In the early 1960s at garden shows across the United States and in the U.K., you’d see more than your usual roses and begonias—you could see science at work. Giant peanuts. Huge tomatoes endlessly growing from a single stock. Multi-colored flowers on a single bush, or seeds that promised to grow an elusive blue rose. Genetic anomalies abounded in displays of flowers arranged to resemble protons and neutrons, advertising a new wave of gardening techniques. Horticulturists lovingly called these “atomic gardens” or “gamma gardens.”

Each of the plants in a gamma garden was a mutant, grown with the help of radiation. They were part of a new, experimental trend in horticulture that was meant to devise new plant breeds and revamp the then-sordid reputation of nuclear technology. From the 1950s into the 1970s, radioactive plants grew both in labs and in amateur gardeners’ backyards.

The mechanism of a gamma garden was simple: radiation came from a radioactive isotope-laden metal rod, which jutted out of the garden’s center and exposed the plants to its silent rays. Radiation slowly bludgeoned the plant DNA like a hammer and changed how genes were expressed.

The largest, usually lab-based gamma gardens could span up to five acres, with plants arranged in sections, like a pizza. The plants nearest to the radioactive source died, and the next farthest grew tumors—but in the next group the mutant action began to show. Once the radiation caused a desirable trait, like fatter tomatoes or larger rosebuds, the mutant seeds were bred to form more super-plants or were irradiated again to further change the DNA. In home gardens, enthusiasts normally used pre-irradiated seeds and bred their plants for mutated traits, but hardcore gamma gardeners obtained a governmental license to use cobalt-60, a solid radiation source, to irradiate plants and seeds.

According to Helen Anne Curry in Evolution Made to Order, “From the start, the assumed appeal to growers of using irradiated seed was less the promise of prettier or easier-to-manage garden plants and more a shared curiosity about the effects of radiation and the aspiration to produce something novel.” The promise of new plants was not lost on the horticultural hobbyist, though; by 1961, Home and Garden shows across the United States and the U.K. were decorated with showy displays of “Atomic Age Gardens,” with multi-colored begonias and giant peas on display, and instructions for building your own radioactive garden nearby.

While new and exciting plants were a focus of atomic gardening, the trend started with scientists who aimed to build a new relationship between nuclear energy and the world. Nuclear fission had a deservedly terrible reputation post-World War II, but from the 1950s through the early 1970s scientists were interested in using radiation for good. There must, they believed, be a way for our power over the atom to produce some positivity in the world, and the solution? Mutant plants. Atomic gardening could speed up evolution, and seemed like a solid answer to the problem of food shortages and plant disease.

The idea caught on: an August 1955 New York Timesarticle exalted the possible benefits of the new science with the subheadline “Irradiated Seed Will Make The Desert Bloom,” highlighting scientists in Geneva and the U.S. who were pioneering some of the research. The “implications for a food-short world were said to be ‘enormous,’” the article claimed. A Boston Globe story from 1961 asked, “Would you like to grow rose plants that might produce blossoms of several color on the same bush? Or would you prefer 10-foot marigolds or perhaps tomato plants that yield as many as 120 fruits per plant?“ Promotions and contests, such as the New Discovery Project, offered cash prizes of $1000 for the “most unusual” plants reported to them. While scientists were the atomic-gardening pioneers, with labs in the U.S., U.K., Japan, India, Costa Rica, and USSR, gardening enthusiasts soon caught wind of the possibilities new plant varieties posed.

In the U.K., gardening enthusiast Muriel Howorth was inspired by the activism and science of gamma gardening after experimenting with and growing an unusually large “x-rayed peanut” plant, a gift from atomic-gardening researchers she called her “science friends”. Paige Johnson wrote in her paper Safeguarding the Atom that “in spite of being both a woman and a non-scientist Howorth wrote her own entry in the Who’s Who of Atoms,” because of her experiments, and she was serious about creating an international movement. In 1959, Howorth formed the The Atomic Gardening Society, “a cultural body for the guidance of atomic plant-mutation experimentation,” made news appearances, sold irradiated seeds and published a book to help others get started on their own atomic journeys called Atomic Gardening for the Layman.

Because of Howorth, over 300 gardeners soon set up experiments in the U.K. to achieve new and intriguing plants, sometimes under healthy competition for Howorth’s “Mutant Peanut Award,” based on the almond-sized peanuts she’d previously grown. Howorth staged conventions for atomic gardeners to meet, and even gained Albert Einstein as a patron for her new organization. Johnson wrote that Howorth “moved smoothly and of her own volition into the sphere of science and technology,” bringing hundreds with her into a newfound love of science, gardener or no. At one event called Atoms for Women, Howorth gathered 250 women to attend a play meant to encourage science interest born of her gamma gardening passion, where 13 “bosomy” Atomic Energy Association members “in flowing evening gowns gyrated gracefully about a stage in earnest imitation of atomic forces at work.”

Gamma gardening had its own movement in the United States, where oral surgeon and gardener C.J. Speas fashioned a radioactive experimental lab from a concrete bunker in his backyard, and sold “atom-blasted” seeds of radishes, sweet corn, and tomatoes to the public. (His man-in-the-moon marigolds later inspired a play.) According to Curry, Speas would go to garden shows in the morning, standing near atomic gardening displays while selling his seeds and giving advice to aspiring gamma gardeners. Speas’ seed packets boasted impossible-sounding results, including 120 tomatoes harvested from a single plant, but also advertised disease resistance and novel vegetable shapes.

Genetically modified foods have a precarious public opinion today, though genetically modifying foods is something humans have technically been doing since at least 7800 BC. Before gamma gardens, farmers and scientists throughout the ages modified plants using selective breeding to enhance a characteristic over a few plant generations, or through chemically induced mutations. Radiation was, as John James wrote in 1961 at The American Rose, “something to be excited about.” Now, your average hobbyists could see the process of genetic variance at home. The results could be unpredictable; “don't expect miracles every time,” he warned—but in the meantime, enjoy the experience. By 1962, garden shows began featuring “atomic energized” tomatoes, and the new radiation-bred seeds and vegetables soon made their way to the supermarket.

Howorth, Speas and many scientists and enthusiasts were not just trying to earn a quick buck—they were making an earnest attempt to change and help the world. Alas, while the initial hype of irradiated plants was strong, scientists grew frustrated with the haphazardness of the genetic mutations, through a few atomic gardening labs still exist today. There was no way to control which genes would pop up in a gamma garden or what their effects could be. The public had also grown wary of the relationship between radiation and cancer, and began worrying about the radioactive tools they used to produce their plants. While Howorth remained a staunch supporter of the gamma garden method until her death in 1971, scientists turned to the more accurate transgenic method of plant-gene splicing, which removes or replaces a few very specific genes to produce, say, disease-resistant plants, a method used in GMO produce today.

Still, the descendants of some plants from the atomic garden exist on our supermarket shelves and bouquets. Breeds of beans and heirloom begonias are mixed in with newer genetically modified foods and the more traditionally bred plants of yore. While the controversy over GMO foods is currently high, gamma gardening certainly contributed to a more positive post-war reputation for nuclear energy. And, of course, those against the idea can at least feel secure that their neighbors are not creating a radioactive hotbed of their backyard.

Trampolines are fun. Full stop. But spaceball looks way funner.

When he first developed the commercial trampoline in the 1940s, gymnast George Nissen thought the recreational device would take over the world. While it didn’t quite become so all-encompassing a phenomenon, his vision did give birth to countless hours of backyard entertainment, an Olympic event—and the weird, failed sport of spaceball.

Nissen built his—and the world’s—first trampoline from a sheet of canvas and rubber strips cut out of a tire inner tube to entertain the kids at a summer camp where he worked during the 1930s. The invention, predictably, was a hit among the kids, so he and some friends took their show on the road. They traveled the country and beyond, performing a comedy tumbling act, to get the word out about how fun the thing was. After landing on the term “trampoline” while doing a show in Mexico City (“trampolín” is Spanish for "diving board"), Nissen and company were able to market their rebound apparatus to schools and YMCAs all over.

He also got the military interested in trampolines to help train pilots and other personnel in the experience of weightlessness. In fact, according to an exhaustive story on the West View Trampoline Community site from 2003, Nissen sold so many trampolines to the military that he had to delay enlisting in World War II, just to fulfill the orders. By the end of the war, the trampoline had become a minor phenomenon, inspired imitation brands, and allowed Nissen to run a trampoline company full-time. He continued to travel the world to spread the gospel of the trampoline, and by the 1960s, “jump centers” began popping up across America. At these facilities people put bunch of trampolines in pits so jumpers could bound around without worrying about falling off. Nissen saw still more potential in his invention.

In the 2003 story, Nissen is quoted as saying, “If you've got 50 kids out there on trampolines, well, after a couple of weeks 25 of them are going to be better than the other 25. And the ones that are not so good at it drop out. Later you'll find there are maybe 12 left. And pretty soon there's just a hard core." Essentially, he was concerned that kids would get bored or grow out of trampolining. His solution was to make a game of it. And lo, spaceball was born.

Nissen took his original trampoline mechanics and twisted the design into a special trampoline that acted as the game’s court. Nissen—never a fan of the common round trampoline design—made the spaceball trampoline a rectangular bouncing surface that curves up at either end, which provided the two players with an elastic backstop that they could use to propel themselves forward. In between them was a net wall with a hole in the top. The object of the game was to bounce up and toss a ball through the hole to the opponent’s side of the tramp. If he or she failed to catch it, the thrower earned get a point. Put simply, it was one-on-one, bounce-enhanced proto-volleyball.

Nissen always championed the trampoline's effectiveness as an exercise tool. NASA ran a study in 1980 that proved that trampolining provides an excellent workout, and according to the Oxford Dictionary of Sports Studies, spaceball was based in part on techniques they were already using to train astronauts. Spaceball combined aerobic exercise and manual dexterity with balance and body control. And it still looks really fun.

Despite its appeal, spaceball never made it into orbit. Nissen demonstrated the game around the world, and at one point even got some members of the Jackson 5 to play it on television. Spaceball picked up a minor following, but it never really caught on. Nissen eventually decided that he wanted to refocus on regular trampolines, and a few other gymnastic inventions, including new kinds of pommel horses and balance beams.

A few gyms kept their old spaceball tramps around, and occasionally units are put up at county fairs. Recently, a $700, scaled down spaceball trampoline, reimagined purely as a kid’s game, was available from upscale tchotchke purveyor Hammacher-Schlemmer, though it no longer appears to be available. Other than that, spaceball has been all but forgotten.

Nissen passed away in 2010, but before he died he said that spaceball was his all-time favorite creation—despite his inability to get it off the ground. But it still has a chance. With a name like that, it may have just been ahead of its time.

Turns out, listening to podcasts on your morning commute is nothing new. In 1931, the British cinemagazine Pathetone Weekly—which documented odd fashion trends during its run from 1930 to 1941—premiered a new invention: the Radio Hat.

In it, a man waiting for the bus decides to listen to the radio—via his straw hat, from which two large antennas poke out.

As a Pathetone Weekly title card read:“They say there’s nothing new under the sun—this little French idea to while away the bus waits, must surely be!”

According to an August 1930 issue of Modern Mechanix, a Berlin engineer invented the hat, which allowed its wearer to “listen to the Sunday sermon while motoring or playing golf, get the stock market returns at the ball game, or get the benefit of the daily dozen while on the way to work by merely tuning in.”

This was not, however, the first radio hat. The technology appears to date back to the early 1920s; a Library of Congress photo taken “between 1921 and 1924” features a man with a radio hat similar to Pathetone Weekly's. Ultimately, neither hat seems to have made much of a splash among the public—but a radio hat designed two decades later certainly did.

In 1949, a Brooklyn novelty store introduced what they called “The Man From Mars Radio Hat.” A flurry of articles promoting it followed, and as did a temporary buying frenzy.

In one article, LIFE Magazinecalled the Man From Mars Radio Hat “the latest and silliest contribution to listeners who feel compelled to hear everything on the air.”

Concerned that radio hats weren’t adequately playing into stringent gender roles? Never fear: LIFE consoled female readers that “more ladylike radio hats are already being designed, involving ribbons and feathers.”

But despite the momentary success of the Man From Mars Radio Hat, sales dropped off in the early 1950s. By the time it disappeared from the market in 1955, a new invention in portable radio technology was making the rounds: the transistor radio.

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

Pollinators are big business—farmers in the United States spend about $656 million every year to rent bees to pollinate crops such as clover and almonds. But once those hives are set out on the edge of a field, farmers have no way of knowing—short of sitting in the field and watching the bees at work—whether they're getting their money's worth. With pollinator populations on the decline, it's more important than ever to know what they're up to. Researchers have finally come up with an ingenious solution for tracking these tiny farm hands: listening to them.

In a lab, a team of scientists from Missouri documented the distinctive buzzes made by two bumblebee species. They then set up iPad minis and microphones in three meadows in Colorado to listen for those signature buzzes to track pollinator activity. They compared their results to visual counts and photographs, and published their results in the journal PLoS One.

"Eavesdropping on the acoustic signatures of bee flights tells the story of bee activity and pollination services," said Candace Galen, a biologist at the University of Missouri and coauthor of the report, in a press release. An algorithm developed by Galen's team was used to analyze the field recordings and determine the number of bees in a field, whether the bumblebees had actually pollinated plants, and which plants are likely to eventually develop fruit. For farmers that rely on pollinators, such data can help them plan for crop surpluses or shortages, and find out the most effective pollinator species to rent or attract for certain crops.

Tyler Tyler misses a crab pot, which is understandable. The seas are already rough this morning, and the sky-blue float marking his pot vaults up and down with the swells. With one hand on the throttle and the other on a gaffing pole, he guns the diesel on his crabbing boat, the Ruth, and whips it around for another pass. Glad Tyler Sr., grandfather and lifelong waterman, doesn’t interfere. This isn’t his boat; he’s just here to lend a hand. Tyler Tyler’s gotta learn.

Their family was among the first to inhabit Smith Island, Maryland’s last offshore settlement, in the 17th century. Since then, Tyler men have fished the Chesapeake Bay. They were born on the island, raised children on the island, and died on the island. Like the other islanders, they spoke a dialect unique to Smith—a slow, sly tongue that, due to the island’s isolation from the mainland, evolved inward rather than outward, building on its own eccentricities rather than absorbing the linguistic tics of the mainland.

Tyler Tyler wears polarized Oakleys, a camouflaged beanie and a faint, fuzzy beard. Were he more like his peers, Tyler would have left the island to live high and dry on the mainland. But he’s not—“I’m not much of a people person,” he says—so he decided to try his luck on the water.

But this isn’t his grandfather’s bay. Crabbing abundance has turned to austerity. Inconsistent harvests and environmental regulations have forced many to abandon the job—more a way of life for men like Glad Sr.— while start-up costs have largely warded off a new generation of crabbers.

Smith Island, once a hub for the crabbing industry, has been forced by environment and economy to contemplate a future without the watermen.

Smith Island sits 12 miles off the coast of Crisfield, Maryland. By boat—the only way to get there—Smith first appears as a low, gap-toothed fuzz of trees on the horizon. Get closer and you can make out homes, hulls, the white steeple of a church.

The roads here are too small for two cars to pass abreast. Most of the houses could use a fresh coat of paint, but there are lights on in the kitchen, clothes flap on the line, and flowers bloom in pots on the doorsteps. Islanders greet tourists with a warm smile and wave, and lest you be disoriented by your trip back in time, a communications tower helps fix you physically and temporally.

In the general store, you can sample Smith Island’s great cultural icons: its cake, and its dialect. The Smith Island Cake, Maryland’s official dessert, may be heavy, with nine layers of sweet cake pressed between layers of frosting with geologic density, but the dialect is heavier. The vowels aren’t vowels, they’re troughs between the peaks of a wave, sloping and wide. Every day, the island elders drift in to pick up a few sundries, maybe order something from the grill, but mostly to chat.

At first, it sounds like a parody of a southern accent, the vowels comically elongated. Down becomes dane. There becomes thaar. Nearby Holland’s Island is pronounced Hallans Ahlan. You can caulk a boat on Smith Island, but it’ll sound like you’re corkin it.

This pronunciation is often and inaccurately described as “Elizabethan,” or “Shakespearean;” in fact, wrote Natalie Schilling, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University, the innovation is original to Smith. In her 2003 article “Fighting the Tide,” she notes: “It seems to have sprung up on the island itself, and it did not attain widespread usage until the mid-twentieth century.”

The island’s most distinct linguistic innovation is “talking backwards,” Schilling writes: the art of saying the exact opposite of what you mean. If She ain’t pretty none, she is. If he ain’t headin’ it none, he should probably ease back on the throttle.

Schilling wrote in an email that while some aspects of the dialogue are eroding, others are proving surprisingly resilient: according to data collected from 2015 to the present, she said, backwards talk is alive and well on Smith Island.

Men like Hoss Parks, a 56-year-old native, tone it down for outsiders. If he doesn’t: “You’ll leave outta here saying, ‘What the heck did he just do?’ I don’t want to leave you baffled,” he says.

If you ask him to baffle you—even if you insist—he’ll just shake his head. “I’m sorry,” he says, “but I’d have to sit with pretty well my own kind to get it right, because every time I look at you I want to laugh, and that ain’t right.” He isn’t being mean, and his chuckle is warm: if you aren’t from here, it’s obvious. You just ain’t from here.

Parks owns a television, which is tuned to an old black-and-white movie, but it’s a recent addition. He doesn’t own a computer. He figures the dialect comes from this isolation, both physical and cultural: “You’re around with no TV all your life, and no radio, and just reading books and talking to your neighbors. If you haven’t got much to say, you ain’t got much to say.”

It takes a few days to realize that Parks might be talking backwards.

According to the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, the Chesapeake Bay will rise between 2.3 and 2.9 feet within the next 100 years. Dr. Donald Boesch, a climate scientist with the department, says this could render Smith Island uninhabitable “before the end of the century.”

Smith Islanders reject sea level rise with near-unanimity. Their denial isn’t founded in red-state rancor, though. They don’t blame liberal scientists. They just don’t see it.

“I don’t go to bed worrying over it,” said Eddie Somers, a native islander and president of Smith Island United, a citizen’s group. He references nearby Spring Island, a flat pad of marsh that can’t rise more than two feet above the bay: if the seas were really rising, wouldn’t they swallow Spring? Even Holland’s Island, nominally submerged, still has a few stands of hardwood trees marking it on the horizon.

But even if the seas aren’t rising, he says, they’re certainly eroding the island. Strong storms and floodwaters released shave feet of Smith’s beaches and marshes, bringing the waterline closer and closer. When the state opened up Conowingo Dam in March 2011 to prevent the Susquehanna River from flooding, the water rushed down the Chesapeake and overtook Smith Island, bringing the sea to Hoss Parks’s front door in Ewell.

In 2013, after Superstorm Sandy ravaged the northeast, the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development earmarked $1 million to buy out Smith Islanders. They rejected the offer and formed Smith Island United to present a counteroffer. Instead of abandoning Smith, they said, the state should invest in the island, and fortify it against the erosion.

Working alongside state planners, Smith Island United produced the Smith Island Vision Plan, an ambitious and optimistic roadmap that envisions a full-on renaissance for the island. Under the plan, new jetties will protect the island’s major settlements. Tourism will boom during the summer, and more year-round residents will stick out the Chesapeake winters. The ranks of watermen will swell, even as they work with state authorities and conservation organizations to sustain the fragile blue crab population.

It’s wide-eyed, almost utopian, but Somers reels it in: nobody on the island wants to be St. Michaels, a mid-bay town in the style of Hyannis. “We don’t want 300 condos,” he says. “We want to stay just the way we are. We like our quiet lifestyle.”

But Boesch trusts his data, and the data is clear: if current warming trends persist, the front yards of Ewell will eventually be swallowed by rising seas. “The rate is relatively slow, compared to the natural fluctuation of the tides and wind effects, so it is hard to ‘see,’” he says, “particularly when one doesn’t want to believe it.”

If Smith Island sinks, Hoss Parks says: “I’ll be here when it goes under. And I’ll just say”—he raises a hand in salute—“God save the queen, glug glug glug.”

By the power of the Schwartz, a Hollywood auction company has put some iconic props from the Star Wars-parody Spaceballs on sale.

Fans of the popular Mel Brooks film will be pleased to know that they can now try and buy the original Dark Helmet … helmet, worn by Rick Moranis in the film, as well as a hero model of Lone Starr’s (Bill Pullman) flying space Winnebago, the Eagle 5, which are being sold by auction house Profiles In History. Both the over-sized helmet and the miniature ship were used on screen in the film, and are some of the most iconic props from the production. The Eagle 5 even comes with little miniature versions of Lone Starr and his companion Barf (John Candy).

According to C|Net, bidding for the helmet starts at $8,000, and bidding for the Eagle 5 model starts at $20,000, so getting your hands on these pieces of comedy history won’t be cheap.

Other pieces of sci-fi memorabilia featured in the same auction include such classic items as screen-used Spock ears, one of C-3PO’s feet from The Empire Strikes Back, and a Sleestak costume from Land of the Lost. As Dark Helmet once said, “Good is dumb.”

During the last glacial period, when much of North America was covered in vast, thick sheets of ice, most of the continent's trees were relegated to warmer latitudes in Mexico and along the Gulf Coast. When the glaciers slowly began to retreat about 18,000 years ago, the land opened up to occupation—from humans, who migrated in from the north, and the trees, which followed more temperate climes from the south.

Individual trees may be rooted to one spot, but populations of trees shift or migrate over time. Seeds are dispersed by wind, water, or animals, and saplings survive anywhere the soil, light, and moisture conditions are right. As those conditions change, new trees occupy new places, a process that takes place over many generations. It can take hundreds or thousands of years for a tree species' range to shift across a continent. But climate is changing today faster than it did at the end of the last ice age, and trees are once again on the move—northward and uphill.

The changes can clearly be seen in historical and modern photographs of some mountains—tree lines are clearly hiking upslope, and this might seem like a clear and predictable change. But trees are part of complex ecosystems built on soil's mixture of nutrients, chemistry, and microbes. There are, in fact, countless factors beyond temperature that influence where a tree population takes root.

“One of the major questions is, can [trees] move fast enough with how quickly temperatures are rising due to human activity now,” says Michael Van Nuland, an ecologist at Stanford University. A recent report, coauthored by Van Nuland when he was a doctoral candidate at the University of Tennessee, suggests there may be unexpected underground obstacles for some trees. “Our study specifically suggests that in certain cases, the soils might help them move quicker, but in other cases it might actually slow their movement.”

One critical factor in the success of a sapling is the the soil microbiome—the community of tiny organisms in the ground (just like the human microbiome) that can help or hinder a young tree’s growth. Scientists aren’t sure precisely which microbes—there are more in a teaspoon of soil than there are people in the world—are involved. But Van Nuland and his colleagues found that they are important to the successful growth of trees, and that elevation is a significant factor in the soil microbe community and its impact. The team collected narrowleaf cottonwood trees and soil samples from around the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, and brought them back to Tennessee. They planted trees from several elevations in a variety of soils and tracked how they grew. Some soil came from the tree's original elevation, and some from uphill. They also planted trees in sterilized soil, free of microbes.

The trees from lower elevations didn’t do so well in soil from higher elevations, despite being the same species as trees that thrive up high. “They seem to grow better really close to their parents, in soils really close to their parent trees,” says Van Nuland. "They prefer to interact with the microbes beneath their parents." But that, he points out, is problematic because those low-elevation trees will face the most warming in coming years, and they may be squeezed between warmer temperatures and less welcoming soil.

But not all trees are doomed. “Trees near the tops of their elevation range limits, they don’t seem to need our help really at all,” Van Nuland says. The trees in the study that already live at high elevations grew just fine in soils from even higher up the mountain. Foresters and biologists, he adds, should focus on “trying to figure out how we can start coaxing the lower-elevation trees to move uphill.”

“What we could do is begin to identify which microbes or which communities are better for trees in certain locations and think about applications of those as some sort of soil probiotic, for example, to help give them the ability to persist and move into new areas,” says Van Nuland. But just like with probiotic treatment in humans, there is still a lot to learn. Soil microbiomes are impossibly diverse and complex, but Van Nuland is optimistic about the potential of the field.

“We’re discovering all this new information about the microbes that live on humans and inside humans,” he says. “That is matched by how much we’re learning about what’s going on below ground, who is there, and what sort of effect they have on plants and important tree species above ground.”

The fate of the largest organisms in a forest, it seems, depends heavily on the smallest—underground and out of sight. Understanding this relationship will be increasingly important if we want to help ecosystems adapt to the world we've made for them.

The great white shark, which is capable of killing humans with a single bite, does not ordinarily prowl British waters. They, like surfers, prefer slightly warmer water. But other sharks do, including more than 40 different species, ranging from demon catsharks, which eat a lot of shrimp, to spiny dogfish, which can grow to over three feet in length and have very sharp teeth.

Then there are smoothhound sharks, one of which recently attacked a surfer, who the BBC identified as Rich Thomson, and left him with a bloodied hand and, perhaps, a new respect for the ocean. Thomson said he was surfing off Bantham when the shark first latched onto his thigh, which was protected by his wetsuit. Thomson then punched the animal, and cut his hand in the process. The smoothhound then swam away.

"I went home and told my wife I was late because I had been bitten by a shark," Thomson told the BBC. "She said 'I've heard that one before', but it was true."

The attack appears to be the first ever documented in waters off England, though The Independenttook a moment to chide "a number of media outlets" for reporting that it definitively was the first ever shark attack in English waters. An expert they spoke with said that fishermen handling sharks "commonly encounter small nips" while other attacks "maybe" happened but weren't reported.

Listen: If you're a fisherman and you catch a shark and that shark bites you, that isn't a shark attack so much as an occupational hazard. And if you were bitten by a shark in the wild and you didn't report it, well that would be rather surprising. Thomson, it's fair to say, has earned his place in history (almost certainly as the first surfer bitten by a shark there), though he says it was mostly just an unfortunate accident.

"It won't stop me going back in the water and it shouldn't stop anyone," Thomson told the BBC. "I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

In 1950, Robert C. Baker, a professor at Cornell University, published Cornell Cooperative Extension Information Bulletin 862, which changed summer in upstate New York forever. Entitled “Barbecued Chicken and Other Meats,” the bulletin describes a simple vinegar-based sauce that can be used to turn broilers—chickens raised for their meat rather than their eggs—into juicy, delicious barbecue heaven.

At the time, this was an innovation. When Americans ate meat, they preferred beef and pork, and the poultry industry was just beginning to increase production. As an agricultural extension specialist, part of Baker’s job was to convince Americans to eat chicken. Before he passed away in 2006, he invented chicken bologna, chicken hot dogs, chicken salami, and, most famously, a prototype chicken nugget.

Cornell Chicken Barbecue Sauce, though, was his first great triumph, and what he is best known for in upstate New York. All summer, every summer, Cornell Barbecue Chicken features at backyard parties and family get-togethers. Younger generations of Finger Lake residents don’t even recognize this as a regional speciality so much as the default way to cook chicken outdoors. “Every fund-raising event, every fire department cookout, every little league barbecue, must serve this recipe or nobody would come,” writes barbecue expert Meathead Goldwyn.

Baker’s recipe is simple enough—oil, cider vinegar, poultry seasoning, salt, pepper, and egg—and delicious. Goldwyn “fell in love with this recipe in a hurry,” and Saveurcalled the result “one of the juiciest, most complex barbecued chickens we've ever tasted.” Gary Jacobson, of the Texas BBQ Posse, writes that “the sauce has been a barbecue mainstay for me” for 40 years.

The egg is a key ingredient. It helps the sauce stick to the chicken, as the albumin denatures and binds to the chicken skin, and it keeps the oil and vinegar emulsified together. The version of the recipe Cornell keeps online adds a caution about egg safety and suggests that anyone making a large batch of sauce “can use pasteurized eggs for an extra margin of safety.”

In the 1950s, this wasn’t a concern. The original bulletin notes that leftover sauce can be stored, refrigerated, for several weeks. But locals took that even further. A family friend of mine, Julie Carpenter, recalls her first encounter with the chicken, as a senior at Cornell, with a boyfriend who grew up in the area. “It was the best chicken I ever had,” she writes. When she heard about the recipe from her boyfriend’s dad, she worried about the raw egg but figured the vinegar would kill off any microbes. “I then watched him strain the used marinade, boil it, put it into a jar, add a bit more vinegar and seasoning, and put it back into the fridge,” she writes. “I almost puked. When I mentioned my concern, he said, ‘Oh no. That's the beauty of this marinade—the vinegar kills everything.’ This didn't stop me from eating it again in the future. And I met many other folks who did the same thing.”

The way Baker told the story, he first came up with the idea of the chicken barbecue when he worked at Penn State and the governor came to visit. When he went to Cornell a short while later, he started putting on barbecues regularly, enlisting his family and the young men who worked with him at Cornell as basters and turners. “My father was quite a promoter,” says Dale Baker, the eldest of Baker’s six children. “He would have me and others go out in high school and cook for groups.” Roy Curtiss, who worked with Baker as a Cornell undergraduate, remembers killing and butchering chickens the basement of Rice Hall, on campus, freezing them, and using them all summer long to create barbecues for 50 to 100 people.

“We’d charge them a buck and half, for a roll, and ear of corn and half a chicken,” Curtiss says. All summer, they set up for church groups and farm bureaus, toting collapsible grates in the back of a pickup truck, all around the Ithaca area. “It was very popular,” he says. “People would hear about this, and think it was a great alternative to hamburgers and hot dogs.”

One of the key features of Baker’s published strategy was that it scaled. These big barbecues required batches of sauce held in 12-quart pans, and the helpers used wallpaper brushes to baste the chicken. “We had these arrangements—a person on either side. You had grates that you could put one on top of the other and flip them all at one time,” says Curtiss. “It was a real production. You would have people going down the line basting, and you would have guys turning, and you would repeat the process. The pits were sometimes 50, 60 feet long.” Curtiss once worked a barbecue for 5,000 people. He also helped create the chart in Bulletin 862 that shows how to scale up an entire chicken dinner, including suggested sides of coleslaw, scalloped potatoes, coffee, and ice cream from 5 to 300 people.

Perhaps the most ambitious use of the sauce, though, has been at Baker’s Chicken Coop, the barbecue stand Baker started in the 1950s at the New York State Fair. (His daughter still operates it today.) “We would cook, when I was younger, 22, 23,000 half-chickens in 10 or 11 days. It was a pretty big thing,” says Dale Baker. When he finished college, he and his dad estimated how many half-chickens they had cooked up until that point in time. It was more than a million.

Later in his career, Baker created products that were mass-produced and sold at grocery stores around the country. Cornell Chicken Barbecue Sauce never made it that big, though. “At one point in life, he put it in aerosol spray cans and tried to sell the spray cans,” says Dale. “They had to do a fair amount of research to get it so it wouldn’t clog up .... That was not a money maker.” Still, for Baker, creating the sauce and the chicken barbecue tradition of upstate New York was one of his greatest accomplishments. “I think for him this was the thing he probably took the greatest pride in,” says Dale. “It went way back to the start of his career. For whatever reason—if you asked him, I think chicken barbecue would have been top of his list.”

The RV Investigator is trawling the depths of the ocean in Australia’s eastern abyss, surveying 14 spots over the course of a month. Recently, as National Geographic reports, the team pulled up from a depth of about 2,500 m, a Bathysaurx ferox, a.k.a. a deep-sea lizard fish.

Because they live so far down in the ocean, these fish are rarely seen by humans, and they are a sight to behold!

Their large eyes and sharp teeth are characteristic of ambush predators, the Investigator’s Asher Flatt explains. If humans rarely see them, they also have a hard time finding each other, so these fish have both male and female reproductive organs to maximize reproductive opportunities. They can grow to about two feet long. One more point for the oceans-are-terrifying team?

Atlas Obscura catalogues the most unusual, surprising, and amazing places around the world, thanks to the discoveries shared by our intrepid community of travelers and explorers. There are now more than 11,000 incredible hidden wonders listed in the Atlas, and we've plotted each and every one of them on this interactive map.

The possibilities are vast, from the Icelandic witchcraft museum to the tree goats of Morocco, to Galileo’s middle finger, to the Skeleton Lake of India and thousands of other architectural oddities, natural wonders, catacombs and crypts, and unique collections across the world's continents and oceans.

Start exploring, and see what rabbit holes you may stumble down. And if you know of an incredible place that we missed, you can add it to the Atlas here!

As visitors to Colorado's Great Sand Dunes National Park are learning, nature has its own version of everything—including water parks. According to 13 Action News, it's surge flow season at Medano Creek, which means tons of revelers are enjoying a galloping ride across the dunes, propelled by wide, gentle sheets of water.

As a video by the National Parks Service explains, Medano Creek is a meltwater creek, fed by snowfields up in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. The water rushes downhill until it reaches the dunes, where it spreads out and laps across the sand.

"Surge flow occurs when underwater sand ridges build up" and break down quickly, causing miniature waves, says ranger Patrick Myers in the video. This makes it great for consistent, low-key bodysurfing and tubing, all with a mountainous backdrop.

Medano Creek is one of the only places in the world that experiences surge flow, and this year's wet spring means the waves might get pretty gnarly—"In wet years, waves can surge up to a foot high," the NPS reports.

You can check up on the presence of surge flow, as well as other relevant conditions, at the National Park Service's Medano Creek page. The best news right now? "Mosquitoes have not yet emerged in any significant amount." Cowabunga!

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.

Some connoisseurs have no qualms dropping hundreds (if not thousands) on a bottle of good whiskey (or whisky). But expensive bottles are not always full of expensive liquor. The spirits inside may not have spent the right time in the right barrel in the right place to earn their labeled age or composition, or the name bourbon or Scotch. Counterfeit whiskies may not fool experts, but most drinkers wouldn't be able to taste the problem. Fortunately, researchers from Germany and the Netherlands have come up with a new way to weed out these weaselly whiskies.

The technique, published this week in the journal Chem, relies on fluorescent polymer dyes that react to different compounds in whiskies. The polymers glow when exposed to fluorescent light, and the intensity depends on factors such as whether the Scotch is double or single malt, or whether the whiskey was distilled in Ireland or the United States.

"Each single polymer's response to the whisky would not be very useful, but if you combine them, they form a really unique pattern," said Uwe Bunz, a coauthor of the report, in a press release. The team tested the method on 33 Irish, Scottish, and American whiskies, and each sample produced a distinctive combination of glowing polymers—a unique chemical fingerprint. The technique can't be used to identify an unknown spirit, but it can compare a sample to a known brand—perfect for catching counterfeiters. The technique might someday be applied to other beverages or even in other scientific fields, but for now, it's a helpful way to make sure a bottle of brown liquor is worth an outrageous price tag.

In the early 20th century, a scam product ruffled a few feathers in the American poultry community: a pendulum that could “instantly determine the sex of humans or animals, whether dead or alive.”

The so-called “sex detector” was essentially a piece of string with a small weight at the end. It had a few variants, according to a 1922 Scientific American article entitled “Sex Detector Exposed”: some of the weights were “nickel plated iron,” while others were “small wooden ball[s], gilded and filled with red lead."

But all of the sex detectors worked the same way: you held out the device in front of an animal, or, preferably, an unhatched egg, and it would move according to the creature’s sex. The sex detector would “indicate male by a pendulum-like motion, female by a circular motion, and sterility by remaining at a standstill," reminiscent of popular divination techniques in which pregnant women used pendulums to determine their baby's gender.

Created by the aptly named company Sex-Detector Laboratories, which was based in San Francisco, the device debuted in numerous poultry magazines in 1920.

The advertisements made no shortage of boasts: the company claimed that their product was developed as “the result of twelve years of patient research and experimentation now made public for the first time.” “Doctors are dumb-founded… at the unfailing accuracy of this miraculous device,” they wrote in an ad for The Poultry Item, arguing that “poultrymen who have used [it] have found it to be infallible in the testing of eggs” and that “a Sex-Detector should be in every home and will last forever.”

In The Leghorn World, they called it “something new under the sun for poultrymen,” the “crowning achievement of modern times,” and “the absolute annihilator of all previous scientific research.” In fact, the sex detector worked even in strange situations: “a wire can be passed through a keyhole into another room—the Sex-Detector will instantly indicate whether a man or woman is holding the other end.”

Because of these extravagant claims, a subsequent account reported that the sex detectors “caused much excitement in the poultry world.” Many farmers hoped to use them to determine the sex of their eggs before they’d hatched and to test the fertility of their stock.

Apparently, the sex detector’s growing prominence in the poultry community inspired competition. Soon after its debut, ads for a knock-off “sex indicator,” this time from the Janos Company in New York City, began popping up.

In fact, this seems to have triggered somewhat of a war in the scam-sex-tester world: in retaliation, Sex-Detector Laboratories began posting all-caps warnings in poultry journals: “BEWARE OF IMITATIONS. THIS IS THE ONLY ORIGINAL SEX-DETECTOR in the WORLD and the FIRST to be put on the market, and we guarantee all of ours, none original unless they come from the SEX-DETECTOR LABORATORIES.”

Regardless, the devices quickly fell from grace. Newspapers like the American Poultry Journal debunked them, and many others followed suit.

The Farm Journal tested the sex detector on a group of unhatched eggs and on “the office cat,” which was male, but which the detector claimed was female. A writer for The California Poultry Journaldescribed how an acquaintance purchased the sex detector and “invited in some friends to see the wonders it performed.” At one point, the group used the detector, inexplicably, “on two silver dollars.” When the device claimed both dollars were male, “the owner of the dollars remarked that was odd, because each dollar had a woman on one side and an eagle on the other.”

As news spread that the sex detectors didn’t work, a reader of The Poultry Craftsman lashed out at the newspapers: “a person cannot be blamed for answering an advertisement for a thing like that. He naturally looks to the owners of papers to keep fraudulent advertisements out.”

By July 1922, the poultry community seemed to have come together in opposition to the fraudulent devices. The Poultry Tribune reported: “all the other leading poultry journals are refusing to carry [the sex detector] ads.” Soon after, the devices faded into obscurity.

Still, maybe it wasn’t all for nothing—the book Pendulum Magic for Beginnersclaims that, because of the 1920s sex detector hysteria, pendulums enjoyed a small “resurgence of popularity” in the United States.

A man, his dog, and a duct-taped boat were plucked from the Gastineau Channel near Juneau, Alaska, on Wednesday June 7, according to the U.S. Coast Guard. The unidentified man, who was not wearing a life jacket, was headed toward Bishop Point, about 10 miles down the channel from where he was picked up. The leaky boat and its passengers were "transferred" to Juneau's Douglas Harbor, the Coast Guard said.

The Coast Guard did not say anything about why he chose this method of transportation, or the origin of it, but they did provide a picture, in case you've never seen a man and a dog in a duct-taped boat.

Let's have a look at him. He is a regular man in shades, sitting cross-legged on a manifestly unsafe vessel, steadily paddling toward a (possibly impossible) goal through what is surely very, very cold water. He's Sisyphus, which is to say he is all of us, which is to say that maybe one day you, too, will be lucky enough to be plucked from a ceaseless grind and deposited back on safer shores, your life reoriented, your reality altered, and your perspective wide enough to see the wisdom of a life jacket and a bigger boat.

The New York Public Library, the Queens Library, and the Brooklyn Public Library have just introduced a novel program to turn New York's subway system into a traveling virtual library: straphangers can now download and read books for free during their commutes. It is a high-tech iteration of the long tradition of the traveling library. In the 19th century, for example, lighthouse keepers waited for sailors to bring them wooden boxes of books. During the Great Depression, in parts of Mississippi and Louisiana, books were delivered on flatboats. And then there’s the familiar bookmobile though it was originally known by a far less catchy title: the "perambulating library."

One of the earliest mobile libraries was the Warrington Mechanics’ Institution Perambulating Library in London. In January 1860, Illustrated London News noted the difficulty “of getting working men to wash their faces and come to the library bar and ask for a book.” Despite this, in its first year readers borrowed 12,000 volumes.

Librarian Mary Titcomb is widely credited with introducing a horse-drawn book wagon in the United States—to rural Maryland in the early 20th century. “The book goes to the man, not waiting for the man to come to the book,” she declared. The arrival of motorcars in 1912 made the process a little easier (on the horses, at least), and the bookmobile as we know it was born.

Traveling libraries have also been popular globally. The first mobile library in South Asia was a two-wheeled cart introduced in India in 1931. Today there’s a camel library that serves communities in northeastern Kenya. And in Colombia, there is the Biblioburro, a library transported by two donkeys.

In the United States today, bookmobiles are declining in number but diversifying in scope. They now offer DVDs, classes, and, in some cases, computers and e-readers. To celebrate the legacy of the bookmobile and its modern incarnations, Atlas Obscura has this selection of vintage images.

There are about as many ways to be buried as there are ways to die. You can be put into a giant egg, or frozen and shaken into dust, or even broken down by caustic chemicals. And if you're looking for something a bit more peaceful (and you aren’t thalassophobic), you can now be built into a living ocean reef.

Florida-based Eternal Reefs offers an oceanic burial option that lets you add your cremains to a perforated dome called a “reef ball,” which will sit at the bottom of the ocean and become a home for local sea life.

“We refer to ourselves as the surf and turf of the natural burial movement,” says George Frankel, CEO of Eternal Reefs, who jokingly describes his position at the company as “chief cook and bottle washer.” As Frankel puts it, the concept behind reef balls was to ask right from the get go, “If I was Mother Nature, what would I like to work with?”

While the business is centered around disposing of the deceased, it began as a project between a couple of diving buddies. Co-founders Don Brawley and Todd Barber knew that the coastal reefs around Florida needed some help to keep them from deteriorating. Their solution was to develop reef balls, which are made of a specially formulated concrete designed to encourage the growth of new reefs with minimal effect on the existing environment.

The reef balls also had to be something that could survive the violent influence of underwater storm currents. “If it moves it’s useless,” says Frankel. So the hollow reef balls weigh anywhere between 800 and 4,000 pounds, and have a domed shape with large perforations all across the surface. Those perforations ensure that storm pressure can’t build up against them and shove them out of place.

“I’m never gonna tell you that mother nature can’t do something," says Frankel, "[but] I will tell you that if she moves one of those reef balls, you’re gonna have much bigger problems on land than you do in the ocean.”

In 1998, the eco-friendly initiative found a whole new purpose after Brawley’s father-in-law, Carleton Palmer, told him that he would like to be buried at sea. “He got sick and said that he’d prefer to be in a reef with all that life and action, than be in a field with a bunch of old dead people,” says Frankel. After Palmer’s death later that year, Brawley realized that the perfect way to honor his father-in-law’s wishes would be to mix his ashes in with the reef ball material, turning their wildlife habitats into a permanent memorial.

From there, they started getting more and more requests from people who wanted their remains to be turned into reef balls, and thus the Eternal Reef concept was born.

Today there are three pieces to Brawley’s reef ball business: two companies that deal with large-scale reef building projects, such as helping to establish sustainable fisheries, and Eternal Reefs, which handles the burial end of things. There are a number of initiatives that work to rehabilitate or create new reefs, but reef ball memorials are the only ones who will make you a part of the structure.

Frankel sees reef ball burials as an important step in the conservation burial movement, not to be confused with the green burial movement. “Green burial has got shades of green,” he says. “Conservation burial is where somebody has taken an ecologically important piece of land, that in all probability some developer would have their eyes on, and used memorialization to preserve that land as permanent green space. There’s no embalming, no caskets, no traditional headstones. It’s left pretty much in a wild state.”

Of the thousands of reef balls that are put into the oceans each year, only about 120-150 of them are the work of Eternal Reefs, but they are understandably much more personal. People can choose from three sizes of reef ball that range in price from about $4,000 to $7,500. The larger reef balls can accommodate multiple sets of remains, so that families can be “buried” together, turning the ball into a sort of underwater mausoleum. Surviving friends and family are encouraged to leave handprints, markings, and messages in the wet cement. Each of the memorial balls is also set with a personalized brass medallion for the deceased.

When the reef balls are taken out to be submerged, the family can come along just as in a more traditional burial. Once they are on the ocean floor, they are permanent and can be visited from the surface of the water, or even on a dive. Frankel says they have an event coming up where over 100 friends and family are coming out to visit one of their memorial reefs.

As to the type of people who opt for burial with Eternal Reefs, Frankel says that it’s not just fishermen and divers. Eternal Reefs sees a number of parents of all ages who have lost children coming to them, looking to give the deceased a sort of second life as part of a living reef. “It all comes full circle to this idea of giving back.”

Another common request is to add the ashes of pets, but due to the prohibitive cost, Frankel says that he usually suggests that people wait, and have their own ashes buried with that of their pet.

Today there have been over 700,000 reef balls placed in 70 countries across the world. Memorial reef balls are just a small part of that number, but Frankel believes that conservation burial will eventually create a sea change in our death practices. Eternal Reefs’ memorial balls may just be one step in building a whole new burial ecosystem.

The post-World War I era saw an explosion of challenges to gender norms. Drag shows and cabarets became fixtures of the growing party culture: in the U.S., prominent venues like The Hamilton Lodge in Harlem regularly accommodated thousands of customers. Gender-bending entertainers like Gladys Bentley, who donned a white tuxedo and top hat and performed overtly sexual songs parodies, became local celebrities.

The increased visibility of queer people—and the social upheaval it represented—was especially evident in the era's music. In 1920, in Germany, a new and controversial type of song swept the Weimar Republic: a gay anthem. Dedicated to the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, an early advocate who tried to decriminalize homosexuality in Germany, “Das Lila Lied”—in English, “The Lavender Song"—boldly humanized homosexuals while condemning those who failed to tolerate them. A 1996 English version, featuring the cabaret star Ute Lemper, includes these lyrics:

The crime is when love must hide
From now on we’ll love with pride

The song was perhaps only possible because of the post-war social turbulence. But the undoing of traditional notions of gender and romance worked its way into American music as well. A popular 1920s drag song called "Masculine Women! Feminine Men!" epitomized this.

Written by Edgar Leslie, “Masculine Women! Feminine Men!” became somewhat of an anthem for its celebration of blurred gender roles. "Masculine women, feminine men," the refrain goes. "It's hard to tell 'em apart today." The song also features such quality lyrics as:

You go and give your girl a kiss in the hall
But instead you find you're kissing her brother Paul

and:

You say hello to Uncle Joe
Then look again and you find it's your Auntie Flo

It wasn't alone: many anthems of the '20s and '30s that made reference to drag. Some featured singers, especially black female blues singers, explicitly discussing their sexual relationships with members of the same gender.

In honor of Pride Month, here is a queer playlist courtesy of the Jazz Age.

"Someone Will Take Your Place" by Alberta Hunter (1923)

Blues singer and Broadway star Alberta Hunter was well known for her song “Downhearted Blues,” but in the less famous “Someone Will Take Your Place,” she talks of replacing a newly departed lover. In one line, she croons, “So if you didn't want me, tell me to my face, cause five or six women going to take your place.”

"Prove it On Me" by Ma Rainey (1928)

The oft-labeled “Mother of the Blues” Ma Rainey married a man, but she had a reputation for sleeping with women. In “Prove It On Me,” Rainey rejects any shame associated with her sexuality or gender presentation:

Folks say I'm crooked. I didn't know where she took it
I want the whole world to know.

She later sings:

Went out last night with a crowd of my friends
They must've been women, 'cause I don't like no men.

It's true I wear a collar and a tie
Makes the wind blow all the while
Don't you say I do it, ain't nobody caught me
You sure got to prove it on me.

"Freakish Man Blues" by George Hanna (1930)

George Hanna was no stranger to queer music. His song “Sissy Man Blues” implores the audience, “If you can’t bring me a woman, bring me a sissy man," while “The Boy in the Boat” describes a relationship between two women. In "Freakish Man Blues," Hanna ponders his interest in men:

There was a time when I was alone
My freakish ways could streak
But they’re so common now
You get one every day of the week.

"B.D. Woman's Blues" by Lucille Bogan (1935)

Recorded by Lucille Bogan, a.k.a. Bessie Jackson, "B.D. Woman's Blues" celebrates the lives of "bulldaggers," a slang term used to describe masculine women. In it, Bogan predicts that there is "comin' a time" when "B. D. women ain't gonna do need no men."

She says of these women: "They got a head like a sweet angel and they walk just like a natural man;" "they can lay their jive just like a natural man;" and "you know they work and make their dough."

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

Between its forthcoming Robocop statue, and a recently installed public borrowing library shaped like Dr. Who’s famous police-box-time-machine, the TARDIS, Detroit is becoming one of the dorkiest cities in America.

As Parade reports, the homemade TARDIS was recently installed on Detroit’s Warren Ave. The life-size prop replica, is the work of local Dr. Who fan Dan Zemke who also runs a branch of the youth reading program, Reach-Out-and-Read. Zemke combined his two passions to create the new mini-library. Along with the help of his father, Zemke was able to custom build the TARDIS over just a few months.

Unlike the fictional TARDIS, Zemke’s creation is not bigger on the inside, but does have room for around 140 books that he hopes people will circulate and replace as they trade them out. Where the original TARDIS has signs around the top saying, “Police Box,” this one has signs saying, “Take A Book, Leave A Book.” Other than that, it is a spitting image of the iconic BBC ship.

At 10 feet tall, and weighing a ton, the whimsical new library is hard to miss. Zemke told Parade that people claim to have almost gotten in car accidents after seeing it parked there on the corner.

For over a century, it's been illegal in Canada to "challenge or attempt by any means to provoke another person to fight a duel, attempt to provoke a person to challenge another person to fight a duel, or accept a challenge to fight a duel," according to Section 71 of the country's Criminal Code.

The penalties for breaking this law are up to two years in prison—but that might be about to change. This week, a member of Parliament introduced legislation to update antiquated sections of that code. Under the proposal, Section 71 would be removed entirely.

This would mean that, yes, it may once again legal to challenge someone to a duel in Canada, though any ensuing consequences (assault with a deadly weapon? murder, maybe?) would still be very much illegal.

Duels, as you probably know, were a mainstay of the 18th and 19th centuries, most famously in the case of Aaron Burr, who shot and killed Alexander Hamilton because of something the latter said at a New York dinner party. But death wasn't the only outcome back then, since those pistols could easily jam or misfire, and were not nearly as accurate as modern firearms. A lot of duels—like Pierre's duel with a suspected lover of his wife in War and Peace—ended with a loser who was merely injured.

Today, of course, we carry much deadlier weapons. So while it might soon be legal to challenge one to a duel in Canada—it's unclear when the legislation might pass, though it's making its way through Canada's House of Commons—maybe keep it at that. Guns aren't what they used to be.