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Neptune's New Surprise Storm Is Nearly as Big as Earth

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Just in recent months, we've seen that Jupiter's magnetic field is lumpy, Venus's atmosphere has giant standing waves, Uranus orbits the sun on its side, and Mars has giant tornados scouring its surface. Our cosmic neighborhood is full of characters, and now it's Neptune's turn in the spotlight. Astronomers recently spotted a storm on the planet's surface that is both in a weird location and nearly the size of Earth.

The wild weather was observed from Hawaii's W.M. Keck Observatory during a test run at dawn, and surprised scientists. “Normally, this area is really quiet and we only see bright clouds in the mid-latitude bands, so to have such an enormous cloud sitting right at the equator is spectacular," said Ned Molter, the University of California, Berkeley, researcher who spotted the storm, in a press release. It stretches 5,500 miles across the middle of Neptune, about twice the distance from New York to Los Angeles.

Neptune's storms don't quite have the enduring persistence of Jupiter's famous Great Red Spot. The planet's Great Dark Spot, in the southern hemisphere, and was captured by Voyager 2's cameras back in 1989. Winds were clocked at 1,500 miles per hour. By the time the Hubble Space Telescope turned its eye toward the planet in 1994, the storm had dissipated, but another was raging in the northern hemisphere. Yet another dark spot storm turned up in 2016. Who knows what surprises the most-distant planet will throw at us next?


Mapping the Sounds of Political Protest Around the World

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In the past year, streets in the United States and across Europe have roared with the sound of political protest. In England, citizens marched in support of a united Europe:

Across the Atlantic, opponents of President Trump demonstrated against his policies and the attitudes they represent:

Inspired by these soundscapes, Cities and Memory, a collaborative sound art and field recording project, has created “the first ever collection of the sounds of protest and political activism from around the world,” and published their work in a single map. The map includes recordings made in 27 countries and dating back to 1991, when opponents of the first Gulf War marched in Washington, D.C. The map also includes versions of the recordings reimagined and remixed by sound artists.

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Stuart Fowkes, the founder of Cities and Memory, asked the project’s contributors to send recordings of protests and political activism of any kind—left, right, whatever, on any subject. More of the sounds in the map come from left-leaning events, but the collection includes a far-right National Front march in England, an anti-LGBT protest in Poland, and anti-Muslim chants in the United States.

Across the world, the sounds of political protest share some qualities. There is often call-and-response chants to repeat and amplify a message. In many languages, political chants have clear rhythms that allow large groups of people to speak together.

But there are also geographical distinctions to be found. In Hungary, for example, protest is relatively quiet:

Especially when compared to this “casserole” protest in Canada, which features the clanging sounds of pots and pans:

Some of the recordings also stand out for the less common sounds they capture. A protest in the wake of the banking collapse in Iceland features a simple, clanging bell, later joined by a cymbal:

In Chile, a student protest includes what Fowkes describes as “this spitting noise”—the sound of students hurling rocks at an armored car, recorded at a safe distance:

Cities and Memory aims to call attention to the sound around them, and the value of preserving it. This project is a record of particular moments in time—with the last several years standing out as a significant time in the history of this sort of grassroots activism. Fowkes points out that there’s an uptick in the recordings submitted that starts in 2008, when the global financial crisis hit, which also coincides with the time that it became cheaper to buy sound recorders and easier to record quality sound with a smartphone.

“I’m hoping what will happen is that people will listen to it and feel like part of a unified global movement,” says Fowkes. “We’re been living in very interesting times, and there is this increase in people finding their voices. I hope the project gets across some of that sense of collective voice.”

The 1930s Film Parodies Starring Only Dogs

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The early sound era of film was like the Wild West when it came to making movies. It was into this experimental milieu that a series of short films that used all-dog casts was produced between 1929 and 1931.

Professionally trained canines were the stars of the “all-barkie” Dogville Comedies. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer produced the nine shorts as parodies of Hollywood’s hits. The films were shot with silent film and dubbed over with human speech, utilizing the voices of the creators Jules White and Zion Myers, as well as their colleague Pete Smith. According to Jan-Christopher Horak, the director of UCLA’s film and television archive, it is likely that other contracted MGM actors and actresses also lent their voices to the films, although none of that work was credited.

To a modern viewer, it can be hard to tell who the audience of these films were. It might seem like a canine cast is best suited for children, but the plots were often mature, featuring adultery, murder, and even cannibalism.

So how did these films come to be made? To understand that, one must also understand the way the studios were operating in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In this era, shorts would play before a full-length feature. They were primarily produced by independent companies and distributed through the studios. As the popularity of the shorts grew, studios brought on some of those independent producers to develop in-house work.

In 1929, according to film historian Rob King, MGM hired Jules White and Zion Myers to organize their new short subjects department. White had close connections in Hollywood. In King’s recent book Hokum!, he writes that Jack White, the older brother of Jules, was a top comedic shorts producer who helped Jules secure work as an assistant film editor before being recruited by MGM. A young Myers began working at Universal as a secretary in the early 1920s, when his sister Carmel was a rising silent film star. One of his co-workers there was Irving G. Thalberg, who would go on to become a legendary figure in American filmmaking. When Thalberg became an executive at MGM in the 1920s, Myers was able to secure a job at the company as a shorts director.

The Dogville shorts started with 1929’s College Hounds, a parody of Buster Keaton’s College that features a huge doggie football game. The next film was Hot Dog, about a murder in a seedy cabaret after a jealous husband finds out his wife has been cheating on him. The subsequent films all had equally punny names. There was the murder-mystery Who Killed Rover? and a Broadway parody called The Dogway Melody. Those were followed by The Big Dog House, All’s Canine on the Western Front, Love Tails of Morocco, Two Barks Brothers, and Trader Hound, a riff on MGM’s Trader Horn.

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Some of the dogs came trained from renowned Hollywood animal trainer Rennie Renfro. Renfro had a ranch in Van Nuys where he reportedly trained roughly one hundred dogs for films over the course of his long career. Renfro worked closely with Myers and White to direct each short. Since they shot on silent film, the directors often shouted their commands to elicit the desired behavior from the dogs.

Other techniques were utilized as well, especially when it came to making the canine performers appear as if they were speaking. According to a January 1931 article in Popular Science Monthly, a director or Renfro himself would stand in front of a dog and wave various lures to focus the canine’s attention. The human would then open his hand repeatedly to entice the dog to open its mouth. Another method to imitate speech involved giving the dogs toffee to make them chomp.

The same Popular Science Monthly mentions the directors’ preference for stray and mixed-breed dogs “because they are not high strung and can get along better in groups than the animal ‘prima donnas’ of breeding.” The directors also used “veteran” animal actors, as they were less likely to miss cues or run off set altogether. Rumors have long circulated that those veteran dogs, including Renfro’s beloved Buster, received special treatment, including their own waiting areas, exercise tracks, and air conditioning, which was rare even for human actors at the time. But these claims cannot be verified.

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Although shorts were typically not reviewed, the Dogville Comedies appear to have been well-received based on trade papers of the time. According to Warner Bros., “a nationwide theatre owners poll in 1930 rated the Dogvilles as the best short subjects over more legendary comedy and musical series.”

Even Jules White would later say that his favorite project of his entire career was “the dog things.” “All the stars at MGM would come over and watch us film them,” he said in a 1982 interview with The Los Angeles Times. He recalled that Greta Garbo liked to admire the cute dogs and was a frequent visitor to the set.

But not everyone was charmed by the “Barkies” and a backlash ensued. The dogs do not look comfortable as they walk on their hindlegs in stiff costumes, apparently held upright by piano wire. The Performing and Captive Animals’ Defense League wrote to the British Board of Film Censors to protest the release of these shorts. Several films in the series were thus banned by the British censor citing animal cruelty.

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All-animal casts were not entirely novel. Released between 1923 and 1924, Dippy-Doo-Dads were Hal Roach-directed silent films featuring monkeys as the stars. A smaller company called Tiffany created a series of chimp comedies in the early 1930s using the same template as the Barkies. They may have been the product of sibling rivalry, as they were actually produced by Jack White, brother of Jules.

The creators stopped making the Dogville Comedies in 1931 after the controversial Trader Hound, banned by U.K. censors for its hints at canine cannibalism. White and Myers were offered other jobs developing the shorts department at Columbia Pictures, where White went on to make film history with the Three Stooges. Myers continued directing and writing comedic shorts and films, even writing the scripts and creating stories for some of the Stooges productions that White directed, such as 1948’s I’m a Monkey’s Uncle.

Today, the Barkies find themselves relegated to a footnote in the history of early talking pictures. But for almost two years, man’s best friend was also the silver screen’s biggest star.

The 'World's Largest Bounce House' Is Touring America

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2017 has been a year of extreme achievements: we've already seen records set for the largest baking soda-and-vinegar volcano, the biggest pink flamingo collection, and the most populous skinny dip. Now, into the annals of Hugest and Greatest has swelled the "Big Bounce," aka "The World's Biggest Bounce House," an inflatable behemoth that is currently touring the United States and putting everything into perspective.

At 10,000 square feet, and made up of 5 separate sections that must be jigsawed together, the Big Bounce is at once the Godzilla and the Frankenstein's Monster of bounce houses. According to WISN, it was created by "two guys from Scotland," Craig and Grahme Furgeson. A few years ago, the Furgesons took it upon themselves to design the largest jumpable monstrosity they could. This year, with the help of a factory in Cleveland, they were finally able to build it.

Bounce houses have been around since the 1950s, when a plastics engineer named John Scurlock started working on inflatable covers for tennis courts, and discovered that his employees liked jumping on them in the off hours.

He quickly repurposed his design into a kind of two-dimensional bouncy runway for kids, which he called a "Space Walk." In the decades since, different manufacturers have taken this basic idea and added walls, ceilings, turrets, slides, and other accessories.

Pictures and videos of the Big Bounce show a truly large bounce house—more of a bounce fiefdom, really—complete with basketball hoops, an obstacle course, an "inflatable forest," and miniature bounce houses within the bounce house. According to WISN, it takes 28 blowers to inflate the thing.

Don't be intimidated, though. "The Big Bounce experience can be as high energy or as low energy as you want," the Big Bounce FAQ promises. In other words, you can bounce, or simply marvel in terror.

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.

When Physicians Used Lunar Signs to Diagnose Patients

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In medieval Europe, bleeding was thought to be the most effective cure around. Medical practitioners believed no disease could withstand a nick in the neck from a small blade, otherwise known as a fleam. Have smallpox? No problem. Epilepsy? Easy. Gout? Cured.

But there was a catch.

Before operating on a patient, medieval physicians needed to consult the stars. The success of the procedure depended on it.

A foundational tenet of medieval medicine was the connection between astrology and human anatomy. The idea—which originated in Ancient Babylonian mythology—was that humans are microcosms of the Ptolemaic universe; the human body was divided into specific regions governed by Zodiac signs, analogous to the way the Earth was divided and ruled by planets.

The moon lay at the center of this theory. The moon's alignment with a certain constellation signaled that a Zodiac sign was active—Libra, for instance, occurred when the moon blocked out the constellation Libra. Unlike their solar counterparts, lunar signs last only two or three days, rather than an entire month. (If you're curious, you can find your moon sign here.)

In medieval medical theory, a lunar Zodiac sign corresponded to each human body part. Aries, for instance, governed the head and eyes; Taurus: the neck, shoulders, throat, and ears; Leo: the heart, spine, and spleen; and so on.

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When a Zodiac sign was active, it was considered dangerous to operate on the associated body parts. Cutting into the neck during Taurus, for instance, could spell death. Because of these dangers, medieval physicians needed to pay special attention the stars.

To determine whether a Zodiac sign was active, they consulted volvelles, or rotating lunar calendars.

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They then cross-referenced the active Zodiac sign with its corresponding body parts. To do this, they turned to the Zodiac Man.

The Zodiac Man is an illustration of the human body divided into twelve sections based on astrological signs. It guides physicians as to which body parts present a danger in which months. Before bleeding their patients—or performing any kind of medical operation—physicians relied on the Zodiac Man to tell them whether a body part could be safely cut.

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The best-known rendition of the Zodiac Man is found in the Fasciculus medicinae, a popular medical book—and the first to feature anatomical sketches of the human body—that first appeared in Venice in 1491. Its printers attributed the work to “Johannes de Ketham,” likely in reference to the 15th-century professor of medicine and previous owner of some of the sketches, Johannes von Kirchheim.

According to an introduction by historian Charles Singer, the text's "popularity was immediate and within eighteen months a new edition was required." Subsequent editions were printed in Zaragoza in 1494, Pamplona in 1495, Sevilla in 1517, and in Venetia in 1495, 1500, 1501, 1508, 1514, and beyond.

Each edition of the Fasciculus medicinae features variations on the original illustrations (along with some new ones), which generally became more anatomically accurate with time. Singer writes that the 1491 version was "essentially a medieval product," while the second edition demonstrated Italian Renaissance influences.

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The Zodiac Man, too, changes from version to version. The New York Academy of Medicine holds an original 1522 edition from Venice. The images shown here are photographed from that edition. Alongside the Zodiac Man are several other woodcut illustrations, such as Wound Man, which warns surgeons of potential errors they could make during operations.

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Underscoring the Fasciculus medicinae is the influence of the moon on medical practice. Lunar signs not only determined whether to operate on a particular body part; they also signaled the effectiveness of certain drugs. Herbs, too, were associated with specific Zodiac signs, and they only worked if they were gathered during the correct time period.

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The moon even helped physicians make diagnoses. Diseases, it was believed, appeared cyclically with the alignment of the moon and the planets. The moon's positioning with Jupiter often signaled the presence of liver disorders, while its alignment Venus usually triggered urinary problems.

You can see a version of the Fasciculus medicinae in its entirety here, and you can determine—per the Zodiac Man—which body parts your lunar sign puts at risk here.

The 19th-Century African-American Actor Who Conquered Europe

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In 1824, a young, black New Yorker named Ira Aldridge set sail for England. Within 10 years, he was performing Shakespeare in London’s Covent Garden. By the time 20 more had passed, he had performed for royalty across Europe, made audiences laugh and weep, and been heralded one of the great actors of his age.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the slave trade flourished, free African Americans and their descendants still weren’t eligible for citizenship, and runaway slaves were supposed to be returned to their owners, no matter which state they were apprehended in.

Aldridge’s career as an actor was exceptional, and not just for a black actor at that time. He traveled farther, was seen by audiences in more countries, and won more medals, decorations, and awards than any other actor of his century. But, somehow, this 19th-century great slips under the radar. He seems to be too American to make it into British or European theatrical histories, and, because he performed almost exclusively in Europe, tends not to appear in American ones. For most of his career, Aldridge traveled from place to place, on short-term engagements that made it hard for him to build a reputation in any one spot. “As a luminary,” writes scholar Bernth Lindfors in the introduction to Ira Aldridge: The African Roscius, “he was more a comet than a fixed star—here today, gone tomorrow—and as a consequence, he shines less brightly now.”

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In addition to his career of rare achievement on the stage, Aldridge used his platform and status to fight slavery, even from across the Atlantic. Traditionally, Shakespearean plays ended with what is known as “a jig,” an unscripted “dance song game” that came after the story itself. They might parody the story, or just act a kind of crude farce. Aldridge, on the other hand, used those moments to speak out. At first, he simply played his guitar and sang, but by the time he was 25, in 1832, he began reciting poetry that he had written himself.

I risk my all upon thy power
Life, son, yea, country, too
To free my brethren, fetter’d slaves
From sinking in inglorious graves.

Aldridge’s activism wasn’t limited to the stage. Throughout his lifetime, he also donated significant amounts of money to the abolitionist movement and the Negro State Conventions. Audiences and reviewers took note. A German review of a play mentions his involvement in the story of a family of five slaves who had escaped from Baltimore to New York. “By the power of the [Fugitive Slave Act], the family was captured and was soon to pay a high price for their desire for liberty in the land of freedom.” The family members were scattered across the United States, and the daughters’ fates were uncertain. Aldridge saw the case in the papers and immediately sent a large sum of money to a New York society to help them. “This is the way,” wrote the paper, “in which he uses his income.”

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Aldridge was born free in New York in 1807 to a lay preacher and straw vendor, Daniel Aldridge, and his wife, Lurona. His mother died when he was young, and his father hoped his son might follow in his professional footsteps. Instead, Aldridge fell in love with the stage—and with Shakespeare.

At the time, black actors were limited to performing at the African Grove Theater, between Bleecker and Prince Streets in lower Manhattan. The theater was one of the earliest attempts to create a black theater in New York, with a black cast, crew, and (mostly) audience, made up of “free and slave, middle-class and working-class” alike. It was also, apparently, where Aldridge saw his first Shakespeare play, and later made his start as an actor.

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But the African Grove couldn’t, or didn’t, last. There are no records of it after 1823, and at least one source claims it was “mysteriously burned to the ground” in 1826. Aldridge seems to have realized that he would never achieve his dreams as an actor as an African American in America, and took the earliest opportunity to leave. “The only recourse for a serious, determined and aspiring young Negro actor was to emigrate,” write his biographers Herbert Marshall and Mildred Stock (his daughter). So, at the age of just 17, he accepted employment on a ship headed to England, never to return.

Almost as soon as Aldridge made it to the United Kingdom, he began to distinguish himself. During 18 months of study at the University of Glasgow, he won “several premiums” and a gold medal for excellence in Latin composition. Though he quickly found work at London’s Royal Coburg Theatre—playing the lead role of Oroonoko in The Revolt of Surinam in 1825—the London press was extremely hostile to him, and predicted that he would never find profitable employment on the stage, or posited that a black man shouldn’t be there at all.

Aldridge then began to tour provincial British cities. For seven years, he went from one town to another—Manchester, Halifax, Edinburgh—playing a variety of “black” roles, including Oronooko, Othello, and Mungo in Charles Dibdin's The Padlock. Audiences loved him, particularly as he gained experience and confidence. In time, the press eventually came around as well. Back in New York, in 1853, The New York Timesquoted a Viennese paper’s review of his Othello: “... an eminent artist, enrapturing as well by the simpleness and truthfulness of his performance in general, as by the power with which he marked the most violent eruptions of passion.” Aldridge never performed in, or returned to, New York after he left.

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Soon, Aldridge had exhausted the traditional “black” roles, but, as an able, versatile, and very popular actor, began to play traditionally white ones. (For these, he was often expected to don a wig and white make-up.)

In these, too, he excelled. “When he played Iago in the city of Moscow, in Russia,” priest and historian George Freeman Bragg wrote in 1914, “a number of students who had witnessed the performance unhitched the horses from the actor’s carriage, after the play, and dragged him in triumph to his lodgings. In Sweden and Germany and England, his name was a household word.” Aldridge played Shylock, Macbeth, Richard III, Lear, and a host of other Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean leads.

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Even in very strange theatrical contexts, Aldridge shined. In Germany, for instance, he played Othello with an entirely German-speaking cast—he alone spoke his lines in English. A Le Nord correspondent watching the show reviewed it, and him, rapturously. “For the first time, we had seen a tragic hero talk and walk like common mortals, without declamations and without exaggerated gestures. We forgot that we were in a theatre, and followed the drama as if it had been a real transaction.” Aldridge’s talent saw him decorated by royals, and he eventually married one, Amanda von Brandt, a Swedish countess who was his second wife. (He had no children with his first wife, but at least six with three other women, including von Brandt.)

Aldridge died 150 years ago on this date, August 7, 1867, in Poland, two years after slavery was abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment. Many of his obituaries, the journal Opportunity noted in 1925, began with the same prophetic, though damning, observation. “... He is the only actor of Color that ever was known, and probably the only instance that may ever again occur.”

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Today, Aldridge’s success is celebrated, but in notably limited ways compared to other 19th-century performers, such as Sarah Bernhardt, Ellen Terry, or Colin Firth-lookalike Edwin Forrest. One of the red velvet chairs in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon bears his name, as does a blue English Heritage plate in London. A plaque recently unveiled in Coventry commemorates his time there, during which “he gave a number of speeches on the evils of slavery,” the BBC reports. “When he left, people inspired by his speeches went to the county hall and petitioned for its abolition.”

Aldridge seems to have been an early example of African-American expatriation—when outstanding black artists left the United States to excel elsewhere. Racism certainly existed in Europe, but there were still more opportunities for them there. Almost exactly 100 years after Aldridge left, the entertainer and activist Josephine Baker went to Paris to make her name. Twenty years later, writer James Baldwin did the same.

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The struggle for recognition of African-American actors continues today. Since the Academy Awards began in 1929, only 6.4 percent of acting nominations have gone to non-white actors, and few actual awards. Only four black men and one black woman have ever won Best Actor or Actress. In Britain, things haven’t been much better. British Film Institute research from earlier this year found that nearly 60 percent of films produced there in the last 11 years had no black actors in any role. And several black British actors, such as David Oyelowo, Idris Elba, John Boyega, and Chiwetel Ejiofor have found their mainstream success in Hollywood.

Was an Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh a Giant?

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He sounds like he came straight out of a myth—an ancient Egyptian pharaoh-giant, ruling (quite literally) from on high. A new study suggests, however, that this might not be a such a tall tale. The supposed remains of Sa-Nakht, an ancient pharaoh living around 2700 B.C., suggest that this ruler may have had one of the earliest known cases of gigantism, or acromegaly.

In the study, published in The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, Michael E. Habicht from the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich, and his colleagues reanalyzed measurements and photographs of the bones thought to be those of Sa-Nakht, and found evidence of "exuberant growth," usually a sign of acromegaly. The condition usually occurs when the body generates too much growth hormone, possibly because of a pituitary tumor. Though today he would only be a little above average height—just under six-foot-two—he would have towered above his contemporaries. In fact, most ancient Egyptian men stood about five-foot-six, Habicht told Live Science.

While pharaohs were, in fact, taller than the rest of the population in general, probably due to better access to healthcare and nutritious food, this individual stood a full five inches taller than the next tallest recorded pharaoh, Ramesses II. No other ancient Egyptian royals are known or thought to have been giants, though researchers say they can't be sure that the remains, discovered in an elite tomb in 1901, are truly Sa-Nakht's. Egyptologists actually know very little about him.

In ancient Egypt, very tall people don't seem to have had any particular social advantages or disadvantages. Dwarves, on the other hand, were held in very high esteem, and sometimes served as pharaoh's assistants or were thought of as divine.

A Discarded Communist Statue From Ukraine Has a New Home in Manchester

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A statue has been freshly erected in front of a theater in Manchester, England, but it's certainly not new. The 12-foot, grim-faced statue of communist writer Friedrich Engels had languished, in pieces, in a Ukrainian field until May, when a British artist loaded it onto a truck and brought it to Manchester in time for an art festival.

Engels was born in Germany, but in 1842 he immigrated to Manchester, where he helped run his family's cotton factory. His father had hoped a stint in industry would cure Engels of his radical liberal beliefs, but instead he used the time in Manchester to educate himself on the conditions of the working class. Before working with Karl Marx on The Communist Manifesto, Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England, which was published in German in 1845 (an English translation wasn't available until 1887).

When British visual artist Phil Collins (no, not that one) became interested in Engels's time in Manchester, he decided to try to find a statue of the man. He spent about a year, reports The New York Times, searching Eastern Europe for a discarded monument. He eventually found one on a farm in eastern Ukraine. Once loaded onto a truck, the statue made its way through Europe, and even stopped in Engels's hometown, Barmen, in what is now Wuppertal, Germany. The complete statue was unveiled at a film event on the closing night of the Manchester International Festival.


Bats in the Belfry Mean Guano in the Church

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Conservation laws in the United Kingdom are pretty strict. It is illegal, for example, to block bats from reaching their roosts. Sometimes, however, those roosts are in places that create a bother for people, such as the belfries of old churches. Bats in the belfry, these churches have found, lead to chiropteran urine and guano scattered across church interiors.

Recently, nearly 100 of the churches formed the Bats and Churches Partnership, a coalition of parishes that's trying to find a solution to the problem, and the big, consistent messes it leaves behind, according to The Telegraph.

“Things need to be kept in balance," Gail Rudge, a laywoman at All Saints Church at Braunston in Rutland, told the newspaper. "The crucial thing is maintaining the balance between our need to have a clean church without any damage and the bats' need to have somewhere to roost."

It usually takes over an hour to scrub the church of bat excrement before events such as weddings, and much of the art and other historic objects inside must remain covered for protection. It is illegal to block the bats entry to the building, but All Saints is one of three churches in a pilot program to possibly change that, or find solutions that comply with the law, such as strategically placed bat boxes or ultrasonic repellent devices.

In the meantime, the church still has to clean up to a half-pound of guano a week. As a layperson at another church in the pilot program told The Telegraph, "This is the first time that people have actually looked into making churches more people-friendly as opposed to bat-friendly."

Adding Cigarette Butts to Asphalt Can Improve Roads

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Cigarette butts are one of the most common forms of litter, with an estimated 1.3 million tons of them produced every year. Just like the rest of a cigarette, butts contain plenty of toxic chemicals that leach into waterways, threatening fish and other aquatic organisms. Disposing of them in landfills doesn't eliminate this problem, and the plastic filters aren't biodegradable. Now researchers in Australia have found a new way to contain the chemicals from cigarette butts—while also improving roads at the same time.

In the study, cigarette butts were coated in paraffin wax and bitumen, a gooey, black oil-based substance, and added to asphalt mixtures. The researchers, at RMIT University in Melbourne, then applied pressure to simulate use as a road surface. Depending on the density of cigarette butts in the sample and the quality of bitumen used, the new material was able to withstand a range of conditions, from light to heavy traffic. The material also had lower thermal conductivity than traditional blacktop, which could weaken the urban heat island effect if city roads were paved with it.

"This research shows that you can create a new construction material while ridding the environment of a huge waste problem," said lead researcher Abbas Mohajerani, in a press release. It's hard to say when or if cigarette butts will be a common ingredient in asphalt mixtures, but it doesn't seem like the supply of them will dwindle any time soon—cigarette production is expected to grow by 50 percent by 2025 (thanks to population growth).

You Can Help Get This Water Tower Painted Like a Hamburger

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Who doesn’t love a painted water tower?! Well apparently town fathers in Hamburg, New York, who kiboshed the idea of painting their obloid water tower like a massive hamburger when it was first proposed some 24 years ago. But now, thanks to the efforts of one devoted Hamburg resident, the town’s towering industrial landmark might finally get the paint job it deserves.

As reported by The Buffalo News, the project was originally shut down because some in town didn’t want it to be famous just for the giant hamburger, a bit of an odd choice considering that Hamburg also claims to have been the birthplace of the hamburger in 1885.

But times have changed, and now Hamburg resident Chris Hannotte Luly has started a website and petition to finally give in to destiny, and paint the water tower like a hamburger. Luly argues that creating a giant hamburger would be a boon to local tourism, as well as a fitting tribute to the town’s heritage.

Support for the paint job seems to be increasing among locals as well, with at least one woman, Patty Schinzel—who voted against painting the water tower 24 years ago—changing her tune.

"I have a worry about people coming to take pictures, like they looked around during the Pokemon game," Schinzel told The Buffalo News.

If you’d like to support the effort to see Hamburg get its giant hamburger, you can sign Luly’s petition here!

Was the First Eclipse Prediction an Act of Genius, a Brilliant Mistake, or Dumb Luck?

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The year was 585 B.C., and the Lydians and the Medes had been warring for half a decade in what we now know as Turkey. No clear victory was in sight. Sometimes the Lydians were on top, on other occasions, the Medes seemed to have matters in hand. Once they even fought a battle in the dead of night. But, in the sixth year of their war, as they brandished their arms on the battlefield, something amazing happened. The skies began to darken. The moon passed in front of the sun. The armies, astonished, lay down their weapons—and called a truce.

This story comes to us via Herodotus, the Greek historian, who lived about a century after the fight. What’s perhaps more remarkable about this story is the line that follows it: “Thales of Miletus had foretold this loss of daylight to the Ionians, fixing it within the year in which the change did indeed happen.”

The ancient philosopher Thales of Miletus had no access to the scientific knowledge or equipment to successfully predict a solar eclipse. As a result, this story has puzzled and divided classicists and scientists for centuries. Was it preternaturally sophisticated astronomy, a myth, or just a happy accident?

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Researchers believe that the eclipse Herodotus describes over the battlefield is the one that took place on May 28, 585 B.C. Its path ran from Nicaragua, over the Atlantic, then across France and Italy—and, finally, Turkey. Thales’s home, the ancient city of Miletus, on the Mediterranean coast, is just outside the path of totality. He would have seen an impressive partial eclipse from there. There are other eclipses around that time that are possible candidates, but none that would have plunged the Lydians and Medes into abrupt darkness in the way that Herodotus describes.

It is particularly strange, if the historian is to be taken at his word, that Thales predicted the year of the eclipse, rather than the exact date. In fact, wrote mathematician Dmitri Pachenko in the Journal for the History of Astronomy, “if one can predict an eclipse at all, one can predict it to the day.” Astronomy is an extremely precise science. If you know a major celestial event is coming, and where it will be visible, you’ll most likely have some precision about when it will take place. Thales, however, was at a marked disadvantage for making astronomical predictions. He didn’t know that the Earth is spherical—and seems to have thought of it as a flat disc, resting on water.

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So how did he do it? A common suggestion is that Thales had coopted the expertise of the ancient Babylonians. Their astronomers, based near modern Baghdad, kept careful records of the sky, including how Venus, Mercury, the Sun, and the Moon moved in the heavens. In 1063 B.C., their records document a total eclipse “that turned day into night.” These records led them to discover what we now call the Saros cycle, which governs the recurrence of eclipses. After three 223-month Saros series, eclipses do return to the same geographic region, but they are a complicated way to make an eclipse prediction. At any given moment, there are approximately 40 Saros cycles taking place at once, carrying on for over 1,000 years. As old sets of cycles end, new ones begin. Understanding them enough to be predictive, at the very least, requires the knowledge that the Earth is round and accurate, detailed observations—not to mention accounting for those missed eclipses that take place on cloudy days.

In 585 B.C., Mesopotamian astronomers hadn’t yet figured out how to use the Saros cycle to predict eclipses with any accuracy. Further, a number of scientists have attempted to predict the May 28, 585 B.C. eclipse using Saros cycles: It just doesn’t seem feasible based on the data that would have been available to Thales.

Whatever Thales’s method, it appears to have worked only once. There’s no other record of him successfully predicting an eclipse, or of him passing information about them to any of his many students. This suggests one of two things: Either the method wasn’t replicable (because it wasn’t scientific), or the prediction didn’t happen at all.

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It’s entirely possible that Thales “predicted” the eclipse in a way that seemed scientific, but was actually wrong. That, at least, is the theory shared by scientists Willy Hartner and Dirk Couprie, though the two differ on how he might have done it. In 1969, Hartner made a list of 29 solar eclipses that Thales might have been able to see around that time. There are patterns among these 29, but it’s unlikely Thales would have been able to understand them. What he might have done, Hartner thinks, is used those patterns to predict the May 18, 584 B.C. eclipse—just less than a year after the one that stopped the battle. When the eclipse came almost exactly a year early, Thales may have shrugged his shoulders and taken credit for being close enough.

Couprie, on the other hand, assumes an even luckier accident. It’s possible, he suggests, that Thales spotted a lucky, though ultimately random, pattern in a number of regional eclipses that took place during his lifetime. “Did Thales really predict the solar eclipse?” asks Couprie. “The answer must be: no. The regularity he saw was only a lucky coincidence.” If he’d tried to predict other eclipses later on using the same method, he would have failed miserably—perhaps explaining why none of his students or successors were able to do so. In fact, the next time an ancient thinker successfully predicted an eclipse was sometime around 150 B.C.: Hipparchus, the man we now credit with discovering trigonometry.

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There is, however, one more option. Thales was an astronomer and philosopher, but he was also a kind of primordial public intellectual—even a bit of a celebrity. Aristophanes says that any man who had “great practical wisdom” was known as a “veritable Thales,” while Aristotle tells a story of Thales predicting a good year for olives, and then cornering the market on olive presses, “thus demonstrating that it is easy for philosophers to be rich, if they wish, but it is not in this that they are interested.”

Thales did feats of mathematics that might have looked like magic to his contemporaries, including calculating the height of the pyramids from the length of their shadows. He was a legend. It’s possible, then, that his famous prediction was, too. People so readily accepted his claims—that magnets have souls because they make things move, that earthquakes happen because the Earth is floating on water, that all things are full of gods—that it wasn’t much of a stretch to believe he could have predicted mysterious happenings in the sky.

This Ship Is Not Sinking—It's Flipping for Science

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The United States research fleet is made up of dozens of vessels, large and small, that take scientists out to sea to collect data on the ocean and climate and marine life, and most of them look like regular old boats or barges. But not the Research Platform FLIP, short for Floating Instrument Platform. It looks like the bow of a regular boat, chopped off and tacked onto end of a submarine. FLIP lives up to its name; it's designed to do what no other boat does without sinking—flip a full 90 degrees by submerging 300 feet of its hull and leaving just 55 feet of bow above the water. The result is a quiet, stable platform for precise scientific measurements at sea.

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This unusual purpose affects every part of the boat's design, including the quirky and cramped living quarters, which must work for life in two orientations. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, FLIP is a favorite among the researchers who spend weeks aboard. "It was built in the decade that people were trying to reach the Moon and so thinking big was on everyone's mind," says Robert Pinkel. Pinkel is a professor emeritus at Scripps Institute of Oceanography in San Diego, California, and has been using FLIP for research nearly as long as it has been in service. The platform, which is technically known as a "spar buoy," was designed and constructed in 1962 to conduct research for the U.S. Navy on how ocean conditions affect acoustics.

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The ship's creators likely didn't expect FLIP to be so popular. The original designs were built on the assumption that scientists would board the platform each day to do research, then return to a "mothership" at night to sleep. "Very quickly, it became clear that nobody wanted to go back at night because FLIP was not only more comfortable, but it provided a good platform for working 24 hours a day," says Pinkel. "When things were working, you didn't want to leave your experiment to go back to a mothership." So bunks for 16 people were soon installed—wherever there was room—and now scientists spend weeks at a time on the platform.

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FLIP isn't exactly a ship; it doesn't have engines of its own, so it must be towed out to sea, laying flat like a boat, before it can sit up. Researchers ride along, making do with awkward furniture arrangements until the big flip. "All of the rooms, basically, are on edge, waiting to come to life when they're in the vertical," says Pinkel. "The amount of useful space that you have once you've flipped suddenly triples."

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The flip takes about half an hour. When the platform reaches its planned research site, the long, thin spar is filled with water, and that end begins to sink, thrusting the bow high into the air. "You go from being 5 feet above the ocean to being 30 feet or 40 feet up in the course of the very last two minutes while it's taking its Titanic dive," says Pinkel. "A big concern is if everything isn't stowed correctly, things will fall off shelves, and so to minimize any chance of danger, we all stand outside on the working decks and hang on out there."

Once the ship is flipped, and the seasickness and disorientation subside, it's time for the scientists to get to work. "FLIP would be enormously fun if you didn't have a job to do," says Pinkel. Instruments and computers are turned on and begin collecting data from sensors placed all over. Today the platform is used for a wide array of projects. Pinkel, for example, has focused on slow-moving waves that propagate in the interior of the ocean, below the choppy surface. Because FLIP doesn't have engines below the water, it's a quiet place, and its flipped configuration is stable, even in 30-foot seas. Pinkel's colleague, John Hildebrand, has used FLIP to monitor the vocalizations of whale populations, while others listen to some of the smallest animals in the ocean—plankton. The platform can shut off its generators and run on electrical power from batteries for short periods of time so scientists can hear the faint Doppler effect of the microorganisms moving toward or away from the ship.

As research budgets shrink, and fewer people go into oceanographic research, it's hard to say what is on the horizon for FLIP. "The future of FLIP is totally determined by the future of people in science," says Pinkel. "FLIP has been a kind of quiet resource for the country for 50 years and it's not so much the ship, but that the next generation of people who are willing to use it—that's what hangs in the balance."

Utrecht Just Wheeled Out the World's Biggest Bike Parking Garage

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There are more bicycles than people in the Netherlands, and most of them get used pretty regularly. If you're hanging out with someone there, and they've traveled fewer than 4.6 miles to meet you, there's a 43% chance they did so by bike.

These numbers, and the infrastructure changes that have enabled them, mean better health and fewer motor vehicle accidents. But they also present a problem: where is everyone going to lock up?

Yesterday, August 7, the city of Utrecht unveiled one solution: what will be the world's largest bike parking garage. Located underneath the central train station, where 40% of commuters arrive by bike, the garage is about 184,000 square feet—the size of the Kennedy Center.

By the time it's finished, at the end of 2018, it will fit 12,500 bicycles—a solid 3,500 more than the current record-holder, Tokyo's Kasai Station, which also boasts automated bike parking machines. Photos show what looks like a standard car garage, with riders following arrows from level to level until they find a skinny, bike-sized spot.

As the Guardian reports, though, some people think even this might fill up too fast. "By the time the politicians have made their decisions, and by the time things are built, there are more people cycling," cycling organization spokesperson Martjin van Es told the outlet.

Those in charge of the garage don't entirely disagree. After it's fully functional, project manager Tatjana Stenfert told the Guardian, "we will have to do some research and find more places for the bikes."

"It never stops," she said.

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.

Japanese Scientists Discover the Secret to Un-Meltable Ice Cream

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Some things just make all kinds of sense: What goes up must come down. Planets orbit the sun. Order turns into chaos. Frozen things melt. Except, that is, when they don’t.

Japanese scientists seem to be breaking the laws of food and physics with their newest ice cream venture: popsicles that don’t melt for hours. The secret is strawberries. According to the daily newspaper Asahi Shimbun, scientists at Biotherapy Development Research Center Co., in Kanazawa, happened on the method almost entirely by accident.

The tragic 2011 earthquake and tsunami ravaged strawberry farms in Miyagi Prefecture, leaving a lot of unsellable fruit. The Research Center tried to find ways to use the damaged harvest, and recruited a local pastry chef to see what he could do with polyphenols, organic chemicals extracted from the berries.

When the chef added dairy cream to the strawberry polyphenol, he found that the mixture solidified “instantly,” which initially led to concerns that there might be something wrong with the fruit. Instead, Kanazawa University's Tomihisa Ota told Asahi Shimbun, the substance has unique characteristics that make it ideal for melt-resistant ice cream. “Polyphenol liquid has properties to make it difficult for water and oil to separate,” he said. “A popsicle containing it will be able to retain the original shape of the cream for a longer time than usual and be hard to melt.”

The resulting popsicle (available, it seems, in chocolate, vanilla, and mango—but not strawberry?) has been on sale in Kanazawa, Osaka, and Tokyo since April, and appears to deliver on its promise. Even under the heat of a hand dryer, it retains its shape while “tasting cool.”


Midday Naps Are Key to Infant Learning (and Parental Mental Health)

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New parents, amazed and overwhelmed, doddering and bleary-eyed, live for the solid nap, when that six-month-old, milk drunk and cried-out, finally nods off. It’s a chance to take a shower, fold the laundry, or quietly stare straight ahead. In those moments, something much more remarkable is taking place in the crib, where the baby’s sleeping brain is baking the day’s lessons into knowledge. According to a new study from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, that process begins earlier than once thought, and depends (like a new parent’s peace of mind), on how long the nap lasts.

The researchers were examining how babies between six and eight months old learn to realize that words are not just noise, but actually refer to objects and ideas. In order to keep the babies’ existing knowledge from tainting the experiment, they used imaginary toy-like objects—which they called “Zusers” and “Bofels”—to assess the value of a midday nap. They found that non-nappers couldn’t tell if a newly introduced object should be called a Zuser or a Bofel. After a 30-minute nap, however, the adorable test subjects could distinguish between the right and wrong terms. And after 50 minutes, the researchers saw a brain pattern that until now has only been seen in older children and adults. Called the N400 component, it is a sign that the babies had formed a solid mental bond between word and object.

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Babies process a lot and, as any parent who has heard a curse word unexpectedly repeated back to them can attest, they’re sponges. "But only during sleep, when the child's brain is disconnected from the outer world, can it filter and save essential relations,” said study author Manuela Friedrich in a release. “Only during the interaction between awake exploration and ordering processes while sleeping can early cognitive and linguistic capabilities develop properly."

All hail the power of the nap.

5 Mythic Eclipse Monsters Who Mess With the Sun and Moon

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Armed with a little science, modern humans can relish in the celestial mechanics of an eclipse without fearing the end times—but it wasn’t always that way.

Before we recognized the moon’s potential to block out the sun and vanish into Earth’s shadow, we sought answers from the gods. Without a full understanding of planetary motion and celestial alignment, we attributed the disruption of solar and lunar cycles to cosmic monsters.

While it’s tempting to interpret such tales as purely explanatory, the relationship between natural phenomena and myth isn’t always so clear. We often don’t know to what extent ancient cultures created stories to explain eclipses or saw their existing myths reflected in the movements of sun and moon. Certainly, generations of tradition allowed mythology to evolve and fulfill various cultural purposes.

Global eclipse mythology features a rogues’ gallery of moon thieves and moon-hungry behemoths. Meet a few of them now, and remember their audacity the next time you gaze up at an eclipse.

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Apep the Moon Serpent

Ancient Egypt

Many solar eclipse myths revolve around the duality of light and darkness, good and evil. As you might imagine, that puts a rather nefarious spin on the sudden obstruction of the midday sun. Thus, Ancient Egyptian cosmology gives us Apep, the cosmic world serpent.

Apep (or Apophis) embodies chaos and death, making the monster a natural adversary for the sun god Ra. The serpent pursues Ra pulls as he pulls the burning sundisc across the sky, lighting the world. Every so often, Apep nearly consumes the sundisc, resulting in an eclipse. Luckily, Ra and the defenders aboard his sky barge always manage to fight free of the serpent’s shadowy coils.

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Rahu the Beheaded Asura

Hinduism

Few eclipse myths can match the horror of Hinduism’s Rahu. Originally known as Svarbhānu, the wrathful demigod sought to live forever by drinking Amrita, the nectar of immortality. Lord Vishnu wouldn’t stand for this, however, and decapitated Svarbhānu, before the liquid could pass down his throat. The decapitated head became the undying Rahu.

Divine comeuppance left Rahu with something of a chip on his shoulder—and also with no shoulders. Consumed by rage, he continually seeks revenge on the sun and moon for informing Vishnu about his nectar theft. Rahu chases sun and moon across the heavens relentlessly—and occasionally catches them. But since Rahu is but a floating head, his victory is always temporary. After he swallows the sun or moon, either orb simply falls out of Rahu’s neck stump and continues its journey.

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The Sebettu

Ancient Mesopotamia

The plague god Erra brought doom to Ancient Mesopotamia, and the Sebettu marched in his wake. The offspring of the sky deity An, these seven demon warriors spread sickness and death—and occasionally gathered in the sky to blot out the moon.

The epic Erra and Išum, written in the East Semitic language of Akkadian sometime around the eighth century BC, describes the seven warriors as so deadly that their “breath of life is death.” It also relates that Erra mainly likes to let them loose on earth “when the clamor of human habitations becomes noisome.”

The Sebettu might seem rather casual eclipse monsters, but their moon-blotting ways may have served a royal purpose. The Assyrians saw eclipses as dire omens, and particular lunar eclipses amounted to divine condemnation of the king. At times, this required the ritual death of a substitute king or šar puhi, who perished in the king’s place. Historian John Z. Wee speculates that the Sebettu may have functioned as a way of absolving the moon-associated king of guilt. Why stage an elaborate sacrifice when you can simply tweak religion to cast yourself as a victim of intermittent demons?

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Sköll and Hati

Norse Mythology

When something dreadful happens in Norse mythology, you can safely assume Loki had something to do with it. The trickster god managed to father the ultimate world-consuming serpent, the queen of the underworld and a god-slaying giant wolf. That wolf, Fenrir, spawned the eventual doom of both sun and moon in the lupine duo Sköll and Hati. Yes, everything Loki touches turns to Ragnarök.

Sköll doesn’t get to gobble up the sun ‘til the end times arrive—and when he finally sinks his teeth in, the light of the world extinguishes in his grim belly. Meanwhile, Hati eats the moon. Stephen Hawking described the wolves as eclipse monsters in The Grand Design and many other publications follow suit, but not everyone’s convinced. Some commentators, such as skeptic Eve Siebert, argue that the often-cited Old Norse poem Grímnismál merely points to a dark eventuality and not recurrent events. Still, it’s possible the Norse saw these tales of doom reflected in eclipses, or even considered them near misses in an eternal race between light and all-consuming dark.

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The Peri

Ancient Persia

Even sun-blotting monsters aren’t above redemption—and the Peri of Ancient Persia prove that sufficient cultural change can erase all cosmic wrongs.

Back in the 6th century B.C., the Peri were small, winged humanoids in pre-Zoroastrian Persian traditions. Like other “fairy” folk in global myth, their relationship with humans ranged from casual benevolence to mischievous destruction. According to folk historian Carol Rose, they might help you out of a tough spot, ruin your crops or darken the sun.

The Peri continued in this role for more than a millennium, until Islamic culture rewrote them as repentant fallen angels. Later tales described their penance as complete and by the end of the first millennium, they even appear in the epic poem Shahnameh as loyal servants to earthly kings.

Found: A Time Capsule Hidden by Author Chuck Palahniuk

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For about 15 years, Chuck Palahniuk, author of the novels Fight Club, Choke, and Snuff, among others, lived in Portland, Oregon, where he combined and renovated two adjacent properties. Palahniuk sold the renovated home to Jolynn Winter in 2007, but left behind a little secret.

Recently, Winter undertook a fresh renovation, and stumbled across this secret when a contractor tore out part of a bathroom ceiling. Out came a time capsule from the previous owner, Winter reported on Facebook. Inside were all sorts of things.

There was a letter from the author himself:

And a signed copy of Palahniuk's most famous book:

As well as some Palahniuk family photos:

And, finally, his original renovation plans for the bathroom:

"SO,THIS WAS A FUN REMODEL FIND!!!" Winter wrote on Facebook. "Very cool. Thanks Chuck Palahniuk!!! We'll pay it forward!"

No word yet on what she plans to put in the ceiling.

Ghana's First Satellite Is Now in Orbit

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There are close to 1,500 satellites orbiting our planet right now, and most of them were put up there by the biggest players in space exploration—the United States, Russia, and China. At least one now has a different home country, Ghana. The small cube-shaped satellite, the nation's first, will help the African nation monitor land along its coast and test the effects of radiation on electronics.

A team of three graduates from All Nations University College in Koforidua spent nearly two years working on the satellite, which uses a commercially available platform called the CubeSat. They worked with scientists from Japan's Kyutech Institute of Technology and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency to build it. On board, two cameras will send back images Ghana's coast, and a tool called the Digi-Singer will take celestial song requests—Ghana's national anthem and other songs will be broadcast from space to special ground stations. The microprocessors on board will also collect important data on the effects of space radiation on electronics to help find ways to protect important instruments on future space missions.

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The satellite hitched a ride up to the International Space Station on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and it was released into orbit in July. Ghana's orbiting entry joins satellites from other African nations, including South Africa, Nigeria, and Egypt.

The Best Trick U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves Ever Pulled on a Criminal

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The American Old West was a fertile cauldron for myth and legend, producing such fantastical figures as Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill. But while many folk heroes of the era may have been embellished-unto-fable, or completely dreamt up, the legendary Wild West figure Bass Reeves was absolutely real, even if his exploits sound like tall tales.

Reeves was one of the most remarkable figures of the Old West, serving as a deputy U.S. Marshal from 1875 to 1907, mostly in and around the regretable Indian Territory, which once made up much of what is now Oklahoma.

Born into slavery, Reeves escaped from the slave owner George Reeves at some point during the Civil War, supposedly knocking out his so-called “master” in a dispute over cards. Bass then fled into Indian Territory where, despite never having had the opportunity to learn to read, he learned the land and languages of the Cherokee, Seminole, and major tribes that had been forced to relocate to the region. After the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865, abolishing slavery, Reeves was finally able to settle down at an Arkansas farm and start a family. He and his wife Nellie would have almost a dozen kids while working their peaceful homestead, but for Bass, the legend was just beginning.

In 1875, Reeves was called upon to help clean up the Indian Territory. U.S. Marshal James Fagan had been tasked with rounding up a couple hundred deputies to reign in the Territories, which had become a haven for outlaws. Reeves was not only a crack shot and an imposing physical presence at over six feet tall, but his knowledge of the Territories and its people made him an ideal candidate for the position. There was also the fact that he was a black man, which was valuable in an area where white men were rightfully treated with suspicion. Fagan took advantage of this fact by hiring a number of black men as deputies.

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During his tenure as a lawman, Reeves quickly attained legendary status. According to a biography put together by the National Parks Service, Reeves was said to have superhuman strength. He could neither read nor write, but he was able to memorize each warrant after it was read to him, and he never brought in the wrong man.

As feared as he was fearless, Reeves earned the nickname the “Invincible Marshal” thanks to stories of dramatic close calls where a bullet knocked the hat off his head, or cut the reins to his horse. He also had a habit of dressing up in disguises to get close to his targets. His illiteracy even became part of his legend. One of the most evocative tales of Reeves’ exploits was the time he used a “letter trick” to save his life, and get his man (well, men).

As recounted in Art Burton’s biography Black Gun, Silver Star: The Life and Legend of Frontier Marshal Bass Reeves, one day Reeves was running down a pair of Texan murderers when they got the drop on him (or so it seemed). Reeves encountered the two men on the road, and they asked him if he was Bass Reeves. Reeves said that he was not, and the outlaws pulled their guns on him, forcing him to ride with them until they encountered someone who knew him.

After continuing along for some time, the Texans got tired of holding Reeves hostage, and they ordered him off of his horse so that they could kill him. Like something out of a Western movie, they asked Reeve if he had any last words, to which he replied that he had a letter from his wife that he wanted the killers to read to him. All off of their horses, Reeves handed them the letter with shaking hands. It was a great act.

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As the men took their eyes off of Reeves, the marshal drew his gun on the outlaw holding the letter, and the other killer dropped his gun in surprise. Reeves brought them both in. A cunning trick, Reeves is said to have made use of this same letter ruse a number of times through the years.

His career was marked with more such tales of dramatic daring, shootouts, and near-death escapades, where he brought down entire gangs, and in one particularly tragic instance, even had to bring in his own son. In 1901, Reeves claimed that he had arrested 3,000 fugitives, and that was five years before he retired.

When Reeves did finally hang up his Marshal badge, it was said that he’d never been hit by an outlaw’s bullet. He died from nephritis in 1910, proving all too human in the end.

Burton has even speculated that Reeves was the original inspiration for The Lone Ranger. But the legend of Bass Reeves himself might be the most incredible of all, because it’s true.

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