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Europeans Are Losing Their Minds Over This Boring Bird

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If you're reading this website, you've probably been tempted to pull an overseas switcheroo: skip out on your life, move abroad, and reinvent yourself. As an expat, you'd be unique, even interesting. You'd learn about a different culture, and all your old stories would seem new again. Maybe you'd even get famous.

This is all currently happening to someone else: a female red-winged blackbird who, due to some strong migratory winds, ended up in North Ronaldsay, an island off the coast of Scotland, last week. After an employee of the local Bird Observatory spotted the feathery fugitive—who is being touted as the first red-winged blackbird ever spotted in the UK—she has gained instant, decidedly contextual fame.

Red-winged blackbirds are a dime a dozen in North America. This one is not particularly exciting—as a female, she doesn't even have the species' trademark red shoulders, and according to the BBC, she has spent her time in Scotland "flying between a bed of irises and some gas canisters."

But none of this has dampened the ardor of birdwatchers. Over the past couple of weeks, dozens of them have chartered planes to get to the island, which normally houses about 45 people. These fans are single-minded: "They take the flight out here, we pick them up, we show them where the bird is, they see the bird and then they pretty much get on the flight back and leave," Larissa Simulik, an assistant warden at the observatory, told the CBC.

Such is the price of fame. Maybe we'd better all stay home.

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.


Spilled: 200 Gallons of Cream in Virginia

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The Department of Public Utilities for the city of Richmond, Virginia, has—like many of its municipal counterparts these days—a Twitter account. Its handle is @UtilityBuddy. On May 9, @UtilityBuddy had some bad news.

For a while, that's all the information the public had to go on. WRICreported early Tuesday that, "It is still unclear what caused the accident." But a couple hours later, NBC 12got some more concrete information (no thanks to @UtilityBuddy), citing the fire department to say that the cream was spilled after an "equipment mishap" at a local dairy.

It should be said that 200 gallons of cream in one place, sitting in the sun, is disgusting. But this was apparently just another day at the tweet office for @UtilityBuddy. Just six minutes after posting the cream spill tweet, @UtilityBuddy was back to more important issues.

"We're giving away free water pouches at Belmont and Cary today from 10a-2p for Drinking Water Week," they wrote. "Skip the coffee and soda. Drink water!" Well, that is actually a pretty important lesson. If you spill a massive amount of cream be sure to stay hydrated.

The Perfect Time-Lapse Video for Rainy Spring Days

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On the gray days of a fickle spring, when rain or the pollen count has driven you indoors, this time-lapse video is here to remind you of the good things the season brings. Jamie Scott's four-minute video starts off with amaryllis blooming, then continues: grape hyacinth, daffodils, tulips, cherry trees, and more. It's a virtual walk through a magical spring day—one that took Scott three years to record.

Those three years of work generated an insane amount of images: about eight terabytes of 5K-resolution footage. Scott documented the flowers in a makeshift studio, and filmed cherry blossoms in Central Park, with just three opportunities each year to get shots just right. He used a sliding rig to make them look continuous, and some composite images to bring in Central Park.

Scott has some experience with this kind of work. He is a visual effects artist, has worked on commercials, and released a fall time-lapse back in 2012, also set in Central Park. Taking several years to capture a single day of a season—it seems to be a bit of a specialty for him.

The Strange and Grotesque Doodles in the Margins of Medieval Books

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Manuscripts can be seen as time capsules,” says Johanna Green, Lecturer in Book History and Digital Humanities at the University of Glasgow. "And marginalia provide layers of information as to the various human hands that have shaped their form and content." From intriguingly detailed illustrations to random doodles, the drawings and other marks made along the edges of pages in medieval manuscripts—called marginalia—are not just peripheral matters. “Both tell us huge amounts about a book’s history and the people who have contributed to it, from creation to the present day.”

On medieval pages, marginalia can run from the decorative to the bizarre, which Green engagingly documents on her Instagram account. There are two broad categories of marginalia: illustrations intended to accompany the text and later annotations by owners and readers. Both can be vehicles for delight, disgust, and befuddlement.

An example of useful intentional illustrations can be found, for those with a strong stomach and an interest in medieval medicine, in John of Arderne’s Mirror of Phlebotomy & Practice of Surgery, which is located at the Glasgow University Library. Known as the "Father of English Surgery," Arderne produced several important medical texts in the 14th century. Fortunately, he was also a prodigious illustrator. His textbooks contain ample amounts of delightfully detailed (and occasionally rather gruesome) illustrations.

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“The margins are full of images of disembodied body parts, plants, animals, even portraits of cross-eyed kings, which relate to the main body of text and act as a mnemonic for the reader," Greene says. "Even though you open the manuscript knowing it is a medical text designed for practical use, nothing quite prepares you for seeing a disembodied leg, posterior, or penis pointing at salient parts of the text!”

In Arderne's texts the marginalia has a clear purpose, but in other manuscripts the meaning of the drawings can be indecipherable. There are countless examples of unusual marginalia—monkeys playing the bagpipes, centaurs, knights in combat with snails, naked bishops, and strange human-animal hybrids that seem to defy categorization.

Beyond these weird and wonderful illustrations, random doodles from later readers are also significant. “Each time we find an annotation in the margin, the form it takes gives us an insight into the kinds of encounters or interactions those people had with these books,” says Green. For medieval texts, “a gloss, biblical reference, or some commentary suggests the user was reading the text closely, compared with pen trials which show scribes breaking in a new nib, while other marks and illustrations often give the impression of a bored reader using the blank parchment of the book as we might use scrap paper. It is essentially a form of archaeology, but for books.”

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If the idea of doodling in a book either appeals to you or repulses you, then consider the pages of a copy of the long 15th-century poem Life of Our Lady, by John Lydgate. It is adorned with pages of doodles from the 16th century: “illustrations of dogs, defecating goats, peacocks with stick-figure riders, boats with tiny passengers aboard, and other marginal marks that look like very young children’s scribbles.”

Atlas Obscura has compiled a selection of doodles and drawings from medieval manuscripts. They are, by turns, silly, dramatic, and puzzling—but always illuminating about the way scribes and readers connected with the texts.

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When Science and the Occult Went Head-to-Head on a German Mountaintop

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Germany’s Harz mountains have historically been associated with witches, spirits, and black magic, particularly the range's highest peak, the Brocken. Back in 1932, one brave skeptic set out to test just how mystical the Brocken truly is by performing a ritual there designed to turn a goat into a little boy.

That skeptic was Harry Price, an early paranormal investigator and debunker. Over the course of his long career, Price labored to bring reason and a scientific eye to the world of the metaphysical. By the time he decided to take a goat to the Brocken, he'd already been responsible for blowing the lid off of spiritualists, psychic photographers, and at least one talking mongoose.

Price's attempt at a magical ritual atop the Brocken came about thanks in part to the writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe famously had an interest in the occult, and visited the Brocken peak, hiking a path that is still memorialized as the Goethe Way. Inspired by the mysterious atmosphere of the Harz region, Goethe set portions of his most famous play, Faust, there, including the surreal walpurgisnacht scene where the devil Mephistopheles leads Faust around the Brocken, observing witches and even a gorgon. “Paganism died hard in the Harz country,” Price would later write.

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Goethe died in 1832, but his legacy is celebrated around the Harz, and on the centennial anniversary of the author’s death, Price got in on festivities. That year, he and fellow philosopher C.E.M. Joad traveled to the Brocken to stage their own large-scale magic ritual.

According to Price's account of the event in his book Confessions of a Ghost-Hunter, he'd come into possession of an arcane grimoire called the High German Black Book, which contained a number of spells and rituals. Apparently discovering that Price was in possession of this book of old magic, the organizers of the Goethe centennial celebration invited him to come and perform some magic. Price jumped at the chance, thinking it a perfect opportunity “to emphasise the absolute futility of ancient magical ritual under twentieth-century conditions.”

One of the spells in the book was the ‘Bloksberg Tryst,’ a ritual designed to transform a young male goat into a human boy. Bloksberg was an older name for the Brocken, and the directions for performing the Bloksberg Tryst stated that it could only successfully be performed atop the peak, under the light of a winter’s full moon.

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According to the elaborate ritual text, the he-goat must be led by a silken cord held by a “mayden pure in heart in fair white garments.” Incense must be burned, and a pine fire lit. Standing on a magical circle that has been drawn on the ground, the maiden must spin the goat three times, then pour wine over its head, while reciting some magic words (Procul O procul este profani—Begone, begone, ye profane ones). When the magic starts to work, the moon is said to go dark, and the maiden then needs to cover the goat with a white sheet. When the cloth is removed, the goat should be gone, replaced with a human boy.

Price, looking to make a true spectacle of the ritual, contacted a number of reporters to come and witness the magical experiment. Then, on June 17, 1932, Price attempted to turn a goat into a boy. For a maiden fair, he brought along Urta Bohn, the daughter of a Bresleau attorney. She dutifully wore a pure white dress that Price felt was right at home at a magical working.

Following the preparations laid out in the book, Price had put together a truly arcane scene, with a large magical circle set into the ground, and incense burning away. In his account of the experiment, Price writes that the only thing that seemed out of place were the dozens of reporters and photographers on the periphery.

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The moon was somewhat obscured by clouds that night, but otherwise the ritual went off without a hitch—save for it not actually working. “The Press reports of this rehearsal rather stressed the point that the 'goat remained a goat,' as if the reporters really anticipated the appearance of the magical Adonis,” writes Price.

For the sake of science, Price and company came back the next night as well, leaving the press behind, and performed the ritual a second time. The result was, unsurprisingly, the same.

Some news outlets reported on the experiment as if it was a joke, but generally the response was positive. Price writes, “[M]ost of the papers realised that the trial of such experiments is worth while, the Evening Standard remarking (June 18, 1932) that the 'investigation of them is a step forward in the progress of science .... The true scientist inquires into the meaning of all phenomena without prejudice.'”

Today the Brocken happily plays up its witchy roots, not unlike a German version of Salem, Massachusetts. But in at least in this instance, Price tried to bring real magic to the area, even if it didn’t work.

The Battle of the Golden Toilets

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On Donald Trump’s 100th day in office, gold toilets with the message “Take a Trump!” started appearing across the country. Some of the first graced Muncie, Indiana. Soon after there were at least 15: four in Indiana, five in Austin, one in D.C., one in Portland, one in Miami, two in Las Vegas, and, as of May 6, one in Los Angeles—perched next to Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

“There are still many more to come,” says the organizer of the Artfinksters, the collective that’s claimed responsibility for the golden toilets. “Where they’re gonna be … we’ll keep that a secret.”

The Artfinksters have other secrets, too. The organizer, a man from the Midwest who wants to be known only as “Art,” describes the group as 50 or 60 of his friends, spread across the country, from elementary school, high school, art school, and the art world. Everyone in the group is anonymous because “our identities don’t matter,” he says. “It’s the message and what we’re trying to say that’s key.”

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What is the message? With a toilet, Art says, “you don’t really have to say much. There’s a lot of meaning to a toilet. They’re kind of gross. They don’t represent cleanliness.”

A series of golden toilets is such a simple and clear message that this is not the first time that the symbol has been used to comment on the rise of Trumpism. The Artfinksters are actually the second anonymous art collective in the United States to send golden toilets onto the streets in the past several months—and the first group isn’t exactly thrilled with the Artfinksters’ work.

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Back in October, before Trump was elected, the Birch Reincliff Art Collective launched its own golden toilet street art project in Chicago, where the group is based. This collective was formed by a group of longtime friends, about 20 at its height, who had been working together for about two years. Birch Reincliff is a friend, one member said in a phone interview, and is also the name they use to refer to each other when talking to the media. "There was a Birch Reincliff, but right now he’s on vacation, so he’s not part of things at the moment," the anonymous member said. (The group told The Daily Beast that Birch was a friend who "had become disenchanted with society when, roughly a year ago, he had an outburst one night when they were together ... as weeks went by it seemed more likely he’d had an extreme mental breakdown.")

The Birch Reincliff Art Collective's toilet project took months to put together. "It was an adventure," the member said. "I came home one day and ... 'Birch' ... he’s on the phone, and he’s talking to this place that sells used appliances. He was so mad, because he was trying to get a bunch of toilets, and one buyer had bought nine. That image is always going to be in my head. Who buys that many toilets?" Well, besides them, of course. Once they all heard the idea, everyone quickly hopped on board. "Maybe you can use art to shine a spotlight on things," the member said. "If it catches people’s attention, maybe that can be a gateway to more serious thought."

The toilets had “Putin Was Here” or “Chris Christie Was Here” spray-painted in dripping letters or scrawled in permanent marker on their covers and tanks. They were also filled with “Donnie the Poo” figurines, which feature a cartoonish pile of poop with Trump’s head affixed to them.

The toilets were made golden by a chroming process that required gas masks, silvering agents, and volatile chemicals. "Gold spray paint just looks so terrible," said the member. "There were people who really wanted it to look nice, to look right, to turn heads."

"When the toilets were finished, they shined,” another member wrote in an email. “You could see yourself in them. It was work we could be proud to claim as our own.”

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But one of the collective’s backers, who had paid for the gas masks and chemicals, didn’t agree. According to the emailer, “He took one look and hated them. He said it wasn’t ‘street art’ enough and insisted we get gold spraypaint instead.”

This difference in artistic vision did not end well. In the end, one of the Birch Reincliff members told the backer, “Chicago is too big for you. ... You want to be an artist, go to Muncie.”

“It appears that’s exactly what he did,” wrote the member. Artfinkster's toilets were first widely noticed in Muncie, leading the Birch Reincliff folks to believe that the other collective was “likely founded” by that backer, who they describe as “a disgruntled former member of the Birch Reincliff Collective.”

"Everything about the language they use is very similar," said the member who spoke by phone. "It seems really derivative and very likely that these guys were involved with us at some point. The details are close enough."

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Art disputes that version of events, and states that the idea for their golden toilet project arose when the phrase “Take a Trump” came out of his mouth one day while talking to a friend. He had been wanting to do a group project with his many artist friends, and he thought, “That’s what we’ll do. We’ll get a toilet and spray-paint it gold, because Trump surrounds himself with everything gold.”

The year 2017 also marks the 100th anniversary of one of Marcel Duchamp’s most famous works and a landmark of 20th-century art—Fountain, the urinal he signed "R. Mutt" and displayed as a piece of art—so the choice had some art historical resonance, too. The Artfinksters, whose name derives from the phrase “rat fink” and Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, collected the toilets from curbs and online sales, and then painted them, for placement at spots around the country where the members live. Each toilet is editioned, as if part of a series, so that viewers will wonder just how many of them are out there, and where they might be.

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As for the Birch Reincliff project, Art says, “I think I had seen it in passing, but it didn’t register. It was just something that I saw and instantly, immediately it was gone. It wasn’t anything that I really thought of.” His project has “absolutely 100% no connection with that whatsoever,” and he has absolutely no idea, he says, why the Birch Reincliff Art Collective thinks their former backer is involved.

"We can't prove it," said a Birch Reincliff member. "If you look at their website and their Instagram, all of the statements they make—it’s just comic. It’s almost word-for-word exactly the stuff he used to write for our social media. I can’t prove it 100%. It just seems like it to me."

Stolen: A Duchess's $1.3 Million Diamond Tiara

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“Someone has stolen the duchess’ tiara!” isn’t something you usually hear outside of a BBC period mystery, but, recently, someone really did steal a German royal’s diamond-encrusted crown from a German museum’s throne room.

According to Associated Press, a jewel thief has hit the state-run Badisches Landesmuesum in Karlsruhe, Germany. They made off with a gold and platinum tiara that belonged to the late Grand Duchess Hilda von Baden, who passed away in 1952. The tiara was created in the early 20th century and is inlaid with an eye-popping 367 diamonds.

Valued at around $1.31 million, the tiara had been locked up in a cabinet in the museum’s throne room before it was discovered missing on April 29.

Local authorities don’t have any suspects so far, but they are asking anyone who might have seen something suspicious to come forward.

Inside the Mumbai Deaf Community's Unique Public Transit Culture

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A few years ago, Sujit Sahasrabudhe, a teacher and researcher, was walking into Mumbai's CST railroad station with his father when he realized he was caught in a classic commuter conundrum: he was holding a hot cup of coffee, and the train car he wanted to ride in was at the other end of the platform. As his father prepared to duck into the nearest compartment, gesturing for his son to join him, Sahasrabudhe decided to risk it, and started to sprint. "I ran and ran with that coffee," he later recalled. "I was so relieved when I sat down."

He wasn't just trying to position himself for an easy transfer. Sahasrabudhe, who is deaf, was running to what the rail system refers to as its "Handicapped Compartment," or HC. There, he expected to meet—as he did every day—a growing, shifting group of fellow deaf people, both old friends and new acquaintances. As the anthropologist Annelies Kusters explains in a recent paper in the Journal of Cultural Geography, for deaf Mumbaikars, a commute in the HC isn't just getting to and from work or school—it is equivalent to "checking into the deaf network, into a space of potential."

Kusters, who's from Belgium, first went to India in November of 2006 to attend a conference for deaf people. Afterward, her new friends showed her around Mumbai. "Their movements and interactions in the city fascinated me," she later wrote. In a series of articles and short films, Kusters has since explored how deaf people in Mumbai have taken a quotidian task, the commute, and turned it into a dynamic, social experience—one that many of them actually look forward to.

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Mumbai is the most densely populated city in India, and about seven and a half million people use the city's public rail network, the Mumbai Suburban Railway, every day. Most start in the more residential, northern part of the city and travel between 1 and 20 miles south to the business district, at the tip of the peninsula. In the evening, they head back uptown again. "The train is [Mumbai]'s lifeline," one of Kusters's interviewees, Ajay, told her. "If at some point the train stops working, everything collapses."

As such, rush hour in Mumbai is no joke: at every stop, people pour in and out of cars, vying for space and sometimes hanging out of the train doors in order to fit. Although the city has tried to keep up with demand by adding new cars and stops, morning and evening commuters often find themselves a part of what experts call "super dense crush loads," in which up to 15 passengers may pack into a single square meter of floor space. "The situation seems insane, but is in fact a daily routine," writes Kusters.

To minimize fallout from these super-dense crushes, certain cars are set aside for particular demographics. Every train has at least one "Ladies Compartment"—reserved for women and young children only—and at peak hours, an entire train or two may be designated a "Ladies Special," a provision that just celebrated its 25th anniversary. Since 1993, there have also been between one and three Handicapped Compartments, or HCs, on every train.

The extra space in the HCs allows people with disabilities and chronic illnesses to use the trains without having to fight for a place to stand. But it also has another benefit: it allows deaf people to sign, a difficult endeavor in the other cars. "In the general compartments it was so crowded that when there was a deaf person with you, you could sign only small signs above people's heads," one of Kusters's interviewees, Rohan, told her. "[In the cars], hearing people can chat with each other…[but] deaf people cannot communicate that way." In the less crowded HCs, though, there is room to converse, one-on-one or in large groups. "Now I feel free," Rohan puts it. "I have space to communicate."

Social use of special train cars isn't unique to deaf riders: on the Ladies Special, "[women] cut vegetables, give each other advice, [and] celebrate festivals," says Kusters. In the HCs, deaf travelers have fully embraced the camaraderie of commuting, turning the train into what Kusters calls "a destination in its own right."

During a given commute, Kusters writes, a deaf person who gets on at a northern stop will enter an HC and begin carving out space for other deaf people. They might text their friends to let them know which car they're in, or when they'll be coming through a relevant station. As more deaf people hop on, they'll form a group within the compartment, chatting and trading news until it's time to get off.

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Then, in the evening, they do it all again, in the other direction. If someone is having a particularly great chat, they might overshoot their intended destination, get off with their friends, and head back the other way.

It's not as though deaf Mumbaikars don't hang out anywhere else, writes Kusters—Mumbai has 22 schools for the deaf, as well as a number of clubs and gathering places. But the HCs are special. For one thing, they enable both a convenience and a visibility that other meeting places cannot. "If you want to meet a person, and I don't mean just sending text messages... you can just catch the train at a particular time and talk there," one interviewee, Ajay, told Kusters. The train-going experience as a whole is conducive to signing, according to Kusters, and deaf people will often talk to each other through train windows, or from platform to platform across the tracks.

While traveling in the HCs, Kusters writes, she often met hearing people who were able to carry on basic signing conversations. Rohan told her he has noticed that since deaf people have begun gathering and speaking on platforms, they attract fewer confused hearing onlookers. "Now they see it and just pass and continue on their way," he says. He takes this as a good sign: "It means that awareness is spreading widely."

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The HCs also facilitate both the maintenance of old friendships and the formation of new ones. "In the space of the handicapped compartment you see another deaf person and ask him who he is," Rohan told Kusters. "On the road this doesn't happen; you walk past each other, and you don't know the other is deaf, too." Deaf acquaintances on the HCs make a point of greeting one another, even waking up their snoozing compatriots to do so.

This communality and comfort transforms an everyday experience into something more. "When the train comes I'm not excited right away, but when I get inside, I feel a big change," one commuter, Harish, told Kusters. "Like I'm walking on a dirty road and suddenly I see something beautiful at the end of the road. The train is also like that: at the outside it's nothing, but inside it's something beautiful."

At this point, Kusters knows this as well as anyone. After meeting Sujit Sahasrabudhe during her first visit to Mumbai in 2006, and riding the HCs with him throughout subsequent research trips, the two were married in 2010. (Their first kiss was in an HC, she says.) "Now we have two kids, and we have just moved to Edinburgh," she says. A testament to the power of commuting done right.


Australia Accidentally Incinerated a Priceless Plant Specimen

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Australia's biosecurity officials have a big job. They stop plants and animals from entering the country—species that could disrupt its delicately balanced ecosystem. But in their quest to protect Australia, they've accidentally destroyed some important biological specimens bound for local researchers. Back in March, for example, biosecurity officials incinerated a plant specimen because of a paperwork mix-up.

The destroyed item was the type specimen for a flowering plant (the exact species hasn't been released), which means it was the specimen that was used to describe the species officially. The plant had been collected in the mid-1800s and ended up in France's National Museum of Natural History, which was sending it to researchers at Queensland's Herbarium.

When the specimen arrived in Australia by mail, biosecurity officers say, its paperwork was incorrect. Emails subsequently sent to the wrong people fouled things up further. While the agency held the specimen in quarantine for longer than they're required to, they incinerated the pressed plants in March—before the issue could be resolved. Now Australia's Federal Department of Agriculture and Water Resources, the agency in charge of biosecurity, says they're investigating the incident.

"We rely on sharing specimens from all over the world to be able to do our science," Michelle Waycott, chair of the Council of Heads of Australasian Herbaria, told Australia's ABC News. The loss of the specimens "may have a major impact on our ability to do our research." This isn't an isolated incident, either, unfortunately. Biosecurity officials also destroyed lichen samples shipped to Australia from New Zealand. Now New Zealand's herbaria are banned from sending specimens across the Tasman Sea. France may follow suit, says Waycott. "That would certainly be my response if it was my herbarium this had happened to."

Found: A 1937 Recording of JFK as a Harvard Student

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In 1937, a young John F. Kennedy, just 20 at the time, signed up for Prof. Frederick Cilfton Packard, Jr.’s English F class. Packard taught the young men of Harvard public speaking, and as part of the class, the students would deliver speeches in Harvard’s Holden Chapel, the college’s third oldest building. While his classmates chose to speak about “book collecting, sourdough, and how to find a wife,” reports the Harvard Gazette, Kennedy spoke about President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s controversial Supreme Court appointee, Hugo Black, who had ties to the Klu Klux Klan.

Decades later, archivists at Harvard discovered the speech about Packard’s archives and have restored the 20-year-old Kennedy’s speech from an aluminum disk into a digital file. Even through the background noise, you can hear the future president’s distinctive accent as he speaks:

Harvard released the recording as part of an exhibit on Kennedy’s relationship with the school; archivists believe Packard’s collection may have more recordings of the young JFK and his siblings waiting to be discovered.

The Surprising Challenges of Making Things Vegan

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

Meat is in the news a lot these days, it seems.

One study claims that animal fat might lower your cholesterol level, while a completely different one suggests meat affects your gut bacteria or causes blood clots.

And there are always stories about meat being where it shouldn’t be—notably, when the startup Clear Foods analyzed a bunch of hot dogs and found that many veggie dogs had remnants of meat on them due to the production process—enough to make any vegan lose his-or-her you-know-what.

And earlier this month, Guinness finally finished its years-long process of getting the fish out of its beer. When this news first gained notice a couple of years ago, a number of folks had a specific reaction: "Wait, they used fish bladders to make Guinness?"

They know, they know, and the folks at the Guinness factory in Dublin have been working on cutting back their use of isinglass, the fish bladder long used to filter its iconic Irish beers.

“All brewers want to use the latest and the best technology, we’ve been researching for a decade about how we can reduce the amount lost in the filtration process so we were excited that this might work,” Guinness master brewer Stephen Kilcullen told The Times of London. “It’s great though that it means people who haven’t had a pint in a while can have one now.”

The announcement that the company was moving away from using isinglass in 2015 mostly had the effect of shocking lazy vegetarians concerned about things such as ethics, but even when Guinness was still using it, the amount was minute.

“The isinglass is retained in the floor of the vat but it is possible that minute quantities might be carried over into the beer,” the company explained in 2013. You can read more about Isinglass over at Smithsonian magazine.

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Of course, Guinness is far from the only thing that vegans have had to worry about over the years.

For example, many vegetarians don't take the full plunge towards veganism because they feel like they'd miss cheese too much. Problem is, some kinds of cheese happen to be made with a certain part of the cow that can't be acquired without killing said cow.

The material, rennet, is procured from the lining of a cow's fourth stomach, and is often used as a way to encourage cheese to curdle. Thanks to the declining cost of artificial or plant-based ways of doing the same thing, major food-makers have slowly moved away from relying so heavily on a material that must be acquired by killing a cow—and the list is growing.

However, there are a few kinds of cheese out there that require rennet to reach their full potential. One of those cheeses is Parmesan, one of the most popular kind of hard cheese there is.

Like a number of other traditional foods originally made in Europe, it has a protected designation of origin, meaning that it can only technically be called Parmesan if it's made in a certain part of Italy, using a traditional production process. And sorry to tell you, eggplant Parmesan fans, rennet is part of that traditional production process.

Even without keeping the vegetarians in mind, this can create unusual complications for those that have diets that vary from the norm. For example, that traditional production process makes it difficult to make a kosher variation on Parmesan, because it has to go through two separate processes to ensure that it follows traditional standards as well as religious ones. It was so complicated, in fact, that it wasn't until 2015 that a kosher variation on Parmesan debuted—complete with Star of David on the cheese block.

But if you're vegetarian and hankering for some of the hard stuff, make sure you're looking for "vegetarian Parmesan" or Parmesan-style cheese on store shelves. You're not getting the real thing, but you'll at least be able to live with yourself the next day.

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The concerns with unexpectedly non-vegan options aren’t just limited to foods, either. Take the outer layers of paintball capsules, which are generally made of gelatin, a form of collagen generally derived from animal bones. (If you like Jell-O, geltabs, or marshmallows, you're also a gelatin user.)

Tattoo ink, traditionally made of bone char, falls into the same category, and animal products are often used in maintaining that tattoo. However, there are some vegan-friendly alternatives out there, so you can still get an ugly tattoo if you would so like.

More surprisingly, guitars are made from animal parts in some cases, especially in the case of acoustic guitars. The nut and saddle of the guitar, two parts that hold the strings in place, are often made from bone, often not limited to one kind of animal. All of which is actually an improvement from the days when instruments were made using ivory.

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And if you’re wearing Converse All-Stars, you may be skipping the leather, but you may not be out of the woods with your canvas shoes. Converse has traditionally shied away from calling its footwear “vegan.” The reason? Simply put, there’s a chance that the glue they use may be of animal origin, though they can’t be sure. Sounds reassuring, doesn’t it? The issue Chucks and their animal-derived glue has long been a matter of online debate. (The debate hasn’t stopped PETA from recommending Chucks to people.)

Of all the surprisingly non-vegan options out there, the most surprising might be fabric softener—which contains animal fat. No, really. Wired reported in 2008 that Downy uses dehydrogenated tallow dimethyl ammonium chloride, a material derived from the rendered fat of cattle, sheep, and horses, to keep your clothes silky smooth.

Or take condoms, another object known for not necessarily being vegan, though one that's also made some strides in recent years, even if some folks, like the author Aine Collier—who literally wrote the book on condoms—remain skeptical.

“It wasn’t about the quality of the condom. Many were absolute crap,” she once told NPR of the phenomenon. “But people were buying them with the eye. They loved the packaging, because it fit the lifestyle they were trying to lead. And I think that's exactly what this fair trade, biodegradable, green, vegan condom sales thing is all about. It's just marketing.”

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All of this is to say that veganism is challenging and hard to get perfect even in the best of circumstances, meaning that when it comes to manufacturing food or other products, we're probably never going to get it 100 percent right. We're already too far down the rabbit hole—a rabbit hole probably filled with many rabbits that have been turned into random chemicals for human consumption.

So maybe Guinness going vegan isn't that big of a deal in the scheme of things, though consider the plight of folks like Paul Vogel, a founder of the Vegan Society of Ireland. He hasn’t been able to drink a pint of Guinness for nearly two decades. He recently got another chance, after he became one of the first people to drink a vegan pint of Guinness.

“It’s nice. I remember what it tasted like because it’s so distinctive. It’s creamy but has that bite,” Vogel told The Times of London. "I remember what it tasted like because it’s so distinctive. It’s creamy but has that bite."

Still, Vogel later admitted that he’s probably going to stick with wine.

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

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The Tale of the Toad and the Bearded Female Saint

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Of all the regions where little toad sculptures were placed as offerings at Christian holy sites, southern Germany was the most enduring—extending from the medieval period through to the 19th century. But at one time, women in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Italy all brought small toad votives, made of wax, wood, or metal, to the shrines of certain saints to request holy intercession in matters of childbirth.

There’s a certain logic to the offering, as in the medieval mind, toads were sometimes considered vaginal symbols. But the amphibians could take on many roles. “Apparitions of toads can have all different modalities and meanings," writes Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski, a University of Pittsburgh professor who specializes in medieval literature, in her book The Strange Case of Ermine de Reims, about a woman haunted by visions of toads and other creatures. In addition to their association with childbirth, toads (like vaginas) were also linked to sin, magic, and evil. Perhaps it’s appropriate that one of the figures most closely associated with toad votives is a gender-bending saint who has never been officially recognized by the church.

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In the medieval world, toads were charter members of the cabal of slimy, devilish creatures imbued with powers and beloved of witches—tormentors of the sinful mind. In one medieval church sculpture motif, the femme aux serpents, the embodiment of sinful lust, toads sometimes sub in for the snakes that writhe around a woman’s body and occasionally bite her breasts. But toads weren’t as purely evil as snakes; they could be humorous, too. In one German story, a woman loses her vagina and it “is mistaken for a toad as it roams the streets,” writes Blumenfeld-Kosinski. (Eventually, the woman gets her detachable vagina back.) Toads were also thought to have the power of spontaneous generation and resurrection.

From this amalgam of symbolism emerged a connection with the womb, so women brought votive statues shaped like toads to ask religious figures to intercede in feminine problems. One might be left after praying for relief from a gynecological problem or the pain of childbirth, or after women prayed to become pregnant or expressed concerned about the health of their unborn children. In southern Germany, where the practice persisted, the figures were made from red wax, which was thought to offer protection from the devil.

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In the medieval period, toad votives were closely associated with particular saints. In one variation, toads offered to St. Roch were “metal toads with baby faces and large, vulvalike openings on their backs believed to be substitutes for representations of uterus,” writes Blumenfeld-Kosinski in Not of Woman Born. More often, though, they were found with images of St. Wilgefortis, also known as "Kümmernis" or "Uncumber," whom one scholar describes as “one of the most interesting of all the ecclesiastical conceptions” and another as “possibly the most spectacular of the grotesque saints and certainly one of the most important.”

St. Wilgefortis had no chapels dedicated specifically to her, but according to David Williams, author of Deformed Discourse, her cult thrived in the 15th century, and those chapels where her image was found sometimes had mysterious underground passages associated with them. She was the patron saint of monsters and people who suffered from deformities, and also of crops, travelers, and the marital bed.

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Wilgefortis’s story, which is not believed to have any basis in fact, is that she was one of seven daughters of a Portuguese pagan king. She found Christianity and vowed to stay a virgin, but her father went against her wishes and pledged her hand to the King of Sicily. After she prayed to be spared from this fate, she grew a beard. It saved her from marriage—but not martyrdom. As late as the 19th century, women prayed to Wilgefortis for children and “as a source of fertility," writes Williams. "As a sign of this, votives in the form of a toad were hung under her image.”

The toad was, for medieval women, a source of agency, of private power that they were willing to use in times of need—even if it was never officially sanctioned by the church that governed their daily lives.

The Unexpected Consequences of Australia's 3,500-Mile Dog Fence

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Dingoes are the scourge of Australian sheep farmers, so authorities established the Dog Fence in 1946—3,488 continuous miles of fence built or updated to prevent the wild dogs from entering the southeastern part of the country. Sheep aren't the only beneficiaries. Kangaroos, the dingoes' favorite meal, have flourished on the other side of the fence. A new study now suggests that the absence of these predators has also reshaped the entire ecosystem of the dingo-free region.

Trophic cascades—the idea that predators such as dingoes can impact entire ecosystems in unpredictable ways—are a contentious topic. For example, the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park, it is said, changed elk foraging habits, resulting in a rebound in the park's trees. Studies have since shown the situation is a bit more complex, and most cases, including Yellowstone, are only studied after the fact, so there is very little experimental data to rely on.

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This new study is one of the first controlled experiments to test trophic cascades. Researchers set up fences around plots on both sides of the Dog Fence, then took a dingo and kangaroo census inside each area. They also measured vegetation cover and took soil samples.

The Dog Fence is definitely doing its job. On the northern side of it, the scientists found 85 dingoes and just eight kangaroos. The southern side was a kangaroo paradise, where 3,200 of the hopping marsupials vastly outnumbered the lone dingo they spotted. On that side, the researchers also created an area free of kangaroos, and found that it had 12 percent more vegetation cover and more soil carbon than plots kangaroos could access. The researchers think the kangaroos might eat grass and then take that carbon content elsewhere, to more forested areas where they lounge during the hottest parts of the day. This suggests that the absence of dingoes changes the outback in fundamental ways.

Some ecologists remain unconvinced, and posit that the difference in vegetation cover could be influenced by sheep or water, rather than the ratio of kangaroos to dingoes. The work at least shows that such controlled experiments are possible. But even if ecologists are one day convinced that dingoes are part of a trophic cascade, it will take much, much more to persuade sheep farmers to do away with the Dog Fence. Dingoes will likely have to keep gazing hungrily across it for some time.

Does it Even Matter if These Vintage Vampire-Killing Kits Are Real?

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Around 1970, when movies and TV series starring Dracula helped revive interest in Eastern Europe’s ancient bloodthirsty undead, dealers started catering to the burgeoning market for antiques related to vampires. Worn wooden boxes full of tarnished weapons, said to kill or at least gross out vampires, surfaced widely at auctions. They were said to have been assembled centuries ago as portable equipment to protect travelers. Prices soon reached tens of thousands of dollars each for the vampire-killing kits, which are typically fitted with pistols, wooden stakes, Bibles, crucifixes and rosaries, plus bottles of garlic powder, holy water and herbal potions.

Dozens of the kits have found their way into museum collections. Visitors flock to see them. Nobody seems to mind that in the last few years, academics have pored through archives and conducted scientific tests indicating how many of the kits now floating around are late-20th-century novelties.

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Despite the in-depth articles and museum labels explaining the objects’ origins, “belief is stronger than objective evidence,” the British weaponry expert Jonathan Ferguson says. He is the curator of firearms at the Royal Armouries in Leeds, which owns a vampire-killing kit that he describes as“inspired by the movies, not Victorian stories and folklore.” The museum acquired it in 2012, knowing that it was probably cobbled together in the 1970s or ‘80s.

The mahogany box, partly lined in velvet, contains a pistol, bullet mold and prayer book that are antiques, dating to the 1850s. The rest—bottles with cryptic labels, a handwritten psalm quote about slaying enemies, banged-up wooden stakes—can be considered handsome Halloween kitsch.

Keeping these invented artifacts on view nonetheless has scholarly value, Ferguson says; they represent the public’s enduring gothic fascination with “supernatural creatures and the means to defeat them.”

Winterthur Museum in Delaware has a vampire-killing kit on display in its show, “Treasures on Trial: The Art and Science of Detecting Fakes.” The set surfaced in the 1980s as a donation to the Mercer Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. On its leather case’s yellowed paper label, the supposed German manufacturer, a professor named Ernst Blomberg, lists its contents including “silver bullets,” a supply of his “new serum” and a gun made by the Belgian gunsmith Nicholas Plomdeur. The label boasts that the kit will help ward off Eastern Europe’s rash of “a particular manifestation of evil known as Vampires.”

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Mr. Ferguson has concluded that in the 1970s, a British antiques dealer with a vivid hematological imagination dreamed up the Blomberg-Plomdeur fable to make some pedestrian guns in his inventory more valuable. On the Mercer’s kit, a Winterthur team found a variety of scientific red flags: the adhesives are modern, Plomdeur’s “silver” bullets are pewter, and Blomberg’s paper labels could only have been printed after 1945. Still, some mysteries remain. No one knows what lurks inside the glass vials; Linda Eaton, the museum’s director of collections, says no one wanted to damage the waxy seals to investigate the serum ingredients.

Sleuths who specialize in debunking vampire legends, including Anthony Hogg, have posted detailed denunciations of the kits. Sometimes the wooden multi-compartment cases are obvious fakes, adapted from antique desks or boxes originally used for tools, guns, pens, cosmetics, jewelry or musical instruments. Sometimes the bullets tucked inside would not actually fit into the barrels of the accompanying guns attributed to Plomdeur. Some anti-vampire potions come in bottles with modern screw-top lids, and the stakes and mallets were clearly made of turned wood recycled from furniture legs.

At the Winterthur show, the public is encouraged (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) to try to keep an open mind. The kit appears in a gallery section called “You Be the Judge.” The curators’ label suggests that well, you never know, it’s a weird world, and maybe there were 19th-century anxious travelers girding themselves for potential danger as they headed into Eastern Europe. The museum’s text notes that the modern components in the leather box, after all, “might just represent replacements and repairs,” and Blomberg kits “have been sold through reputable auction houses.”

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In 2004, Sotheby’s sold a Blomberg kit for $26,400, although the catalog cautioned that “Neither the existence of Professor Blomberg nor that of the gunmaker Plomdeur can be confirmed. Also open to question is whether these kits were ever employed successfully in the killing of vampires.” In 2011, an unsigned vampire killing kit, with 32 components including a map of Transylvania and no less than two crucifixes, brought $25,000 at Sotheby’s. For a Blomberg kit that came up at Sotheby’s in 2012 and sold for $13,750, the catalog described it as “Continental, circa 1900 and later” and had no comment on whether the makers were fictional.

David Walker, the head of the auction house’s 19th-century furniture department in New York, says he remains skeptical of stories that travelers ever used the kits for self-protection. He describes the material as “very theatrical” as well as “rather elaborate and quite whimsical,” and he adds that they generate conversation when they’re on view and media attention whenever they come up for sale.

Cory Amsler, a vice president at the Mercer Museum, says their kit has boosted attendance for decades. It serves as a spooky prop during Halloween programs, and it has been used as a serious educational tool, to explain centuries of woeful misconceptions about the causes of wasting diseases. Some visitors have brought in their own supposedly antique heirloom kits, to compare to the display. All these assemblages of vampire repellents based on late-20th-century pop culture, Amsler says, “take on their own narratives going forward. People continue to make their own stories that get passed down.”

An Australian Baby Just Became the First to Breastfeed in Parliament

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Australian Senator Larissa Waters made history yesterday when she became the first Australian politician to breastfeed during a parliamentary session, the BBC reports.

"It's slightly ridiculous, really, that feeding one's baby is international news," Waters told the BBC. "Women have been breastfeeding since time immemorial."

Although the House of Representatives voted to allow breastfeeding and bottle-feeding last year, Waters—and her baby daughter, Alia Joy—were the first to take advantage of it. Before this rule change, babies were banned from entering the lower house's chambers. In 2003, assembly member Kirstie Marshall and her 11-day-old daughter were ejected from Parliament because the baby was a "stranger."

Some countries are less suspicious of babies: A Spanish politician who fed her son in parliament faced political backlash, but was legally fine. Others are even further ahead—last year, politician Unnur Brá Konráðsdóttir nursed her daughter while actually addressing the Icelandic legislature.

But plenty still have a ways to go. The UK's House of Commons still does not allow breastfeeding in the chambers, also under the stranger-baby logic. And while the U.S. Senate has discussed breastfeeding many times—and public breastfeeding is legal in D.C.—it's unclear whether or not anyone has actually tried pulling it off on the floor (officials did not respond to requests for comment.) Time for a brave American baby to step up.

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 17-Foot Python That Went Missing for 2 Weeks Has Mysteriously Returned Home

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On April 24, Sam, a 17-foot Burmese python who lives in a home in Meadow Lakes, Alaska, around 45 miles north of Anchorage, went missing. Sam belongs to local resident David Hyde, who describes him as "shy and hungry"—though that probably did little to calm his alarmed neighbors.

Officials alerted area residents to Sam's disappearance while Hyde fruitlessly searched. Finally, he told Alaska Dispatch News, he had more or less given up hope that he would ever see his beloved legless pet again. "I decided he was gone forever," Hyde said.

Then, on May 8, Hyde saw a familiar sight in his living room: Sam, who had apparently slithered back in through the front door while Hyde had been working outside. Where had Sam been? No one knows, though Hyde told the News that it appeared he hadn't been eating. (The Associated Press reported that Sam feasted on a 25-pound rabbit before going missing.)

Hyde said that from now on he will take few chances with the 100-pound reptile. Sam, the News reported, "will likely stay locked in a room."

Drone Meets Cyclist And It Ends Badly

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More and more, drones are becoming ubiquitous parts of the modern landscape, but that doesn’t mean they can’t still surprise us. Unfortunately, that shock can prove catastrophic when you are speeding around on a bicycle.

As shown in a video recently shot by Kaito Clarke, an out of control drone collided with a biker during the Golden State Race in Sacramento, California. At first it didn’t look like the crashing drone had affected the racer, but as they slowed down, a piece got wedged in his front wheel, and the racer was forced over their handlebars.

The drone had apparently hit a tree before careening into the racer’s wheel, getting destroyed in the process. Luckily, the racer fared much better, only getting some scrapes and a broken wheel.

According to users on Reddit, the owner of the drone reached out to the person they hit, and offered to pay for a new helmet and wheel, but it's unclear if any money actually changed hands.

Be careful out there, bikers.

The Crab Nebula Is Ready for Its Close-Up

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In 1054, Chinese astronomers observed a star that glowed particularly bright for two years and then winked out. We know now that they were looking at a supernova, the terminal explosion of a star, when its core collapses under its own gravity. The remains of that cosmic explosion, the Crab Nebula, some 6,500 light years away from Earth, are no longer visible to the naked eye. The nebula was first identified in 1731 by the doctor and astronomer John Bevis, and we’ve been watching it ever since—but it’s never looked quite like this.

The latest image of the Crab Nebula was assembled by merging views from five different telescopes—four in space and one here on Earth—that cover almost the entire electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to X-rays. Data from the Very Large Array (radio), Spitzer Space Telescope (infrared), Hubble Space Telescope (visible), XMM-Newton Observatory (ultraviolet), and Chandra X-ray Observatory (X-ray) were each assigned to a visible color and then overlaid to reveal the nebula in unprecedented detail.

The bright spot at the center is a pulsar, a tiny neutron star that rotates rapidly (30 times per second), sending out electromagnetic beams like a lighthouse on overdrive. It is surrounded by a swirl of particles caught up in the pulsar’s magnetic wind, followed by the remnants of the supernova, and then finally material ejected from the star before it exploded. The comparative data are helping scientists understand the structure and physics of the nebula, which is three light years across.

"Comparing these new images, made at different wavelengths, is providing us with a wealth of new detail about the Crab Nebula,” said Gloria Dubner of the Institute of Astronomy and Physics at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina, who is leading the study, in a NASA release. “Though the Crab has been studied extensively for years, we still have much to learn about it."

Found: Three Dead Great White Sharks, Missing Their Livers

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On the western cape of South Africa, about two and half hours south of Cape Town, shark experts have found three dead sharks who washed up on the beach in quick succession with unusual injuries. Each of the sharks was sliced through. The first and third were missing their livers; the second was missing its liver and its heart.

These were great white sharks—predators with few enemies. After autopsying the sharks’ corpses, the experts believe that they were likely killed by orcas.

Sharks have large, fatty livers, which are full of energy and nutrients and which help keep them afloat underwater. Marine mammals are known to prey on smaller sharks, as Live Science explains: sea lions, for instance, will often eviscerate smaller leopard sharks and gobble up their rich inner organs. It’s unusual for an orca to prey on a great white shark in this way, but it’s not an entirely out of the ordinary.

The dexterity these enormous animals are capable of is mind blowing, almost surgical precision as they remove the squalene rich liver of the white sharks and dump their carcass,” writes the SharkWatch SA blog.

Robo-Falcons Will Soon Patrol Edmonton International Airport

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Counterintuitive as it may be, birds and planes don't get along. Ever since Orville Wright knocked into a flock while flying over a cornfield in 1905, airborne humans have worked hard to keep their feathery predecessors away from airports, where they tend to crack windshields, bend sensitive instruments, and get sucked into fuselages.

To keep birds away, airports have shot off fireworks, hired snipers, and planted vast prairies nearby so that birds will live there instead. Now, according to a recent press release, Edmonton International Airport has decided to up the ante: they're going to bring on a fleet of robo-falcons to chase away the real birds.

A Dutch company called Clear Flight Solutions introduced these robo-falcons, otherwise known as "Robirds™," just a few years ago. Unlike other drones, these are the size and shape of the birds they're meant to imitate. They move around by gliding and flapping—often extremely wildly, if the below video is to be believed:

The airport "will integrate CFS’s Robird™ technology to guide birds safely away from air traffic, while discouraging nesting near airside operations and glide paths," the press release says. The hope is that this will be an eco-friendly solution to a difficult problem—and thus a win for both birds and planes.

The robo-birds will mostly inscribe figure-eights near—but never over—the runways, Tim Bibby, who is involved with the new program, told Motherboard. The airport will also be hiring pilots to fly the birds. So if you've always admired the world's original aeronauts, this might be the job for you.

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.

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