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This Artist Designed Pigeon Shoes So She Could Befriend Actual Pigeons

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When the Japanese artist Keiko Ohata decided to befriend a group of pigeons, she knew exactly how to do it: design and wear a pair of shoes that would be close to indistinguishable from the real birds. The pigeons, in theory, would assume she is one of their own, and they wouldn't be afraid of her.

Ohata shared her process for making the shoes on the website Nifty, where she's posted many DIY projects over the years, including a bird's nest for humans made of colored hangers.

Using felt, styrofoam, and wool, Ohata built two pigeons and attached them to a pair of high heels, covering her toes with the birds' tail feathers. The pigeon heads face out behind her, ready to lure genuine birds.

Last week, she put the shoes to the test at a park in Tokyo.

When pigeons gathered nearby, a man beside her started throwing food for them. The birds rushed after it, paying no attention to Ohata's shoes despite her gentle foot movements.

Pigeons may not have flocked to her footwear, but Ohata's heels have certainly made a fashion statement.

Video Wonders are audiovisual offerings that delight, inspire, and entertain. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.


NASA's Silver Snoopy Award, Explained

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Yes, NASA really does give out a prestigious award called the Silver Snoopy. But it isn't given to astronauts.

Instead, astronauts give them to members of their various research and support staffs, in recognition of their contributions to the safety of the space program. Why Snoopy? Because in the 1960s, there was no one hotter.

In that decade, the popularity of Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts characters were at an all-time high. The first animated special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, hit the airwaves at the end of 1965. Earlier that same year, the characters were featured on the cover of Time. In the Peanuts gang, and specifically in breakout star Snoopy, NASA saw a way to bring a beloved, smiling face to the space program at a time when it desperately needed one.

Recall that in 1967, Apollo 1 suffered a catastrophic fire in the command module that killed all three crew members. The tragedy forced the massive space agency to grapple with how they could help their often disconnected internal departments feel closer to the actual astronauts and their mission. By 1968, NASA employed some 268,000 people, a great number of whom were solely dedicated to sending a handful of astronauts into space.

The Silver Snoopy award came out of these post-Apollo 1 efforts, and was the brainchild of Al Chop, then the director of public affairs for the Manned Spacecraft Center.

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As he recounted in a 2000 article in the Houston Chronicle (shared on Collect Space), Chop went to the United Feature Syndicate, which controlled the rights to Peanuts, to ask permission to use Snoopy for the award. Initially, they were reluctant to let the beagle “moonlight,” until Chop mentioned that he could probably send Snoopy to the moon. Before long, and with the blessing of Schulz himself, Snoopy was approved for work with NASA.

In 2010, Schulz’s son Craig was quoted as saying that his father was thrilled to get the opportunity to work with the space program. The elder Schulz drew an original sketch of Snoopy in a space suit, complete with helmet, scarf, and little gearbox, and from this drawing, the Silver Snoopy award, a small silver tie pin, was cast.

The first Silver Snoopy Awards were bestowed in 1968, to some of the crew who worked on the LTA-8 project, a test version of what would become the lunar module. The next year, in 1969, Chop’s promise to get Snoopy to the moon would more or less come true during the Apollo 10 mission. As a test run for Apollo 11, Apollo 10 came within eight miles of the moon’s surface. Its command module and lunar module were nicknamed “Charlie Brown” and “Snoopy,” respectively, and the astronauts on the mission even sent back images of themselves holding pictures of the Peanuts characters in space.

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Today, NASA’s database of Silver Snoopy recipients lists over 15,000 individuals who have received the award since its inception, hailing from departments across the agency. NASA says that fewer than 1 percent of their workforce receive the award annually, and in order to be eligible they must meet at least two criteria from a longer list that includes such goals as, “Developing or assisting with an operational improvement that increases efficiency and performance,” or “Contributing to one or more major cost saving/cost avoidance.”

The Silver Snoopy pin is also a hit among collectors of both space memorabilia and Peanuts artifacts, going for $1,000 or more on eBay. Adding to their appeal, NASA’s site says that each pin has been to space and back before it is awarded, although some collectors dispute this.

In 2009, a five-foot-tall statue of Snoopy in a space suit was erected outside of the Kennedy Space Center to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the beagle’s role in the Apollo 10 mission. But the cartoon dog’s role in the space program is reaffirmed each time the Silver Snoopy honors another behind-the-scenes hero.

NASA Is Creating Glowing Clouds for Science

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If you're on the Eastern Seaboard and look up around 4:25 am on Thursday, June 1, don't panic. The glowing red and green clouds you may see aren't aliens or "chemtrails," but harmless clouds of barium, strontium, and cupric oxide created by NASA to study how particles move through the atmosphere.

NASA uses what are called sounding rockets for short-term experiments or equipment tests in the upper atmosphere that don't need to be performed from space. The latest one, which launches Thursday from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, will release 10 soda can–sized canisters that will emit vapor between 96 and 124 miles above Earth. The glowing clouds will be visible from North Carolina to New York, and as far west as Charlottesville, Virginia. They will provide a nice light show for anyone awake that early (with no other impact on the ground or in the air), but will also give scientists a chance to collect important data, using two cameras on the ground—one at Wallops and another in Duck, North Carolina—to help refine computer models of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere.

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NASA planned to launch the rocket May 31, but delayed due to cloudy weather. (When glowing clouds are the focus of an experiment, regular clouds can be a problem.) The launch is scheduled for Thursday, but as with any rocket launch, there's a chance it could be delayed again if weather interferes. NASA's backup dates are June 1 to June 6. There's a phone app to help with viewing, and those not on the East Coast can stream the launch and resulting clouds.

Watching a Blue Whale Get Vacuumed Is Surprisingly Satisfying

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About once a year at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, the time comes again to scrub the whale. Specifically, the jaw-dropping, 21,000 pound, life-size model of a blue whale that hangs from the ceiling of the Irma and Paul Milstein Family Hall of Ocean Life.

The 94-foot long model was installed in 1969, and has been one of the museum’s most famous attractions ever since. Made to look as though it is “swimming” through the space, it is only attached at the arch of its back, which appears to graze the ceiling. This clever design hides a sturdy iron framework that runs throughout the model. The bulk of the beast is relatively light fiberglass and polyurethane. All of the technical details aside, it convincingly looks like a whale is floating in the middle of the room.

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Prior to a renovation in 2003 that gave the whale a more accurate blue hue and replaced its bulging bug eyes with more natural ones (the original was based on dead specimens), the whale was a duller shade of gray. To this day, the whale takes on a grayer tone throughout the year as it get covered in a thin layer of crud. “Dust gets kicked up from all the visitors who come through here, and some of it settles on the whale,” says Dean Markosian, director of project management for the museum’s Department of Exhibition. And that’s why once each year, someone has to suit up and clean the thing.

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Despite being almost 50 years old (young for its species, which can live to over 100), the blue whale is still sturdy, but during the cleaning, it is treated delicately nonetheless. “It’s not really delicate, but there is a paint treatment on there to get the right look,” says Markosian. “Really we only use a vacuum with a soft brush attachment on the end. That’s really the only tool we need.”

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Even with the whale’s impressive surface area, the cleaning is carried out pretty much exclusively by one person equipped with a backpack vacuum and a cherry-picker lift. Moving around each part of the model, they are sure to get in all the nooks and crannies including under the fins, and in between all the ridges on its underside. As the vacuum passes over filthy spots, it sucks up the grime to reveal the vibrant, mottled paint job beneath. “The highest point is a bit tough to reach and the tail is a bit out of the way, but overall it’s just a question of covering all of the surface area, which there is a lot of,” says Markosian. It almost looks like the cleaner is repainting the model. And just like watching someone slowly cover a wall in paint, stroke after stroke, it is satisfyingly hypnotic. All told, it takes about two days to completely clean the whale, and not a drop of water is used.

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While the blue whale is the museum’s largest model, and cleaning it is no small thing, it may not even be the most difficult maintenance job in the museum. “Everything has its own challenges. Some of the dinosaur skeletons, which are also pretty large, have lots of surfaces, because of the ribs and vertebrae and all the individual bones, there’s lots of places you have to get to,” says Markosian.

Markosian says that the blue whale model doesn’t have an internal nickname or anything like that. But at least for today, everyone can call it “clean.”

The World's Smallest Violin and the Tiny Musicians Who Play It

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The world’s tiniest violin is an honest-to-goodness four-stringed, spruce-and-maple music-maker sized for the diaper-wearing preschool set—horsehair bow included. From tailpiece to tip of its scroll, the whole instrument clocks in just under a foot. And it is adorable. (For comparison, a full-size violin is 23 inches long: behemoth.)

It’s called a 1/64 violin—or “the sixty-fourth” according to luthiers, who make stringed instruments. Its slightly larger siblings are the 1/32 violin (13.4 inches long) and the 1/16 (15 inches). (The fraction comes from measuring the volume inside the instrument’s body.) Elissa Krebs, a Utah-based violin teacher and author of the Diaper Class Blog: Violin for Babies says they’re so small, they fit in a purse.

At the start of her career, Krebs, a mother of two—and soon to be three—miniature violinists, tried unsuccessfully to teach the violin to three and four year olds. Yet when she became a mother, she found herself wanting to try again—this time even earlier. “I was really obsessed with parenting. I read every single parenting manual I could find … When my little boy turned two, I was just like, howcan I teach him violin?

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Answer? With arts and crafts. Krebs got a butter box, cut it in half, wrapped it in brown paper, taped a paint stirrer down its middle, and drew a violin on it.

The “box violin” is a fairly standard choice for parents who are not aware of tiny violins. (When this writer wanted to learn the cello at age five, she was handed a doll trunk and a stick.) It’s also standard for parents who are aware of tiny violins but don’t trust their toddlers to differentiate between a musical instrument and a Tonka truck. Many teachers, too, think the box is best for teaching “set-up,” how to hold the instrument. Krebs was the latter two.

Her son caught onto his early lessons quickly—a little too quickly. Before his body was big enough for a 1/32 violin, she needed to graduate him to a proper noise-making instrument. “I knew there were 1/64ths out there, but I didn’t know where to find one. The violin shop that I use for all my students didn’t have anything that small.” Although she forbids her students’ parents from getting violins online (“You just don’t buy one off of eBay!”), Krebs, desperate, had to. “So I’m Googling and I found this shop set up from China. I don’t even know what it was, but for $50 they had a 1/64th size.” She ordered it.

“And it turned out, it’s basically a piece of garbage. It doesn’t really play.”


Although full-size violins have existed since the 1500s, it wasn’t until Dr. Shinichi Suzuki founded his musical pedagogy in the 20th century that anyone thought to outfit a tiny human with a real instrument.

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A child can learn music the same way she learns language, Suzuki believed: by ear, by immersion, and by imitation. Musical development should begin around the same time as language—which is to say, very, very young. “Mother-tongue approach,” he called his method. Many Suzuki violin instructors today say that yes, they’ve heard of colleagues who have worked with kids as young as two, but sigh when asked if they would take on the challenge themselves. Contemporary Suzuki “Pre-Twinkle” programs are filled with kids closer to age four. Most Pre-Twinklers saw their open strings on a 1/16th.

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As Dr. Suzuki and his method were becoming known across Europe and North America in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Stentor Music, a 120-year-old British manufacturer and distributor of stringed instruments, spotted an opportunity to expand—by shrinking. “My father really built [our] violin business into what it is today,” says Luke Doughty, the Product Manager at Stentor and heir apparent to this family business. Recognizing the budding demand for extra-small violins, the elder Mr. Doughty partnered with luthiers, string makers, and violin teachers to hack the 1/32 and 1/64 sizes. In the 1980s, Stentor’s tiny violins went to market.

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Today there are about 15 craftsmen in Stentor’s Taixing, China, factory trained to build these tiniest of instruments. By hand, they shape little planes of wood and whittle miniature F-holes and carve absurdly small bespoke wood bridges. They even lay purfling—inlaid decorative lines— in perfect parallel around the sixty-fourth’s edges. It’s a process that requires 80-plus man hours.

Beyond the cute factor, there’s not much reward. Stentor prices its smallest violins around $160. What parent would pay more for something a toddler will grow out of, or break, in months? So even though Stentor is the biggest player in the tiny-violin game, they produce just a few hundred each year. Distributed globally, real sixty-fourths are rare birds indeed.


“An eBay”—not a sixty-fourth—is what we should call the $50 job Elissa Krebs wound up with. That’s what violin dealer Harold Hagopian said in a shoebox of a garden apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. This is the shop out of which Hagopian rents his massive inventory of stringed instruments. He stocks 1/16ths galore and plenty of 1/32nds. But he only has one sixty-fourth.

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A Juilliard-trained violinist, Hagopian founded Virtuoso Resources eight years ago when he faced the same dilemma as Krebs: a tiny violinist for a son, but only eBays in the ether. eBays, he explained, are made of plywood, spray painted brown-ish, and lacquered in a slop of polyurethane. “You can drop it and everything and it won’t break. But there’s absolutely no sound.” In the height of industry invective, an eBay is this: a toy.

Unlike the real deal.

Hagopian lifted his sixty-fourth out of its case. He explained that his smallest violin is not a Stentor, but comes from his own label. Like Stentor’s instruments, however, it was crafted by hand in China from carefully sourced woods and varnishes.

It looks, feels, and smells just like a full-size violin. In the squeaky, unsure timbre of the tiniest violinists who play it, it even, sort of, sings.

Toxic Foam Is Fouling the Streets of Bangalore

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Foam blowing through city streets sounds like it could be a pleasant sight, but as the residents of a Bangalore, India, neighborhood are discovering, it can be incredibly unpleasant. During major rainstorms, a white foam has been forming on the surface of Varthur Lake, on the east side of the city. High winds then whip it up and blow it around what is known as the "Silicon Valley of India." The foam is disrupting traffic, but more than that—it's toxic.

That's because the foul-smelling foam, which can cause skin and respiratory problems, contains phosphorous from sewage and industrial pollution in the lake, according to CNN. "When sewage gets into the water body, nutrients, in the form of nitrogen and phosphorus, go in too," TV Ramachandra, a researcher at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, told CNN. "The nitrogen is taken by the plants in the water, while the phosphorus gets trapped in the sediment. The rainfall and the high wind velocity churn the lakes, and the phosphorus that is trapped in the sediment is released, creating the foam."

The city erected a wire fence in an attempt to keep the frothy plague contained, but it was overmatched by a large storm. This isn't the first time the city has experienced this problem—social media posts documenting the phenomenon date back to 2013. According to the Times of India, foaming has been a problem on two other lakes in the area. No other official action, besides testing for chemicals in the lakes, has been taken, according to news reports. So it looks like the toxic "snow" will continue to plague the streets.

A Look Back at the Mustache Cups That Kept Tea-Drinkers' Whiskers Dry

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It’s holiday season, 1896. A hairy situation: What do you get the man who has everything, including a luxuriant mustache?

The answer, according to the Wisconsin State Register’s “presents suitable for a gentlemen,” is obvious. What man wouldn’t want a mustache cup and matching saucer?

Being a man in the late 19th century required an impressive mustache, but drinking tea while mustachioed could be perilous. The heat of the drink melted mustache wax, sending the corners of the mustache drooping flaccidly onto either cheek. Mustaches, and their owners, were literally getting into hot water.

The mustache cup was the solution to this embarrassing problem. Almost certainly invented by the British potter Harvey Adams in the 1870s, it was so popular that within 15 years, he was able to retire. He patented a secret shelf, set inside the cup and shaped like a butterfly, with a hole to drink through. In short: sippy cups for adult men. These sold in great quantities, first in the UK, then throughout Europe. In time, they hit the U.S., on offer everywhere from Sears to the department store Marshall Field’s, later owned by Macy’s.

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The cups came in many shapes and sizes. Larger “farmers’ cups”’ held as much as a pint of tea, while dainty porcelain pieces were sculpted like conch shells or embossed with the name of the owner. Some were made of silver. Most had saucers to match. (A British newspaper classified of the time reads: ‘‘REWARD—If the Lady who STOLE A GENT’S MUSTACHE CUP on Saturday Night from the Little Dust Pan will apply at once, she can have the SAUCER FREE.”’)

Just 20 or 30 years earlier, there would have been little demand for mustache cups. Statement facial hair was uncommon—only one British Member of Parliament had any kind of facial hair at that time.

But British colonialism changed everything. The British Army, based in India, saw the vigorous whiskers of many local men and were quick to copy them. Stories differ: some say the clean-shaven British army simply wanted to emulate these impressively masculine mousers. Other accounts claim they struggled to maintain authority among their well-plumed Indian troops. Whatever the explanation, from 1860 to 1916, Command 1695 of the King’s Regulations and Orders for the Army was clear: ‘The hair of the head will be kept short. The chin and the under lip will be shaved, but not the upper lip…’ Mustaches swiftly became the norm in the army, at home in Britain, and, in time, across the Atlantic.

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Maintaining a mustache could be hard work. Cecil B Hartley, in the 1860 Gentlemen’s Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness, warned that mustaches must be kept “within limits” and “never be curled, nor pulled out to an absurd length. Still worse is it to cut them close with the scissors. The mustache should be neat and not too large.”

Rudyard Kipling’s heroines favored a tempered tash: in the short story “Poor Dear Mamma,” one tells the other that kissing a man who doesn’t wax his mustache is “like eating an egg without salt.” (The French author Guy de Maupassant, writing around the same time, said: “A man without a mustache is no longer a man,” and warned that their kisses “have no flavor, none whatever!”)

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But the golden age of mustaches, and mustache cups, came to a close during the First World War. It ended, as it had begun, in the British army: the former stipulation was scrapped, as men struggled to maintain good grooming in the trenches. More importantly, a hairy face made it near-impossible to get a decent seal on a gas mask. Industry shifted to serving the troops and the war effort, and the mustache cup fell first from favor and then from sight.

The irrepressible mustache wouldn’t stay down for long. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, it was back on screens and in magazines—think Salvador Dali’s two-whisker wonder, Clark Gable’s miniature handlebar. Men’s philtrums were cosy once again, but the mustache cup was all but forgotten.

These days, you’ll mostly find them in museums or private collections of Victoriana—or, unexpectedly, holding a cocktail at New York’s Dead Rabbit Bar in the Financial District. There, bar manager Jack McGarry sources antique examples from eBay and serves 1870s-style punch in them. Most of the clientele don’t have the mustaches to match their crockery, he says, though the mustache guard does do an excellent job at holding back the ice.

A Broken Kyiv Water Main Caused an Impressive Street Explosion

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Stand back! That street’s gonna blow! A recent video out of Ukraine shows the explosive results of a broken water main that tore through a seemingly safe bit of street.

In the video, which has popped up everywhere from Sploid to the BBC, an unidentified Kyiv parking lot can be seen, caught on a CCTV camera. In the background, a pedestrian strolls by. Suddenly, the asphalt begins to shake, before instantly bubbling into a dome and exploding, sending dirt, debris, and water flying everywhere. The burst was so powerful that it even managed to lift one of the cars that was parked on the edge of the bubble.

Judging by the video, the pedestrian seems unhurt by the surprising eruption, although the same can’t be said for the parking lot, which was essentially demolished.

The explosion was caused by a broken water main that sent a jet of water seven stories high. Despite the violence of the explosion, no injuries were reported.


Even World War II Had Its Weird Side

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In the vast archive of photos held at Britain's Imperial War Museums (IWM)—some 11 million images—there are some that defy all expectations of what life was like during wartime. One of the Royal Navy's mascots, Venus the bulldog, hangs out a porthole and wears a jauntily-angled hat. Spitfires are painted pink to blend in at sunrise and sunset. A woman adorns a cow with white stripes.

These are the lighter, unexpected, eccentric moments, enlivened with odd facts and unusual stories, that make up the new IWM book Weird War Two: Intriguing Items and Surprising Stuff from the Second World War. “Not only does this book offer some remarkable and often unbelievable anecdotes, but it highlights the tenacity of the people who lived through some of the darkest days in our history,” writes author Peter Taylor. “This book is proof that the truth is often stranger than fiction.”

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In many ways, the images in the book are testaments to the British wartime "Make Do and Mend" spirit—ingenuity, practicality, and positivity in the face of unimaginable dangers. Consider the woman painting the cow. This curious moment reflects a lesser-known aspect of Britain’s wartime blackout (when all the lights were extinguished at night to foil nighttime bombing raids): the dangers posed by cattle wandering around in the dead of night. The stripes helped make cows more visible to motorists.

In fact, Weird War Two has several pages devoted to inventive ways Britons coped with six years of dark nights, including a "kerbfinder" apparatus to help pedestrians stay on sidewalks and the Brighter Blackout Book, a compendium of parlor games for passing long nights. There are other innovations as well, such as inflatable tanks to trick the enemy (such decoys were used on all sides of the war), brightly colored gas masks for children, and shoe soles designed to leave barefoot prints (to resemble those made by local people in Southeast Asia).

Many of the photos also happen to include animals, which must have provided some levity and comfort in the dark days of the war. There are mascots, livestock, and work animals, but also circus elephants pressed into service, a paratrooper dog, a kitten in a hammock, and the good luck monkeys of Gibraltar. Even Winston Churchill himself gets into the act, in a photo with a baby and wearing one of the "siren suits" he himself invented—a kind of onesie or boilersuit that could be pulled on for warmth and modesty during a nighttime air raid. According to the book, he liked them so much he owned several, in denim, pinstripes, and velvet, and even wore them to meetings with world leaders.

Atlas Obscura has a selection of these images from the book, which contains scores more unusual objects and stories from the war.

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Found: Cat's Paw Print on a Roman Roof Tile

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About 2,000 years ago, a cat walked across a roof tile while it was still drying:

Recently, a team of archaeologists working along the route of a new road in Lincoln, England, found the tile among thousands of pieces of newly uncovered Roman-era material, Lincolnshire Live reports.

These clay tiles were made for the roof of a Roman house. They had been laid out to dry—when a cat sauntered by. A couple of years ago, a similar tile was found in Gloucester. According to the BBC, it's not unusual for animal (or human) prints to show up on Roman roof tiles, but it's rare to find one from a cat. Even 2,000 years ago, cats were fussy enough not to walk across wet clay, apparently.

Taipei's New 'Forest Bus' Is the Best Bus in the World

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Public transportation: It can be just fine. If all goes well, you get on the bus or train, it goes for a while, and you get off again. Feel-good maxims be damned, it's generally about the destination, not the journey.

But what about ... public plantsportation!?

Since last Wednesday, lucky commuters in Taipei, Taiwan, have had the opportunity to get around via the "forest bus"—an ordinary city bus that has been temporarily transformed into a verdant jungle.

"[Riders] can smell the scent of summer on the bus and ... feel messages from nature," the bus's designer, floral designer and artist Alfie Lin, told Agence France-Presse. All of the plants he chose are native to Taiwan and currently in season.

Although generally known for his minimalism and elegance, Lin went all-out for the bus, tucking wildflower sprigs into the window ledges, hanging epiphytes from handrails, and even covering the floor and seats with grass. In a video from AFP, plant and human passengers alike sway gently as the bus bumps down the road.

The forest bus is in commission through Sunday. It ferries its ecosystem along Route 203, which goes between several markets, a temple, an art museum, and a baseball stadium, Taiwan News reports.

今晨真的是搭对公车了! #森林公车 #forestbus #taipei #cnflower #flowerstagram #zeeXtaipei

A post shared by 🇨🇦🇻🇳🇲🇾🌏 (@piecesofzee) on

The bus is now also an attraction in itself. "There's no rushing on and off like a regular bus," commuter Larry Huang, who works at the museum, told AFP. "I feel like I'm at a party with friends." A beautiful, fragrant party that gets you where you want to go.

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.

The Wartime Spies Who Used Knitting as an Espionage Tool

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During World War I, a grandmother in Belgium knitted at her window, watching the passing trains. As one train chugged by, she made a bumpy stitch in the fabric with her two needles. Another passed, and she dropped a stitch from the fabric, making an intentional hole. Later, she would risk her life by handing the fabric to a soldier—a fellow spy in the Belgian resistance, working to defeat the occupying German force.

Whether women knitted codes into fabric or used stereotypes of knitting women as a cover, there’s a history between knitting and espionage. “Spies have been known to work code messages into knitting, embroidery, hooked rugs, etc,” according to the 1942 book A Guide to Codes and Signals. During wartime, where there were knitters, there were often spies; a pair of eyes, watching between the click of two needles.

When knitters used knitting to encode messages, the message was a form of steganography, a way to hide a message physically (which includes, for example, hiding morse code somewhere on a postcard, or digitally disguising one image within another). If the message must be low-tech, knitting is great for this; every knitted garment is made of different combinations of just two stitches: a knit stitch, which is smooth and looks like a “v”, and a purl stitch, which looks like a horizontal line or a little bump. By making a specific combination of knits and purls in a predetermined pattern, spies could pass on a custom piece of fabric and read the secret message, buried in the innocent warmth of a scarf or hat.

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Phyllis Latour Doyle, secret agent for Britain during World War II, spent the war years sneaking information to the British using knitting as a cover. She parachuted into occupied Normandy in 1944 and rode stashed bicycles to troops, chatting with German soldiers under the pretense of being helpful—then, she would return to her knitting kit, in which she hid a silk yarn ready to be filled with secret knotted messages, which she would translate using Morse Code equipment. “I always carried knitting because my codes were on a piece of silk—I had about 2000 I could use. When I used a code I would just pinprick it to indicate it had gone. I wrapped the piece of silk around a knitting needle and put it in a flat shoe lace which I used to tie my hair up,” she toldNew Zealand Army News in 2009.

A knitting pattern, to non-knitters, may look undecipherable, and not unlike a secret code to begin with. This could cause paranoia around what knitting patterns might mean. Lucy Adlington, in her book Stitches in Time, writes about one article that appeared in UKPearson's Magazine in October 1918, which reported that Germans were knitting whole sweaters to send messages—perhaps an exaggeration.

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“When the German authorities carefully unraveled such a sweater, the story went, they found the wool thread dotted with many knots. By marking a vertical door frame with the letters of the alphabet, spaced an inch apart, the knots could be deciphered as words by measuring the yarn along this alphabet and marking which letters the knots touched.” Adlington writes, adding that the magazine described this as "safer, and not apt to be detected." As with many things spy-related, getting the proof and exact details on code knitting can be tricky; much of the time, knitters used needles and yarn as a cover to spy on their enemies without attracting suspicion. Knitting hidden codes was less common.

The Pearson's account of code knitting seems a bit convoluted, but the rumors were not pure fantasy. Because women were encouraged to knit socks, hats, and balaclavas for soldiers during many conflicts, including the American Civil War, and the World Wars, knitting and textile work was a common sight—and one that could be easily used to the spy’s advantage. In Writing Secret Codes and Sending Hidden Messages, Gyles Daubeney Brandreth and Peter Stevenson note that after Morse Code was invented, it was soon realized that string or yarn suit it well. And “an ordinary loop knot can make the equivalent of a dot and a knot in the figure-eight manner will give you the equivalent of a dash.”

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The most famous example of knitting in code comes from fiction; in A Tale of Two Cities, a bloodthirsty French woman named Madame Defarge knits coolly among the audience while the guillotine beheads French nobles, and zealously creates a series of stitches to encode names of nobles that will be executed next. “Despite involvement of Madame Defarge to take up knitting as a source of code, the use of knitting in espionage has nonfictional roots in the United Kingdom during the Great War,” writes Jacqueline Witkowski in the journal InVisible Culture. During the same time that the UK banned knitting patterns for fear of hidden messages, British Secret Intelligence agents hired spies in occupied areas who would pose as ordinary citizens doing ordinary things, which sometimes included knitting.

Madame Levengle was one such woman, who “would sit in front of her window knitting, while tapping signals with her heels to her children in the room below,” writes Kathryn Atwood in Women Heroes of World War I. Her kids, pretending to do schoolwork, wrote down the codes she tapped, all while a German marshal stayed in their home. The Alice Network, a collection of spies and allies in Europe who were experts in chemistry, radio, photography and more, employed “ordinary people who discovered unusual but extremely effective ways to collect information,” Atwood explains.

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In many cases, just being a knitter—even if you weren’t making coded fabric—was enough of a cover to gather information, and this tradition continued decades later during World War II. Again in Belgium, the resistance hired older women near train yards to add code into their knitting, to track the travel of enemy forces. “This enactment led to the Office of Censorship’s ban on posted knitting patterns in the Second World War, in case they contained coded messages,” Witkowski writes. Knitting used by the Belgian Resistance during World War II included dropping a stitch, which forms a hole, for one sort of passing train, and purling a stitch, which forms a bump in the fabric, for another, which helped the resistance track the logistics of their enemies. Elizabeth Bently, an American who spied for the Soviet Union during World War II and later became a US informant, used her knitting bag to sneak early plans for the B-29 bombs and information on aircraft creation.

Female spies during the American Revolutionary War also used the “old women are always knitting” stereotype to their advantage. Molly “Old Mom” Rinker, a spy for George Washington during the Revolutionary War, sat on a hilltop and pretended to knit while spying on the British, according to An Encyclopedia of American Women at War. She then hid scraps of paper with sensitive information in balls of yarn, which she tossed over a cliff to hidden soldiers right below, under the noses of the enemy.

Knitting, spying and secret messages so often go hand-in-hand that knitters around the world have figured out ways you, or the knitter in your life, can make your own secret knitting codes. Non-spying knitters make gloves and scarves from the Dewey Decimal system, Morse code, and binary programming language for computers, treating knits and purls like zeros and ones. The possibilities are so apparently endless, it might even be worth learning to knit to give it a try. Plus, if you do pass on knitted code, you’ll be joining a longstanding tradition of textile-making spies.

A Former 7-Eleven Owner Opened a Rival Store Across the Street Named 6-Twelve

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The former owner of a South Boston 7-Eleven has opened a competitor across the street from his old store. His intention is simple: to run the 7-Eleven out of business.

The owner, Abu Musa, named his new convenience store "6-Twelve," a one-up of the 7-Eleven name, which references the chain's original operating hours of 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. Musa's store operates from 6 a.m. to 12 a.m.

A few years after launching his 7-Eleven franchise in 2005, Musa began to run into problems. He told The Boston Globe that the company forced him to cook hot dogs and taquitos, which few people purchased, even though they were losing him money. Then a consultant for the chain pushed him to add pizza and chicken wings to the menu and to hire an extra employee to staff the hot-foods counter.

He resisted, and the tension reached its height in 2014 when 7-Eleven accused him of "shady practices." An ensuing legal battle ended with an undisclosed settlement in October of that year.

At his new 6-Twelve store, Musa is rejecting the 7-Eleven business practices that he believes lost him money. Most notably: 6-Twelve will not serve hot food.

He is not, however, the first to open a convenience store with the 6-Twelve name. One exists in North Carolina and another in New Jersey.

Still, the nascent rivalry is making news in Boston. Channelling popular sentiment, one of Musa's customers described his reaction to The Boston Globe: "I thought it was the greatest thing I’ve ever heard—a gang fight over Ho Hos and lukewarm coffee."

Watch Lightning Strike in Slow Motion

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Taking a photo or video of lightning requires unreasonable patience, which is why no one's managed to capture high-speed video of a natural lightning strike hitting a building—until now. Researchers in Brazil set up two high-speed cameras and managed to record not one but three lightning strikes on lightning rods in São Paulo. They published their findings in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

The two cameras shot at top speeds of 20,000 and 10,000 frames per second, which allows the researchers to stretch out the several milliseconds of each bolt of lightning into a video that clearly shows every step of the process—from the descent from the clouds and the bolt that rises up from the building, to the obliterating flash of the full strike and the plasma that lingers afterward.

Yeah, it looks cool, but there is scientific value in the videos, too. They will help researchers better understand how lightning rods work, which is important for anyone concerned with protecting people and property from severe weather. The rods attract lightning strikes and safely dissipate their intense energy—as much as a billion volts. Engineers can use this new data to better position lighting rods to maximize the areas they protect.

In Search of the Elusive Pink-Headed Duck

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More than a century ago, in the wetlands around Kolkata, India, there lived a shy type of duck with a bright pink head. It was named, appropriately, the pink-headed duck. The males of the species had rosy pink bills and pink plumage covering their heads and necks. Some of them had light, blush-colored feathers; others were as bright as Pepto-Bismol. They were never particularly common, but hunters spotted them and on occasion bagged them while hunting bigger game. One of the last times anyone saw a pink-headed duck in the wild, it was in the mouth of a hunting dog, who delivered its carcass to Charles M. Inglis, curator of the Darjeeling museum, outside the Indian city of Darbhanga in June 1935.

Officially, the pink-headed duck is listed as critically endangered. The last confirmed sighting in the wild was in 1949. Though there have been reports of pink-headed ducks here and there in the decades since, many people now believe the birds are not just rare and shy, but extinct.

Richard Thorns is not among them. For years now, he has been searching for the pink-headed duck, and, since 2009, he has traveled six times to Myanmar, where he believes a flock of about 50 birds might live. Thorns, an enthusiastic, 53-year-old Englishman whose look can range from scholarly nerd to rugged adventurer, first learned about the pink-headed duck around 1997, from a library book on vanishing birds. At the time, he was working as a shop assistant. As he read about these stunning, rare birds, and the elephant grasses and lotus flowers that they lived among, he had a realization. “I didn’t want to be a shop assistant anymore,” he says. “I decided to look for the pink-headed duck. So I did, and I’ve been after it ever since.”

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From his journeys in Myanmar, Thorns has developed a theory about exactly where the pink-headed duck could be hiding, and this fall he plans to return for a seventh search, as part of the Search for Lost Species. The campaign, created by Austin-based nonprofit Global Wildlife Conservation, will attempt to relocate a handful of more than 1,200 species considered “lost to science”—long unseen, unrecorded, and feared extinct. A century ago, pink-headed ducks could be found in Myanmar, and Thorns believes that it’s very possible the ducks are living there still, in parts of the country long closed to outsiders, out of sight of birdwatchers and conservation organizations.

To some, there’s little point in a quixotic search for a lost duck. These birds supposed to be extinct, after all. “The people who hope for the pink-headed duck are people prepared to think in a different way,” Thorns says. “It’s like a detective story. Have we just missed it? Or is it hidden where no one can go?”

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Thorns is not the first to go looking for the elusive waterfowl. In the 1980s, Rory Nugent, an American adventurer and writer, heard about the duck from a friend. By two months later, he had sold his apartment, had put his belongings in storage, and was on his way to India. Like Thorns, Nugent believed he could find the duck in a part of the world troubled by violent conflict and usually off-limits. He waited for months for permission to travel the Brahmaputra River in Assam, which he spent searching for the duck in the bird markets of Kolkata (then still called Calcutta), in the towns of Sikkim, and on the border of India and Tibet. Finally, he and Shankar Barua, an artist and photographer whom he met in New Delhi, set out down the Brahmaputra and scoured the river for weeks. He never got a clear glimpse of his quarry, but by the end of the journey Nugent insisted, “We’ve seen it. We just didn’t notice it. … They’re not extinct, just hard to find.” His book about the adventure ends with a reported sighting and the author heading back upriver.

Part of the mystery surrounding the pink-headed duck is why it disappeared to begin with. Most species are driven to extinction by habitat loss, hunting, or predation by an invasive species, but there’s no obvious cause for the pink-headed duck's disappearance. Though its habitat has diminished and it was hunted, other birds have survived the same circumstances. Since the pink-headed duck was always relatively rare, it is possible to imagine the bird is still hiding somewhere out there. Nugent’s report, another from Myanmar in 1968, and other more recent sightings are not considered robust enough to count as evidence for the duck's continued survival. But stories of pink-headed duck sightings keep popping up, and some of the most recent come from the exact area of Myanmar where Thorns has been searching.

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In 1910, a pink-headed duck, now stuffed and held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, turned up at a bazaar in Mandalay, one of the country’s largest cities. Since then, unconfirmed reports of the ducks have come from the country’s northern districts. In the early 2000s, two conservation groups—BirdLife International and Myanmar’s Biodiversity and Nature Conservation Association (BANCA)—began surveying rivers, lakes, and wetlands in the region for pink-headed ducks.

In December 2004, the team was in the Nawng Kwin wetlands, north of vast Indawgyi Lake, when they met a young man named Saw Aung, who said he was familiar with the duck. One morning, the group went out into the grasslands, and Saw Aung flushed a flock of ducks from a wetland pool. A few dozen mallards rose into the air, and as three foreign birdwatchers peered through telescopes, one duck "broke off from the flock, climbed quite high, circled for 2 to 3 minutes, and then descended into the grassland,” the team later wrote in a published report. The three men agreed: The bird, medium-sized, had a pale head and neck, a dark body, and dark upper wings. It looked a lot like a pink-headed duck.

In that part of the world, though, there is another bird with similar features, the spot-billed duck. The men discussed the features that would distinguish one bird from another—in particular, white feathers on the underside of the wing, a characteristic of the spot-billed duck. Had they seen those feathers? One of the three observers thought he had. Though another thought it was “very likely” they had seen a pink-headed duck, the other two weren't so sure. They couldn’t rule out the possibility that they’d seen a variety of spot-billed duck. “On balance, therefore, this record should be treated as a possible but unconfirmed sighting of Pink-headed Duck,” they wrote. The thrilling moment had passed too quickly for any semblance of certainty.

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Before beginning his search, Thorns was not a serious birder. “My brother is the person to talk to there,” he says. “He is a real hotshot birder.” But once he heard of the pink-headed duck, he never forgot about the bird, its beauty, and the beauty of its habitat. “I inherited my grandfather’s instincts as an explorer,” he says. “I think a lot of it was ... I wasn’t doing very much. I didn’t really feel fulfilled. The pink-headed duck is like some sort of mythical thing. It is so iconic and beautiful.” The idea of finding something missing for so many years gave him a mission.

In his first visits to Myanmar, Thorns tried to keep himself and his purpose as well concealed as the fowl he was searching for. Before 2011, the country was still ruled by the military junta that had been in power since 1962, and even today the government restricts the movements of foreign travelers in certain parts of the country. Myanmar is rich in jade, gold, and other treasures. Some of the most resource-rich areas are off-limits, and in the north ethnic independence armies are still in conflict with government forces. But for pink-headed duck seekers, those same areas are some of the most promising targets, full of marshy, undeveloped, restricted habitat. To find the duck, Thorns figured he would need to sneak into places he technically was not supposed to be.

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Thorns made his way north to visit towns on the Ayeyarwady River, following historic reports, and to Indawgyi Lake, where the 2004 expedition made its possible sighting. In Bhamo, he sought out a man named Sein Win. Thorns had read in a Lonely Planet guide that this man was locally famous for having built his own helicopter. “I figured that if he was eccentric enough to have built a helicopter, he might not be too averse to being my guide,” Thorns says. They snuck farther upriver than the government allowed, but they did not go unnoticed. One time they had to wait on the boat until night fell to sneak downriver, hide in a temple, and pretend they were coming back into town from the south. Another time, Thorns traveled to a promising lake only to find it was on the wrong, off-limits side of the river. He had to offer a boatman “a million kyat”—hundreds of dollars—to take him across.

All that risk-taking had an impact. On his third trip, in 2012, the conflict in the country’s north had heated up, and sneaking upriver on a boat was no longer an option. So Thorns rented a bicycle and tried to pedal out of town. “Looking back at it now, it was a mad thing to do,” he says. On the small road, two kids roared by on a motorbike, and as Thorns fell, his hand collided with their vehicle. A well-meaning woman brought him ointment, but he knew the hand was broken. Even today he can’t open it properly.

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That year Thorns spent part of his trip relaxing on the beach and in Mandalay’s public baths, but it was a breakthrough of sorts. He had first learned about the pink-headed duck in his early 30s, and he was then in his late 40s. He had worked for more than a decade as a driver, mostly for a local hospital, and never had much money. Financing the trips required single-minded purpose—between each he worked as much as possible to pay off debts from the previous one and save for the next. It’s been a very long time, he says, since he’s had girlfriend. Though he had some financial help from an anonymous backer, over the years, he estimates he has spent £12,000—the equivalent of $15,000 at today’s exchange rate—of his own money on his fruitless search. It wasn't wise, but it was worth it, he believed. If he could find the pink-headed duck, he could change history. But he needed to change his strategy. He resolved to stop sneaking around and embrace the authorities.

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Through BANCA, Thorns built relationships with guides and travel agencies to help him get permits to travel to the more remote places on his list of potential pink-headed duck hotspots. On his most recent trip, in 2016, he had an experience that convinced him he might be getting closer. On his last day in the field, he was in a village where he’d been in 2010. Thorns and his guide were showing their bird book to locals, and one man came into the café. He pointed to the pink-headed duck and said that the bird was very rare.

“Has he ever seen it?” Thorns asked, through the guide and interpreter, Lay Win.

No, he hadn’t, the man replied. Thorns probed further. Had he never seen it at all?

Oh, he had seen it elsewhere, the man said. It was five or six years ago ... up in the wetlands.

“I was there in 2010; I was just asking the wrong person in the village,” says Thorns. “He said that it was very rare and extremely shy. You can only find it in a certain part of the wetlands.”

That night, Thorns and his guide were sitting by the water, having a beer. Thorns asked the guide, whom he describes as “very cautious guy,” if he thought the man had really seen the duck.

“Yes,” he said. “I think he did see it.”

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After consulting with BANCA, Thorns now believes that the pink-headed duck may visit that area in the wet season before migrating elsewhere, to a valley where outsiders are not allowed, for the rest of the year. “The people who were reporting the pink-headed duck were not tourists or birders,” he says. “They were hunters, travelers, farmers. They’re all people who have no choice but to go into a swamp in the rainy season.” He now plans to return to Myanmar this fall, starting in the last week of October, when traveling the country is “like being in a washing machine,” to continue the search. He is working with Global Wildlife Conservation to fund the trip, but his team is also raising funds on its own. This time, Thorns also plans to hire an elephant to help flush the birds out and increase the chance that the pink-headed duck will briefly reveal itself.

If Thorns and his companions on this next journey, naturalist and writer Errol Fuller, photographer John Hodges, and Hodges’s partner, Pilar Bueno, do make a sighting, they may need to keep the exact location secret. “I can’t emphasize enough how sought after a pink-headed duck head would be,” Thorns says. “You have to be very, very careful.”

In fact, it’s possible that a European birdwatcher has already seen the duck in the same area Thorns will search. When Thorns visited the area the first time, he was told about a Dutch man who came each year, for five years, and hired an elephant, in search of the pink-headed duck. On his fifth visit, he came back from the wetland triumphant—he was sure he had seen the bird, he told locals, but had not managed to take a picture.

“You don’t know how you will behave” upon finding the duck, says Thorns. “I remember once finding an opal in this old abandoned heap of junk. There was a dividing line—I went from not having an opal to having an opal in my pocket. But these things happen. It’s hard to know how you’re going to react.” If all goes well, it will be the same scenario. One minute, no one will have definitively seen the duck for decades. The next, Thorns will have conclusively identified, photographed, and rediscovered the pink-headed duck. Known again to science. No longer lost.

“If anyone is going to find the pink-headed duck," he says, "I want it to be me.”


The World's Largest Floating Solar Farm Is Officially Online

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On the same day that President Donald Trump announced that the United States will be exiting the Paris Climate Accord, there is at least one ray of environmental sunshine. The world’s largest floating solar energy farm (for now) has officially been fired up in China.

Located in Huainan, China, the massive new array of solar panels floats over what was once mining land. In the past this region was powered by coal mined in the area, but those mines eventually collapsed and over time, filled with rainwater. The resulting lake was left largely unused, until now.

Floating on waters that are up to 10 meters deep in some places, the modularly designed farm consists of six sprawling flotillas, all connected to converter boxes that turn their intake into usable energy. The whole setup is specially designed to resist the salt and humidity that comes from being on the water, while evaporative breezes from the water's surface help keep the panels cool, reducing the chances of a failure. The floating solar energy farm also provides power without using up valuable land or damaging the ecosystem.

Now that it has finally been turned on, the farm will be able to put out 40 megawatts of power. As Curbed notes, the world’s largest wind turbine, located in Denmark, can only pump out around 9 megawatts. A previous claimant to the title of world’s largest floating solar farm, a facility that went live in 2016 in London, was only capable of producing a little over 6 megawatts.

Europe's Lead Pollution Dropped to Zero Only Once in 2,000 Years

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Long before the factories of the Industrial Revolution started belching out black soot and carbon dioxide, humans found ways to mess up the environment. Lead mining and smelting, for example, have been fouling Europe's air and water for about 2,000 years. And because of all those years of pollution, we don't know what the background level of atmospheric lead—before humans started adding to it—actually was.

That's an important data point when it comes to developing environmental and public health policy, which assumes that background levels are both greater than zero and also generally safe for humans. It was long thought that preindustrial lead levels represent this baseline, but new research suggests that it should be much, much lower. Scientists from Harvard University and the University of Maine examined an ice core taken from the Alps to determine that background level and see how atmospheric lead pollution changed over time. In 2,000 years they noticed just one large drop in lead levels—in the middle of the 14th century, when the Black Death swept through Europe. At that time, the lead concentration in the atmosphere basically dropped to zero, which should perhaps be considered the new "natural" and "safe" level of lead contamination in the air.

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“In different parts of Europe, the Black Death wiped out as much as half of the population. It radically changed society in multiple ways," said Alexander More, a historian at Harvard and a coauthor of the report, in a press release. "The mining of lead essentially stopped in major areas of production. You see this reflected in the ice core in a large drop in atmospheric lead levels, and you see it in historical records for an extended period of time.”

The researchers observed two other notable dips in lead. One came around 1460, corresponding to another epidemic. And the other, more recent, drop began in the 1970s, as a result of regulations banning lead in gasoline, among other policy changes. Hopefully it won't take another catastrophic epidemic to bring lead levels close to zero again.

National Doughnut Day Began With an Ingenious Woman on a WWI Battlefield

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Each year, on the first Friday of June, Americans celebrate National Doughnut Day with free doughnuts at Krispy Kreme and Dunkin’ Donuts and, sometimes, with doughnut bouquet deliveries. But as a Salvation Army video demonstrates, the history of the holiday is also the story of World War I—and of the woman who made doughnuts an American staple.

In 1938, capitalizing on the growing doughnut craze, the Salvation Army created National Doughnut Day to raise funds and to promote its efforts "provid[ing] spiritual and emotional support for U.S. soldiers” during the First World War.

After the United States entered World War I in 1917, a group of 250 predominantly female volunteers journeyed to the front lines of France and moved into tents, offering soldiers food and clothing. There, many soldiers began requesting something sweet to eat, but because the volunteers lacked access to ovens, one woman—Lt. Colonel Helen Purviance, an Indiana native who enrolled in the Salvation Army in 1906—came up with a solution: doughnuts.

Using little besides flour, sugar, baking powder, cinnamon, and canned milk, Purviance and another volunteer, Margaret Sheldon, began making dough and frying it in oil. “I was literally on my knees when those first donuts were fried, seven at a time, in a small pan,” Purviance said later. “There was a prayer in my heart that somehow this home touch would do more for those who ate the donuts than satisfy a physical hunger.”

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Because there was so little proper cooking equipment, the women needed to improvise: they used wine bottles as rolling pins, a “lamp chimney to cut the doughnut,” and “the top of a coffee percolator to make the hole.” When the pans ran out, they fried doughnuts in soldiers’ helmets.

The sweet treats were an instant hit with the soldiers, who consistently crowded around the Salvation Army tents looking for more. Whenever they saw Salvation Army volunteers, they celebrated the arrival of the “doughnut girls.”

Astoundingly, an April 1938 New York Times article reported that Purviance “cooked no fewer than 1,000,000 doughnuts for the United States fighting forces,” describing her “cooking doughnuts under shellfire with a cutter made out of an evaporated milk can and a shaving-stick holder and a grape-juice bottle for a rolling pin.”

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American World War I soldiers were hooked, and when they returned home, they hungered for more doughnuts, which had previously been a niche food. Purviance turned them into an American classic. According to the book Donuts: An American Passion: “the Salvation Army was among the strongest charitable forces in America—and their chosen totem, the donut, was an ingrained symbol of home.”

Soon after, an entrepreneur named Adolph Levitt capitalized on the burgeoning interest in doughnuts, debuting the first doughnut machine in 1920. A little over a decade later, he was making $25 million a year in sales.

Despite her success, after the war Purviance stopped making doughnuts because they reminded her of the suffering she witnessed. When the New York Times reported on her in 1938, she had only fried doughnuts twice since returning home.

Is This Swiss Village Too Beautiful to Photograph?

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The mountain village of Bergün is—like many such villages in Switzerland—alarmingly picturesque. Green, tree-studded hills give way to swelling mountains. Small white houses dot the landscape and, every once in a while, a bright red train trundles through.

Unlike its fellow villages, though, Bergün recently engaged a bit of introspection. At a municipal assembly meeting this past Monday, May 29, villagers passed a law banning tourist photography.

Their stated intention? Cutting down on FOMO. "It is scientifically proven that beautiful holiday photos on social media make the viewer unhappy because they can't be there themselves," the village tourist office wrote in a statement translated by The Local.

Вы просто не можете не поставить лайк 💗за совершенно безумную историю про то, каков он #беспощадныймаркетинг в Швейцарии! 🙈🙈🙈 . «Научно доказано, что красивые фото из отпуска, опубликованные в соцсетях, делают других людей – тех, кто просматривает снимки, – несчастными, так как сами они не находятся в этом месте», – говорит администрация и запрещает фотографировать свою деревню из-за её исключительной красоты. 😂🤦🏻‍♀️ . Туристическое ведомство не отрицает, что это часть маркетинговой стратегии, но тут же уточняет, что запрет введён на законодательном уровне и имеет юридическую силу. Отныне тех, кто фоткается в деревне Бергюн, штрафуют. . И лично меня не столько возмущает сам штраф, как учёные, которые занимались исследованием инстаграма на наличие несчастных людей при виде крутых фотографий 😂 . Вывод какой? Фотографий из отпуска не будет!!! #снимитеэтонемедленно

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"We don't want to make people outside the community unhappy by sharing social media photos of our picturesque landscape," the mayor, Peter Nicolay, later added.

After the vote, the village moved forward quickly with the plan, and instituted a five-franc fee ($5.19) for shutterbug scofflaws. The tourist office removed photos from Twitter and Facebook, and began taking them down from the official website as well. They even installed at least one "No Photography" sign, at a scenic location.

There's no better way to make someone want to do something than to tell them they can't. The initial announcement spawned three days of diverse, widespread press coverage, by outlets from The Sun ("Swiss village bans tourists taking photos as it's TOO PRETTY for Instagram") to the International Business Times ("Swiss village bans cameras in bid to promote happiness online").

When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on. -Franklin D. Roosevelt

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All this is to say that the publicity stunt worked, well, beautifully. Three days after the ban was passed, the village overturned it.

"The commune never thought this initiative would generate so much media interest," Nicolay said, in a new statement. "It seems there is huge interest in Bergün."

There certainly is now. If anyone has photos of Nicolay high-fiving members of the tourism office, please post them.

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.

Found: Giant Mounds and Craters Across the Arctic Seafloor

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In the polar reaches of the Arctic Ocean, in northern Bjørnøyrenna, the seafloor is bumpy, pockmarked mess. Much of the seabed in the region is smooth, but not in the area that’s the subject of a new paper published in Science, where it is dotted with giant mounds and craters.

Karin Andreassen, of University of Tromsø - The Arctic University of Norway, didn’t expect to observe many features there, according to The Atlantic. But when she and her team studied the area, they found more than a hundred giant craters, ranging from about a fifth-mile to a half-mile wide. They were deep, too, about 100 feet into the seafloor. They “generally have an oval shape,” Andreassen and her colleagues write in their paper. On the edges of the craters, the team found strange mounds of similar size and shape—more than a half-mile on a side, about 65 feet high, and semicircular or elliptical in shape.

What had happened to give the seafloor such weird goosebumps?

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In the paper, Andreassen and her colleagues describe a likely origin: methane burps. Thousands of years ago, this area of the ocean was solid ice, and as movements of the Earth below pushed methane up, the gas would have been frozen in the bedrock below the ice.

Then conditions changed. The ice sheet melted away, and that “the rapid transition of the seafloor from a subglacial to marine environment,” the scientists write, “degraded conditions conducive to hydrate stability.” In other words, the methane turned back to gas and accumulated closer to the surface of the seafloor. In some cases, the gas caused the bedrock to buckle up into the giant mounds. In other cases, the pressure burst the mounds open and created craters.

Similar structures have been found on land, in the melting permafrost in northern regions. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and if it's released into the atmosphere by a warming climate (from land or the bottom of the ocean), it could speed up an already runaway process.

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