandrake plant is pulled carefully from the earth with lengths of string. The painting depicts just one part of the extensive mythology surrounding the mandrake—its ability to kill with its scream when uprooted. In painting this scene, Bateman also added to the rich history of how the supernatural is portrayed in art.

This is the subject of Christopher Dell’s new book The Occult, Witchcraft and Magic: An Illustrated History. Full of art, illustrations and photographs, the book brings together a compelling visual history of magic and its uses, from ancient Egyptian magical spells printed on papyrus, to the film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. 

As the book shows, the mandrake is just one of the many objects that humans have imbued with significance. In palmistry, it’s the lines of the hand. In both alchemy and fraternal societies, it's secret symbols. Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from this fascinating collection. 

Someone keeps leaving weird poems on food at Tesco. https://t.co/GUED3ehS2Ypic.twitter.com/rwLlFTPCEE

— Report UK (@ReportUK) January 4, 2017

In the bakery aisle of a Tesco supermarket in Coventry, England, a vigilante poetry-lover left a surprise, as the Coventry Telegraph reports.

There, near the bread, was a printed poem entitled “Bread,” by W.S. Merwin, a prolific modern American poet. It begins:

Each face in the street is a slice of bread
wandering on
searching

somewhere in the light the true hunger
appears to be passing them by
they clutch

Elsewhere in the store, another poem appeared. This one was entitled “Deer” and came from “A Bestiary,” by Kenneth Rexroth.

Deer are gentle and graceful
And they have beautiful eyes.
They hurt no one but themselves,
The males, and only for love.

There are few clues as to who might be leaving these poems about, but in December, the same Tesco had another rash of vigilante notes left on its shelves. The December notes targeted diet drink products, like SlimFast, and told would-be buyers “You don’t need these chemicals” and “Stop counting calories! You look great.” 

Spiel und Spaß auf @Insel_Langeoog: Nach Sturm Zehntausende Innenteile von Überraschungseiern angespült. https://t.co/SQYi36S8D7#Langeoogpic.twitter.com/Q9czJpxp8t

— Burkhard Ewert (@burkhardewert) January 4, 2017

On Wednesday evening, a Danish cargo ship ran into a vicious storm on its way back from China, losing five containers in the process. As a result, this morning, kids on the German island of Langeoog woke up to a treat—thousands of Kinder eggs scattered across the shore.

The wrappers and chocolate had washed off, so the tide line was strewn with colorful plastic eggs, each with a toy inside. Residents immediately took to this sea-sponsored scavenger hunt, filling bags with the treasures, The Local reports. 

Tausende Ü-Eier am Strand von #Langeoog: Sturmtief #Axel war heute auf jeden Fall für eine Überraschung gut! :-) https://t.co/oNcfvB62Odpic.twitter.com/volctOMeXG

— WESER-KURIER (@weserkurier) January 4, 2017

By the afternoon, the egg cleanup was complete, but the ocean had more presents for the island's kiddos. Legos—much harder to gather, and dangerous to sea creatures—were washing ashore. "This isn't funny anymore," the mayor said. What's next?

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 tocara@atlasobscura.com.