Vincenzo Commez was born into poverty in Naples in the first years of the 20th century. He begged on the street to help feed his mother and six siblings. He worked in a coal mine. With his father in prison, after his mother died of cholera, his aunt took him and a brother to the Naples navy yard, to join other scugnizzi—street urchins—as part of an educational experiment designed to turn them into respectful citizens. He was among 750 street children who, over 15 years, boarded a ship docked there called Caracciolo. In 1914, Commez wrote:

After two days we were dressed as sailors and we were sailors like everyone else who was on board. After two months a "mum" came on board, Ms. Civita, who is so kind and affectionate towards us.

The "kindergarten ship," as it was known, was led by that kind woman, Giulia Civita Franceschi, a Naples-born educator who emphasized practice over theory. The “Civita Method” did not “simply teach them a useful skill for life” writes Maria Antoinetta Selvaggio, sociologist and author of the book Transforming Street Urchins into Adult Sailors on the Training Ship "Caracciolo" (1913–1928): Giulia Civita Franceschi and Her Educational Vision, in an email interview. “[It] also prepared them to be conscientious and dignified citizens proud of having walked the walk to social redemption and true resilience.”

The idea of a training ship for disadvantaged children wasn’t new in Italy. In 1883, Genoa had established the training ship Garaventa and in Venice, Scilla was open to orphans of fishermen. In Naples, the situation of the poor was particularly desperate. Housing was unsanitary and overcrowded. Malnutrition was common. The cholera outbreak of 1910–11 killed an estimated 2,600 people over five months. In 1911, a law was passed to approve the donation of Caracciolo, a former Navy ship, to the city. In August 1913, Civita came aboard as head of the program, which was open to boys between the ages of six and 16 (despite being referred to as a "kindergarten ship").

One of the tasks assigned to each boy, once he was able, was to write a short autobiography. They mostly wrote about “early parental loss, neglect, the bleakest poverty, and a grim struggle for survival, in the absence of any protection or support from the adult world, of which they know the worst aspects, ranging from indifference to pitiless exploitation,” says Selvaggio.

Raffaele Lastro was one of the Caracciolini, as the boys became known, whose account is held in the archives at the Museo del Mare in Naples. (Selvaggio originally received the archive from a daughter of one of the boys, and she donated the materials to the museum.) Lastro earned pennies carrying bags for tourists, and was often the subject of their ridicule. “At night when I go to bed I think back to those foreigners who asked me to perform somersaults for them and I wish they could see me now—especially the one who called me a pig—and see that I am better dressed than them—as an Italian sailor—and even wearing a pair of black shoes,” he wrote in his biography.

In the photographic archives from the ship, Lastro stands with erect posture in a pristine white sailor's shirt. Some of the boys were also photographed prior to boarding the ship—a visual record of the conditions in which they lived: dirty faces, ragged clothes, distant eyes. The boys arrived “haphazardly,” according to Selvaggio, although it appears at least one boy was brought to the ship by the American Red Cross, which also holds photographic archives from the ship. Once on board, he named himself“Kelly” after the Red Cross worker who had found him on the street, Alice McKay Kelly.

According to Selvaggio, writing these mini-autobiographies was a way for the boys to acknowledge, and distance themselves, from their experiences. The words have "a therapeutic and cathartic effect," says Selvaggio. For Lastro, writing appears to have been a point of pride: "Ms. Civita has been taking care of me since I was illiterate—and now I can write my own thoughts with no one dictating to me. I owe everything to her who helps me as if she was my mother."

The education offered on the ship was broad. In addition to classes, there were workshops in vocational skills such as carpentry and sailing. Even sex education was covered. There were occasional field trips and physical activities, from fishing to gymnastics. In 1922, the Minister for Education wrote, “The school is integrated in the work and vice versa: the contact with objects, the immediate reality, gives the child an experience that becomes richer by the day and helps to materialize the first expressions of his thoughts.”

The ship also had what would be later recognized today as a “buddy system” between the older and younger boys. Writing in 1950, after the program had ended, Civita said she established “with appropriate precautions, of relationships of solidarity similar to those that are created in the family between elder and younger siblings and not infrequently are established between these children during their vagrant life as street urchins.”

Under Civita, the ship had rules, but no rewards or punishments. According to the student Lastro, “I am grateful to all of my superiors that took me here but I am young and sometimes make mistakes but when I do the Captain tells me off so I can learn.” Selvaggio notes that some of the rules “were strict, but they were understood to be conditions designed to foster individual growth. Compliance with the rules was part of being accountable.” Children could be expelled, however, if they were deemed “unfit” for physical, disciplinary, or moral reasons.

In 1928, with the rise of fascism in Italy, the ship was turned over to the Opera Nazionale Balilla, the militaristic youth organization. According to Selvaggio, Civita's ethos was “completely incompatible” with the new regime. The existence of the kindergarten ship was largely forgotten until 2009, when the Museo del Mare in Naples opened a photo exhibition. Atlas Obscura has a selection of images of the boys of Caracciolo.

In 1919, a hurricane hit the coast of Texas, just 25 miles south of the growing city of Corpus Christi. As the storm approached from the Gulf of Mexico and the wind picked up, massive schools of fish fled into Corpus Christi Bay. The city’s residents weren’t worried, though: They had made it through a hurricane just three years before with minimal damage, and they believed the barrier islands that guarded the city then would protect them again.

This hurricane, though, hit harder. Corpus Christi fell in the quadrant of the storm with the fiercest winds and the greatest risk of flooding. The surge rushed in at 16 feet high, destroying the lower-lying parts of the city. Hundreds died.

Two decades before, after being hit by a similar storm, Galveston had built a seawall, and now the reeling residents of Corpus Christi began to demand one of their own. In the 1910s, the residential section of the city sat on a bluff, about 50 feet higher than the beach, but the city’s business section sat below, just a few feet above sea level. “If you’re so close to the water, you need protection,” says Mary Jo O’Rear, author of Bulwark Against the Bay, an account of the city’s quest to build a seawall. In the aftermath of the 1919 storm, city leaders presented the first proposal for a seawall, which would have stood 14 feet above sea level.

But that wall was never built. It would be more than 20 years before Corpus Christi had that storm protection. While politicians shifted their ambitions to other infrastructure projects—a port, a dam, canals—citizens recruited their own designer, Gutzon Borglum, the sculptor responsible for Mount Rushmore, who imagined the Corpus Christi seawall less as practical, protective measure than as an opportunity to beautify the city.

In 1927, when Borglum first came to Corpus Christi, both his fame and infamy were growing. The Idaho-born sculptor had won awards and commissions, including, most prominently, the job of creating a sculpture of Union General Philip Sheridan for Washington, D.C., and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York had acquired one of his sculptures, an unprecedented honor for an American artist. But in 1923, he had also started worked on a giant image of Confederate leaders, to be sculpted into the side of Stone Mountain, Georgia. The Daughters of the Confederacy were primary funders of that work, but the group that actually commissioned it also had deep ties to the Ku Klux Klan. The project did not go well, and Borglum left, but not before his own ties and sympathies with the Klan had been exposed.

After that he found himself in Texas, working on a new monument commission. In Corpus Christi, where he had come to give a talk to local business owners, he was treated as a possible savior. Margaret Lorine Spoonts, the pioneering head of the city’s Chamber of Commerce, took him to see the city’s bay, and he was enamored, O’Rear writes in her book. In his own words, “the little city nestling along the shore of the beautiful bay, with the breeze coming in from the Mexican Gulf behind,” had charmed him, and he immediately started imagining how to improve upon it, “with parkways, esplanade and playgrounds rimming the bay ... and [a] boulevard running along the entire front of the city eventually continuing on to the Gulf.” As his plan grew, it came to encompass a series of statues commemorating Texas history and a towering statue of Christ, in honor of the city’s name, out in the bay.

There was no money to pay him, Spoonts told him, but he didn’t seem to care. For years to come, Borglum developed and advocated for his vision of a beautiful seawall running along the city’s coast.

In the following months, Borglum traveled the country, telling every reporter he met, it seemed, about his plans for Corpus Christi. By 1928, he was ready to pitch his vision to the city. He had drawn a map and made a 175-foot plaster model that he presented at the city’s Nueces Hotel. Like the Galveston seawall, his was a vertical wall; it would hug the shore, then fan out into an esplanade, with a walkway, lovely landscapes, and trees, before turning back to the coast. “His was more of a beauty thing, and he admitted it in one of his interviews,” says O’Rear. “This isn’t much for protection; it’s for beauty. It would have been beautiful.”

But it would not, O'Rear explains in the book, have been particularly practical. In his map and model, Borglum left out key features of the city, including the Municipal Pier, which served the city’s businesses. He also had little interest in the engineering behind a seawall that could withstand another dangerous storm.

Borglum's seawall would also be expensive, at $1.25 million (nearly $18 million today, adjusting for inflation). The city would need to issue a bond to raise the money and, according to Texas law at the time, it would have to go to a public vote. The bond election was scheduled for October 1928. Led by Spoonts and other business leaders, the city started to rally around the proposal. Much to the surprise of the city’s political class, says O’Rear, “it actually looked like it was going to win.”

Then the city’s mayor canceled the vote.

“He had his sights set on building a dam,” says O’Rear. Even though Borglum had promised to donate the giant statue of Christ, the rest of his vision would still be costly. “I thought the cancellation of that bond election really affected the populace,” says O’Rear. “They were really excited, and we don’t get a lot of excitement in Corpus, we just don’t. I think it hurt people and angered them when the bond election got canceled.”

For years, Borglum kept pushing his vision for Corpus Christi Bay, but when the seawall finally did get built, it was the vision of engineers, not an artist, that prevailed. By the late 1930s, Corpus Christi had become a bustling port and refinery city, and those resources still needed protection from the threat of storms. The mayor at the time, A.C. McCaughan, made a seawall a priority. That time, though, the plans proceeded quietly, with little boosterism or fanfare, and they came from the engineering firm of Edward Noyes and E.L. Myers.

Noyes and Myers had little interest in sculptures or Texas history. They were more practical-minded, but they did care about good design. Before creating their proposal, they toured the Gulf Coast to understand the seawalls that had already been built. What they came up with, though, was unique to Corpus Christi.

At the time, seawalls were made of vertical, concreted steel sheets to keep water at bay. Borglum’s actual wall would have been a similar barrier, but Noyes and Myers had a different idea. Instead of a vertical front, they proposed a graduated front—a set of concrete steps, each a foot deep and almost two feet wide. This would actually give the wall more strength to bear the force of waves. The seawall itself was 25 feet wide, with its top at an elevation of 14 feet; the engineers' design also extended the city's coast towards the water, creating enough room for a road to pass along the bay, and included boat basins for sailors. Construction began in 1939, and by 1940, 21 years after 1919’s destructive storm, Corpus Christi finally had its seawall.

The step design had an added benefit, too. “It was a brilliant move,” says O’Rear, “because what it did was create an arena where people can come and sit on the steps. They can watch boat races; we’ve had replicas of the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria in the bay. You can go in the morning, and people are jogging on the seawall, they’re coming out to look at the water.” The practical engineers had created a public space that people actually want to use.

In the decades that followed, the seawall helped protect the city as storms passed through. But it has limitations. It doesn’t extend to the slim peninsula just north of the city’s downtown, an area called North Beach, for instance. “That gets flooded every time,” says O’Rear. “It’s right there at sea level. They’ve got condominiums, they’ve got wonderful restaurants, they have hotels there, and it’s wide open. I have no idea what’s going to be going on there right now.” Almost a century after the 1919 storm inspired the city to seek more protection, another hurricane is battering the Gulf Coast. Even with a seawall, Corpus Christi still seems vulnerable.

In 1898, the people of Elberton, Georgia—like those of many Southern towns a few decades after the Civil War—commissioned a granite statue to honor those local men who had fought for the Confederate army. Two years later, late one night, those same people took their own monument down. Public opinion of the war hadn't shifted much: the statue was just ugly, with bug eyes, and what looked suspiciously like a Union-style overcoat. The citizens had nicknamed it Dutchy, because it resembled, one said, "a cross between a Pennsylvania Dutchman and a hippopotamus."

According to the Elberton Star, on August 13, 1900, around midnight, a group of men tugged Dutchy down via "a rope around his neck." A few days later, they buried him. And after they'd dusted themselves off, what did they do? They ordered a brand new "white bronze" statue from Monumental Bronze Co.—because one of those, they had been told, would last forever.

Today—117 years later—Dutchy's replacement still stands. (It has been moved several times, and is now at Confederate Memorial Park, in Lee County.) A bunch of his Confederate clones still stand, too, in town squares and courthouses across the American South, while their Union brothers, in slightly different uniforms, remain stationed all around the North.

As recent events have reminded us, many of the South's Confederate monuments went up not immediately after the war, but half a century later, in the first two decades of the 1900s. During this time, organizations like the United Daughters of the Confederacy were looking to reframe and glorify the Confederate cause, and in many states, the descendants of slaves had been stripped of the right to vote, which impeded their ability to effectively voice opposition.

Today, historians argue that the rush to erect Civil War statues, especially in former Confederate states, was part of that project. “It is hardly coincidence that the cluttering of the state’s landscape with Confederate monuments coincided with two major national cultural projects: first, the “reconciliation” of the North and the South, and second, the imposition of Jim Crow [racial segregation laws] and white supremacy in the South,” writes historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage, at Vox. By memorializing the dead in this particular way, Brundage argues, those who put up statues sought to reframe the story of the war, "making the Confederate cause virtually sacred." In the spirit of peacemaking, Northerners went along with it, and put up their own statues, too. These goals may have been political, but the means were material: they almost certainly couldn’t have gotten so many statues up, in the North or South, without white bronze.

White bronze isn't white. It's more of a chromy gray that, over time, gets progressively blue. It isn't bronze, either: it's zinc, cast into shape in a mold, and blasted with sand to add a rough, stony texture. But "bluish-gray sand-blasted zinc" doesn't sound that appealing, and the company trafficking in this material, Monumental Bronze Co., of Bridgeport, Connecticut, was focused hard on selling it. From 1879 until 1914, Monumental Bronze Co. offered statues, grave markers and monuments that were, in their words, "beautiful in appearance and unequaled for durability."

There were plenty of such businesses around at the time—death is certain, after all. But as the Associated Press reported in 2015, Monumental Bronze Co. set itself apart from its competitors in three ways. One was variety: customers could get an urn-topped pillar, a St. Joseph, or an elephant holding a bushel of cigars, each one on a pedestal with four fully customizable panels. ("It [was] like going to Wal-Mart," monument expert Timothy S. Sedore told the AP.)

They also had a whole muster of Civil War statues in various designs, the parts of which could also be easily interchanged, Mr. Potato Head-style. "Statue of American Soldier" was a man with a mustache and a billed cap, holding his gun in both hands. "Colorbearer" had a flag draped over his shoulder. "Confederate Soldier," introduced in 1889, wore a broad-brimmed hat and carried a bedroll. You could also get your soldiers custom-made: the Confederate Monument in Portsmouth, Virginia has four Monumental Bronze Co. statues on it, each fashioned after a local man.

Another of their selling points was price: thanks to their choice of material (as well as their distribution model, which relied on independent "agents" and eliminated the need for storerooms) they could easily undersell stone-based companies. In 1890, a "life size" soldier from Monumental Bronze Co. would set you back $450, the equivalent of $12,000 today—tough, but doable, especially if the whole town was chipping in.

But their third claim to uniqueness—and the one that, judging by their advertising strategy, was deemed the most appealing—was that white bronze. More specifically, it was the material's supposedly peerless endurance. When zinc is exposed to air, a thin patina forms over it, which protects it from weathering. Page through Monumental Bronze Co. documents, and all you see is tales of the metal's immunity to all of time's ravages, both physical and spiritual. Stone will crack, crumble, and get mossy, they argue. White bronze will not.

"The most durable material of which monuments or statuary are made," promised one advertisement. "Marble is entirely out of date, [and] granite… requires constant expense and care," asserted another. "Many granite dealers have bought White Bronze for their own burial plots." In a broadsheet themed around run-down national monuments, the company asked, "Will the American people ever learn that NO STONE, no matter what it is, can withstand the rigors of our northern climate?" And while said stone came in various grades, they wrote, "In White Bronze there is but one quality (the best)."

In print advertisements, customer testimonials to this effect are stacked as high as the illustrated obelisks next to them. Many paint an image in which all history crumbles, save for the parts mankind was savvy enough to cast in white bronze. One, detailing a scene at San Francisco's Presidio Army base, is particularly stark: "The White Bronze Soldiers' Monument… looks as majestic as ever," it reads, "while all around lie large marble and granite monuments, cracked and broken."

The company even snuck this claim into their signoffs —at least one mailing ends with the valediction, "Yours for Artistic and Ever-Enduring Memorials, The Monumental Bronze Co." "Please preserve this card," reads another, its choice of verb clearly deliberate.

Along with the good reviews and morbid rhetoric, the company also brought out some bigger guns: scientists. Metallurgists, government chemists, and other experts were apparently eager to predict, with varying degrees of preciseness, how long a white bronze statue might stand. "I can see no good reason why these monuments should not last as long as the Pyramids of Egypt," wrote Professor J.W. Armstrong of the New York State Normal School. Others went with "thousands of years," or simply "ages."

Weather and vegetation could also try their worst: "It will not be altered by the action of any constituents of the atmosphere," wrote Professor E.P. Harris of Amherst College, "nor will it absorb the moisture and become coated with green, cryptogamous plants.'' As one broadsheet sums up, "White bronze is endorsed by scientists. Stone is not."

This marketing strategy clearly worked. Although specific numbers are hard to come by, the Monumental Bronze Co. thrived for decades, eventually expanding its operations to Detroit, Chicago, Ontario, and Louisiana. in 1921, the company's home newspaper, the Bridgeport Telegram, reported that they were doing "enormous" business, "especially in the South and West."

According to the company, their soldier statues, which they called "a specialty," eventually appeared in 31 of the then-48 states. Newspaper items announcing their arrival, in cities and towns both North and South, are invariably positive—"The color is Confederate gray," one reviewer, from Houston, enthused of the white bronze. To fund Portsmouth, Virginia's massive Confederate Monument (the one with the four custom statues), the local Ladies Memorial Aid Association raised money for 18 years.

But the trend wouldn't last forever. In 1914, World War I began, abruptly ending the Civil War statue boom. It also ended memorial-making at Monumental Bronze Co., as the government took over the company's zinc foundries to cast gun mounts and munitions. The white bronze monuments, though, largely stood their ground, and many have to this day.

Although the heavier ones are prone to sinking, and some have turned bluer with age, there are still Monumental Bronze Co. Civil War soldiers in towns and cities from Maine and Vermont to Missouri and Virginia. Their inscriptions, experts say, remain especially legible—"every word, every name, every date is as clear ... as the day it was cast," write two genealogists from Pennsylvania.

At least, they've done so until now. When Monumental Bronze Co. wrote, in 1890, "when marble, sandstone and granite have crumbled to atoms, these monuments will remain untouched by the destroying hand of time," they and the customers that listened to them weren't taking into account the fact that more than one thing can fell a statue. Locals have been trying to take down that Confederate Monument in Portsmouth, Virginia for over a year, an effort that has gained new steam in recent weeks—and one of many such efforts now taking place across the country. Sometimes it's not the material that's the problem, but the message.

There are lots of ways to avoid shark attacks, the most effective being just to stay out of the ocean. But for those that simply insist on tempting the literal jaws of death swimming in our seas, the University of Technology Sydney’s School of Software is implementing a new drone-based system to keep you safe.

As Reuters is reporting, the university is teaming with public safety and rescue drone company Little Ripper to establish a fleet of unmanned autonomous vehicles that can patrol Australia’s beaches and spot sharks before they spook beachgoers. The drones will be equipped with special shark-detection software, which will help human spotters watching through a live feed. The software will also be able to catalog the number of sharks (and other large sea animals), which they are being taught to identify with preexisting aerial video.

Though shark attacks overall remain very rare, as of 2016, Australia had the second highest number of unprovoked shark attacks in the world, trailing only the United States. In response to a series of attacks along the northeast coast of the country in early 2017, a number of nets were installed to keep sharks out of areas frequented by tourists. The drone program, while more complicated, would be able to prevent unwanted encounters without disrupting the sea life. If a spotter caught site of shark near shore, for example, they could simply verbally warn nearby swimmers via a megaphone in the Little Ripper drone. So if you are swimming in the ocean and a flying robot begins screaming at you, you know what to do.

The drones are set to start their patrols in September 2017, but this is not the first time that aerial patrols have been used to attempt to cut down on shark attacks. In 2016, a group started using a small blimp for a similar purpose.

Fossils of Ichthyosaurus, an ancient creature that swam the oceans before the dinosaurs even existed, were some of the first evidence that humans discovered of prehistoric life on earth. The first complete fossil of one of these reptiles was found in 1810, by a scrappy female paleontologist named Mary Anning, on the cliffs of Britain. So when another specimen of Ichthyosaurus was unearthed on the coast of England in the 1990s, this new “sea dragon” fossil wasn’t considered such an important discovery.

Now, though, two paleontologists report in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica that this fossil is a unique specimen—the largest Ichthyosaurus ever found, with a fossilized embryo in its belly, the third ever on record, the BBC reports.

After the fossil was first discovered, it made its way to the Lower Saxony State Museum, in Hannover, Germany. Recently, Sven Sachs of the Bielefeld Natural History Museum, spotted it there and began to suspect it might be worth taking a closer look at. With ichthyosaur expert Dean Lomax, of the University of Manchester, he examined the specimen and determined that, at more than 10 feet long, this specimen was the largest Ichthyosaurus somersetensis ever found.

This particular reptile would have lived about 200 million years ago; its kind went extinct about 90 million years ago, in the Cretaceous period.

The paleontologists found another surprise when they examined this particular fossil more closely—its tail had been appended from another ichtyosaur entirely, in order to make it look better on the wall of the museum.

We see faces that don’t exist. A toilet's two-buttoned flush looks like a wonky scowl. Two cardboard boxes, stacked on top of each other, resemble an astonished beast-with-two-backs, caught open-mouthed in an unnatural act. A suitcase, peering out from its overhead locker, is somewhere between disgusted and irate. (All these are from the excellent Twitter feed, Faces in Things.)

Pareidolia, as this phenomenon is technically known, gets used in artificial intelligence, when training computer networks to recognize faces. It also has a role to play in psychological assessment, in the Rorschach "inkblot" test, where patients look for objects in seemingly random shapes.

But it turns out we aren't the only animal that sees sloths in pains au chocolat or Jesus Christ in our morning coffee. A new study from a team of researchers at the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health suggests that rhesus monkeys do, too.

Rhesus monkeys are a particularly social species, with impressive cognitive abilities. They can sort the wheat from the chaff, understand simple rules, and live in complicated matriarchal troops of 20 to 200 monkeys. (In 2014, a Kanpur rhesus monkey stole hearts, and clicks, when it helped to revive a simian friend who had electrocuted itself on a train line.) Because of these factors, researchers say, a predisposition toward pareidolia isn’t totally surprising.

Monkeys were shown trios of pictures on a computer screen, and timed to see which one held their attention for the longest. Prior research suggests that rhesus monkeys, like humans, are far more interested in looking at pictures of faces than they are of objects. Face-tracking software showed that they particularly focused on objects that appeared to be eyes or mouths. Even more strangely, the monkeys preferred to look at objects that looked like faces more than pictures of other monkeys.

Perhaps they, like @FacesPics’ 583,000 followers, just thought it was funny that a cute little black coffee appeared to be smiling out at them.

On August 17th, a Russian tanker called the Christophe de Margeriepulled into South Korea's port of Boryeong. The tanker, which is owned by the Russian shipping company Sovcomflot, had set out from Norway just nineteen days prior, meaning that it covered the 2,193-nautical-mile journey in record time.

Das russische Tankschiff Christophe de Margerie hat als erstes die #Nordostpassage ohne Begleitung eines Eisbrechers passiert.#klimawandelpic.twitter.com/hWYrzAYMy0

— sundine (@evasundin1) August 28, 2017

Even more unusual? It did it alone. As the New York Times reports, with this voyage, the tanker "became the first ship to complete the so called-Northern Sea Route without the aid of specialized ice-breaking vessels."

As the Times writes, the Northern Sea Route, which runs along Russia's Arctic coast, is more geographically direct than the most popular current route between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, which runs through the Suez Canal.

Logistically, though, it's much tougher, as the sea there is covered with a thick layer of ice for much of the year. This has stymied would-be explorers, traders, and conquerers for centuries, ever since John Cabot set out to find a route from England to Asia in 1497. (Although Cabot thought he managed it, he had actually ended up in Canada.)

Since the end of the 19th century, shipping vessels have relied on special reinforced boats called icebreakers to help them get through the frozen waters—and only then in the summer, when the ice is thinnest. (The first, the Yermak, shepherded its first ship through the Arctic in 1897.) The Christophe de Margerie is currently the only tanker of its specific type to have this capability built-in: according to the BBC, it can get through ice up to 2.1 meters thick all on its own.

Sovcomflot expects this will be enough to let it make the journey for half the year, from July through December. Since the 1980s, minimum Arctic sea ice coverage, which occurs in September, has shrunk by about 13 percent every decade, one way in which climate change is reshaping the region. Maximum coverage, which happens in March, has also declined.

With our past track feature, see the Christophe de Margerie sailing through the arctic without an icebreaker's help! https://t.co/vKxuu1yQEzpic.twitter.com/TUJcVHFxoX

— MarineTraffic (@MarineTraffic) August 28, 2017

Sovcomflot is banking on this trend continuing, and plans to make an entire fleet of icebreaking ships. "There is an assumption that the ice is not going to thicken dramatically for the economic life of these vessels, which could be over 30 years," Bill Spears of Sovcomflot told the BBC. Like the Christophe de Margerie, all will carry liquified natural gas, almost as if to help themselves along.

Tropical Storm Harvey has forced people from their homes and patients from hospitals, and turned quiet streets into turbulent torrents. For the city’s 2.3 million residents, it has been terrifying, catastrophic, tragic. Amid this ongoing disaster, one iconic local inhabitant is standing its ground: the 1,000-year-old Big Tree at Goose Island State Park near Rockport.

The Texas Parks and Wildlife Facebook page posted a photo of the tree on August 28, surrounded by the wreckage of its brethren. Younger trees, they wrote, might have perished in the calamitous storm—but “you don’t get old by being weak.” Texans seem to have found some solace in this 44-foot pillar of strength. Local resident Dana Brotherwood thanked them for putting the photo up, adding: “I know it's silly but if he can make it, then no matter what else we as Texans can keep going. I am just so happy to see this.”

The Big Tree, as it’s usually known, is one of the oldest, most well known live oak trees in the United States. In its 1,000 years, it has survived hurricanes, fires, and even an 1864 Civil War battle that razed the rest of the town, Lamar, to the ground. The tree has its own dark history as well, as it has variously been associated with hangings, cannibalism, or pirates.

Despite technically being the second-oldest live oak in the state—dethroned in 2003 by the discovery of an older tree in Brazoria County—it is much beloved, and has inspired some fervent tributes from local poets, mostly written from the tree's perspective. Mary Hoekstra, from Rockport, writes:

Cold fingers of ice have touched my heartwood.
Dust-dry days of sandstorms have scoured my skin.
Torrents of rain, driven by gales have rushed at me,
And I have swayed, but stayed unbroken.

A swiftly moving wildfire near Black Eagle, Montana, consumed about 40 acres of grass before members of the Black Eagle Volunteer Fire Department managed to extinguish the flames. No one was hurt, but one of the firefighters did happen upon the cause of the blaze: a hawk carrying a large snake, lying under a set of power lines.

The hawk had apparently scooped up the snake for its next meal, then landed on one of the power lines above the grass. When the long snake touched another of the power lines, a circuit was completed and the snake and the bird were electrocuted. The fire was probably started by sparks from the shock, reports Earth Touch News, and the two animals were killed instantly. The fire department plans to preserve them and keep the pair at their station.

"Animal arson" often involves power lines. A hawk carrying a snake started a 2015 wildfire in Southern California after completing a circuit between two lines, and a squirrel on power lines sparked a 2016 grass fire in South Dakota. A raven flew into a transmission tower at a Canadian dam in 2014, causing a power outage for local residents and a 37-acre wildfire. Fire investigators found fish around a transformer in South Dakota in 2012—a bird had probably dropped its meal on the power lines. But power lines aren't always involved. For example, a pigeon dropped a burning cigarette butt into a rooftop nest and caught a building on fire in London in 2014. And later that year, a house fire in the Yukon Territory was started by a dog chewing on a box of strike-anywhere matches. Maybe Smokey the Bear should start urging his fellow fauna to prevent wildfires, too.

Since they were patented in 1845, rubber bands have been put to a staggering variety of uses. If one rubber band manufacturer is to be believed, there's about to be a lot more, as science is set to create a major upgrade to the old office standby.

According to a story on Science Alert, the world’s largest rubber band maker, Alliance, Ohio’s, Alliance Rubber Co., is working with researchers to create unbreakable rubber bands that will also be traceable and responsive to external stimuli. This all thanks to the addition of the space-age material graphene, which is said to be 200 times stronger than steel.

By adding graphene to traditional rubber bands, they could be made virtually indestructible. These bands could also be embedded with RFID tags for tracking, or made to change color as a function of time or temperature. As Science Alert notes, they will be static-resistant, making them perfect for shipping electronics, or they could be designed to change color based on the age and health of produce. Think of it as rubber band 2.0.

Alliance Rubber is working with a British research firm to find the ideal ratio of graphene to rubber, so the future is still a bit off. But sooner rather than later, even the humble rubber band is going to get smart.

On December 28, 1973, for a little over 90 minutes, NASA Mission Control in Houston, Texas, lost radio contact with the three astronauts aboard the Skylab space station. Although they could track Skylab as it completed its full orbit of Earth, each time they buzzed the crew to try to talk to them, they got no response. Then, after they had completed one full orbit of Earth, the three astronauts came online again.

Depending on who you ask, this relatively brief loss of contact was either a space blooper or a deliberately staged strike; a trumped-up accident or a labor milestone. Regardless, that hour and a half, along with the events that came before and after, spurred a canonical inter-atmospheric negotiation. And as with so many things that happen high up in space, the shifting ways in which we tell its story reflect how things are going back down here on Earth.

Although the action in question took place about halfway through the Skylab 4 mission, "tensions seemed to be inevitable from the beginning," says Taylor Genovese, a PhD student in space anthropology who has studied the event. When the three Skylab 4 astronauts reached the space station, on November 16, 1973, they found that the previous crew had left them a present: three human-sized dummies dressed in flight suits, with name tags that matched their own. "The dummy for Gerald P. Carr, Skylab 4 commander, was placed in the Lower Body Negative Pressure Device," writes NASA. The pilot, William R. Pogue's, was on the stationary bike, and the science pilot, Edward G. Gibson's, "was left in the waste compartment."

Though clearly meant as a joke by the departing crew, the dummies could also be taken as something of a jab: while both of Skylab's earlier missions had at least one astro-veteran on the crew, Carr, Gibson, and Pogue were all spaceflight rookies. Meanwhile, Skylab was scheduled for early retirement, and NASA, wanting to squeeze everything they could out of the station, packed the new team's schedule full. As NASA stated in the mission's press kit, "Earth resources, solar astronomy, medical and other experiments will fill the waking hours of the Skylab crewmen." There were few breaks for rest, recalibration, or easing into the zero-gravity lifestyle.

This had near-immediate consequences. By their first evening, communication between the crew and Mission Control had already begun to go south, thanks to some unexpected vomit. Docking into Skylab made all three crew members nauseous; after their first space dinner, Captain Pogue belied his nickname, "Iron Belly," by upchucking some stewed tomatoes. As Marsha Freeman writes in her book Challenges of Space Exploration, at this point, "the astronauts should have informed Mission Control, and they should have freeze-dried the product and brought it back for post-flight analysis."

Instead, after some discussion, they tossed the barf bag through the trash airlock—having decided, as David Shayler writes in Skylab: America's Space Station, that "if the medics knew that the crew was vomiting, their influence over the rest of the the flight could be quite serious." After a night of sleep, Pogue felt better.

All three forgot that a tape recorder had been running the whole time. The next morning, when Mission Control read the transcripts—which included the discussion in which the crew decided to lie to them—they were angry. "The crew was reprimanded—the first time astronauts had ever been publicly reproved during a flight," wrote Henry S.F. Cooper in an article for the New Yorker. "The incident and the reprimand doubtless affected much that happened later."

Meanwhile, the crew embarked on their rigorous workload. Almost immediately, they fell behind schedule, stymied by the challenges of working around the clock in a brand new environment. They began to push back: "There is no way we can do a professional job," Pogue said on a tape sent to NASA scientists on the ground. "We're pressed bodily from one point of the spacecraft to another with no time for even mental preparation."

Every 10 days, they were supposed to get one free day to shower and kick back, but for the first month, they were so behind that they worked right through those days off. "It was almost to the point where you almost had to schedule a time when you could go to the bathroom, it was that tightly scheduled," Carr later recalled.

As Cooper detailed in his article, there were other gripes, too—from both sides. Gibson, a stylish guy back on Earth, kvetched about his monochrome space wardrobe. "I feel like I've been drafted into the Army with this darn brown … I'd like to get some different color T-shirts," Cooper quotes him as saying. There were also more concrete clothing complaints: "One thing I would like to have is a couple of plain old handkerchiefs around here," said Gibson, who hated tissues. (He also disliked the towels, which he said were scratchy and non-absorbent.)

What's more, bad design meant that none of the astronauts' tools fit in the particular pockets they were supposed to. As a result, they had to put them in other spots, which led to some downright dangerous Macguyvering: "Every time I raise my right foot to tie my shoelace, I jab myself in the groin with the scissors," Carr told Cooper.

This discontentment came through in various ways. All three grew beards: an unusual choice, and one that Cooper writes "made the men on the ground uneasy." Eventually, he writes, Mission Control began "openly [describing the crew] as lethargic and negative"—something that had never happened before. Their clear displeasure failed to effect any changes: "The controllers heard their complaints, but always expected them to break through the barrier," writes Shayler.

A few days before New Year's Eve, they hit that barrier instead. (This is also where the story gets a bit, well, spacey.) For a full orbit during that day—a little over 93 minutes—none of the astronauts manned any of the radios that connected them to Mission Control. Depending on whose account you are relying on, this may have been an accident: in David Hitt's 2008 book Homesteading Space, Gibson says that the three men simply failed to synchronize their radio response shifts, and that as a result, "one day we made a mistake and for a whole orbit we all had our radios off!" The press, he says, misconstrued this as a purposeful action. "There was no ‘strike in space’ by any stretch of the imagination," Gibson says in the book. "What could we threaten to do, go live on the moon?" He says the same in his oral history, calling it a "myth." (A 2016 Reddit thread details the case against the "strike" characterization extensively.)

But other accounts suggest it was at least somewhat purposeful. In a 1997 New York Times interview, Carr says that at that point, he and his crewmates had told Mission Control that they were finally taking their day off, which they emphasized by shutting off the radios. "We looked out the window, took showers, and did that sort of thing," he said. In his own oral history, he describes that day as one where they "did what they wanted to do," reading, looking out the window, and doing some off-the-cuff experiments. But there, he too says that they got "careless with the radios," and that the press had blown things out of proportion.

Whether it was the radio issue, the lingering aura of the vomit incident, or the pattern of complaints—or, more likely, just everything together—it was now clear that certain things needed to be hashed out between Mission Control and the Skylab 4 crew. On December 28, Carr got on the radio and laid down what he described as a "special message" for Phil Shaffer, the flight director, and Dick Truly, the Civil Air Patrol Communications Officer. In it, he requested a conversation: "Are we behind, and if so, how far? Or is all this hustle over our time a result of people coming out of the woodwork with new things to be done?" he asked. "I'd like to get some straight, unabridged words from you guys on just exactly where we stand… we'd like to be in on the loop."

Two days later, that conversation began. Firstly, the astronauts laid out their side of things. "I told them everything," Carr later recalled. "I said, 'We need more time to rest. We need a schedule that's not quite so packed. We don't want exercise after a meal anymore. We need to get the pace of things under control.'" Next, it was Mission Control's turn. According to NASA transcripts, they had five pages of "comments and status statements" teleprinted on board Skylab. They then gave the astronauts the "straight, unabridged words" they'd asked for. "It's apparent to us… that the scheduling was too ambitious," Truly said. They continued in this vein, briefly interrupted every 10 minutes or so as Skylab lost and regained contact with the ground. (Carr was willing to give this part of the situation a title: he later described this as the "first sensitivity session" in space.)

The negotiations were successful. For the last half of the mission, the astronauts of Skylab 4 got mealtimes and evenings off. Rather than being rigorously scheduled, the day's tasks were added to a "shopping list" posted in the station, which the astronauts then completed when they decided the time was right. "It worked beautifully," Carr said. "It turns out, when the mission was over, we completed every one of the experiments that we needed to do."

The Skylab 4 crew did their job in another important way: the unusually strained relationship they had with Mission Control gave NASA the kind of information about long-term life in space that they couldn't get from medical readings. Ina 1985 publication, Living Aloft: Human Requirements for Extended Spaceflight, NASA researcher M.M. Connors referenced the crew extensively in a chapter on "Organization and Management."

"Conflict is often instrumental, in the sense that it helps the contending parties reach important goals," Connors wrote. "In the absence of conflict, the Skylab 4 crew might have remained saddled with a work schedule which undermined their morale and impaired the overall quality of their performance."

Over the past few years, the story of the Skylab "strike" has come back into public orbit, gaining coverage in the LA Times, Smithsonian, Gizmodo, and elsewhere. When William Pogue died in 2014, it made up the lead anecdote in his New York Times obituary. While in the years after their mission, the astronauts pushed back against characterizations of their action as a strike (or, worse, a mutiny), Genovese thinks it's possible that this was a contextual decision: "It seems that, post-mission, the astronauts themselves did not want to be recognized as some kind of labor leaders," he says, "especially during a time when the United States was still locked in the Cold War."

Times have changed, and for the most part, these more recent articles portray the strike as an entirely positive action, as does Genovese. "NASA still views spaceflight as being solely a privilege … but it is also a site where an enormous amount of human labor takes place"—labor that, he says he has found during talks with other astronauts, is not always recognized as the type that deserves a back-and-forth. "That [relationship] has only been shattered during one event: Skylab 4’s radio silence," Genovese says. "Whether intentional or not, it got results."

The Caniapiscau Reservoir lies 400 miles down a gravel road in northern Quebec—the most remote place in North America still accessible by car. It was here that fur traders established a Hudson’s Bay trading post in 1834, and where in 1976 Hydro-Québec began building a series of dams and dikes, part of the massive James Bay hydroelectric project. And it is here, among the black spruce of the boreal forest, that the intrepid traveler finds the Garden at the End of the World.

Even without a daylong journey through the wilderness, one can experience the garden, a metaphoric collection of 101 place names spread across 101 islands, through Le Jardin au Bout du Monde, a map the Commission de toponymie du Québec published in August 1997. Taking its name from a novel by French Canadian writer Gabrielle Roy, the blue and white map represents an area of about 350 square miles, with rough coordinates for each of the islands. In the upper right, a small inset positions the garden in relation to Montreal and Quebec City, while offering a politically charged view of Quebec and Labrador: the former implicitly lays claim to the latter through the use of light grey, which visually downplays a long disputed border. Beyond that, the map makes no reference to the gravel road and Hydro-Québec landing strip that link the Caniapiscau Reservoir to the outside world, nor does it include much else of cartographic value. As a wayfinding device, Le Jardin operates less in geographic reality and more in carto-literary make-believe—an imaginary map that bears the imprimatur of the Province of Quebec.

The toponymy commission, the provincial authority responsible for place names throughout Quebec, conceived of Le Jardin as a poème géographique that would give cultural dimension to “public lands in a landscape remodelled by human acts” while commemorating the 1977 Charter of French Language, commonly known as Bill 101. Nine commissioners selected the toponyms from fiction and verse published since World War II—what they considered “the most prestigious manifestations of Québécois language and literature.”

Whether on the ground or on paper, Quebec’s geographic poem presents a narrow view of the provincial oeuvre: The majority of place names originate from works by native-born francophones. La Fleur de Lyse, for example, comes from a line in Félix Leclerc’s song “Le tour de I’île,” while Le Nid du Silence comes from Gilles Vigneault’s poem “L’Immigrant.” A smaller number of islands honor work by French-speaking newcomers, such as Haitian-Canadian Dany Laferrière. Commissioners derived just three names from English-language works, albeit in translated form, while La Lune-Où-Il–Gèle alludes to the only First Nations book included on the map, La Saga des Béothuks (written, incidentally, by novelist and toponymy commissioner Bernard Assiniwi). Read as a whole, the mapmakers explained in the commission’s Toponymix newsletter, the new place names tell the story of “flowers that escaped from the garden of the imagination and tumbled into the Garden at the End of the World, animating the anonymous.” They also literally, figuratively, and officially put authors on the map.

Today, the map’s simplistic design, along with the purple prose that framed its release 20 years ago, belies the controversy that surrounded it upon publication. In fact, the announcement of Le Jardin proved immediately contentious in a province not yet two years removed from the sovereignty referendum of 1995, in which Quebec residents narrowly voted against leaving Canada. Literary-minded anglophones objected to the exclusion of English-language works by Leonard Cohen, Mavis Gallant, and Hugh MacLennan, among others. TheMontreal Gazette, for example, ran dozens of letters criticizing the toponomy commission for the cartographic and critical slight, as well as a sarcastic op-ed (reprinted across Canada) by novelist Mordecai Richler:

Seemingly, on Thursday, Aug. 21, my time had come at last. . . . I sat by the phone from morning to night, a list of my published books to hand, but the call never came. There was to be no room for me in La Jardin au Bout du Monde. The sapients who preside over the Commission de Toponymie, its primary job to re-christian Quebec places besmirched by Anglophone names, had found me wanting.

An embarrassing homonymic oversight at first blush, Richler’s verb “re-christian” wryly alludes to an even more troubling aspect of the map—the whitewashing of a region long inhabited and named by Indigenous peoples.

While bookish types in Montreal feigned disgrace, Cree and Inuit leaders expressed genuine outrage. Without consulting northern communities, they pointed out, distant government officials had rechristened Rabbit Mountain, Beaver Mountain, Our Grandfather Mountain, and scores of traditional sites that had become islands as the reservoir filled. In eschewing existing topographic knowledge in favour of contemporary Québécois literary nationalism, commissioners had taken a well-worn page from the colonizer’s playbook.

“This is a political move, an attempt to occupy our territory and rename it, rather than adopt local names,” Bill Namagoose, of the Grand Council of Crees, told The Gazette. “When you fight over territory or sovereignty, one of the important things is to have title to the names.” Leaders in Nunavik, the Inuit region of northern Quebec, expressed similar outrage, describing the project as a “naming assault” and an arbitrary attempt to “manufacture French history where there is none.”

A month after the map’s publication, the toponymy commission seemed to backtrack on the place names it had just codified. Under the Gazette headline “Iles 101: Quebec Admits Mistake,” geographer Christian Bonnelly doubled down on the province’s best intentions while understating any error: “We were convinced they didn’t have names,” he told the paper. “If the Crees have some names in their inventories, the commission will consider the file in light of this new information. It could lead to certain changes.” Ostensibly, the commission did not consider Le Jardin a “closed file,” and would attempt to catalogue and adopt traditional Cree names.

Of course, taking La Fleur de Lyse, Le Nid du Silence, or La Lune-Où-Il Gèle off the map would compromise the organizing principle of the map itself. Perhaps that is why the toponymy commission did no such thing: Today, those and 98 other fictional locales remain the official designations for 101 islands of the Caniapiscau Reservoir. Twenty years after the commission offered to “officialize the Cree names,” Quebec’s online place-name database continues to celebrate the 1997 map and makes no reference to competing designations. (When contacted recently, a spokesperson said it was not appropriate to revisit Le Jardin, but that the commission remained open to "enriching" other islands of the Caniapiscau archipelago with Indigenous names.)

Like all maps, Le Jardin au Bout du Monde is a cartographic bibliography, a charged document that reveals complex narratives about a place’s spirituality, stories, and contested history. It epitomizes the fraught marriage of cartography and literary nationalism—taking to extremes a long tradition of literary mapmaking that can be traced back to the late 19th century. Unlike most pictorial literary maps, however, the critical lens of Le Jardin bears the power of the state. By disregarding Cree and Inuit place names in favor of fictional ones, mapmakers casually—and officially—brushed aside traditions that root Indigenous people to the Caniapiscau region.

At the same time, Le Jardin demonstrates that once they appear on a map, imposed place names (and all of the complicated consequences they impart) have the tendency to stick. Indeed, as Martin Waldseemüller found when he erroneously christened an entire continent“America” in 1507, it is easy to place a name on a map—but much harder to remove it.

In the winter of 1922, two years after the start of Prohibition in the United States, a mysterious craft was said to be sneaking around the waters of Seattle’s Puget Sound. Locals reported seeing the boat multiple times, and authorities believed that it had delivered illegal liquor in Seattle and then traveled south to the California coast. In years when the United States was a dry country—by law if not in practice—it was not uncommon for boats to smuggle liquor into the country. But this one was different. This one was a submarine.

Submarines first became practical in the 1860s, when a crewed submarine successfully submerged, cruised, and resurfaced—and when, for the first time, a military submarine sank a ship. Several decades later, during World War I, submarines, specifically German U-boats, began to play a major strategic role for the first time. The creepy, claustrophobic craft had become the focus of public fascination and an enduring source of mystery and paranoia.

Throughout the Prohibition Era, there were persistent rumors and newspaper reports that boats—both traditional and the underwater variety—were running rum and other spirits from Canada and the Caribbean to thirsty American shores. Coastal officials investigated these sightings, but also tried to downplay submarine stories, calling them “absurd,” or reporting that what seemed to be submarine conning towers were, in fact, dorsal fins of dolphin.

But as much as U.S. officials wanted to deny it, there was at least some truth to the rumors of rumrunning submarines.

Around the same time as the reports of a submarine in Puget Sound began, East Coast officials were dealing with similar sightings—off the coast of Cape May, New Jersey, for example, where the Coast Guard faced wintry conditions to search for the alleged boat, the Associated Press reported at the time. Over the next few years, people began seeing smugglers’ submarines off the shore of Long Island all the way up to Cape Cod. Investigating officials, however, always came back empty-handed.

One of the reasons that authorities dismissed these reports is that it seemed unlikely that smugglers, even very successful ones, would have been able to obtain a submarine. They were still relatively rare: In the years before and during the war, Germany built close to 400 U-boats, but more than half were destroyed or out of commission by the end of the war. The United States had just a few dozen in total, with just 11 new subs constructed during the war. This was military technology that didn’t just fall into the hands of smugglers. Navy officials in New York told reporters that rumrunners would never get their hands on a submarine, “as the United States navy has sold none, and none is believed to have been manufactured in this country for other than war purposes under navy jurisdiction.”

People who claimed to have seen these boats were likely to agree with that assessment—because they didn't think these were American Navy ships. The Puget Sound submarine was thought to have been built in Seattle but sold to the Canadian government, which later sold it for junk. And the boats on the East Coast were thought to come from Europe: “Up and down Cape Cod chin whiskers are bristling in the salt air as fishermen tell of a giant German U-boat which is torpedoing the Eighteenth Amendment with liquor and beer,” one United Press reporter wrote sun 1924.

Finally, after two years of rumors, evidence surfaced. As historian Ellen NicKenzie Lawson reports in her book Smugglers, Bootleggers, And Scofflaws, in 1924, a commercial mapping firm was flying over the Hudson River when it spotted two submarines, each 250 feet long, in the water 30 miles up the river. They shared a photo with the Navy, which confirmed the submarines did not belong to the United States. Could those photos, preserved in Coast Guard intelligence files, have shown the U-boats of rumor?

Over the remaining years of Prohibition, law enforcement officials did sometimes find ingenious underwater craft used to ferry alcohol over international borders. In 1925, in Lake Michigan, smugglers were using a cast-iron craft, which the Associated Press described as a “cigar-shaped trailer” big enough to hold 150 cases of beer. The submerged iron case could be towed across the lake by boat. No one knows how many successful trips it made, but when officials found it, it had sprung a leak and sunk. The next year, Canadian authorities found a similar setup in Lake Champlain, which connects Quebec with New York and Vermont, a “submarine without motors” that could hold close to 5,000 bottles of beer. The beer weighed the container down to keep it underwater to be towed across the border.

This strategy seemed successful enough that variations were used (and sometimes foiled) through the 1930s (and it seems to be common in the drug trade today), but there's no hard evidence of a U-boat running liquor on the East Coast or a rogue Canadian underwater vessel plying the waters of Puget Sound. If they had been out there, the same stealth that made them threats in wartime kept their party-time cargo safe.

Saint Catherine’s Monastery has been standing at the foot of Mount Sinai, of Biblical fame, for 1,500 years. One of its attractions is its extensive library, which holds thousands of early books and thousands more manuscripts.

Among those handwritten manuscripts are 130 that have additional secrets: They are palimpsests, documents in which the original text was erased and written over, the parchment considered more valuable than the text. Over the past few years, though, researchers have been able to reveal the “undertext” of those manuscripts—the long-lost words that were wiped away hundreds of years ago, The Times reports.

Their discoveries included two rare texts of Caucasian Albanian, an obscure language known mostly from snippets of stone inscriptions, and examples of Christian Palestinian Aramaic, a hybrid Syraic-Greek language that’s been dead for 800 years.

The original writing on the palimpsests was erased anywhere between the 4th and 12th century, according to the Early Manuscripts Electronic Library, which has been working to rediscover those lost words. To reveal the now-invisible text, the project photographs each page with a series of different lighting strategies, capturing images with visible, infrared, and ultraviolet light. As The Atlantic reports, the project has already produced 30 terabytes worth of images from 74 palimpsests.

Often the text that’s been overwritten is in a language that’s still extant; the researchers have found Arabic, Latin, and Greek texts. (Greek over Greek is a common find.) Some of the texts are valuable for their contents: One Greek text turned out to be a recipe attributed to Hippocrates, for instance.

But the most unique discoveries are the texts of lost languages. Caucasian Albanian disappeared from the area that’s now Azerbaijan before the end of the first millennium A.D. and is known today from only a few texts. The discovery of the erased texts in this language “has brought a 25 percent increase in the readability” of Caucasian Albanian, the linguist Jost Gippert tells The Atlantic, adding basic words like “net” and “fish” to the language’s known vocabulary.

Sometimes discovery means stumbling across a new and fascinating object, but sometimes it means looking more closely and with new eyes at treasures already known.

Decorative crests bearing eagles, clasped hands, and shining suns were once signs of membership in a special club. They showed that the building to which they were affixed was insured against fire—and that if the building caught on fire, a private fire brigade would come to attempt to put it out. Now, long after their heyday, these plaques, known as "fire marks," have become collector’s items—every bit as fascinating and artful today as they were when they were installed.

After the Great Fire of London in September 1666, which damaged or destroyed huge swaths of the historic city, the need for a more organized response to fires became tragically apparent. This led to the creation of the world’s first property insurance policies, issued by what is considered the world’s first insurance company, called the “Fire Office.” Despite its official-sounding name, the Fire Office was not a municipal department, but a private company. At the beginning, it provided money for the restoration or reconstruction of buildings damaged by fire.

Not long after the Fire Office was established, a number of other insurance outfits began to appear. According to the Museum of London, one of every 10 houses in London was insured by 1690. As time passed, many insurance companies wised up to the fact that it was cheaper to prevent and fight fires than simply to pay the cost of reconstruction, and that’s where fire marks come in. Insurance companies such as the Fire Office established their own in-house fire brigades, tasked with protecting the buildings covered under policy—and, in many cases, only those buildings. If another company's brigade put out a fire in a building insured by a different company, they might be reimbursed for their trouble, but if your building did not carry a crest, it might be left to burn. To designate which buildings were covered by which company's brigade, fire marks were installed on the exteriors of the buildings.

The Fire Office first used a fitting phoenix symbol on its mark, and other companies employed a wide variety of symbols, from a blazing sun to a building capped by a heraldic crown to a rearing horse, often with the policy number underneath the decoration. Fire marks were often metal plates affixed to exterior, but were sometimes more substantial or worked into the facade itself.

The practice soon spread beyond London. By the end of the 18th century they had made their way across the Atlantic—though in the United States their function wasn't always quite so pitiless as it was in their initial English form.

By the time that the idea of fire insurance made its way to the Untied States, volunteer fire brigades were already a well-established tradition to protect the common good. Fire marks, which first took hold in Philadelphia, where some can still be found today, functioned simply as insurance advertisements, and as a sort of turf mark. According to a story in Philadelphia Magazine, at least one insurance company in the 1800s offered rewards to fire brigades that got to a fire first, creating rivalries of a sort. It is also said that some of the fire companies were closely related to the city’s street gangs, and the brigades' work could be used to set up ambushes and fights. Regardless of how they worked in practice, a number of attractive fire marks were installed in the City of Brotherly Love.

The most iconic of Philadelphia's fire marks was that of the Ben Franklin–founded Philadelphia Contributionship, which bore the image of four hands grabbing each other by the wrists. It was often molded out of metal and affixed to a wooden shield. There was also the mark of the Mutual Insurance Company, a leafy tree that was a direct slam on the Contributionship (which wouldn’t insure properties that had trees in front of them). Just as in London before, as the number of insurance companies grew nationwide, the variety of fire marks grew with them.

By the mid-19th century, London had established a public firefighting operation, and the use of fire marks began to decline. The same trend occurred across the pond, as the prevalence of insurance spread and more effective ways of advertising arose. But fire marks maintained some popularity even as their utility waned.

Today, fire marks survive as historic points of interest or collector's items. Like philatelists and numismatists (collectors of stamps and coins, respectively), people who study and collect fire marks have a name: signevierists. Probably the most organized group of signevierists is the Fire Mark Circle of America, which oversees a number of auctions and connects enthusiasts. Their auction listings even act as a sort of database of the wide variety of preserved marks being traded around.

In this second life, fire marks have become popular decorative flourishes, and there are even modern recreations floating around. Some home insurance companies still grant buildings new decorative fire marks for a fee. But we are well past the days when these curious little symbols were a sign of security.

Cheerios-box yellow, it turns out, isn't legally "a thing." That's according to an August 22 ruling from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office after nearly two years of attempts from its parent company, General Mills, to register the precise shade of sunshine yellow on its boxes of "toroidal-shaped, oat-based breakfast cereal" as a trademark.

It's not impossible to trademark a color. Tiffany blue, for instance, can't be used by any other jewelry company, nor Coca-Cola red by any drinks vendor. But there are specific restraints: Trademarks have to specifically "designate the source of a good," write Kal Raustiala and Chris Sprigman on the Freakonomics blog. Because of that, colors can be trademarked only if they specifically "identify the source of a product"—and not perform any other function.

This is where Cheerios is ineligible, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board said, because many breakfast cereals also sell their grainy goods in yellow boxes. Quartz described yellow as a "kind of lingua franca in cereal box design": It appears variously on Kellogg’s Corn Pops, Trader Joe’s Joe’s O’s Toasted Whole Grain Oats, Post’s Honey Comb, and Nature’s Path Honey’d Corn Flakes, among others. If General Mills had been successful, they alone would have had the right to yellow packaging, likely forcing their competitors to change.

Yellow packaging on cereal boxes, Judge Anthony R. Masiello writes, has become so ubiquitous that customers are "likely to view yellow packaging simply as eye-catching ornamentation customarily used for the packaging of breakfast cereals generally."

Clashes over color are nothing new. In the United Kingdom, Cadbury and Nestlé continue to squabble over the definitive rights to a particular shade of royal purple. (Cadbury has a 1995 trademark on the color which could be invalidated if Nestlé contests it.) The high-end shoemaker, Christian Louboutin, is currently attempting to trademark the cherry-red soles on its shoes worldwide. And app companies PayPal and Pandora are similarly coming to blows over the blue in each of their logos.

Up yours #pink

A post shared by Anish Kapoor (@dirty_corner) on Dec 23, 2016 at 2:32am PST

In the art world, too, who can use what color has proven contentious, even if the legal battleground is slightly different. A fight continues to brew between high-profile artist Anish Kapoor and fellow Brit Stuart Semple. Kapoor ruffled feathers when he obtained the exclusive rights to the pigment Vantablack, produced by British company NanoSystems. It is the blackest substance known in the world, originally developed for military purposes and astronomy equipment. Semple retaliated, on behalf of all fellow artists forbidden from using the pigment, by producing the "world's pinkest pink," which he sells for no profit on his website. Despite a customer guarantee that "the paint will not make its way into the hands of Anish Kapoor," Kapoor did manage to obtain some, upsetting Semple and other artists in the process.

The German patent attorney Dr. Ralf Sieckmann has compiled a fascinating compendium of "non traditional trademarks," including "smell marks," "tactile marks," and "sound marks." These throw up some curious examples of what can, and cannot, be trademarked. In 1996, for instance, the European Union gave Santa Aromatics the exclusive right to make tennis balls smell like freshly cut grass. In Germany, "sound marks" are almost always short jingles. In the United States, the process is far more complicated and usually limited to specific sounds, rather than short, seemingly recognizable tunes.

This is General Mills's second unsuccessful attempt to claim yellow for their own—but they say it won't be the last. "We are working to protect the iconic yellow color for our Cheerios box," brand media relations manager Mike Siemienas told Quartz. Kellogg's had better watch its back.

As summer ends, three workers prepare for a common plunge: they're about to leave their home in upstate New York and head to Manhattan, where a new job awaits. Are they prepared for urban life? Do they feel nervous, as they depart their pastoral town, about making their way in the big bad city?

It's hard to tell, because they're sheep. As the New York Times reports, three ewes from Elizaville, New York, are about to start a six-week landscaping shift at the Basilica of Old St. Patrick's Cathedral, in Nolita.

In New York, Basilica of St. Patrick's Old Cathedral is using sheep to cut the grass this summer (CNS photos) pic.twitter.com/GTfJGvQG7K

— Rhina Guidos (@CNS_Rhina) August 12, 2016

The Cathedral's administrator, Frank Alfieri, has brought sheep in to cut the grass since 2013, when the human landscaper retired. The first ewe crew "did a better job than the guy," Alfieri told the Times.

This is a fairly common sentiment. Over the past few years, sheep have been put on grounds duty everywhere from the city parks of Fort Saskatchewan, Canada, to Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, Virginia. In the spirit of healthy competition, goats keep Brooklyn's Prospect Park trimmed in the summers, and a full goat/sheep/llama team takes care of unruly vegetation at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. (Of course, animals have been doing this type of work for a while, usually without quite so much fanfare.)

Proponents of this landscaping style bolster their case with a number of sheeply virtues. "Animal lawnmowers are ecological as no gasoline is required, and cost half the price of a machine," farmer Marcel Collet told the Associated Press in 2013, after bringing grass-cutting sheep to Paris's City Hall. "And they're so cute." (Weirdly, mid-20th century homeowners said much the same about lawnmowers.)

Sheep cuteness is undeniable at the Cathedral, where the workers will wear small protective jackets, and will be given names chosen by the community. You can visit them starting later this week, and until mid-October.

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.

Even a person rushing for a tight connection at Paddington Station, London, might have stopped to stare at a strange group making its way onto the train to Weymouth on February 7, 1910. Four people, men of foreign extraction, by all appearances, with luxuriant beards, patterned turbans, gold chains, and extravagant brocade robes, were shepherded through the station by two Brits in suits—interpreters, apparently. One of them, six-foot-five in socks, wore a bowler hat and a great coat. Later, he said that he was dressed “like a seedy commercial traveller.”

But all was not as it appeared. The foreign delegation wore blackface (no less racist for being a common theatrical practice at the time), their beards likely concealing grins. This crew was then young nobodies, but they went on to be some of the most famous artists and thinkers of their time—Virginia Woolf, her brother Adrian Stephen, and the painter Duncan Grant, all of whom later became members of the influential Bloomsbury Group.

Their ringleader, Horace de Vere Cole, had previously pulled off a similar prank at the University of Cambridge, where he and some friends impersonated the Sultan of Zanzibar and his retinue. This time, however, he was attempting a joke on a far grander scale—tricking the Royal Navy into giving a gang of fake “Abyssinian princes” a special tour of its flagship, HMS Dreadnought—537 feet of advanced naval technology.

Danell Jones, a writer and scholar who has written extensively about the “Dreadnought hoax,” as it has come to be known, describes the period as the height of a naval arms race between Germany and Britain. "Six years earlier, they’d brought out this ship that really had made every other ship obsolete," she says. "A real statement of sea power and British supremacy." Having this showpiece battleship at the heart of such a hoax would therefore have been especially humiliating for the Navy—it was, for the pranksters, the perfect target.

(While they might have been attempting to subvert the British Empire’s policies, the colonial, racist attitudes underpinning the pranksters' methods seem, from a modern perspective, deeply problematic. Woolf, for her part, was unambiguous in her attitude toward people with dark skin, writing contemptuously in her diary when she passed an African man in European clothing on the street—noting the “degradation stamped on him” by the color of his skin.)

February 1910 had been cold and rainy. The foreigners’ guides hurried them out of the drizzle and onto a train headed for Weymouth, a seaside town on the south coast. They avoided the rain to prevent their dark makeup from running down their faces. The beards and costumes were similarly ersatz.

Ahead of their arrival, Cole had sent a telegram to the Navy, alerting them of the plans, from one “Herbert Cholmondeley,” of the Foreign Office—the nonexistent interpreter/guide he played in the prank. In Stephen’s later account, he described the two "guides" hunkering down in the dining car on the train, nervous and excited. “I think I half expected that no notice would be taken of us at all, and we should just have to slink back to London,” he wrote.“But no, there on the platform stood a naval officer in full uniform, and the hoax had begun.”

The Royal Navy literally rolled out the red carpet for this foreign delegation. A barrier was put up to keep bystanders away from the “princes.” The naval bandmaster couldn’t find the music to the Abyssinian National Anthem (because it doesn’t exist), so instead played the anthem of Zanzibar, "Mungu ibariki Afrika." The princes professed to be delighted, allegedly exclaiming “Bunga bunga!” in amazement or surprise, which they also did when shown electric lights in the ship. In a letter from the time, Cole described how he had called them “jolly savages” to the Navy, and claimed “I didn't understand much of what they said” to their maritime hosts.

The foreign language they appeared to be speaking was a mixture of ancient and modern tongues, swiftly cobbled together on the train with the help of a teach-yourself-Swahili grammar book. British papers went on to describe them as speaking “fluent Abyssinian”—a language that also does not exist. To those with little exposure to people from Africa, the ruse was apparently rather convincing.

While Edwardian sensibilities certainly discriminated against black people, this would have been confounded by the supposedly high status of these fake foreign visitors, says Jones. In this complicated situation, "a lot of [Edwardians] reverted to respecting royalty."

By the time they were led onto the ship, Stephen remembered, “it was hardly a question any longer of a hoax. We were almost acting the truth.” Everyone was quite convinced that they were being visited by “the emperor and his suite … and it would have been extremely difficult not to.” After a 45-minute tour, and an attempt to pin a fake medal on the breast of a young guard, the troop returned home. They had a photograph taken, and, though proud of themselves for hoodwinking the Navy, thought that would be the end of the jape.

But word got out. It might have been Cole himself who leaked the prank, though he never confirmed that. Either way, shortly afterwards, the Daily Mirror published the story of the hoax, along with the photograph. The Navy was deeply humiliated, and called for the arrest of the perpetrators.

While the hoax was, in essence, a joke, there was an element of pacifist protest to it, wrote the late Alex Zwerdling, who described it as Woolf’s “first public expression” of her lifelong contempt for war. (Woolf and Stephen's family was always overtly pacifist, and her father Leslie Stephen forbade his sons from joining the military.) Her biographer, Quentin Bell, went further still. This event, he said, “reinforced political sentiments which had for some time been taking shape in her mind.”

There were dark murmurings of imprisonment awaiting the group, amid vague allegations that what they had done constituted fraud, but nothing came of it. The press, too, were divided, writes the Irish poet Robert Greacen. “Some journalists were outraged, others amused.” The Daily Express and the Globe both proclaimed the hoax “amazing” in their headlines. The Mirror declared the hoaxers “The ‘Abyssinian Princes’ Who Have Made All England Laugh,” and published a sardonic comic professing concern about what this might mean for future foreign delegations. Meanwhile, the Penny Illustrated Paper seemed sure that the troop would soon be soundly punished: “The case is too grave to be passed over by the authorities,” it declared, on February 19, 1910.

But punishment, when it came, was rather unofficial and bizarre. Two naval officers appeared at Cole’s home and said they had come “to avenge the honor of the Navy,” according to Stephen’s 1936 account. They had planned to beat him with a stick, but were scuppered by the fact that he was unwell at the time. “Eventually, Cole made a proposal: he would agree to be beaten if he was allowed to reply in kind,” Stephen wrote. So followed a peculiar exchange. On a quiet back street where they would not be interrupted, "six ceremonial taps were administered to Cole’s hindquarters, and six ceremonial taps were administered by him, in return.”

For the Navy, the whole affair was a source of deep embarrassment. “Bunga bunga” became a national catchphrase, and three months of hooting copy appeared in newspapers around the world. “The real threat was to the Navy’s image,” says Jones. “Showing their vulnerability to be hoaxed, in this really silly way—they feared it was going to tarnish their reputation that they were really going to great lengths to create.”

Curiously, the coverage, and much of the ensuing scholarship on the hoax, seems to gloss over its obviously racist aspects. Blackface was not uncommon in theater at that time, but much about the way the pranksters behaved is deeply troubling to modern sensibilities. Tony Thorne, editor of theDictionary of Contemporary Slang, described“bunga bunga” as having “crude and infantile” sound, like an “Africanism—some kind of colonial imagined tribal ritual of sexual abandon," he told the BBC. "It has a racist, imperialist quality to it—like a phoney African word, like 'wonga.'” The term resurfaced more recently to describe then–Prime Minister of Italy Silvio Berlusconi's sexually charged parties.

Woolf, the only woman in the party, was 28 and unmarried at the time. After the incident she was mistaken for a hired prostitute by the press that covered the incident. She soon grew tired of the attention, and considered the entire episode “dull.” But years later she drew on it for inspiration—first in the 1921 storyA Society, then in a 1940 talk, where she stretched the truth on some details and omitted others. This talk recast the story not as a high-stakes stunt, but active political protest in which cheekiness and racist exoticism pulled the curtain back on the pageantry and pomp of war.

Squid are wondrous and terrifying by turns, and it seems like scientists regularly discover some strange new variety or learn some vaguely frightening new details about them. So it should come as little surprise—despite being quite surprising—that researchers have recently captured video of a remarkable squid that is largely see-through.

As shared on Laughing Squid, the Ocean Exploration Trust’s Nautilus science vessel recently recorded a gorgeous cockatoo squid in the wild. Also known, for obvious reasons, as a “glass squid,” the animal is almost totally translucent, but gets the former, colorful name from the crown of dark, stubby tentacles atop its mantle, which resembles the crest of a cockatoo.

Their bodies are filled with an ammonia solution that provides a remarkably clear look at the only visible internal organ, a “cigar-shaped digestive gland.” But, like other varieties of squid, they can use the chromatophores in their skin to change color to signal or blend in as needed.

The squid was found a little more than 1,600 feet deep, in the Salish Sea in the North Pacific, where the squid are rather common, according to researchers. Though glass squid are not the rarest animals in the region, such clear and vivid video of one is a special sight. And for anyone who suffers from thalassophobia, invisible squid are just another wonder to worry about.

Thanks to Stephen King, monsters and mist go hand-in-hand. But on Sunday, in East Sussex, England, the monster was the mist itself. A strange haze descended on beaches along the southern coast, leaving authorities puzzled and dozens of people in need of medical treatment for stinging eyes, sore throats, and vomiting, The Independent reported.

Birling Gap beach evacuated after suspected chemical leak #BirlingGap#Birlingpic.twitter.com/1UjrGu56Ws

— Darren Oatway (@DarrenOatway) August 27, 2017

With temperatures at 77 degrees, beachgoers had thronged to the pebbly shores between Eastbourne and Birling Gap, south of London, for the penultimate weekend before school starts. But the cloud, which allegedly smelled of something between chlorine and burning plastic, ended the fun.

Those affected took to Twitter to air their concerns: Kyle Crickmore tweeted about his "streaming" eyes, while Dan Sankey described "some weird mist, burning everyone’s eyes which led to the beach and cliff being evacuated.” The smog also provoked some tongue-in-cheek commentary on Eastbourne's local slogan: "Breathe it in."

But the source of the cloud remains unknown, The Guardian reported. Despite whispers that it might have come an industrial chemical operation across the channel in France, a source close to the investigation has suggested that it might have been vented from a passing ship. Even gas monitoring equipment has so far failed to conclusively identify either the source or composition of the toxic haze. In a release, East Sussex Fire and Rescue Service explained that, so far, they have no clear leads in their investigation, though they report that it is unlikely to have been chlorine gas. "This makes it more difficult to discover where it came from," they said.

Whatever it was, said Bob Jefferey of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, it seems to have mostly dispersed. "It hung around and didn’t move yesterday because there was no wind." The hospital has since downgraded the threat, and people have returned to the beaches.