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College Student Shotguns 13 Beers During Half-Marathon

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Emmet Farnan is a senior at the University of Notre Dame, an amateur runner, and a consumer of alcohol. Like many before him, he recently managed to combine the latter two pursuits, this time in a stunt that was a twist on the beer mile.

On April 1, Farnan ran a half-marathon, or 13.1 miles, shotgunning a Coors Light at every mile. For the uninitiated, that means that he cut a hole in the bottom of each can and, upon popping the top, slurped its contents out in seconds. He finished the race—against 1,700 other runners and common sense—in one hour, 43 minutes, 42 seconds, an average of just under eight minutes per mile.

“I thought, you know, I’ll do the [half-marathon], but I haven’t been training properly," Farnan told Runner's World. "How do I run it without being worried about my time?” So to take his mind off how bad his time might be, he chose beer, which seems like a reasonable strategy.

As Runner's World notes, Farnan's stunt wasn't as rigorous as an official beer mile, in which participants must not shotgun beers or throw up, as Farnan did at one point. Still, he ran much much farther than a mile and, like few of his contemporaries, has a viral video to prove it.


Who Is Shaving Virginia's Cats?

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An unknown perpetrator is shaving (apparently) random cats across Waynesboro, Virginia, police there said Friday.

Since December, at least seven cats have been abducted and let loose again with their underbellies or legs carefully shorn, according to the Associated Press.

The felines, who all have collars and owners, have so far been returned otherwise unharmed, and even the seemingly baffled police aren’t exactly sure what, if any, law the perpetrator is breaking.

Which means that, for now, at least, Waynesboro's cats might have to look out for themselves. Stay safe out there, cats of Waynesboro.

The Largest Centaur in the Solar System Has Rings

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The most famous rings in the solar system encircle Saturn, Uranus, and Jupiter, but they're not the only planetary jewelry. Chariklo may be small by comparison—in cross-section it's about the size of Sri Lanka—but the minor planet, known as a "centaur," has two little rings of its own. Those rings also just so happen to be the perfect size for learning more about how ring systems form. A team of scientists from Japan has developed the first complete simulation of a ring system, and their model shows Chariklo's rings may be short-lived.

Chariklo orbits the sun between Saturn and Uranus, and just like those of its neighbors, its opaque rings are made up of tiny chunks of ice and rocky debris. Modeling the complex interactions between particles in the huge rings around bigger planets is pretty much impossible. Though Chariklo's small rings are more manageable from a computational point of view, they still require a supercomputer to simulate. With the model the scientists have created, they're starting to understand how particles in rings—large or small—behave.

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According to the model, the particles in Chariklo's rings are interacting in a way that's not sustainable, and ought to dissipate in around 100 years. So either we're very lucky to be able to see them or there's some other force keeping them together. It could be that the particles are very tiny, just a few millimeters across, which would allow the rings to stay together for millions of years, according to the simulation. "Another possibility is the existence of an undiscovered shepherd satellite which slows down the dissolution of the rings," Eiichiro Kokubo, a theoretical astronomer at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, said in a press release. Understanding this effect will help make sense of how Saturn's 62 moons—from Aegaeon to Ymir—impacts its rings.

Another use for these computer models? Soothing virtual flybys.

One of the Earliest Industrial Spies Was a French Missionary Stationed in China

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Plenty of today's technological arms races involve an element of industrial espionage. An executive from Uber has been accused of stealing autonomous car-related data from his old employer, Google. Just this month, the same company was accused of using hidden tracking software to keep tabs on their chief ride-hailing rival, Lyft. And China is trying to partner with the European Union on a suite of new moon bases partly because they can't work on scientific projects with the United States, thanks to laws meant to prevent secret-stealing.

But intellectual property theft hasn't always involved elaborate software programs and moonshots. Back in the 17th century, all it took to steal trade secrets was a Jesuit missionary with an eye for detail who was fluent in Chinese and willing to spend a lot of time in a ceramics factory.

When Francois Xavier d'Entrecolles joined the priesthood in 1682, he probably didn't plan to become the world’s first industrial spy. As the historian Robert Finlay writes inThe Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History, d'Entrecolles was a skilled translator with "a passion for the curious and unusual, along with a gift for sifting and marshaling information." Known for his friendliness and wisdom, he was sent to China in 1698, along with nine other missionaries.

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As Finlay explains, Jesuits at the time saw their missionary work as a kind of back-and-forth—as they spread the teachings of Christianity and Western science to other countries, they gathered valuable local knowledge in return. Priests came back from their missions with everything from technological plans to bags of malaria-curing cinchona bark. Carl Linnaeus developed his system of classification with the help of Chinese plant samples that were sent to him by a Jesuit missionary.

Although many of these were lucky discoveries, d’Entrecolles’s experience was slightly different. When he set out from France, he did so with a particular assignment. At the time, much of Europe was seized with a mania for imported porcelain— in the words of the English journalist and author Daniel Defoe, everyone who could afford to was "piling china up on the tops of cabinets, escritoires and every chimney-piece, to the tops of the ceilings… till it became a grievance."

Virtually all of this valuable material came from the Chinese city of Jingdezhen, where it had first been invented, and which roared all day and night with fires from the kilns. Although Europeans guessed at how the people of Jingdezhen made this "white gold," they were pretty far off. (One account diagnosed it as an eggshell-and-fish-scale mixture that was shaped into plates and vases, and then left underground for a century to cure.) Attempts to reverse-engineer the process had likewise been unsuccessful. The ruling class was growing impatient—increasingly, "there was intense interest at the French court… in discovering how porcelain was made,” Finlay writes. “D’Entrecolles’s superiors plainly sent him to Jingdezhen on a mission of industrial espionage.”

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It was a difficult job. D'Entrecolles had to deal with scrutiny on a number of levels. Many trade secrets were kept within families, passed down to the next generation only when the previous one retired. When he was allowed to visit the factories, d'Entrecolles, despite his fluency in Chinese, struggled with the workers' job-specific lingo. Although the would-be spy made it to Jingdezhen around 1700, over a decade had passed before he was able to mail a description of his findings to France.

This first letter, sent to the treasurer of the Jesuit missions to China in September of 1712, makes the author's intentions clear immediately. "My Reverend Father," it begins, "The visits that I have made from time to time at Jingdezhen… have given me in turn an opportunity to instruct myself concerning the manner in which one makes this beautiful porcelain which is so admired and which is exported to all parts of the world… I believe that a detailed description of all that is concerned with this sort of work should be of some use in Europe."

He goes on to explain that despite the hardships involved, many of the city's Christian converts work in the porcelain trade, and that he has checked what they've told him against some textbooks and "acquired a fairly exact knowledge of all aspects of this fine art." D'Entrecolles periodically loses the plot—he gets distracted giving statistics about the city, explaining its policing strategies, and relating a local legend about a woman who gives birth to a serpent.

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But by the end of the letter, he has taught his interlocutor exactly what porcelain is made of, how those materials are mixed, separated, and purified, and how the resulting clay is rolled, kneaded, moulded, and fired. He has gone over special cases (extra-large pieces; glaze preparation; crackling) and speculated about how to reconstruct various techniques that the Chinese artisans considered “lost secrets,” including kia-tsim—a glazing technique in which illustrations appear on a bowl only when it’s full of water.

A modern reader comes away with a good understanding of the porcelain-making process, as well as an appreciation for the creativity on display. D’Entrecolles tells of porcelain ducks and turtles that float on water, and realistic porcelain cats with eyes that glow when candles are put inside. (Those were meant to scare rats.)

He describes a faux-aging process, meant to make new porcelain look antique, that involves covering it with meat soup and then leaving it in a sewer for a month. He also details the complex worker assembly lines that allowed for speedy production. "It is said that one piece of fired porcelain passes through the hands of seventy workers," d’Entrecolles writes. "I have no trouble in believing this."

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This was not quite enough for d’Entrecolles’s superiors in France. “They informed [him] that his information had not been sufficient,” writes Finlay. D’Entrecolles’s second letter, sent ten years after the first, contains even more instructions—on how to restore gilt finishes, mix a mirrored black glaze, and fortify edges so they won’t chip. (He also sent samples.) Taken together, Finlay writes, the two letters “represent one of the earliest and most calculated cases of an effort to implement mercantilist economic strategies of technology transfer.”

In the end, France was not the first country to produce porcelain in Europe—that honor went either to Germany or England (the two countries are still litigating). But at least one future porcelain maven got a lot out of d’Entrecolles’s work. The British potter and entrepreneur Josiah Wedgwood was fascinated by d'Entrecolles's letters, and copied the passage about Jingdezhen's assembly lines into his commonplace book. Years later, he would recreate that setup in his pottery factory, assigning different workers to model, mold, paint, and fire the clay—an innovation in the field. "The triumphs of the industrial revolution thus owed something to the potters of Jingdezhen," writes Finlay.

Similarly, any successful modern incarnation of industrial espionage—which is to say, those cases we haven't been hearing about—may owe something to the work of d'Entrecolles, who accidentally invented an entirely new type of corporate competition.

Found: The Hoof of Napoleon’s Horse, Hiding in a Cottage Drawer in England

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Back in 1815, during the Battle of Waterloo, the British army captured Napoleon’s horse, alive. The stallion, named Marengo, was sold to a member of the Grenadier Guards, who brought the horse back to his family farmhouse in Somerset. When Marengo died in 1831, the family had his two front hooves mounted in silver and kept them as keepsakes.

The family also preserved the horse’s skeleton and for many year it has been on display—it’s now at the National Army Museum in London.

One of those silver-plated front hooves went to the officers’ mess at St. James’s Palace, where it still resides today. The other, though, was lost.

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But recently a descendant of Marengo’s original British owners re-discovered the hoof. It was in a plastic bag, The Times reports,“at the back of a kitchen drawer in a Somerset farmhouse once one by the wealthy family who bought Marengo.” It’s now on loan to the Household Cavalry Museum in London, still separated from the horse’s skeleton but found at last.

In Antarctica, a Mysterious Igloo Slowly Appears

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If you're a slow TV buff, the webcam for Casey Station, one of Australia's three Antarctic research bases, makes for reasonably compelling viewing. Wind blows, and trucks make tracks in the snow. Ant-sized scientists scurry in and out of the various doors. Someone occasionally switches out the name on the black and orange Happy Birthday sign.

Over the last week in April, though, the webcam's fans were treated to an unusual and thrillingly progress-related activity. "The emails started to come into Australia’s Antarctic Division," Business Insider Australia writes. Far to the right side of the frame, someone was building—was that an igloo?

It was. According to BI, two staff members from the base, electrician Adam Roberts and communications technician Clint Chilcott, had been discussing building an igloo for a long time. Last week, they decided to give it a go.

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Igloos are generally the provenance of more Northern climes—they were invented by the Inuit people of the Central Arctic, who built them while out on winter hunting trips. But the two Australian friends couldn't resist. "It's a one-off opportunity," Chilcott explained to BI. "Not many places you get to live is there enough snow to build an igloo."

They built theirs using their hands and a short pruning knife. Over the course of the above time lapse video, you can see it appear, layer by snow-brick layer.

After they finished it, they tricked it out—on the night of day #7, you can see it glowing from the inside, thanks to strings of LED lights. Chilcott even stayed overnight in it, after the station chef dared him to. (His prize was breakfast in bed.)

And, as is to be expected, Chilcott and Roberts gave their creation its own ad on the station's notice board—the local version of Airbnb. "Comfortably sleeps one or if traveling with a really close friend there's room for two," it reads, in part. "Book now before the busy winter gets into full swing!" Definitely do.

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.

Why Female Dragonflies Fake Death to Avoid Males

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“I'm used to dealing with angry, aggressive, dysfunctional men—i.e., men," Selina Meyer, the fictional politician in HBO's Veep, declared in the show's season-four premiere. It turns out female dragonflies may sympathize.

That's because, according to new research, female moorland hawker dragonflies sometimes drop from the air and play dead when they see an eager male approaching—a strategy designed to protect them from what would constitute a heinous sex crime in the human world.

Among some dragonfly species, male mates hang around to guard egg-laying females. Moorland hawker females, on the contrary, are on their own, and are therefore vulnerable to harassment. And the consequences for them are severe, as another mating encounter could damage their reproductive tracts. Playing dead appears to be a common tactic in the face of intense attention from males, Rassim Khelifa of the University of Zurich told New Scientist. Of the 31 females he observed, 27 attempted the tactic and 21 of them were successful in fending off the unwanted advances.

Female dragonflies, in other words, are used to dealing with angry, aggressive, sexually predatory male dragonflies—i.e., male dragonflies.

How the Leatherdykes Helped Change Feminism

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It was Memorial Day, 2004, and Alex Warner was at a barbecue near Washington, D.C. It was an important time for her. She was in graduate school at Rutgers University, planning a dissertation on women’s social justice movements, and had recently experienced something of a personal awakening. A couple months prior, she'd attended her first Leatherdyke play party, and the community of like-minded women she encountered there had embraced her. The barbecue was in the backyard of a woman named Jo, a founder of the Lesbian Sex Mafia, one of the godmothers of the lesbian sadomasochist leather community. Jo told Warner stories about what it had been like, decades before, to be a Leatherdyke before there was a name for it. There were no parties, no barbecues, no safe spaces. Before founding the Lesbian Sex Mafia—a support and education group, despite the name—in 1981, Jo went to men’s leather bars and passed as a man, she explained. She had sexual encounters with men—Jo is a lesbian—to find some kind of sexual fulfillment. She also told Warner about how wonderful it felt, later, finally to find other women who shared her interest in playing around with power and pain.

Warner was moved to tears. It felt, she says, like she was learning her history for the first time—learning for the first time that she even had a history. By the time she got home that night, Warner had decided to switch her research topic to the social and cultural history of Leatherdykes.

The history of sadomasochism is long and complex, but the origin of the term is clear enough. The first part famously comes from Donatien Alphonse François de Sade—French aristocrat, philosopher, and profane libertine author of various violent, blasphemous sexual fantasies. The less famous second half comes from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, an Austrian journalist and author of Venus in Furs, a novella that reflects a fetish for dominant women. Together they encompass the practice of deriving pleasure from giving or getting pain or humiliation. SM (practitioners drop the “&,” though usage has varied) has its most popular conceptions today in poorly written novels and the basic image of the Leatherman, icon of the subculture of gay males who draw aesthetic inspiration from biker culture and aesthetics. (We should stop for a moment and marvel at how subversive it was that a Leatherman appeared on the pop charts with the Village People in the 1970s and sang about the YMCA and the Navy, and it didn’t seem to bother anybody.)

Editor's Note: Some images included in this story may be NSFW.

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The Leatherman, clad in chaps, vest, and motorcycle boots, has penetrated popular culture, but the Leatherdyke—a queer or bisexual women who participates in consensual sadomasochistic behavior—is less well known and less visible. As a sexual practice it’s quite diverse: bondage; dominance and submission; caning, punching, or spanking; and a range of toys and tools, from gags and restraints to paddles and floggers. It is all conducted with consent and in service of power and pleasure, and sometimes humiliation and the trance-like “subspace,” a kind of flow state for submissives. Based on Warner’s research, it is clear that the particular strain of sexual expression this represents has provoked uncomfortable questions in feminist and lesbian circles, and played an outsized role in the development of feminist thought in the 1970s and 1980s. But that impact did not come easily.

Warner’s dissertation research, which she completed in 2011, is the only academic excavation specific to the Leatherdyke in the United States. She drew primarily from archival sources, feminist journals, and what might be called zines. She's assembled here a selection of quotes from her research that reflect a history of marginalization—from the mainstream, lesbians, and feminists—that conceals the role of the Leatherdykes in opening conversations about sex, power, patriarchy, and consent that resonate today.

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While women most likely had been participating in SM privately for a long time, they only began to connect with one another publicly in the mid-1970s, usually through published works and general workshops on sexuality that came with the decade’s greater openness to sex.

When I was eight years old I was masturbatory, lesbian and sado-masochistic. Subsequently, because of my feelings of guilt, I renounced all three. Then, along came women’s liberation. I learned to affirm my feelings of self-love and woman-love … But I’m still in the closet on S-M. I have admitted that I used to be into it, but said that “those feelings” (I only owned up to masochism) were aroused only with men and attributed the whole thing to what I call my “lousy heterosexual instincts.” … I have not “come out” on S-M.
—Barbara Lipscutz (aka Drivenwoman), in the Journal of Radical Therapy, 1976

Myself and half a dozen women I know are into S&M or bondage and discipline … we’re not exactly sure what we’re doing! I’ve never talked about it with other lesbians. I wanted to sort of come out!
—Anonymous, quoted by Jeanne Cordova in Lesbian Tide, 1976

We had a sexuality workshop a year and a half ago, and I … came out as a sado-masochist there and got no support … from one person out of a hundred women. I was so fed up I almost quit my [feminist health collective].
—Anonymous, quoted by Jeanne Cordova in Lesbian Tide, 1976

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As these women were discovering their sexuality, Warner's work shows, the feminist world was taking notice of SM. First-wave feminism, which dates to the 19th and early 20th centuries, was largely about suffrage and other legal issues. Second-wave feminism, which began in the 1960s, took on a wider range of issues, including reproductive rights, domesticity, sexuality, and violence. Several feminist thinkers of the time, including Andrea Dworkin and Gloria Steinem, cast SM in general as anti-feminist because it simulates the sexual power dynamics that allowed men to oppress women for ages, they claimed. There was, however, a counterclaim, that lesbian SM allowed women to reclaim power and consent, and generally upset ideas about how women are supposed to behave.

S&M is a game people play called “who’s got the power.” It’s a game because there are two sides (the sadist and the masochist), but it’s a win-win since both should end up with an equal amount of the power, and with sexual satisfaction.
— Rosenjoy, in GCN, 1976

Another thing I enjoy about S&M is being able to be as strong as I am. Not feeling like I have to hold back and treat her like, or be treated like, I’m fragile.
—Anonymous, quoted by Jeanne Cordova in Lesbian Tide, 1976

I believe that the world’s problems can be solved in the bedroom. … S&M is a liberating game; it liberates both man and woman, butch and femme without necessarily taking their chosen roles away from they (if they still want to keep them once they understand the game). S&M teaches you that both sides have the power and how they can use it to their best advantage.
—Rosenjoy, in GCN, 1976

If I want to scream and yell I can do that too. I’ve never been allowed to make those sounds before. I feel that’s positive and political. In this society you are not allowed to express your body as much as your mind …
—Anonymous, quoted by Jeanne Cordova in Lesbian Tide, 1976

Talking about pain … when I am getting progressively more turned on toward orgasm, pain gradually diminishes and turns into something else. So for me, being bitten really hard or being scratched, or being beaten is a turn on. When I’m down and cooled off I might say, my god, what I have been doing, but because I was aroused it’s a whole different expression.
—Anonymous, quoted by Jeanne Cordova in Lesbian Tide, 1976

Masochism springs out of a sense of inadequacy so great one yearns for a redeemer, attributing to a stronger person superhuman powers and yielding every right over oneself. Masochism is a kind of spellbound, childlike dependency.
—Josephine Hendin, in Ms., 1976

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In 1978, with lesbian SM a recurring topic in feminist circles, a small group of women founded the first independent lesbian SM group, named Samois, in San Francisco. It was named for Samois-sur-Seine, the fictional estate of a lesbian dominatrix in the controversial 1954 French novel Story of O. In its first year, Samois published What Color Is Your Handkerchief, a booklet that explained the group’s philosophy and its fervent belief that lesbian SM was a feminist practice. Samois was a confrontational organization, and its disagreements with other feminist organizations—tracked by Warner—helped propel the discussion of SM, which pushed the practice into the national public eye.

I am not suggesting that we abandon our critical capacity or feminist politics, or that the personal is not political. On the contrary, I am proposing that a commitment to the notion that the personal is political requires a more complex political assessment of sexual diversity, based on case by case examinations. Both the mobilization of the sexual fringe, and the increasing politicization of sexuality, challenge feminism to develop a politics which can be pro-sex while remaining anti-sexist.
—Gayle Rubin, What Color Is Your Handkerchief, 1979

It’s time and time past for some angry, emotional words to be published in favor of SM by a Lesbian and a feminist. … After a while explanation begins to be an apology … And I don’t think that anyone should have to apologize for their sexuality. … I feel like I’ve been much more open when I look at views opposed to SM than most of the opposition has been. And, I’m tired of it. I don’t want to hear any more disguised puritanism or any more unreasoning fear parading as moral or political righteousness. … Anyone who starts stepping on our rights—be warned: you won’t get away with it.
—Janet Schrim, What Color Is Your Handkerchief, 1979

We are told S/M is responsible for practically every ill and inequity, large and small and that they world has ever known, including rape, racism, classism, spouse abuse, difficult interpersonal relationships, fascism, a liking of vaginal penetration, political repression in Third World countries, and so on. … [We] are being labeled anti-feminist, mentally ill or worse … we find ourselves, quite unexpectedly, on the ‘other’ side. We are being cast out, denied. We become heretics.
—Samois, “Coming to Power,” 1981

I am grateful that Samois was here when I needed you all. I am even more grateful that you gave me the space to find my own way, the time I needed to process. Indeed, I love you for being Lesbian-feminists who do S/M …
—Anonymous, Samois Newsletter, 1981

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A significant movement within second-wave feminism was opposition to pornography, led by a Bay Area group called Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media (WAVPM). WAVPM was strongly against sadomasochism in general, which it felt perpetuated and glorified violence against women—even when conducted among women. Samois countered: WAVPM was conservative and puritanical. The conflict between these groups and related ones—protests of movies, picketing of strip clubs, public campaigns, in one case even a suspected bomb threat—were some of the early salvos in what became known as the “Feminist Sex Wars.” There were many facets to the Sex Wars, but one of the primary divisions was between anti-pornography feminists and pro-sex feminists. Samois was among the earliest advocates of sex-positive feminism, Warner says.

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The debate soon went national. In 1980, the National Organization of Women specifically labeled lesbian SM as outside the parameters of the feminist agenda. Shortly thereafter, Samois published a manifesto, Coming to Power. In the pages of Ms. magazine, the writer Alice Walker critiqued lesbian SM for its insensitivity to the experiences of black women. Things came to a head at a contentious conference at Barnard College in 1982, very publicly picketed by anti-pornography activists. The schism within feminism garnered a great deal of attention, and a national discussion of pornography that resulted in Ronald Reagan’s 1985 order for an investigation. This resulted in a 2,000-page report produced by the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, also known as the Meese Report, in 1986.

The third wave of feminism developed in the early 1990s and, depending on whom you ask, is primarily built around ideas of individual identity and diversity, with a greater openness toward non-white women, queer women, and the variety of ways women can take control of their sexuality. It’s a reflection that the pro-sex version of feminism that lesbian SM communities encouraged has found a wider, more receptive public.

You can learn more about the history of leather, kink, and fetish lifestyles with a private tour of the Leather Archives & Museum in Chicago on Obscura Day, May 6, 2017. The Museum has a Women’s Leather History Program, which includes an exhibit curated by Alex Warner.


Mapping Ireland's Mysterious Carvings of Old Women Exposing Their Genitals

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Sometime in the 1940s, workers repairing a culvert in Limerick, Ireland, pried a stone out of the ground, flipped it over, and found a surprise waiting for them on the other side. Carved into the rock was a headless figure, with drooping breasts and a round navel. One of her hands had crumbled away, but the other was doing something unmistakable: pulling a thigh aside to better expose her vagina, which had been chiseled deep into the stone.

The carving is one of Ireland's many Sheela-na-gigs: mysterious depictions of old women displaying their genitals. Once considered too vulgar for either scholarship or display, interested parties can now explore all of the known Sheela-na-gig in Ireland thanks to a brand new interactive map from the country's Heritage Council. "We realized that no dedicated map of these wonderful sculptures existed," writes Patrick Reid, a GIS consultant for the Council, in an email. "So we decided to fill this gap." (To use the map, follow the link above, click "Layer List," then "Archeology," then "Sheela-na-gig.")

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Today, Sheela-na-gigs are considered undisputed archeological treasures. Most date back to medieval times, when they were a standard element of decor for churches, castles, and other important rural buildings. Their craftsmanship and placement, combined with the unusual choice of subject, make them "very evocative symbols of the feminine in old Irish culture," says Beatrice Kelly, the head of the Heritage Council, in a statement.

It has taken the carvings a while to gain this academic reputation, though. The first modern discovery of a Sheela-na-gig, in the wall of a Tipperary church in 1840, inspired an angry letter from its finder, Thomas O'Conor, who was very confused that this "ill executed piece of sculpture," which promoted the "grossest idea of immorality and licentiousness," should be anywhere near a church.

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O'Conor's reaction would set the scholarly tone for decades to come. Over the following decades, experts largely wrote Sheela-na-gigs off as unworthy of serious consideration. Museums kept them in basements, and clergymen removed and sometimes even destroyed them. (The carving discovered by workers in 1940 was probably made for a nearby castle, before more prudish inhabitants hid it face-down in the culvert wall.) "Only in the less puritanical atmosphere of the past few decades have academics and artists turned their interest to Sheela-na-gigs," as the historian Barbara Freitag explains in her book on the subject.

As a result, many mysteries remain. While some experts maintain that the carvings are meant to warn against lust, others, including Freitag, posit that they instead represent fertility and rebirth. Even the name, which was was also first recorded in the 1840s, is shrouded in confusion, as it does not have an obvious translation—some interpret it to mean "old woman of the breasts," while others go with "supernatural river goddess," or "castle hag."

With so much still to be learned, Reid and his team hope that their map might help scholars make up for lost time. To make it, they first scraped Sheela-na-gig locations from Ireland's National Monument Service, which keeps an up-to-date list. They then supplemented as many entries as possible with historical information, descriptions, and images, sourced from museums, experts, and what Reid calls "inspiring amateur Sheela-na-gig enthusiasts."

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In this way, they've provided a sort of national, virtual exhibition: click on a particular part of Ireland, and you'll meet that area's resident Sheela. Over the years, many have been relocated or repurposed, and reading about each gives a sense of the changing meanings afforded to them. One, carved into a window spandrel, was only discovered in 2002, because it blends in so well with the surrounding decorations. Another, in Sligo County, has been painted pink. A third—relatively small, and doing an impressive full split—formerly watched over Scregg Castle, and is now "built into the southern pier of a nearby outhouse."

The map stretches from Ballynacarriga, on the country's southern edge (which has a big-headed Sheela, with "huge droopy ears and asymmetrical eyes"), all the way north to Maghera, in Derry County (where one is carved into a church tower, about 20 feet up). In total it currently offers 110 Sheelas, enough to satisfy most anyone's curiosity.

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The mystery, though, spreads out beyond Northern Ireland—another map, made by a separate group, maps Sheelas and "other exhibitionist figures" in Britain, Scotland, and Wales, and similar carvings have been found in Norway, Spain, and elsewhere. Although the Heritage Map project focuses specifically on Irish carvings, "we do hope that our map will aid and stimulate Sheela research at a European level," says Reid.

Their main goal, though, is to get everyone talking: "The aim… is to help re-introduce them into both academic and popular cultural debate," writes Reid. In this particular mission, the Sheelas' striking choice of pose may finally help them.

Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.

The Great Salt Lake's Mercury Mystery

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The Great Salt Lake's water is full of salt and minerals—and a serious dose of mercury. Most of that toxic metal was deposited naturally by the atmosphere, but thanks to bacteria and an engineering project, most of it ended up concentrated at the bottom of the lake in the form of particularly nasty methylmercury. But five years after the methylmercury was first documented, it appears to be gone, without any warning or cleanup efforts. Now scientists want to know where it all went.

What they do know is how the mercury got to the bottom of the lake in the first place. Elemental mercury, the form found in older thermometers, drifts in on dust particles. It is converted to methylmercury by microbes, particularly when they're cut off from oxygen somehow. In the Great Salt Lake, this happened when a rock-and-dirt railroad causeway was constructed across the lake in the 1950s. Rivers flow into the southern arm of the lake, diluting the salt, while the northern half of the lake is much saltier and pinker (thanks to algae). Just two culverts allowed the two sides to mix, and when the salty, dense northern water flows south, it tends to settle at the bottom.

That dense water cuts the bottom-dwelling microbes off from oxygen, which causes them to crank out the sulfide that makes the lake stink of rotten eggs—and to convert mercury to methylmercury. Scientists found high levels of methylmercury in the deep briny layer in 2010, and biologists noticed high levels of mercury in ducks on the lake around the same time.

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But when scientists sampled the deep water again in 2015, they found the amount of toxic mercury had dropped by 88 percent. The mercury's disappearance is a mystery. Scientists think the microbes might be making less, in part because the culverts were closed in 2013, but that doesn't quite explain what happened to the methylmercury that was there before. And it also doesn't mean the ducks are free and clear—the toxic metal is still found in carcasses on the lake's shores. In the meantime, scientists hope the opening of a new culvert in 2016 will provide some clues in the poisonous case.

The 1957 Rikers Island Plane Crash That Made Inmates Heroes

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Peggy Benson wanted to get off the plane. The flight from New York’s Laguardia airport to Miami had already been delayed by hours. Scheduled to take off at 2:45, it was now 6pm. The city was blanketed in a snowstorm and passengers waited while crew de-iced the plane’s wings. Now she sat on board as snow fell outside and she was upset.

“She wanted to get off,” her husband Mason would tell The New York Times the next day, “The stewardess talked her out of it.” They were told that if they left, their bags would continue on to Florida without them. They stayed despite Peggy’s qualms, and the plane taxied down the runway and then took off, climbing into the wintry night.

It was February 1, 1957 and Northeast Airlines Flight 823 would remain airborne for about one minute before plunging from the sky and crashing onto Rikers Island, New York’s 400 acre prison complex.

“All of a sudden,” Peggy said, “Everything was afire. My husband pushed me toward a window.” She hit the ground and started running.

Prisoner Angel Gorbea was playing cards when the plane went down.

“Then,” Gorbea told the Times, “the explosions came. “Then the whole sky, even through the snow, was lighted. We stood at the windows. We saw the people tumbling out of that ship—they were all lighted, too, by the flames. We saw them and their shadows. We saw them stumble.”

Delphine Proelss Lowe was an 11-year-old inhabitant of Rikers at the time of the crash; her father was the island’s Episcopal chaplain.

”My mother and a houseman were preparing dinner when we heard a loud roar, saw a very bright flash and heard my mother scream,” she recalled 50 years after the disaster.

The plane’s left wing had been sheared off, the engine torn away and flames poured forth from the wreckage. It was a scene of chaos. People were on fire and struggled to escape, rolling in the snow as the storm continued around them.

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“I was caught on my seat,” said Jacob Taub, a doctor from the Bronx. “Flames licking the back of my neck.”

Twenty people died in the crash, while 81 survivors either fought for their lives or tried to help others, many of whom were terribly burned. Isolated on an island, help would have to arrive by water. With just a small staff on hand, prison officials ordered prisoners be released to help the victims. Around 50 inmates rushed to help pull passengers from the wreckage.

Dazed survivors were taken wherever there was room; Lowe recalled a pianist with burned hands being brought into the chapel. Some were brought into the prison, where inmates peered through the bars at prone passengers laid out on stretchers.

Deputy Fire Chief Richard A. Denahan was on the Triborough Bridge when he heard about the crash on the radio and drove straight to a ferry landing, arriving at Rikers Island within a half hour to help crews on the ground.

The plane would burn for nearly two hours, leaving behind a smoking hull. Eventually, an investigation would decide that pilot error had caused the crash.

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It was a frightening time for air travel. Just one month earlier, on January 31, 1957 a passenger plane in California manned by a crew of four had taken off for a test flight and collided in mid-air with a fighter jet. The wreckage rained down on Pacoima Junior High School, killing two students instantly. A third student later died of their injuries. After the crash on Rikers Island, the press would obsess over stories of near-misses.

There was the 62-year-old baker, Ben Opatowsky, who insisted on sitting next to an emergency door, even though his wife, Yetta, wanted to sit further back on the plane. Upon impact, he pushed open the door and “grabbed his wife by the hair and pulled her onto the wing, from where they leaped onto the ground.” There was Joan Sanger and her three-year-old daughter Mindy, who both had the bad luck to be taking their inaugural flight, and the flight attendant on the brink of retirement. LIFE magazine recorded the story of Robert Selmonsky, who dropped his pregnant wife and two year old son off for their flight, despite his misgivings about the snowstorm. As he drove away from the airport, he saw the explosion in the sky. (Both survived.) As the Times interviewed the badly burned pianist, Charles Naylor, his wife declared that she had had a premonition of doom. “My intuitions were so right, weren’t they, dear?,” she said. “That’s what is so frightening.”

Eventually every survivor was plucked from the island and ferried back to shore. A couple of months later, some of the prisoners who had helped save their lives would also board a ship to the mainland.

"We want to show society and the inmates that we are just as quick to reward and show appreciation for noble works as we are to punish for evil deeds,” Anna M. Kross, Commissioner of Corrections, told the Times. On March 8, 1957 11 men were freed as a reward for their rescue efforts. She refused to reveal their names, insisting that “publicity would have a detrimental effect upon them.” A few weeks later, the Times reported that the governor had commuted 11 more sentences, and that 46 sentences had so far been reduced.

Mark Kronen was only six weeks old when the plane crashed. An inmate discovered him buried in snow, and brought the infant inside.

“He saved my life, no question about it,” Kronen told The New York Post.“I probably would’ve died if he hadn’t of found me.” Kronen doesn’t know the name of the man who saved him.

The disaster captured the popular imagination for a period, even producing a TV dramatization that the Times declared “occasionally effective,” and then faded from memory. A mere day after the tragedy, even the lucky baker, Ben Opatowsky was making plans to resume his travels.

“We’re still going to Florida,” he said, “But it will be by train.”

For Sale: A Solid Gold Darth Vader Mask

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A jeweler in Tokyo is offering a life-size replica of Darth Vader’s helmet made entirely out of solid gold.

According to the AP, the jewelry and gold maker Ginza Tanaka has created a 24-karat gold copy of Sith Lord Darth Vader’s mask in honor of the 40th anniversary of the original Star Wars (now known as Star Wars: Episode VI — A New Hope). As though the dark helm of Emperor Palpatine's right hand wasn’t ostentatious enough, Ginza Tanaka’s version weighs a good 33 pounds, costing any prospective rich Sith $1.4 million. It is not designed to be worn.

And while it took Dark Side alchemy and Empire science to create Vader’s helmet in the Star Wars universe, it took ten separate goldsmiths to create the Ginza Tanaka’s gilded version. Because of the complexity of the helmet’s construction, any buyers will need to wait three months before receiving their finished gold mask.

May 4th is Star Wars Day, so if you have the spare million credits, you could do worse than a commemorating the day with a golden Dark Side relic. At least it makes for a more attractive keepsake than Kylo Ren’s busted-up version of his grandad’s hat.

Announcing the Fellowship of the Loneliest Road

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Dubbed the “Loneliest Road in America” by Life Magazine in 1986, Nevada’s Highway 50 has captured the imagination of westbound travelers for decades. In the smartphone era, its remoteness (and signal-free zones) have taken on mythical proportions. Out here, majestic mountains and the vastness of the desert shield the road from the pace of modern life. Against a backdrop of rugged beauty, the mind has a rare chance to wander, undisturbed.

At Atlas Obscura, we believe that exploration has the power to transform you, and that the more unique the experience, the more likely you are to walk away inspired. That’s why Atlas Obscura is partnering with TravelNevada to send one artist on the road—specifically, the “Loneliest Road in America.”

“The Fellowship of the Loneliest Road” will award one artist (all mediums welcome!) with a full stipend to traverse Highway 50, from Ely to Carson City—solo. In addition to airfare and a rental car, Atlas Obscura will provide the recipient with $5,000 for lodging and other incidentals. While on the five-day trip, the selected artist will be expected to create a travelogue documenting the experience and artistic process. Upon returning home, we will work together to display the completed body of work on Atlas Obscura and TravelNevada's channels.

Fellowship applications will be judged based on three broad criteria:

  • The originality and feasibility of the proposal
  • The plan to integrate Highway 50/Nevada into the work
  • The work’s ability to be displayed on digital channels

Click here to enter.

You have until May 19 to apply. Questions? Email elizabeth.horkley@atlasobscura.com.

Click here to read terms and conditions.

Debunking the Myth of 19th-Century 'Tear Catchers'

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The Victorians were experts in the art of mourning: They wore black for extended periods, wove human hair into elaborate wreaths, and wept, it is said, into delicate glass bottles called “tear catchers.” Victorian ephemera is hot these days, as is death, oddly enough—see the rise of the #deathpositive movement—so mourning artifacts are in high demand. Vintage tear catchers, also called “lachrymatory bottles,” can be found in online auctions and marketplaces, as well as through estate sales and antique stores. During the 19th century, and especially in America during and after the Civil War, supposedly, tear catchers were used as a measure of grieving time. Once the tears cried into them had evaporated, the mourning period was over. It’s a good story—too good. In truth, both science and history agree, there’s really no such thing as a tear catcher. Caveat emptor.

“People ask to buy them all of the time. At least a few people a week,” says Christian Harding, owner of The Belfry, an oddities and collectibles store in Seattle. Harding then must explain that the bottles most are looking for—blown, usually clear, glass decorated with patterns, gilding, and colorful enamel—are throwaway perfume bottles. But the “tear catcher” term has stuck, through a combination of historical accident and deceptive, yet effective, marketing.

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The myth likely began with archaeologists and an oddly chosen term. Small glass bottles were often found in Greek and Roman tombs, and “early scholars romantically dubbed [them] lachrymatories or tear bottles,” writes Grace Elizabeth Arnone Hummel, who runs the perfume website Cleopatra’s Boudoir. Those glass bottles held perfume and unguents, not tears, Hummel explains. “Scientists have performed chemical tests on these flasks and they disproved the romantic theory.” But stories sometimes acquire their own momentum.

Nathan Graves, owner of Cemetery Gates in Portland, Oregon, first stumbled across tear catchers while researching mourning jewelry. He was suspicious immediately, because the bottles look identical to ones he’d seen in antique shops, flea markets, and yard sales for as long as he could remember. “Always thought of them as grandma’s perfume sample collection,” he says. “The idea that people were collecting tears in them seemed like folklore.” The terms “Victorian” and “mourning” in general, Graves continues, have become catchalls for anything old, sentimental, or made of black materials. “I think some people have the tendency to romanticize objects and their history.”

“It’s a beautiful idea but no one really [cried into the bottles],” Harding agrees. “Through the years, after reading many different articles and speaking with other collectors, I realized that the stories were, in fact, just myth.” When asked about tear catchers by collectors eager to add Victorian curiosities to their wunderkammers, Harding explains the true uses of the decorative bottles, but many customers don’t want to believe it—and some just don’t care.

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“I have probably sold dozens at this point,” says Katie Kierstead, owner of an online Victorian antique shop. She “fell in love with the poetical conceit as much as anyone else,” she says. She did her research and regularly stocks them—in the perfume section. “They are worth the same amount to a perfume bottle collector as to someone interested in mourning,” she says.

Not every seller is so transparent, which helps the tear catcher tale persist. Much of the online information that still links the bottles to the mourning story can be traced back to Tear Catcher Gifts, a company that sells modern tear bottles intended to be given as gifts at special occasions. The startlingly uncritical “tear catcher” article on Wikipedia, at the time this story appears, lists only two sources: the website of Tear Catcher Gifts, and another registered to a Tear Catcher email address.

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According to a 2004 article in Belgrade News, the owners of the largest wholesale distributor of Tear Catcher Gifts’ modern bottles, Timeless Traditions, were inspired by the 1996 bestselling novel Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, in which a character gives her mother a lachrymatory. “I looked everywhere [for them],” coowner Jacqueline Bean told Belgrade News. “[I] found no bottles but I did find all these women who had read the book and were looking for them too. ... Our goal was to saturate the market as quickly as we could to keep competition at bay.” The bottles are available at dozens of stores, both online and off, and several “informative” sites appear to exist entirely to drive customers to purchase them.

“That’s why I think it’s important for academics to engage in public discourse,” says Nuri McBride, a perfume collector and researcher who writes about the intersections of fragrance and death rituals at Death/Scent. “The Internet is, in a lot of ways, its own folklore-creating machine,” she says. “If a unit of data gets shared enough times it is considered true.

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“A cosmetic historian or a Victorian glass expert could have told a customer in 30 seconds [that] those bottles are not lachrymatories and the colorful eBay descriptions of Civil War brides were spurious at best,” she continues. “But we need to be in a position to interact with each other for that to happen.”

Harding, owner of the Seattle oddities store, hopes that such interactions will happen more often as more people become interested in collecting Victoriana. “Over the five years [my store] has been open, it seems like the situation gets worse,” he says. He continues educating customers, as do Graves and Kierstead. One of the Tear Catcher Gifts sites takes a more untroubled approach to facts: It states that the scientific truth will be uncovered eventually (it already has), “but until then, each of us can choose our own belief.”

Norway's Migrating Reindeer Are Too Slow for Slow TV

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Reindeer Migration: Minute by Minute was supposed to be the hit of the Norwegian slow-TV season—and for a while, everything was going great. Videographers schlepped cameras out into the wilderness, affixing one to a reindeer's head. The Sami people, who own the herds, got ready for their close-ups. And millions of Norwegians settled down in front of their television sets to watch hundreds of ungulates make their majestic way across the country.

But there's one problem—the stars have stopped cooperating. As The Local reports, the reindeer are now going so slowly that production has been brought to a temporary halt.

"Slow TV," or sakte-tv in Norwegian, is a different kind of reality television, one that eschews fast cuts and manufactured drama in favor of close, detailed looks at mundane occurrences.

Although Norway did not invent the trend, over the past decade, public broadcaster NPK has taken the genre to new heights, thrilling audiences with "minute by minute" dispatches from train journeys and salmon runs. In 2013, they broadcast a live fireplace for eight hours, and 20 percent of the country tuned in.

This year, they decided to film something slightly more exciting—the springtime reindeer migration, during which the Sami people herd hundreds of the animals from Šuoššjávri, in Northeast Norway, to their summer pastures on the island of Kvaløya. “The aim of the project is to make a completely unknown part of Norwegian daily life known to the rest of the Norwegians,” editor Ole Rune Hætta told the Guardian.

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The plan was to keep cameras on the herds 24/7, and the finale was scheduled for this past Friday, when producers estimated the reindeer would hit the coast and make the dramatic swim to the island.

But reality TV stars can be fickle, and the reindeer have been taking their time. Yesterday, the herds stopped moving altogether, and the decision was made to give the crews—who have been out in the wilderness for weeks now—a break.

According to the livestream's website, broadcasting will resume tomorrow at 10 a.m. local time. The final crossing "might happen on Thursday, Friday, or Saturday," a producer said. In the meantime, you can watch the old hits online—or, you know, go outside.

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.


A Visit to the Synthetic Cadaver Factory

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In an ordinary Tampa, Florida, office park, just a couple of blocks from a bustling thoroughfare, a skinless cadaver named Quella is having the muscles of her arms individually sewn together by a young woman wearing headphones and a hoodie.

On a table nearby, a technician lays out an exposed vascular system, pushing water through it until she finds a leak that sprays like gore from a PG horror movie.

It's not quite lunchtime at SynDaver Labs. Inside this otherwise unassuming facility, workers are creating what may be the world’s most advanced surgical and anatomical models out of little more than salt and water. Fully synthetic corpses like these, complete with skin, muscle, organs, and bone, might one day eliminate our need to test many new technologies on humans or animals.

And it's not just SynDaver’s materials that make their cadavers unique. It’s their visceral realism.

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Anatomical models have existed for centuries, as attempts to recreate biology, as training tools, and as living records. Museums across the globe hold generations of anatomical reproductions made of everything from wax to plastic to real bone. Many of them, having been created in less learned times, look odd or monstrous to us now, but they've all been stepping stones on our journey toward more comprehensive and humane ways of learning about physiology.

SynDaver’s products carry on that legacy into realms that are both gruesome and fascinating. "It's about creating empathy," says Dr. David Danielson, the company's vice president of veterinary technologies. Danielson joined the team about a year ago to help develop a new canine model. Part of SynDaver's stated goal is to provide a synthetic training experience for the medical fields that feels as emotionally real as working with an actual dead thing. Danielson says he's seen this in action, when some students he was working with ruptured one model's pumping artery, releasing a stream of fake blood. "I want them to fail. They took it seriously. They were shaken, they were nervous," he says. By making mistakes on SynDaver's fake bodies and organs, the thinking goes, students can better prepare themselves for the unforeseen crises that can pop up with real patients.

SynDaver's founder and president, Dr. Christopher Sakezles, is not a medical doctor. Sitting in his office, he looks every bit the slightly eccentric mastermind of a body factory. Wearing blue medical scrubs embroidered with the SynDaver logo, he's surrounded by toys, and magazines about military miniatures. With a background in polymer science and engineering, Sakezles started SynDaver following a career in the medical device industry. “It actually started in grad school," he says. "I was developing a new kind of endotracheal tube, and we didn’t have enough money to run an animal study.”

Looking for a stand-in trachea, his professor ordered a model that Sakezles describes as “absurd.” Simply a plastic tube with some coiling around it, the training organ neither looked nor functioned like a real piece of anatomy. “I threw it in the trash.” Sakezles then went ahead and built his own trachea model using a material of his own design, and the die was cast. He could do better.

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The earliest incarnations of SynDaver Labs date to 2004 in Princeton, New Jersey. Sazkezles spent the first five years working alone on basic research, filing patents, and perfecting the proprietary formula of salt, water, and fibers that make his synthetic humans so eerily life-like. In 2009, he hired his first employee and launched the Tampa operation. Eventually bringing on outside investors (a period of time that resulted in an abortive appearance on Shark Tank), the company continued to grow, but it hasn't been an easy road. "I can't tell you how many investors have insisted that we start making sex dolls," Sakezles laughs.

Today, SynDaver Labs employs around 100 people, and takes up nearly every inch of their office park with the various steps along their synthetic body assembly line. SynDaver's flagship product is their full cadaver, which is available in differing levels of interactivity. "It's like a Chevy you can turn into a Cadillac," says Sakezles. They also sell dozens of synthetic organs and targeted task trainers, such as a replica of a back that's optimized for practicing spinal taps, or a wearable piece of torso for chest tube training. If you need a body part, SynDaver can build it.

Sakezles has continued to develop his false flesh into over 100 variants, whether for skin, muscle, or vein. Looking in part to help reduce the number of cats used in medical training (yes, this is a thing) as well as to provide an option for veterinary interests, the company has recently introduced a synthetic dog to their catalog, with a cat and a horse also in the works.

SynDaver sells about 100 full-body synthetic cadavers a year, and they aren’t cheap. Their lowest end “mortuary science” model goes for about $50,000, while the most expensive body they've ever sold went for a whopping $184,000. At first glance, the price seems prohibitive compared to a real cadaver, but "it’s not really a fair direct comparison,” Sakezles says. “Cadavers in some cases are free to acquire. But then you have transport costs and disposal costs and handling costs and facilities and all the regulations. You have to build a $4 million facility to use a cadaver. With a SynDaver you just need a table.”

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In the early days of the company, each piece of SynDaver anatomy was modeled by hand, out of clay or wax. Today they’ve mostly moved on to 3D modeling, but their development space still retains the marks of the old days. Splotches of clay drippings cover the checkerboard floors, and every surface is cluttered with half-created prototypes of bones and body parts.

The designers and artists developing SynDaver’s products are surrounded by scraps, sketches, reference materials, fake bones, sculpting tools, random body parts, and tissue made of plastic and clay. One worker stands at a table painting metal rods with a clear substance he’s dabbing out of a crock pot, developing custom veins for a customer; another sits at a computer, modeling a cat’s rib cage for a forthcoming “cat-in-a-bag” product, which will allow trainees to reassemble a synthetic cat, as opposed to taking it apart. “We’ve learned that building anatomy is the best way to learn it,” says Sakezles.

There’s a small room crammed with half-a-dozen 3D printers, working 24-hours-a-day to pump out prototypes. A rib cage being slowly constructed in white plastic looks like a scene straight out of Westworld. Sakezles says they're also trying to develop a way to print wet tissue.

The actual construction of the products takes place across a handful of stations throughout the complex. The body parts begin life in a large manufacturing room, with rows of tables where workers sit, adding detail and color to raw material molds. Each of the fabricators has a specialty. One woman delicately lays pieces of red string, meant to indicate part of the vascular system, into what looks like it will eventually be a lung. At another station, someone is painting a pink hue into what will be a dog's ear.

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A majority of the staff at SynDaver, a mix of young to middle-age employees, some sporting mohawks and piercings, wear surgical scrubs. “It’s messy work," says Sakezles.

On one end of the manufacture room stand racks of molds for all of the separate parts needed to create a single synthetic cadaver. Against another wall is a row of foil-lined crock pots that hold different consistencies of material, ready to be applied to the appropriate mold. The entire facility is infused with the smell of the company's signature material—a salty, slightly antiseptic scent that sticks to the skin long after touching the stuff.

Depending on the intended use of a specific SynDaver, each comes equipped with varying levels of complexity. Some are cosmetically accurate models, with all the muscles and organs. Others can bleed, simulate breathing, and even “go into shock” with the help of sensors and pumps.

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Full-body SynDaver humans are put together in a final assembly room across the complex, where each muscle and organ is hand-sewn together, piece by piece, and working systems are tested before being added. Nearly complete, skinless cadavers are laid out on tables, their extremities propped up on yoga blocks, as seamstresses expertly join biceps, hands, and buttocks to a plastic skeleton frame (hello again, Quella). Pin cushions and other traditional sewing equipment litter the tables next to frighteningly realistic pieces of SynDaver meat.

On another table, a functioning vascular system is spread out and tested for leaks. Pump boxes underneath the table push water through a synthetic heart and down its fibrous veins. Spurts of water begin to gush in a natural rhythm down what will be a right leg, spraying out of a small tear near the end of the line—a technician notes that it will have to fixed before it is installed. The scene is somewhere between a futuristic mortuary and an underground clone factory.

This is also where SynDaver's synthetic humans come to be repaired and serviced. All SynDaver cadavers come with a service agreement that usually covers replacement parts. If you are a medical school that uses a surgical SynDaver model, and students are cutting into parts and damaging them, you can send your body back, and it will be repaired piecemeal, to be put under the knife once again. With the proper care, Sakezles says that his company's synthetic bodies can pretty much last forever.

The walls are lined with metal racks full of plastic bins, each of which hold a specific part needed to build a synthetic human or animal. Labeled with painter’s tape and marker, there's a bin for stomachs, one for vaginas, one for spleens, and on and on. SynDaver material, made of 85 percent water (much like a real human being) needs to be stored in water or else it will dry out, so each of the bins is filled with a level of liquid that the spare parts float in. Hilariously horrific dried-out abominations can be found all over the room, like grim reminders that the parts need to be hydrated.

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When a completed body, or say, a head, is finished, they too need to be stored in water until they are shipped out, so one end of the finishing room is home to rows of large green vats full of realistic-looking synthetic bodies. Arguably the most unsettling location in the lab, the tubs hold such wonders as a half-human with full skin save for its midsection, with intestines floating out of the body. There are also finished editions of the new canine trainers, plus various component parts—doggo heads and muscles, bumping together in the water.

Since each handmade synthetic cadaver is unique to some degree, they're not given serial numbers but names, which are recorded on ankle bracelets. Sakezles says that anything with a head gets a name, including the dogs. One canine vat holding a pair of dogs indicated that they were “Wynonna” and “Jazzy.” There's no hard and fast system for naming a SynDaver cadaver. One employee mentioned that they frequently turn to the internet for inspiration, having already burned through the names of Game of Thrones characters. Otherwise they just go down the alphabet to make sure they don't repeat themselves.

Once a synthetic cadaver is ready to be shipped, they're sealed, placed in standard body bags, and sent off in militaristic plastic crates that double as their storage boxes.

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Thanks to their portability, the amazingly lifelike nature of the SynDaver material, and their complex construction, the company’s products are finding a growing number of applications. In addition to their uses in medical training and experimentation, SynDaver has also been finding new customers in the automotive industry, TV shows such as Mythbusters and Grey’s Anatomy, and the Army’s Transport Medical Training Laboratory.

But even as the business expands, Sakezles would eventually like to get back to his original passion, developing medical devices, which thanks to SynDaver’s technology he says he can now do faster and more effectively.

SynDaver continues to evolve and improve their models, each time aiming to bring them closer to the physical and emotional experience of working with a formerly living being. But at this point Sakezles and his team are getting to a level of granular anatomy that’s hard to beat. “That is a process that will never end. Because we’re never going to get down to the level of individual cells unless we’re cloning people,” says Sakezles. “What we’re trying to do is impossible. But every day we get a little better.”

Found: A Lost Wallet, 13 Years Later

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Around 13 years ago, Dean McAuley of Tacoma, Washington, lost his wallet. At the time, he was too busy to worry about it, he recently told KING. He canceled a few cards and quickly moved on with his life.

But recently, someone mailed him that wallet—intact, including his driver's license and $11 in cash. The wallet also came with an anonymous note. “Mr. McAuley, I found your wallet outside a Mexican restaurant years ago," the person wrote, and went on to explain that initial attempts to track McAuley down had failed, before the writer simply forgot about it. "Just recently, I found it in my desk at work and found your address on the Pierce County assessor’s website. I apologize it took so long."

The note was dated March 29. McAuley, a firefighter, told KING that he wouldn't mind tracking down the Good Samaritan, but even if he can't, the note will be a good example for his son. "It has nothing to do with the money, it has nothing to do with a wallet," McAuley said. "It has to do with character."

A Giant Permafrost Crater Grows in Siberia

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Picture a crater, a deep pockmark on the surface of the Earth, and then imagine the process that created it. It is probably very high energy—explosive, catastrophic, destructive. Asteroid impact.Volcanic eruption.Nuclear detonation.

The Batagaika Crater in the distant reaches of eastern Siberia is a different species. Rather than sudden it is slow, and rather than static it is growing. But the process it represents is no less catastrophic than those of the others.

The crater first began to form, scientists believe, in the 1980s. The forest in the area had been cleared decades before, exposing the permafrost below to increasingly warm summers and short winters. As climate change has accelerated, the frozen soil has collapsed and eroded away. The growth of Batagaika Crater (technically more a “depression” or “megaslump”) over the last 20 years has been especially pronounced, and can be seen clearly in satellite images recently released by NASA’s Earth Observatory.

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Today the tadpole-shaped depression is about half a mile in diameter and up to 300 feet deep. It’s already the largest permafrost crater—they're all over Siberia—and it’s only going to get bigger. “Every year as soon as temperatures go above freezing, it’s going to start happening again,” said Mary Edwards, a professor at the University of Southampton who has studied the crater. “Once you’ve exposed something like this, it’s very hard to stop it.”

If there’s a scientific silver lining here—in addition to the crater’s impact as a gaping visual representation of a global process—it’s the Pliestocene animal remains that are emerging from it, including those of extinct horses, steppe bison, cave lions, and wolves.

Tiny Gadheim Will Be the New Center of the EU, Thanks to Brexit

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Gadheim, population 89, is a quiet village surrounded by farms in central Germany's wine country. It may be just a small dot on the map, but Gadheim is about to be a symbolically important dot. When Brexit is finalized in 2019, the town will be the new geographic center of the European Union.

The exact coordinates of the new center of Europe lead to a field of rapeseed owned by Karin Kessler. An EU flag will soon fly there to mark the spot, but Kessler has mixed feelings about the designation. "The fact that it's only happening because of this Brexit is a bit of a shame for me," she told German news site The Local.

The geographic center of the EU shifts each time a country joins or leaves. The current center is in Westerngrund, about 37 miles northwest of Gadheim, but it has only held the title since 2013, when Croatia joined the coalition. Before that, the inclusion of Bulgaria and Romania put the center in Meerholz, Germany. If Scotland votes to withdraw from the United Kingdom and independently rejoin the EU, the geographic center will move (slightly) once again, back toward Westerngrund.

There are several methods for geographers to pinpoint the geographic center of a country or landmass, and there has been much debate over the years of how it should be determined. One way is with an actual pinpoint. The geographic center of the contiguous United States, for example, was identified in 1918 when someone at the U.S. National Geodetic Survey (NGS) balanced a cardboard cutout of the lower 48 on a point to find its center of gravity. The coordinates were only 20 miles off the actual center, calculated through a later survey, near Lebanon, Kansas. The NGS puts the geographic center of the entire country—Alaska and Hawaii included—just a few miles from the point where the borders of South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming meet.

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Modern methods have made the calculations of geographic centers much easier, but that doesn't make them controversy-free. A geographer at the University of Buffalo, Peter Rogerson, developed a computer program that calculates the precise mathematical center of any state or country. The program deposed Rugby, North Dakota, as the center of the North American continent, a title the small town has prominently claimed since 1931. The new center of the continent is 145 miles southwest in the appropriately—and entirely coincidentally—named Center, North Dakota.

If there's one thing Gadheim can learn from all of this, it's that their new status is probably temporary.

An Ivan the Terrible Statue in Russia Was 'Stolen' an Hour After It Went Up

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Ivan The Terrible’s reign as "Tsar of All the Russias" may have lasted decades, but a recently unveiled statue of the ruler in the Russian town of Alexandrov only lasted an hour before it was stolen.

According to the BBC, the statue, sculpted by artist Vasili Selivanov was placed on its pedestal in preparation for an official unveiling. But when Selivanov returned from his lunch break, the bronze figure had simply disappeared. No small heist when you consider that they needed a crane to put it in place to begin with.

While the artist was understandably baffled by the theft, it turned out that there was no ragtag team of Russian criminals, each with their own rare specialty, behind the disappearance. Instead, it was local authorities who had absconded with the figure. They claimed that the artist had not obtained the proper documentation to install the statue, and that the site had not been properly prepared for the unveiling.

The government is holding on to the statue until an approved ceremony can inaugurate it in June. In the meantime, an empty plinth remains.

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