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The Premeditated Zucchini Switcheroo

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Stamford, Connecticut, is a city of some 120,000 people, served by a main downtown library and four smaller branches. One of those, the idyllic Weed Memorial and Hollander Branch, which is housed in a 19th-century farmhouse, was this week the location for a heinous, vegetable-based crime.

The branch has a sunny outdoor patio where, for the last year, Youth Services Librarian Marissa Bucci has been tending to its very own garden—two raised beds, and a whole lot of plants. But disaster struck on Tuesday, August 8, when an intruder found their way to the zucchini patch.

Bucci had been nurturing a single, promising zucchini and counting the days until it was sufficiently large to pick. When she went to water it earlier this week, however, she spotted "a very light, zucchini-shaped object in its place," she said. "I was like, "That's not right. I got closer, and noticed that it wasn't actually attached to anything. And," she said, "that it was a cucumber. In the middle of a zucchini plant."

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The culprit had found their way to the patch, armed with two cucumbers. After cruelly tearing the zucchini from its home, they surreptitiously lay a cucumber in its place. The other was placed elsewhere on the plant. "They were just nestled, as if though they belonged there and they were growing there. It was premeditated."

Before installing the garden, branch supervisor Erin Shea said, they had considered the possibility that people might steal their produce. With no fence and no cameras, the library's garden is defenseless—but they decided it was a risk they were happy to take. They hadn't considered, however, that they might play victim to a swap so shocking it shook them to the marrow.

As yet, they have no leads on who might be behind the swap. “We’re just going to wait and see if any other produce gets replaced," Shea said. And if they do? She laughs. "We'd probably find that quite funny."


A WWII Bomb Has Been Found at the Fukushima Nuclear Site

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As if Japan’s Fukushima nuclear clean-up operations weren’t dangerous enough, workers near the site of the former power plant, which disastrously melted down in 2011, just discovered what may be an unexploded bomb from World War II.

In March 2011, the Fukushima nuclear site experienced a series of disasters after Japan was hit with a tsunami and an earthquake, all culminating in an environmental catastrophe that has been compared to Chernobyl. According to a story on Channel NewsAsia, workers near the plant reactors were building a parking lot when they discovered an 85-centimeter-long object that they suspect is an old bomb. Newsweek reports that the object had what look to be stabilizing fins.

As Channel NewsAsia points out, the area did experience bombing by American forces during WWII, and it is not unheard of for old munitions to be dug up from time to time.

Upon finding the object, the clean-up crew immediately called the police to collect it and dispose of the suspected weapon.

Found: A 6-Foot Boa in This Guy's Attic

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For a long time now, Bob van der Herchen has been hearing sounds coming from the attic in his house in Englewood, Florida, about an hour-and-a-half south of Tampa.

"Probably over the last couple of years, my wife said she heard sounds in the attic. My son said he heard sounds in the attic, " Van der Herchen told WESH. "I didn't think much of it. I thought maybe it was rats."

Which he was apparently willing to live with. What it actually was was a snake, a six-foot boa constrictor that was found hanging out in the insulation.

A snake catcher came to retrieve the reptile, noting that the presence of shedded snake skin, indicating it had been there for awhile—possibly up to four years.

Where might it have come from? Van der Herchen told WFLA that he thinks it might've been a pet, coming into the house, perhaps, by way of surrounding trees. Which is the lesson in all of this for Van der Herchen, he says: be sure to trim your trees.

Also, one might add: if there's noises coming from your attic, investigate them. It could be a six-foot snake.

The Unique Science Experiments Planned for the Eclipse

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A lot of space science relies on waiting for things to be just right—for planets to align, for the night sky to be dark enough. The solar eclipse that will be visible from the U.S. on August 21 is no different. Scientists have been planning experiments for years that can only be done during the brief period when the moon is completely blocking the sun.

The sun's outer atmosphere, the planet Mercury, and even our own planet will all be studied by scientists who plan to position themselves along the path of totality. Here are some of the projects astronomers, physicists, and ordinary citizens will be working on later this month.

The Sun's Corona

While we can see sunspots and other surface phenomena thanks to filters on telescopes and cameras, we still have a lot to learn about the nuclear fireball at the center of our solar system. The sun's atmosphere, known as the corona, is particularly difficult to study because the sun is so bright. Scientists can create a sort of artificial eclipse to study the corona, but the total eclipse is a special opportunity because the innermost layers of the corona will be visible. Scientists have some unique experiments planned, and the data they collect could help predict future space weather that can affect us here on Earth.

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Both satellites and scientists on Earth will be taking images of the sun's corona during the eclipse, but they'll be capturing more than just regular visible light. Scientists are interested in X-rays emitted by the sun, and images of a broad spectrum of light will show its magnetic field. Telescopes mounted on the noses of two of NASA's WB-57 jets will try to capture small explosions, called nanoflares, that are believed to help heat up the corona.

The telescopes will also take the first thermal images of Mercury's surface. In order to get the clearest images, the two jets will fly along the path of totality at a speed of 470 miles per hour, and an altitude of 50,000 feet. They'll only be in the moon's shadow for roughly eight minutes, but that's enough time for the two instruments to collect valuable data. Another plane, a Gulfstream V owned by the National Science Foundation and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, will fly with the eclipse for about four minutes to learn more about the corona's thermal structure.

The Size of the Sun

You'd think humanity would know exactly how big the sun is by now, but it turns out our measurements have been a little imprecise. Scientists have been able to measure its diameter by carefully observing transits, such as when Venus or Mercury pass in front of the sun, or by measuring images produced by satellites. Unfortunately, these methods aren't perfectly accurate. Xavier Jubier, whose website models past and future eclipses, noticed that models of past eclipses, based on these measurements, didn't quite match photographs unless he made the sun's radius several hundred kilometers larger.

A precise measurement of the size of the sun doesn't matter for most solar scientists, but for eclipse chasers (or even people new to eclipse viewing), an imprecise value can mean missing out on the path of totality. So during the big event, Space.com reports, scientists both in and out of the path will measure the exact size of the umbra on the ground. Using the known diameter of the moon, and the distances between Earth, the moon, and the sun, they'll calculate the diameter of the sun that would be able to create that size of an umbra.

Earth's Atmosphere

When the moon passes in front of the sun, light isn't the only thing that's blocked. For a brief moment, the sun suddenly won't be bombarding a swath of planet with radiation, even though it just had been minutes before. That gives scientists a rare chance to observe one of the uppermost layers of our atmosphere, the ionosphere, as it rapidly switches between day and night conditions. Several experiments, including a crowdsourced project using cellphones, will use radio waves to observe changes in the ionosphere that could affect communications networks and GPS down on the ground. Another experiment will use 6,000 sensors on the ground to track gravity waves in the ionosphere that are triggered by the eclipse.

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Earth's weather isn't immune to changes caused by the eclipse. Temperatures will drop along the path of totality as the sun's warming rays are blocked by the moon, and citizen scientists can contribute to a database of atmospheric conditions, including temperature and cloud conditions, using the GLOBE Observer app. A separate team of scientists will be measuring the amount of solar energy reaching Earth as the eclipse occurs. That data will help them refine something called a 3-D radiative transfer model, which helps scientists understand how energy from the sun affects climate. Measurements taken in Wyoming and Missouri will be combined with data from satellites, measuring the amount of energy Earth reflects back into space, to understand how solar energy passes through Earth's atmosphere.

Proving Relativity Right, Again

Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity says that a massive object like the sun will have such an effect on gravity that it will bend light passing around it. Arthur Eddington first tried to prove this, by measuring the change in positions of stars, during a 1919 eclipse that passed over Africa and Brazil. Clouds got in the way, and it wasn't until 1922 that more definitive numbers, proving Einstein's theory correct, were collected.

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But the instruments of the time weren't terribly precise. Don Bruns, an amateur astronomer, told LiveScience that Eddington's numbers were off by about 10 percent. Bruns and several other groups will recreate the experiment on August 21, for the first time since 1973, and if you want to join them, you still have time to gather the necessary equipment.

Found: An Old Well Was Beneath a U.K. Nightclub

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In the process of turning one nightclub into another nightclub, workers in the town of Burton-on-Trent—about three hours northwest of London— have uncovered a historic well, that harkens back to the area’s past, and will also make for a great spot for bottle service.

As the Burton Mail is reporting, workers at the former Fever nightclub in the town were pulling up the floorboards as part of the club’s renovation and transformation into Society Bar, when they found the brick well hidden underneath.

The old well is a remnant of the town’s history as a hub of beer brewing. The building was once a cooperage which produced the barrels used in the town’s many breweries, and the well dates back to the location’s original usage.

"We were so excited when we discovered it and it'll be a real key feature for us in terms of paying homage to the heritage of the town," Pete Terry, the club's owner, told the Mail.

Rather than demolish the historic feature, which still holds clear water at the bottom, the nightclub owner is going to transform it into a feature table, decorated with lights and such. VIPs and coopers welcome.

Spain's Bright Blue 'Smurf Village' Is Being Forced to De-Smurf

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In comic books and films, the Smurf village is a land of magic and cooperation, in which tiny blue creatures live in mushroom-capped houses and work together to solve problems. Its only true threat is Gargamel, an evil wizard who will stop at nothing to destroy the Smurfs.

In the real world, the closest thing we've got to a Smurf village is Júzcar, Spain—a bright blue cluster of buildings high in the Andalusian mountains. And its Gargamel, it turns out, is the Smurfs' original creator.

First, some backstory. Back in 2011, when the CGI extravaganza The Smurfs was about to come out, Sony Pictures marketers approached the people of Júzcar with an idea. At the time, the village sported the color scheme more common to the area: each building had white walls and a red roof. What if, Sony said, Júzcar put itself (and their movie) on the map by entirely blueing itself?

After some prodding, the village agreed. Painters swept in and coated the whole town, including churches and gravestones, with 4,200 liters of blue paint. After tourist visits picked up about five hundredfold, the residents voted to keep the new color scheme. Júzcar, which had suffered from high unemployment, leaned into its new role. Everyone was happy.

That is, except the descendants of the Smurfs' original creator, Pierre Culliford. As The Local reports, after a royalties dispute arose last year, Júzcar has now “lost the authorization to market itself as a Smurf town.” There will be no more Smurf-themed weddings, Smurfette impersonators, or mushroom-capped public kiosks.

The Day of DeSmurfing—after which, The Local writes, the town will "cease to make reference to the small blue characters"—is August 15th. So if you'd like to pay homage, you'd better get there soon.

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.

Almost Edible, 106-Year-Old Fruitcake Found in Antarctica

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It's not that uncommon re-finding forgotten holiday fruitcake months after the event. More surprising, though, is when it's over a century old. Conservators from the New Zealand-run Antarctic Heritage Trust found themselves faced with this kind of a figgy phenomenon while recently excavating an abandoned hut some 2,500 miles from the South Pole. Cape Adare, at Antarctica's northeastern tip, was an important landing site and base camp used by early Antarctic explorers.

Made by the British brand Huntley & Palmers, which still exists today, the cake was wrapped in its original paper and stored in a tin-plated iron alloy box. While the tin had begun to deteriorate, the cake was in near-perfect condition and, according the researchers, still looked “almost edible”.

In a statement, Lizzie Meek, the Trust’s Programme Manager-Artefacts, described the cake as “an ideal high-energy food for Antarctic conditions, and still a favorite item on modern trips to the Ice.” Despite that, researchers manage to hold off snacking on their discovery, which apparently smelt like "rancid butter". In fact, the hut contained the best part of a picnic: sardines, "badly deteriorated" meat and fish and some more appealing "nice looking" jams.

In 1910, the British explorer Robert Falcon Scott made an ill-fated expedition to reach the South Pole and, on the way, explore the continent’s uncharted wastelands. The Heritage Trust believes the cake dates from his endeavor, known as the Terra Nova Expedition after the supply ship.

Conservators from the Trust have been working on restoring and documenting almost 1500 artifacts from the Cape for the past year. Once they've finished their conservation efforts, everything will be returned to the Ice for future explorers to find and enjoy—though they may want to avoid sampling the fruitcake.

Three Corpse Flowers Are About to Bloom in Washington, D.C.

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Washington, D.C., won't see a total solar eclipse on August 21 (residents will get upwards of 80 percent coverage), but there's another incredible natural phenomenon that could help make up for it. Three corpse flowers are expected to bloom at the United States Botanic Garden, stinking up its conservatory sometime between August 17 and 23.

Corpse flowers are native to Indonesia and known for their pungent smell that's reminiscent of rotting garbage, as well as their infrequent blooms. The strange plant, also called the titan arum, can grow up to 12 feet tall, so its blooms (technically inflorescences, or flower clusters) are quite the spectacle. The three plants at the Botanic Garden started out between two and three feet in height, but are growing quickly as they approach opening. The flower on the far left in the Botanic Garden's live stream, below, was 36 inches tall on August 6. By August 10, it had already shot up to 54 inches.

The Botanic Garden says this is likely the first time three corpse flowers at one institution have bloomed at once in North America. Chicago's Botanic Garden had two bloom back in June, and the New York Botanic Garden and the United States Botanic Garden had one bloom each last summer. There are a few possible explanations for why all these corpse flowers appear to be blooming around the same time, but the eclipse isn't one of them. The partial occlusion of the sun over D.C. is just a coincidence, but together they might make quite the natural show for the nation's capital.


The 1922 Eclipse Adventure That Sought to Confirm the Theory of Relativity

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On August 30, 1922, astronomer William Wallace Campbell arrived at Wallal, Western Australia, for the solar eclipse that would happen three weeks later. It had already been quite a journey. In July, Campbell—director of California’s Lick Observatory—had sailed roughly 7,500 miles from San Francisco to Sydney. From there, he crossed Australia by train to reach Perth, then traveled north by ship for 10 days to reach the town of Broome. At this point his expedition party was around 35 people strong: it included his wife, Elizabeth Campbell, and scientists from Australia, India and Canada. From Broome, two boats carrying 35 tons of equipment sailed to Eighty Mile Beach, the final stop before they could reach their destination of Wallal.

The path of the eclipse could not have been further from California. It swept from the east coast of Africa over the Indian Ocean before crossing Australia at Wallal. The options for the expedition were Christmas Island, the Maldives, or other rural locations in Australia. But the weather conditions favored Wallal, as did the fact that it would see the longest totality of all the locations.

Wallal is in a uniquely remote position. To the west is the Great Sandy Desert, an arid landmass larger than the whole of New Zealand. Beyond that lies the Australian outback, a vast area of bush land that stretches across the country. To the east is the Indian Ocean, which brings in cyclones for five months of the year.

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Campbell had previously traveled to faraway destinations—Spain, India, Ukraine and Kiribati—to record eclipses. However, getting the right conditions for the 1922 eclipse was crucial. The purpose of this expedition was to test Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, which had been published in 1915. In order to do this—to see whether Einstein’s prediction that light from distant stars would bend around the sun was correct—Campbell needed perfect conditions to photograph the sun during totality.

It wasn’t the first time Campbell had tried to test one of Einstein’s theories. In the late summer of 1914, as Europe marched toward war, Campbell went to Ukraine for the August eclipse. This trip—an attempt to test Einstein’s 1905 Theory of Special Relativity—was thwarted by bad weather. He was not only unable to get any accurate data, but war was officially declared three weeks before the eclipse. He had to return home and leave his equipment with the Pulkovo Observatory in Russia.

The next attempt was during the eclipse of June 8, 1918—the last to travel across America until August 21, 2017. Campbell positioned himself in Goldendale, Washington, but once again, he was unlucky. With his instruments still stuck in Russia, he had to use borrowed equipment in cloudy weather. He found the test to be inconclusive.

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The following year, a British astronomer named Arthur Stanley Eddington travelled to Principe Island off the east coast of Africa for the eclipse on May 29, 1919. His goal was the same as Campbell’s: to photograph starlight to see if Einstein’s theory was correct. During a totality of 6 minutes and 51 seconds, in changeable conditions, Eddington succeeded in capturing the images he needed. After careful analysis, the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society announced, in November 1919, that there was “no doubt that they confirm Einstein’s prediction. A very definite result has been obtained that light is deflected in accordance with Einstein’s law of gravitation.”

The 1919 eclipse results made Einstein and his theory world famous, even if some of the general public—and journalists reporting on the momentous event—still struggled to understand relativity theory. (A headline from The New York Times in November 29, 1919 read: Can’t Understand Einstein). However, some scientists expressed concern over the accuracy of Eddington’s plates. For some years, even Campbell was bothered by his own 1918 results. In 1921, he wrote“The fact is that we should not have attempted any observations on that subject with the imperfect and untested lenses which we borrowed only one month before the date of the 1918 eclipse.” The British astronomers also wanted a confirmation of Eddington’s measurements. The next total solar eclipse was September 21, 1922. Campbell turned his attention to find the most suitable place to retest Relativity Theory.

It is fortunate that at least one of the 35-odd people in Campbell’s expedition recorded the journey itself. The expedition photographs held at the University of California’s Lick Observatory collection are an extraordinary archive that shows both the remoteness of the location and the amount of work that went into capturing the eclipse.

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“The amount of preparation that went into this expedition is astounding,” says Supervisory Archivist Kate Dundon, “all leading up to a few crucial minutes in which they could take photographs of the total eclipse through the telescope.” (The other images in this story are from the State Archives of Western Australia). It’s also interesting, notes Dundon, that “they had the foresight to document their astronomical research, which was focused on photographically capturing the eclipse, with photography.”

One of the more striking images shows equipment being ferried to shore. Whaleboats full of precious equipment had to navigate the 26-foot sand bank before being carried across the surf and loaded into donkey wagons. With the help of the local indigenous Nyangumarta people, the expedition gear was then transported to the campsite. Only there, between wattle trees, dusty soil and relentless flies, could the preparations truly begin.

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The photographs also show the sheer size of the instruments. Campbell’s party alone had a 40-foot camera, which needed to be housed in a specially constructed tower. There were also two 15-foot cameras, and glass plates measuring 17 inches square and one-quarter-of-an-inch thick. A tent between trees created a makeshift darkroom.

The photo archive also reveals another side to the camp: The mess tent was christened Café Einstein. The group enjoyed a trip to the beach, which Clarence Chant, the Canadian astronomer, documented in his account of the expedition. Another photo shows that, unusually for the era, Elizabeth Campbell was not the only woman present and that she played a significant role in the expedition. She was involved with “many of the day-to-day operations at the eclipse camp and helping operate the spectrograph and develop photographic plates,” says Alix Norton, Archivist. “Much of what we know about daily life on these expeditions is due to Elizabeth’s detailed diaries and photo scrapbooks,” all of which are also part of the USC’s collections.

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In perfect conditions, on the afternoon of September 21, 1922, the sky darkened. Months of preparation—and years of attempts—had led Campbell to these 5 minutes and 19 seconds. What he saw that day is now part of the Lick Observatory Collection. One of his eclipse photographs shows the sun’s corona burning around a dark moon; around it, the sky is dotted with circles. These circles “denote the positions of stars around the edge of the sun, which are only visible at this position when an eclipse occurs,” says Norton. It’s one of her favorite images in the collection. “This photo of the total solar eclipse is stunning both from an artistic and scientific point of view—first of all, it’s gorgeous, but more importantly, it confirmed Einstein’s general theory of relativity.”

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But before he could confirm anything, Campbell and Robert Trumpler, who was part of the Wallal eclipse party, had to measure the results against the comparison plates. Despite the heat and the dust, some of the plates were developed in Wallal and the rest in Broome en route back to Perth. The photographs were then shipped back to the Lick Observatory, where they could be carefully analyzed. Campbell knew the conditions had been favorable, unlike for the British expedition to Christmas Island: cloud had entirely obscured their view. There was overwhelming press interest and speculation in the outcome. On April 12, 1923, Campbell confirmed Einstein’s theory of relativity base, with measurements from over 100 stars. His cable to British astronomer Frank Dyson ended with the words “We need not repeat Einstein text next eclipse.”

Amid the data, logistics, preparation, measurements, press attention, the expedition also witnessed an extraordinary event in an extraordinary place. As Chant reported afterward, in addition to his gratitude towards the government assistance, “many valued personal friendships were made. Indeed everyone we met seemed anxious to render us all possible help to make our expedition pleasant and successful. It was the experience of a life-time."

Found: A Llama on the Lam

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Yesterday morning a stray llama was reported near Notch Road in Granby, Connecticut. Four hours later, local police posted a photo of the animal to Twitter. Their tweet was perfectly calibrated and engineered to go viral:

They were indeed not kidding, and off the tweet went—at press time it had been retweeted more than 11,000 times. If one had to develop a theory as to why this particular post one captured people's imagination, the photo of the llama itself is a good place to start. Look at this poor animal:

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It's not clear what the white speck on its mouth is, but it adds to the tableau: bemused smile, wide eyes, heavy brow, pinned ears, tousled fur. According to the Hartford Courant, the llama was cared for during the period after it was on the lam. It saw a veterinarian, and was passed on to "a local resident with llama know-how."

And, then, four hours after the post, police said the mystery was solved.

"The Llama Drama is over," they reported in a tweet. "The animal has been reunited with its owner."

Please try to keep track of your llamas.

Mesopotamian Shaman Mistaken (?) For Bigfoot in North Carolina

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Can’t a guy just don his full-body shamanic hair costume and go on walkabout without being mistaken for a Sasquatch anymore? Apparently not in North Carolina.

According to the BBC, a self-described shaman was taking a stroll in the Appalachian hills recently when he was spotted by local Bigfoot hunters him for their quarry. Or they actually saw Bigfoot. (Accounts differ.)

The group, known as Bigfoot 911, first made local news after reporting they saw the cryptid in Pisgah National Park. But a few days later, Gawain MacGregor, who follows a faith that involves a Mesopotamian figure, Enkidu—and also claims to have seen multiple Bigfoots himself—stepped forward to say that, in fact, he was the figure they saw. MacGregor’s ritual observances include donning a suit, mask and all, of hairy animal skins, and taking to the wilderness to get back to nature. (Bigfoot 911’s “commander,” John Bruner, took to their closed Facebook group to disagree.)

In response to all of this, local police stepped in with a sensible suggestion, asking residents not to shoot at any suspected Bigfoots, lest they hit "a fun-loving and well-intentioned person, sweating in a gorilla costume."

How the Internet Changed the Meaning of 'Mamihlapinatapai'

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“A look shared by two people, each wishing that the other would initiate something that they both desire but which neither wants to begin.” Okay, now say that in one word.

Hard to distill, isn’t it?

But one word does exist to define this nebulous concept, a term originating from the highly endangered Yaghan language: Mamihlapinatapai.

Listed in the 1994 Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s most “succinct word,” mamihlapinatapai stems from the language of the Yaghan (or Yamana) tribe of Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago split between Chile and Argentina at the southern tip of South America.

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The Yaghan (or Yamana, as they are also called) have lived as hunter-gatherers in Tierra del Fuego for more than 10,000 years. They are nomadic, and their language, rich in words describing the sea and marine life, links them to their land and culture. Today, the tribe has been reduced to fewer than 2,000 members. Most speak Spanish.

Routinely considered to be one of the hardest words to translate, “mamihlapinatapai” has nonetheless found a place among the world’s favorite “untranslatables”: words that communicate concepts or situations that lack exact definition in English or other common tongues.

Mamihlapinatapai first started appearing consistently on websites globally in the late 2000s. It has since infiltrated the worlds of art, pop culture, and Internet subcultures related to linguistics and creative writing. One reason for its popularity may have been its mention in the 2011 documentary Life in a Day. Composed of crowdsourced video clips portraying a day in the life of people all over the world, the film, according to director Kevin Macdonald, is “a metaphor of the experience of being on the Internet ... clicking from one place to another, in this almost random way … following our own thoughts, following narrative and thematic paths.” In response to the question “What do you love?” a young woman, standing in the forest, speaks into a handheld camera, describing the word mamihlapinatapai, giving its origin, various definitions, possible pronunciation, and explaining what she loves about the phrase.

Apart from the lost-in-your-eyes romantic notions that most people associate the word with, mamihlapinatapai has also been cited in gamer’s theory as referring to the volunteer’s dilemma, in which any of a number of players faces a decision that may require a sacrifice on an individual player’s part, but will benefit everyone else.

In the art world, mamihlapinatapai has become an inspiration for a variety of artistic mediums, including serving as the title of a song on American actor and musician Ronny Cox’s 2004 album, and the title of an exhibit by Belgian photographer Max Pinckers. It has influenced artwork, stories, essays, videos, and books, such as the popular Lost in Translation, in which author Ella Frances Sanders colorfully illustrated some the world’s favorite untranslatable words. Some people have even inked themselves with it. Mamihlapinatapai has also wormed its way into academia, being featured in the book Defining the World in reference to Samuel Johnson’s—of Oxford English Dictionary fame—tribulations in finding compact but accurate definitions for words, and in a 1998 sociology treatise entitled “Social Dilemmas: The Anatomy of Cooperation.”

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“I think the word and its approximate translation is popular because most people can relate to that awkward, fleeting feeling of wanting to initiate something meaningful, but not wanting to be the first, for fear of embarrassment or rejection,” says Anna Daigneault of the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, a non-profit that works to document threatened languages. In recent years, the organization has done a lot of work with tribes in Chile and Tierra del Fuego, where the Yaghan tribe originated and currently live, and where many native groups are losing their linguistic heritage, deferring to Spanish over tribal languages. This is due to dwindling numbers—the 2002 census counted 1,685 Yaghans—the pressure to speak the native language of the country they live and work in, and societal bias against indigenous groups.

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However, Daigneault also brings up the fact that, outside of its parent culture, mamihlapinatapai is being viewed and interpreted differently from its original meaning.

“I think through a Western lens, it might appear that this word has a romantic undertone, but it might not be used in that way in the Yaghan language,” says Daigneault. Rather, it may be closer to “a strong, shared glance that connects the two speakers in some way that is beyond words.”

While mamihlapinatapai is undergoing its own online renaissance and reinterpretation, its parent language is on the brink of extinction.

The Yaghan lexicon is a language isolate, meaning that it has no linguistic relatives. It is an idiomatic island. If it dies out, there are no related languages that conserve elements of the language.

As is the case with many indigenous groups throughout history, when European settlers came to Tierra del Fuego, their diseases and land-grabbing decimated local tribes. As of 2017, there is only one fluent, living speaker of the language left: 89-year-old Cristina Calderon. When “Abuela”, as she is lovingly referred to, eventually passes away, much of the language and its connection with the Yaghan culture will die with her.

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But there is still some hope. Calderon has taught her granddaughter, Cristina Zarraga, some of the language, and both Calderon and Zarraga have published several books for posterity about Yaghan culture and history, as well as stories from Calderon’s own life.

Furthermore, the Yaghan language has been preserved in dictionary form, and can be found at such august institutions as the Library of Congress. The Yahgan Dictionary: Language of the Yamana people of Tierra del Fuego exists thanks to Thomas Bridges, a missionary who lived in Tierra del Fuego in the late 1800s with his family and worked with the local Yaghan people, recording their culture and language for more than 20 years.

But even so, as anthropologist Maurice van de Maele wrote in an article for the Chilean newspaper EMOL, "the younger generations also know the Yagán language but not at Cristina's level, so there will be an irreparable loss.”

Also, while mamihlapinatapai’s Internet fame has introduced the world to its parent tongue and culture, it has also brought unwanted media and tourist attention to the Yaghan community, which has closed ranks against the intrusive outside world and rarely offers glimpses into their lives.

Has exposing the world to the Yaghan language through mamihlapinatapai been enough to spur interest and potentially save the language? Linguists and experts say no.

“A ‘living’ language is one that is still in use by the generations in its speech community. So no, if only one word survived, that does not mean the language is still alive. The fame of that one word may still provide a little bit of visibility on the internet, and thus a bit of effect on the mass consciousness," says Daigneault. "But it's more of a ghost whisper at that point."

The Squirrel Who Ruined 21,000 Gallons of Milk

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Earlier this week, in Burnaby, British Columbia, just outside Vancouver, a squirrel worked its way through some electrical equipment. It chewed and chewed enough to spark a fire on a utility pole, which cut power to 150 residents, in addition to a local cheese factory.

This was bad news for around 21,000 gallons of milk at the factory, which spoiled after sitting in the Pacific Northwest's mild summer heat for 12 hours without cooling, according to the Vancouver Sun.

The factory is operated by Scardillo Cheese, which calls itself "British Columbia's largest independent cheese makers," and while the milk was lost, the cheese inside was spared, thanks to generators that kept it at the right temperature. But this is cold comfort, since the aftermath of the squirrel's infrastructure adjustments is expected to last for a while.

"The company is estimated to lose about a week of production disposing of and cleaning up the milk," the Sun reported Thursday. "The squirrel is still at large."

Did Mooncakes Help the Chinese Overthrow the Mongols?

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After 88 years under Mongol rule, the spirits of Han Chinese families were at an all-time low. Every aspect of their lives was at the mercy of their Mongol rulers who were, mostly, not terribly merciful. Due to fears about uprisings, the Han couldn’t meet in groups. Possessing weapons was out, too, even meat and vegetable cleavers, which were rationed—one for every ten families. Mongol guards were everywhere, keeping an eye on that potentially nefarious chopper. Spies were even stationed in each house, while famine and poverty scratched at the door.

And there were worse abuses, or so the stories say. Young sons were molested, daughters were violently “deflowered” before their weddings. A Mongol law demanded the thumbs of all Chinese boys to be mutilated at birth so they would be incapable of drawing a bow.

By 1368, the stories continue, the time was ripe for an uprising. Zhu Yuanzhang, the man who would one day be emperor of China’s Ming Dynasty, was then a young man born to a desperately poor Han Chinese peasant family. However, he had a brilliant friend, Liu Bowen, to aid his rise to prominence and power. Liu was a poet and philosopher—and a remarkable strategist. The Mid-Autumn Festival was approaching, the time when every family would traditionally exchange and eat pastries called mooncakes.

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Liu sent men to every corner of the three prefectures under Mongol rule, where each visited pastry shops and filed orders for millions and millions of mooncakes. In each one, it is said, they slipped a piece of paper that said: “The spiritual illuminaries are hidden in the darkness, they are secretly helping people to defreeze the icy cold. Take action on the midnight hour, let us kill the housekeeping masters all together!” And so they did, on the night of the Moon Festival, and so the Chinese were liberated.

At least, that’s one version of the story. Another says that the message read, less poetically, ‘‘Kill the Tartars on New Year’s Eve!’ (The Mongols did not read Chinese, and so remained in the dark about the mooncake messages.) Or perhaps the message was written on the rice-paper placed under the cakes. Maybe the message had been coded, and assembled by combining multiple mooncakes. Was it definitely mooncakes? It might have been instructions on medicine sold door-to-door. No, wait, no message whatsoever—just the power of rumor, whispered from household to household.

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All these stories, collated by the late scholar of Chinese history Hok-Lam Chan, are just stories. “It’s preposterous,” he writes, “to cast [Liu] as the instigator of the uprising and credit him with the plan to conceal the messages calling for rebellion in the filling of mooncakes.”

We do know that the Mongols ruled over the Han Chinese, and that, over multiple decades in the second half of the 14th century, there was an uprising that led to Zhu Yuanzhang seizing control and establishing the Ming Dynasty. But almost everything else in this amalgamation of stories, from the thumbs to the messages to the mooncakes, is entirely untrue. Still, the story is often repeated as fact, or as an unverified-but-probably-true story that somehow escapes the “orthodox” histories.

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But what are mooncakes? Often described as a cultural equivalent to Western holiday fruitcake, mooncakes are a seasonal dessert bought by millions of Chinese families to celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival. Round and golden like the harvest moon, the cakes consist of a filled pastry case molded into the shape of a chrysanthemum, about three or four inches in diameter. Not everyone likes them. They’re extremely dense—not because they’re made of moon, but because they enclose a thick, rich filling of red beans, dates, or lotus seed paste. There are regional varieties, too. Cantonese mooncakes, for example, conceal a whole salted duck egg yolk, as rich and round as the late September full moon, within their shell.

Eating them is a celebration of the moon and the harvest. It’s also an important cultural transaction: Businessmen spend the equivalent of hundreds of dollars on high-end versions. The especially luxurious ones come in boxes decorated with silk, paintings, and sometimes real gold. (Each contains either four or eight mooncakes, with more superfluous individual wrappings.) Every year, close to $375 million is spent on their packaging alone. These expensive gifts sometimes blur the line between business “gifting” and outright bribery.

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In 2013, the Chinese government cracked down on what it perceived as out-of-control expenditures by government officials who used public money to gift mooncakes to business associates. (An official party circular from President Xi Jinping said, according to CNN, "Superior departments and officials should seize on the trend of these luxurious celebrations and be courageous enough to spot and rectify decadent behavior in a timely manner while setting an example themselves.”) Like fruitcakes, millions, too, get chucked out. In Hong Kong alone, an estimated 2.5 million mooncakes were thrown away after the 2013 Mid-Autumn Festival. That’s one for every three people living on the island.

There is plenty of Chinese mythos around the Moon and, by extension, around mooncakes—such as Old Man Under the Moon or the Lady of the Moon. But only the Mongol legend is repeated, at least occasionally, as being true. The reason, says Chan, may relate to historical Chinese nationalism. In the late Qing period, which ended around the beginning of World War I, written accounts of the story began to spread anew. In those stories, the Han Chinese, the dominant ethnic group in China, were being ruled by a different ethnic minority—the Manchus (who dominated the Qing Dynasty).

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It’s likely, Chan says, that the stories were written and shared by members of anti-Manchu secret societies. By sharing the stories as fact, they remade the collective memory of the Han Chinese rebellion against the Mongols. This version of history put the uprising in the hands of the people, which stirred up nationalistic fervor. It wasn’t hard for Han readers at the time to link their experience under the Manchus to their ancestors’ trials under the Mongols. Liu Bowen, in turn, became a relatable, inspirational, contemporary hero.

Chinese repression under the Manchus was less cartoonishly horrible than the fictional Mongol version, though it was still felt acutely. One particularly striking example, which makes it into many propaganda images from the time, was the Manchu hairstyle that Han Chinese men were obliged to don. Known as a “queue” or “cue,” it consists of a partially shaved head with a long braid cascading from the top of the crown. Traditionally, Han Chinese men and women did not cut their hair at all, and instead wound it into a topknot. But from 1644, when Beijing was sacked by the Qing, the queue was a compulsory sign of submission to Manchu rule.

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The mooncakes’ message might not played a direct role in overthrowing the Mongols, but the idea of it did play a small part in propagating what Chan describes as the “‘expel the Tartars, restore Chinese rule’ manifesto of the Han nationalist revolution.” This same sentiment, in turn, led to the overthrow of the Manchus. The story may be fictional, but the impact of the propaganda is real, and was harnessed in a very elegant way by anti-Qing campaigners. Political opposition of this sort had simmered for centuries, in pockets of resistance and occasional uprisings. (Between 1850 and 1863, for example, the Taiping Rebellion led to tens of millions of people dying in clashes between rebels from southern China and the Manchu rulers—by some estimates, twice the death toll of World War I.)

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One of the definitive events of this opposition, the Wuchang Uprising, took place in October 1911. The conflict began due to a kerfuffle over railway nationalization, but it snowballed into a coup. In time, this came to be known as the Xinhai Revolution, and led to the 1912 abdication of the six-year-old Manchu emperor, the end of the Qing Dynasty, and the start of the Republic of China. The mooncakes’ role in this (as instruments of propaganda and symbols of Han nationalism) may have been limited, but it was more real and tangible than its effect on the overthrow of the Mongols some 600 years earlier.

Contemporary Chinese diners tend not to think about the political implications of their mooncakes. Squabbles about fillings and crusts are far more common. (The hashtag #五仁滾出月餅界, which was trending in 2013, called for a ban on a filling known as “five nuts.”) Curiously, the Cantonese variety with duck egg yolk has become especially popular over the last century.

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That's not to say that mooncakes have had no contemporary political import whatsoever. Sometimes, they appear in overt, anti-China messages. In the 1950s, a bakery in Taipei, Taiwan (considered a rebel province of China) rechristened its festive offerings “anti-communism and fight Russia moon cake” and called on customers to “develop the righteous spirit of the ethnic group.” More recently, in 2014, Umbrella Revolution dissidents in Hong Kong baked political messages into the exterior of mooncakes. Still, it's still far more common for them to be used by Chinese embassies, diplomats, and officials as tasty vessels for national pride (and red beans). Whatever the purpose, there's more lurking underneath this crusty exterior than duck eggs, five nuts, or lotus seed paste.

A Very Detailed, Interactive Map of Chicago’s Tree Canopy

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In June, the Chicago Regional Tree Initiative and Morton Arboretum released what they say is the most comprehensive tree canopy data set of any region in the U.S., covering 284 municipalities in the Chicago area. Now, that data is helping neighborhoods improve their environments and assist their communities.

“When we go to talk to communities,” says Lydia Scott, director of the CRTI, “We say ‘trees reduce crime.’ And then they go, ‘Explain to me how that could possibly be, because that’s the most bizarre thing I’ve ever heard.’”

In Chicago, where more than 2,000 people have been shot this year, scientists are looking at physical features of neighborhoods for solutions. “We started to look at where we have heavy crime, and whether there was a correlation with tree canopy, and often, there is,” says Scott. “Communities that have higher tree population have lower crime. Areas where trees are prevalent, people tend to be outside, mingling, enjoying their community.”

The map revealed that poorer neighborhoods are often “tree deserts,” areas with little or no tree canopy. Trees reduce flooding, improve property values, prevent heat islands, promote feelings of safety, reduce mortality, and provide other significant social and health benefits. This means that when you live in, for example, the South Side, where trees are scarcer, you lose more than just green leaves overhead.

Never before have researchers been able to look so widely and deeply at this sort of data. The map is huge—it covers seven counties—and extremely detailed. That has allowed Scott and her colleagues to notice some startling patterns. For example, in the North Shore community—an affluent, lakeside, suburban area—canopy cover tends to be 40 percent or higher. On the economically depressed South Side, canopy can be as low as 7 percent.

To make the map, scientists at CRTI and Morton overlaid a wide range of data sets to get the clearest, most holistic picture to date. “We’re able to layer heat island data; demographic information such as age, vulnerable population, education background; we’re layering Medicaid claims because we know there’s a correlation between health issues—cardiopulmonary problems—and loss of trees,” says Scott.

Next, they combined that data with LIDAR imagery. LIDAR is a remote sensing method. A plane with a small camera attached to the underside flies over neighborhoods, where it’s able to record height differences on the ground. That allows scientists to identify the layout of the tree canopy with an impressive degree of accuracy.

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Of course, skeptics might argue that this sort of data is only correlation, rather than causation. Underserved communities have high crime and fewer trees—not high crime in part due to fewer trees. So to support their claims, CRTI compiled all the benefits that trees provide, with citations for the various studies backing up the claims. One of those studies suggests that trees “may deter crime both by increasing informal surveillance and by mitigating some of the psychological precursors to violence.”

Now, municipal leaders will work with CRTI to create custom solutions for their problems. For example, if an area is having floods, CRTI can show the town where upstream they need to plant trees. Just south of the city in the village of Dolton, which struggles with high crime rates and depopulation, Scott met with the mayor to determine which areas and what tree species they should focus efforts on to make the neighborhood safer and more pleasant.

Regardless, many of these efforts won’t pay off for years. Trees, obviously, need time to grow. In some ways, this planting will be a leap of faith.

But the trees do have immediate benefits in other respects. Blacks in Green is a Chicago-based economic development organization that aims to create self-sustaining black communities through green initiatives. “We’re using the green economy to galvanize, organize, energize,” says founder Naomi Davis. Davis has met with Scott and CRTI multiple times over the last few years in order to plan BiG’s approach. “When you’re starting something, you should take stock of what you got,” Davis says. “We realized we were going to need to start with a tree inventory. Now we’re finally getting that inventory.”

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In 2015, BiG purchased a vacant lot in Chicago's West Woodlawn neighborhood from the city for $1. They’ve now created a fruit and nut orchard in that lot, with plum, crabapple, and pawpaw trees. “We are looking at what it would mean to have a green, healthy space in a blighted African-American neighborhood…We have a really nasty, barren, burnt out commercial corridor, which is 61st Street. Last year we planted about 45 trees there.”

Both Scott and Davis agree that when people come out to plant, they're amplifying community interaction and bonding. Additionally, the community training also introduces people to skill sets they didn’t have before. BiG has put two students from the neighborhood through a certified tree-keeping course.

Davis is also enthusiastic about the potential jobs. “This is something that is a strong career for good-paying wages,” she says. “We’re gonna need more trees than ever to be planted because of climate change.” BiG will have a horticulturalist career fair in October. “In a neighborhood where unemployment is so high,” she says, it’s a game-changer.

“It’s making people excited about their neighborhood,” says Scott. “They use to walk by and not notice. Now they’re starting to look up.”


Found: A Very Unusual Time Capsule

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Normally, when someone finds a random time capsule, it contains some charming reminders of what life was like in years past—a newspaper, some trinkets, perhaps a letter from the person who hid the capsule.

The content of a capsule found in Winthrop, Maine, were a little more edgy.

As the Kennebec Journal reports, Randy Hooper was digging a hole in his backyard to plant a blueberry bush when he found an 8 inch length of rusty pipe, sealed at the ends. Inside was a newspaper from October 2, 1955, which is exactly what you’d expect in time capsule.

But the other objects were more unusual. There was an old needle, syringes, a pestle for grinding, and a bottle of morphine.

Not exactly what you expect to find in a time capsule. Hooper told the Journal he was hoping to find a letter or picture. Instead, he had to report his find to the local police, who came and took the decades-old drug kit away.

A Colony of Bats Has Moved Into a Triceratops

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Life is stirring among the dinosaurs of North Devon, England. Deep in the belly of a giant fiberglass triceratops, on display at Combe Martin Wildlife and Dinosaur Park, eight rare lesser horseshoe bats have made a home.

The dinosaur in question is 13 feet tall and one of the older models in the park. It’s thought the bats snuck in through a hole in its stomach and found an unexpected dream home inside—a safe, dry place to while away the daytime in peace, before heading out at night to forage for insects.

Bat experts and enthusiasts, including the local Devon Greater Horseshoe Bat Project, are delighted at the recent relocation. “It shows how opportunistic bats can be,” Ruth Testa, from the project, told the BBC. “It’s encouraging to find them somewhere that’s so well used and has so many people passing by.”

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Volunteers from the project had been invited to the park to look for possible roosts. “We could never have guessed where they would be living,” Testa told Devon Live. “To find them hanging out inside a model of a triceratops came as a big surprise.”

Though not technically endangered, lesser horseshoe bats have been at risk in the United Kingdom for some time. A rise of insecticides has made their provender of choice less available, while industrialization has destroyed many of their preferred roosts and foraging spots. A triceratops isn't the most obvious alternative, but it looks like winging it has worked out well for them.

Big Ben Is Taking Four Years Off

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Every hour since 1859, with very few exceptions, everyone within hearing range of London’s Parliament Square has been treated to the resounding bong of Big Ben, announcing the passage of time.

Now Londoners will have to check their smartphones like the rest of us. As the BBC reports, Big Ben’s bells are going silent for about four years.

Stilling the bell is a safety measure as workers head up there to repair its home, Queen Elizabeth Tower. As the BBC writes, they plan to install an elevator, a toilet, and a kitchen; clean and repair the clock; and make the building more energy efficient.

While such quiet spells have happened before, this will be Big Ben’s longest mandated silence since it began ringing in 1859. The clock is taking a break, too—although one face will still tell the time, it will be powered by an electric motor rather than its regular series of gears.

The bell’s last regular toll will take place next Monday, August 21, at noon, and people are expected to gather in Parliament Square to listen. After that, “the hammers will be locked and disconnected from the clock,” SkyNews reports.

The clock can’t catch a true break, though—“it will still sound for important events including New Year’s eve and Remembrance Sunday,” the BBC writes. And for those who really can’t go without, BBC Radio 4 will broadcast recordings of its chimes every fifteen minutes.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

The Hunt for a Missing Canadian Lily

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In 1928, the plant breeder Isabella Preston took a moment between her duties at Ottawa's Central Experimental Farm to reflect on her first big success. The Canadian Horticultural Council had asked her to write down a detailed description of a particular flowering plant, in order to answer a taxonomic question. So sometime after watering the columbines, or cross-pollinating the Siberian irises, she jotted down some words about the George C. Creelman lily—a big, white-flowered varietal she had bred 12 years earlier, and that had gone on to take the gardening world by storm.

Over 80 years later, in 2009, curator Alex Henderson took a break from his own day-to-day duties to rifle through the Isabella Preston archives at his workplace, the Royal Botanical Gardens in Ontario. "I found this handwritten description of this lily," he says. "Written by her, in her own handwriting." He pauses, and his voice gets hushed: "It was one of those nerd alert moments, where the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end."

To Henderson, this wasn't just esoterica. It was a piece of evidence in a mystery that spans centuries. At the time he found Preston's description, Henderson had been searching for the George C. Creelman lily for about two years; by now, he's been on the hunt for a full decade. To Henderson and other experts, the vanished lily is a vital part of Canada's horticultural history. Its creation marked "the first real attempt to introduce a lily that was acclimatized to the Canadian climate," he says. It is also, as an early example of Preston's hybridization, a kind of lost masterwork—the equivalent of a missing Bach cantata, or a stolen Blue Period Picasso.

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Canada is a tough place for your garden-variety lily. Up until the early 1900s, plant-lovers there had to make do with flowers bred for gardens in the United States and Europe, which tend to be suited to more temperate climates. Although much brainpower had been put toward making fruits, vegetables, and grains suitable for northern climes, less utilitarian plants hadn't yet been given that same treatment. As the archivist Edwinna von Baeyer explains in her 1987 article "The Horticultural Odyssey of Isabella Preston," in the years after World War I, horticulturists found that of the decorative plants being imported from Europe and America, "perhaps 50%... [were] not suitable for Canada."

Into this void sailed Preston. Herself a transplant to Canada—she and her sister immigrated from England after their mother's death—Preston always knew she wanted to work with plants. She described herself as "born with green fingers," and was known to remark that all of her earliest memories were vegetable-related. Undaunted by the lack of women in such fields ("If you have to do something agricultural, why not take up poultry?" one acquaintance asked her) she enrolled in the Department of Horticulture at Ontario Agricultural College as soon as she arrived in the country, in 1912.

She pursued her studies with quiet vigor: over the course of her time at the college, she later wrote, she eventually read "all the books in the library." After a year of classes, she switched to a self-study course, and began working full-time in the greenhouses. There, within a few years, she had started growing hundreds of lily bulbs for her own experiments.

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In 1916, these experiments bore their first significant result: the George C. Creelman lily. Preston had crossed two cultivars from southern China, the first a particularly vigorous and hardy plant, called Lilium regale, and the second a large-flowered, fragrant one called L. sargentiate. The result was "stronger-growing and later-blooming than either parent," writes von Baeyer. It grew about 6 feet tall, and its flowers were white and sweet-smelling, with yellow throats and pink speckles. She named it after the president of the Agricultural College, George C. Creelman.

When, after four years of tweaking, the Creelman lily was released to the public, it was an immediate and lasting hit. Breeders used it to make more hybrids, and the Royal Horticultural Society granted it an "Award of Merit" in 1934. The Creelman lily moved hobbyists to histrionics ("it is difficult to speak with restrained enthusiasm" about it, one wrote), and experts to gestures of respect: upon seeing an early specimen in bloom at the Ontario Agricultural College, one horticulture professor wrote that he "felt like taking off [his] hat." As Henderson later found, it ended up in collections as far afield as Europe and Australia, a local plant made good.

And then, at some point in the 1940s, it seems to have vanished, Henderson says. His own quest started in 2007, with another handwritten clue: a cocktail napkin, scrawled with the phrase "George C. Creelman lily" and given to him by a colleague who had run into Creelman's grandson at a bar. As the curator for the Royal Botanical Gardens, Henderson is used to tracking down obscure plants. He was also passingly familiar with the lily, whose reputation for beauty and vigor has endured, and he figured it shouldn't be too hard to dig up.

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"We didn't have it, but I went into our plant records, and we used to have it," he says. When local nurseries also lacked any living specimens, he went farther afield—"around Canada, and then Europe, and Australia," he says. "All these places used to have it, and then didn't. I realized then that this was a very strange story."

Henderson's first big lead came a couple of years after the hunt started, from a colleague at the former Ontario Agricultural College, now called the University of Guelph. "I happened to tell him the story," he says, "and at the end of it he goes, 'I've got that.'" The friend sent over a few bulbs, and Henderson waited impatiently for them to grow and flower. When they did, he set up a kind of plant-forensics room inside the Royal Botanical Gardens. "I got two botanists that work here, and I literally locked them in the room with the handwritten description and the lily flowers, so they could try to compare and contrast," he says. "I was pacing up and down the corridor for two hours waiting for the results."

When said results came, they were inconclusive. "They said, 'You know what, it's really close—but there's just enough doubt in our minds,'" he says. So Henderson went back into the archives, where he began to piece together what he calls a "CSI-type" story of mistaken identities and genetic mayhem.

It turns out that in the years after the Creelman lily made it big, breeders began to notice small differences between individual plants, genetic variations that stemmed from the original crossbreeding. The Agricultural College's strict naming rules meant that only one of these varieties could be considered the official George C. Creelman lily, and asked Preston to decide which one it would be. (Henderson thinks that the bulbs he got belonged to one of the inferior offshoots, which would explain the botanists' diagnosis of close-but-not-quite.) "She claimed that the true varietal was a bulb that was owned by a man named Robert Patterson," a commercial breeder, Henderson says. "But nobody knows who this guy was. The trail goes cold."

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At this point, Henderson isn't quite sure how to heat it up again. So far, his lily-sleuthing has largely had to take place in spare moments, in between larger projects. "I can't dedicated my full-time job to finding one plant for ten years—I'd get fired, right?" he says, a bit wistfully. He sees his quest as a mix between Jurassic Park and art appreciation: "You're bringing something back that used to be around, and is no longer here," he says. "It's also no different than [looking for] a painting or a photograph or a work of art—it's about that higher meaning, how humanity values aesthetic beauty."

The Creelman lily was just the first of many successful Preston hybrids. By the end of her 30-year career, she was a giant of horticulture, with an international reputation. Von Baeyer relates a tale in which a Japanese admiral, brought to the United States on a diplomatic visit, asks to take a day trip to Canada to meet Preston. She created hundreds of new plants, many of which she named for the people and places of her adopted homeland: crabapples after Canadian lakes; roses after First Nations peoples; dark red lilies after the Horticultural Society's stenographers. "It's incredible, really, the amount of plants she bred," says Henderson. "Even though she's not here anymore, her spirit very strongly is."

It's because of that spirit that Henderson isn't giving up. He recently happened to hear a woman talking about the Creelman lily on a gardening radio program; he has since connected with her, and gotten a few bulbs. In a year, when they bloom, he'll lock the botanists in that room again and see what they say.

He's trying not to get his hopes up—he suspects they are inferior varietals, like last time. But if they do turn out to be the real thing? "I'll probably have a beer," he says. "Sit on a balcony for a couple of days and just relax."

Antarctica's Ice Hides 91 Newly Described Volcanoes

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Antarctica is home to lots of penguins and seals—and plenty of secrets locked in, or under, its ice. Scientists have recently uncovered a few more things the continent was hiding, including 91 previously unknown volcanoes, and some of the world's largest proteins.

A team of researchers from the University of Edinburgh used ice-penetrating radar, coupled with satellite and aerial survey data, to identify 138 volcanic peaks under the Antarctic ice sheet, 91 of which were previously undescribed. The smallest one is just over 300 feet tall, while the largest peak tops out at more than 12,500 feet, roughly as tall as the Eiger in the Swiss Alps. The peaks are spread out over more than 2,000 miles in the West Antarctic Rift System. The basalt volcanoes probably aren't active, but the researchers say there's a chance there could be an increase in volcanic activity if the ice over them thins—just one more way climate change could wreak havoc on Antarctica.

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That's the wide angle view. Closer in, also hidden in the ice is one of the largest proteins ever described. The Marinomonas primoryensis bacterium uses the oversized protein to latch onto diatoms floating in the water where it lives. Those diatoms provide the bacterium with oxygen and, in turn, the bacterium keep the photosynthesizing diatoms up at the surface of the water, where they can draw energy from the Sun. The giant protein is 600 nanometers long, compared to between two and 15 nanometers for most (a human hair is roughly 75,000 nanometers wide, so even the biggest proteins remain invisible to the naked eye). From mountains to microbes, Antarctica clearly has some giant secrets.

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