In the 4th century A.D., a Roman soldier and historian, Ammien Marcellin, recorded the fate of a coastal city in North Africa, Neapolis. Not many Roman historians bothered with Neapolis, after the city sided with Carthage in the third Punic War, in the 2nd century A.D. But Marcellin recorded its unfortunate fate, as The Independent reports: The same tsunami that hit Alexandria and Crete destroyed Neapolis almost entirely.
Now, the AFP writes, after seven years of searching, a team of archaeologists has found evidence that this bit of history is true. In modern times, no one had been able to find any trace of Neapolis. But Mounir Fantar and his colleagues looked underwater and finally found about 50 acres of Roman ruins off the coast of Tunisia, near the modern town of Nabeul.
The ruins include Roman streets and monuments, along with 100 tanks to ferment garum, the fish sauce used in Roman cuisine as a ubiquitous condiment. Finding the city, Fantar told the AFP, helps prove that this place was a major “center for the manufacture of garum and salt fish, probably the largest center in the Roman world," before being thrashed by the water and disappearing from history.
In 1992, three Canadians, inspired by their country's 125th birthday celebration, thought up a crazy plan. What if they could connect all of Canada's hiking trails, footpaths, rail trails, and boardwalks and into one giant mega-trail that snaked from coast to coast?
It's now 2017. Canada has celebrated its 150th birthday. And on August 26th, those three dreamers—along with the thousands of volunteers who helped clear brush, fix planks, put up signs, and do all the other little tasks that make wilderness passable—celebrated the coast-to-coast connection of what they're calling the Great Trail.
As MTLBlog reports, the trail can be used for biking, hiking, and horseback riding in the summer, and cross-country skiing and snowmobiling in the winter. "First you build it, then get people using it and then it becomes an icon that will hopefully last forever," Paul LaBarge, one of the original founders, told the Globe and Mail.
The path stretches 24,000 kilometers, or nearly 15,000 miles, criss-crossing southern Canada before forming a huge loop in the Northwest. A quarter of this length is water—wetland and river routes where hikers will have to trade boots for boats.
It's almost four times as long as the Grand Italian trail, which covers all of Italy. It's also over five times as long as the West Coast's famed Pacific Crest Trail, and over six times as long as the Appalachian. (In case you were wondering, it would take a roller-grill hot dog 76 years and 256 days to travel the entire trail network.)
The trail is far from finished. As LaBarge tells the Globe and Mail, connection is merely "phase one." Now, signs must be added, more funds must be raised for upkeep, and—most importantly—people must be brought out to actually use it.
After a few news articles jumped the gun and called the trail "complete," the Trail's twitter account jumped in to correct them: "It is not, it is CONNECTED," it clarified. "Work remains to be done but it's time to 🎉." (That emoji is presumably a cone of trail mix.) If you'd like to join in, this map will tell you the closest spot to hop on. Happy hiking!
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 room is always laid out according to exact specifications. A nylon sofa by the wall. A dark faux-leather La-Z-Boy in the corner. A lamp here and a television there. Perhaps a wool rug hugging the floor with a wood coffee table on top. Maybe there’s even a bag of potato chips on the table. However it’s arranged, wherever each piece of furniture is placed, it often feels and looks like a typical American home. Then, they set it all on fire.
Welcome to the ATF Fire Research Laboratory in the leafy D.C. suburb of Beltsville, Maryland. This is the world’s largest and most advanced research lab dedicated to fire scene investigations. It’s here, 20 miles outside of the United States’ capital, in a giant warehouse that resembles more a Hollywood soundstage than a science lab, where scenarios are played out once, twice, a dozen times to see if a fire is the result of an innocent accident or malicious intent. In this cavernous building with an gigantic exhaust hood that looks like a space shuttle jet engine, they construct three-story structures only to reduce them to ashes. They bring in perfectly comfortable mattresses and set them ablaze. They turn up electric heaters one would purchase at WalMart or Target to see if they’ll ignite.
They do all of this because fire is a notoriously confusing culprit, with clues of its origin often destroyed by its very nature. “Any crime scene is very complex, there are so many pieces … and, then, you set it on fire,” says John Allen, forensic electrical engineer and Chief of the ATF Fire Research Lab.
In the 1950s, Harvard professor Howard "Mr. Fire Research” Emmons earned his nickname by applying science to firefighting and prevention. He knew that by figuring out the “what” in a fire scene, it could often lead to the “why” and “how.” He was known to set his own office furniture on fire to test theories. While flames raged, he tracked and took notes on every possible variable that could be impacting the fire—the materials in the burning chair, the air flow in the room, the components of the paint on the wall. His mission was to test every possible scenario and miss nothing. As Emmons wrote in 1986, “The ultimate purpose of fire science is to remove the guesswork.”
Big or small, every case is unique, complex, and hard. After all, arson is a federal crime and, depending on the laws in the relevant state, may be punishable by death. “Every time I testify, my career is on the line,” says Allen. “[If we’re wrong] we are done.”
That’s why the ATF is so meticulous about its test burns. Several large burns (such as a two-story structure) are conducted in a year, but smaller burns—like setting fire to a chair or carpet—are sometimes done a few times a day. Big or small, they catalog an enormous amount of data using high-tech instruments, HD video, and a giant exhaust hood (connected to a state-of-the-art exhaust system) that hangs from the ceiling and over the proceedings. The temperature of the fire, air velocity, voltage, smoke density, the time of day, and heat flux are just a few examples of what’s recorded.
Allen explains that they run “real-life scenarios,” meaning they need to make sure every piece of furniture in their scenario matches the original scene. That could mean buying out the local Ashley Furniture of all their La-Z-Boys or knocking on the neighbor’s door. “We’ve gone into someone’s house and said ‘we need your carpet,’” says Allen, “and we have to buy it off them.” But it goes further than that. Newspapers, toys, books and, even food that was in the room at the time of the fire needs to be accounted for. “Potato chips, because of all the oil....[they’re a] great [fire] accelerator,” says Allen. “Fritos too,” pipes in Chad Campanell, ATF Senior Special Agent and Certified Fire Investigator.
Campanell is one of 117 certified fire investigators across the country whose job is to go out into the field to fire scenes of federal interest and starts putting the puzzle together. He wades through ash and burned husks of buildings collecting evidence, photographing burn marks and looking for clues about how it all started. If it’s a possible case of arson, he brings everything back to the lab to continue the dig. However, he knows that this could all lead to his original hypothesis being disproven. Says Campanell, “If there’s no data to back [my hypothesis] up, there’s no case ... Science doesn’t have a bias.”
Both Allen and Campanell say that there are plenty of times that a case may look like arson at first glance but is actually a tragic accident. Faulty or malfunctioning electrical connections causes over a billion dollars in property damage a year in the United States. Allen is in the midst of researching how certain older garage door openers can open on their own when exposed to high temperatures, making a mechanical malfunction look like a potential break-in. And cats have a reputation for turning stove knobs when hopping on counters. Although, perhaps the felines are doing this on purpose.
Every day at the lab, investigators are attempting to distinguish between arson and accident. Through science, meticulous collecting of data and burning stuff down, they are getting the job done. Nowhere is the old proverb “fight fire with fire” more apropos than at the ATF Research Laboratory.
When two people share the same passion, that passion may draw them together, but almost as often it can drive them apart. Rival anatomists Govert Bidloo and Frederick Ruysch, who lived in the Netherlands in the late 17th century, were both innovators in a field that was, at the time, revealing the secrets of the human body as never before. Bidloo created a magnificent atlas of dissections that depicts the workings of the body's muscles, organs, and bones; Ruysch was a showman who revolutionized the preservation of anatomical specimens and built cabinets of curiosities that drew dignitaries from across Europe. In the words of Daniel Margócsy, author of Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age, “The two anatomists despised each other.”
Though they shared a field, Bidloo and Ruysch diverged in their beliefs about almost every aspect of it. While Bidloo believed only printed images could accurately show the details of anatomy, Ruysch preferred displays of real skeletons and organs, suspended in preservatives. Bidloo offered realistic images of death that did not obscure the morbidity of this science. Ruysch created dioramas that added an element of art to his deceased subjects.
But this wasn't an argument just about aesthetics. Each believed that the other was wrong about certain newly discovered details of anatomy, and each believed the other was misleading the public with false ideas.
In the 17th century, the study of anatomy was still cutting-edge science. Cadaver dissection became more acceptable and common, which led to a revolutionary new understanding of how the human body actually works. The circulation of blood was a relatively new discovery, for example. One of Bidloo's accomplishments was demonstrating that nerves are not tubes that carry a liquid "spiritus" through the body, as blood vessels do. Some anatomists were revered for their abilities and insight, and were associated with the highest levels of society. For seven years, Bidloo served as personal physician to the English King William III of Orange, who was Dutch-born.
Anatomy as a practice and field of study lived at the intersection of art and science. Before Bidloo published his tome, anatomical illustrations tended to shy away from the grislier side of the work. Skeletons and skinned men, muscles exposed, were depicted moving through the world and demonstrating the workings of the human body as if they were alive. But Bidloo wanted to strip away that artifice. He “emphasized the deadness of the dissected body,” writes historian Rina Knoeff, in her article on “Moral Lessons of Perfection.”
The illustrations in his book, created by the artist Gérard de Lairesse, one of the most accomplished of his day, were based on 200 dissections, and they showed how the work was done. Skin and tendons are held back by pins and needles; in one image, a fly has landed on the dead flesh. Bidloo believed that living forms represent the epitome of beauty created by God, writes Knoeff, and that he should not try to reanimate these dead people through art. On the other hand, by offering images of the body and its parts from different angles, dissected using different techniques, he felt he could offer a more accurate and whole picture of how they worked.
Bidloo’s atlas was ground-breaking, but not wildly popular. Ruysch, on the other hand, knew how to attract a crowd. Based in Amsterdam, he led the city’s surgical guild, and became “the most active municipal anatomist in Amsterdam’s history,” historian Julie Hansen writes, as he performed 31 public dissections over his career. His greatest accomplishment as a showman, though, was the cabinet of curiosities he created to display the specimens he had gathered and preserved. “Venice et Videte!” he invited audiences. “Come and see!”
Using his collection of thousands of specimens, Ruysch created dioramas that combined skeletons, plants, and other specimens into fanciful arrangements. For him, most of these specimens did indeed clearly reveal the wonder of the human body—wonder was an important concept to him—and his displays helped people see the specimens in all their beauty.
Bidloo, predictably, disdained this aesthetic. The lace, the glass eyes, the false drama—he hated it all. (One can assume he was also bothered by the popularity of Ruysch’s work, which attracted crowds of enthusiastic intellectuals and nobles.)
If the two anatomists had different styles, though, they may not have been as divergent as either believed. “Bidloo’s stern aesthetic is just another interpretation of the same artistic trends that influenced Ruysch,” writes historian Elisabeth Brander. Ultimately, both were influenced by realism and still lifes in their efforts to communicate the true details of the human body—living or dead.
Bidloo and Ruysch did not end their dispute at aesthetics, though. Ruysch was an intellectual fighter, always ready for a scrap, and he challenged the accuracy of the medical information Bidloo presented. In a war of published pamphlets, they argued over the shapes of certain glands and the organization of the circulatory system. Ruysch needled Bidloo, and called him “shameless” and “the professor of impudence.” At one of his public demonstrations, Ruysch baited Bidloo to come forward and show that a cutaneous gland was oblate, as Bidloo had written. Ruysch held up the organ, which he said was clearly round. He also tried to show that a membrane around the brain is too thin and hard to dissect in any way that would prove that tiny blood vessels flow through it, as Bidloo’s illustrations depict.
There was a certain amount of artifice in even such live anatomy demonstrations, though. These were events, almost like fashion shows today, that were attended by interested dignitaries, who got the best seats. No one could see very well what was going on, and the other doctors were seated behind the dignitaries. The human eye could not detect all the subtleties of anatomy, and Ruysch knew this. His preserved specimens, too, though the finest of their day, were not exact representations: Some details were distorted in the process of preservation.
It’s true that the illustrations in Bidloo’s book include details that were not copied from anatomical specimens. Rather, they extrapolated from the anatomist’s knowledge of the body. This strategy, he argued, got at the ultimate truth of the body, which could never be captured with a single image or dead specimen. Through his knowledge and many images, he believed, he could provide a sense of how the body moves in life, a sense far more accurate than that of Ruysch’s decorated specimens.
At heart, these arguments were theoretical disagreements. Bidloo and Ruysch staked their reputations and their financial futures on these ideas. If the market is a measure of success, Ruysch won. His fame surpassed Bidloo’s, and while Bidloo had to fight the publishers of an English reprint of his book that used his illustrations but barely mentioned him, Ruysch sold his cabinet of curiosities for 30,000 guilders—a fortune—and set about making another. He understood what Bidloo did not: that realism could go too far. The way to get people to see his work with the clearest eyes was to make it just a little easier and enjoyable for them.
This story was inspired by an Atlas Obscura event at the New York Academy of Medicine. Join us in our ongoing series to learn about more amazing medical history in their rare books library.
Two weeks ago, a few days before the August 21 solar eclipse swept across United States, we asked park rangers, zookeepers, and biologists within the path of totality how they thought animals would react to this unusual celestial event. Their predictions ranged from "they probably won't care," to "they'll try to go to sleep," all the way to "they'll sit and worship the sun." (Lemurs are always up for a good time.)
The eclipse came and went. People laughed, cried, danced, and sang. And once we recovered, we called our experts back and asked: what did the animals do?
A lot of things, it turns out! "The bats were really chapped," says ranger Steve Fullmer of Fort Laramie National Historic Site in Wyoming. "A few left their roosts to start hunting for the 'night.' As the sun returned, the first flight tried to get back to the roost, while others were still queued up to take off. Shall we just say that 'air traffic control' was snarled up. The bats were chattering their anger call. Definitely a unique problem!"
They said animal behavior might be odd during the eclipse. Here's an opossum taking a walk in the bright of day during the eclipse! pic.twitter.com/Bobp3TxBQh
Elsewhere at Fort Laramie, turkey vultures took totality as a sign to come back to their roost. When it got light again, most left, unruffled. But "some sat there and looked confounded," another ranger, Michael Evans, said. "If a vulture can express confoundment."
Alvis Mar, the superintendent of Agate Fossil Beds National Monument, had predicted that nocturnal animals would come out during totality. But even he was surprised at where they came from. "Some of our visitors saw bats fly from their roosts in trees in the middle of our parking lot," he says. Even after years of monitoring and inventorying bats, he says, "I didn't suspect that the bats [were staying] in the trees in the parking lot!"
Meanwhile, plenty of citizen scientists across the United States kept their eyes peeled as part of the California Academy of Science's "Life Responds" project, coordinated through the iNaturalist app. "We ended up with over 2,600 observations from [over] 630 participants," says project head Elise Ricard, more than twice as many as had previously been recorded for any one-day event.
She's still going through the data, but so far, a few of the observations stand out, she says: "[One user took] a beautiful set of photos of an okra flower opening and closing in Columbia, Missouri," as totality came and went. "We also had reports of small fish re-emerging from deeper areas and swarming close to the surface, honey bees being absent from flower beds, and alligators doing nothing," she says. (If you'd like to explore the iNaturalist data yourself, you can do so here.)
Ricard herself was stationed in Oregon, where she watched a group of cows migrate to one end of a field and lay down. "We also noticed the local cat, who doesn't usually come near people, delicately walking close to us with its hackles up," she says.
Sometimes the best reaction is none at all. On eclipse day, the Washington Post's Dave Jorgensen headed to Cross Plains, Tennessee, to spend totality with the town's famous fainting goats. There's a "Best Of" video up here, which shows what happened when the sun disappeared: Jorgensen pretended to faint over and over again, while the goats remained unruffled.
Zoos across the country also hosted successful observation events. Keepers at South Carolina's Greenville Zoo noticed flamingos flocking to one side of their lagoon, writes the Greenville Journal. One female rhea even abandoned a nest full of eggs to rush across her enclosure.
At the Nashville Zoo in Tennessee, orangutans climbed as high as they possibly could in their enclosure, and all four giraffes, including the usually unruffled adults, ran around as totality approached. Nearby, at the Chattanooga Zoo, a chimp named Katrina showed concern as the sun disappeared, and another came over to comfort her, WRCBtv reports.
And what about those sun-worshipping Tennessee Aquarium lemurs? In the end, they didn't really do anything, perhaps because they were just outside the path of totality. Oh well—there's always 2024.
Faced with seemingly unsolvable problems, historically, people get creative, whether a sword through the Gordian Knot or the threat of one through a disputed baby. But a seemingly "simple" chess problem will require a sharper solution—so sharp, in fact, that researchers at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland are offering a $1 million reward.
The riddle, known as the Queens Puzzle, was devised in 1850. Eight queens must be placed on a standard chessboard so that no two pieces can take one another. According to a release from the university, “This means putting one queen each row, so that no two queens are in the same column, and no two queens in the same diagonal.” Solutions are not hard to imagine, but the problem becomes more complex when the chessboard grows—say 100 queens on a 100-by-100 chessboard. When the numbers start getting really large, computer solutions are unable to solve it.
Any program that could do so will be far more powerful than anything we currently have, said Professor Ian Gent, a computer scientist at the university. "If you could write a computer program that could solve the problem really fast, you could adapt it to solve many of the most important problems that affect us all daily.” This program, he said, would be able to decrypt even the toughest online security, something that would take current software thousands of years to unravel, by scrolling through and then discarding an almost infinite number of solutions until one works. His colleague, Peter Nightingale, questioned whether this is even be possible. “What our research has shown is that—for all practical purposes—it can't be done," he says. Hence the massive prize offer.
Although it’s hard to prove definitively, historians believe chess was invented in around the year 570, in what is now northeastern India. There is no shortage of famous chess puzzles, many of which remain unsolved to this day. A more recent development, however, has come in the writing of programs that create or solve problems too difficult or time-consuming for humans to do unassisted.
Some of these programs are so complicated that even their designers don’t fully understand how they work. Chesthetica, a program written by the computer scientist Azlan Iqbal, generates hundreds of problems, using digital synaptic neural substrate (DSNS) technology. “One might ask where does Chesthetica 'get its ideas'?” writes Iqbal in Chess News. “I do not know. How or why should a computer be able to compose chess problems like these at all? Can computers autonomously do this sort of thing? These are also good questions and I believe the answer lies with the DSNS technology.” Why it works, he explained, remained an open question—but, somehow, it does. Maybe the large Queens puzzle–solving program will be similarly inscrutable.
About echidnas, the odd and fascinating spiny mammal, there is one fact that you should never forget: when they mate, they form long, waddling processions called “love trains.”
For the uninitiated, echidnas are a rare type of mammal known as a “monotreme,” which are distinguished by the fact that they lay eggs. Along with the platypus, the four species of echidna—found in Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea—are the only known monotremes left on the planet. And like their platypus cousins, echidnas also look like mash-up creatures.
Sometimes called “spiny anteaters,” echidnas are squat little animals, usually weighing somewhere around 11 pounds when fully grown. Where a platypus resembles a combination of an otter and a duck, echidnas, with their tubular snouts and thick spines, look like a cross between a mole, a porcupine, and an anteater. They have short legs that end in long claws, which they use to dig into the earth and make burrows. Living large portions of their lives undercover, echidnas are said to be shy, quiet, and solitary.
They subsist on small bugs devoured through the mouth at the tip of their snout. Because they are so private, they are difficult to observe in a natural setting, and even though they are said to be the “most widely spread native Australian mammal,” relatively little is known about them. But the more we find out, the stranger and more wonderful they seem.
Among the odder facts about echidnas that have come to light are that they are hosts to what is possibly the world’s largest type of flea, and they might have the lowest general body temperature of any mammal. But the most notable quirk of echidna behavior is their mating trains. During the echidna mating season (for the Australian echidna, June-September), males will line up, snout-to-rump, behind a single female, and follow her around in a line for days or even weeks. These trains have been observed to have as many as ten males waddling around behind a female, the youngest male echidna bringing up the rear. Males might leave their train and form or join another during the season, literally chasing the dream of mating with an eligible female.
It’s not entirely clear why exactly these trains form. It could be a way to tire out the males until only the strongest is still following, or it could have to do with the female selectively waiting for the right male to get behind her. Either way, the behavior is often correlated with some kind of selection process.
When echidnas actually get down to business, it’s equally as enigmatic, with the male using its reptile-like four-headed penis to impregnate a female, sometimes while they hibernate. Echidnas then produce an egg that is held in a pouch (did we mention that echidnas have pouches?), until it is ready to hatch. Once they are finally born, baby echidnas are called “puggles.”
Whatever the true purpose behind the echidna love train, they make for a pretty odd sight. Watching groups of these spiny little guys totter along in their little parade is both fascinating and rare. The world can be a strange and alienating place, but at least the echidnas are out there following each other for love.
Many of the world's best statues and memorials honor those who accomplished extraordinary things despite a steep personal cost. Europe is dotted with statues that memorialize the attempts made by desperate people who opposed the Nazis. They did what they could with what they had, and often paid unimaginable prices for their efforts. Their likenesses implore us to remember their actions and consider our own, so that we don’t take the past for granted, idly watch the present, or let the future repeat such atrocities.
In 1941, when the German Army entered the city of Kyiv, young Tatyana Markus was there to greet them, congratulatory flowers in hand. But instead of graciously handing the flowers over to the triumphant soldiers, she threw them—and the grenades hidden underneath them—at the approaching contingent, killing four Nazi soldiers. Her father threw a second grenade, to prevent them from retaliating. She was able to get away, but he was killed in the ensuing fight.
Later, Markus assumed a fake identity and went undercover. A young operative, she won the confidence of several German army officials and gathered information that helped the Ukrainian rebels resist them. She also worked in a German officers’ mess hall and lured soldiers into isolated areas where she killed them herself.
After the mysterious deaths of so many soldiers, the Gestapo launched an operation to find their killer. Markus was caught in August of 1942 and tortured for information for more than five months, a process which intensified when her Jewish heritage was discovered. But she refused to provide them with any information about her comrades. She was killed in January of 1943 and, according to some accounts, thrown into the notorious Babi Yar ravine, where thousands were massacred by the Nazis.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, a statue of the courageous young woman who gave her life in the fight against the Nazis was unveiled in Babi Yar in 2009, just a few years after she was honored as a “Heroine of Ukraine.”
Georg Elser was a carpenter and a member of the leftist Federation of Woodworkers Union. As early as 1933 he opposed the Nazis and refused to perform the Hitler salute; Elser felt the Nazi Party's potential rule would be a detriment to workers’ rights and a catalyst for war.
In 1938 he traveled to see Hitler’s annual speech at the Bürgerbräukeller beer hall, cased the joint, and came home with a plan to assassinate Hitler. Elser took a job at an armament factory and systematically stole explosives. He eventually amassed 105 blasting cartridges and 125 detonators. He built and tested timed explosives using clock parts and turn signals from cars in a secluded orchard owned by his parents.
At the end of 1939 he moved to a place near the Bürgerbräukeller and spent his nights hiding in the hall, carving out the pillar next to the speaker’s rostrum. He installed a homemade time bomb in the emptied column and left town for Sweden on the morning of November 8. That night, eight high-ranking Nazi officers were killed and 63 were injured when the bomb exploded right on time at 9:20 p.m., exactly 13 minutes after Hitler left the event. His flight had been canceled due to fog, so the event started a half hour early.
Officers found Elser on the Swiss border with wire cutters, notes, sketches, firing pins, and a blank postcard of the interior of the Bürgerbräukeller. He spent his last days a prisoner, and in 1945, shortly before the end of the war, he was killed on Hitler’s orders in the Dachau concentration camp.
The 56-foot sculpture erected in his honor in Berlin is an outline of Elser’s profile, and lights up at night. It was unveiled on November 8, 2011, to coincide with the anniversary of his heroic attempt.
Stjepan Filipvić joined the laborer’s movement in 1937. He spent a year in jail for his association with the anti-fascist group, but his conviction remained. He joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia in 1940, and by ‘41 he’d been made commander of the Partisans’ Tamnavsko-Kolubarski unit in Valjevo. He was captured by the Axis forces in 1942 and sentenced to death. But even in his final moments, he resisted the Nazi occupation. The Yugoslav communist stood on the gallows in Valjevo, rope around his neck, and threw his fists in the air and shouted out his last words to the onlookers: “Smrt fašizmu, sloboda narodu!” (“Death to fascism, freedom to the people!”).
Stjepan Filipović was declared a National Hero of Yugoslavia in 1949, and in 1960, a 52-foot statue was erected in his honor. The sculptor Vojin Bakic’s monument to Filipović stands in the same defiant pose in the city where he was killed.
In August of 1944, an uprising broke out in Warsaw, Poland, which at the time had been occupied by Nazi forces for five years. The Polish resistance had been planning an attack for some time, but they were forced to carry it out much sooner than expected and without help from the Allied forces.
The resistance expected Soviet help to arrive during the 68-day battle, but it never came. Documents are hard to obtain and the motive is unclear. It’s possible the Soviet troops were too tired or the roads were too treacherous to quickly maneuver, or Stalin stopped the aid for fear the uprising might encourage Russian workers to move against his leadership.
By the end of the uprising, the Polish resistance had managed to kill 8,000 Nazi soldiers and wounded around the same number. But as the Nazis razed the city, the resistance deaths had climbed to 16,000 people, and the civilian death toll, including the Jews being hidden by the Polish people, reached as high as 200,000. The Nazis went on to destroy almost 90 percent of the buildings in the area.
A 33-foot-tall bronze sculpture was unveiled in 1989 to commemorate the resistance. It depicts a group of fighters in active combat while running beneath the ruins of a falling building. A smaller structure shows insurgents entering a manhole, which pays tribute to the way the Poles made use of the city’s sewer system.
Hitler and SS leader Heinrich Himmler made the Polish capital city a specific target early on in the war. Their plan of attack was detailed in the horrifically succinct Order for Warsaw: “Every citizen of Warsaw is to be killed including men, women and children. Warsaw has to be leveled to the ground in order to set a terrifying example to the rest of Europe."
The children of Warsaw were no strangers to the ongoing atrocities, and many young boys in the Polish Underground Scouting, known during wartime as the Gray Ranks, played an integral role in the Warsaw Uprising, mostly carrying messages for the troops, but sometimes donning stolen German helmets and guns and fighting on the front lines.
This statue of a young boy wearing an oversized helmet and holding a German submachine gun is reputed to be modeled after a child soldier called “Antek,” a 13-year-old boy who was killed on August 8, 1944.
The Mauthausen Memorial describes itself as “a former crime scene, a place of memory, a cemetery for the mortal remains of thousands of those murdered here and, increasingly, a site of political and historical education.” Between 1938 and 1945, the Mauthausen concentration camp was the center of more than 40 sub-camps and was the main site of persecution by the National Socialist regime on Austrian territory.
The memorial features a museum in the preserved buildings of the center camp. There are three permanent collections, including the “Room of Names,” which features over 81,000 names of those killed at Mauthausen and the surrounding sub camps.
The outside areas feature sculptures that honor the 190,000 people from over 40 different nations who were imprisoned during the camp’s seven years of terror. Memorial sculptures of varying sizes and styles pay homage to the Jewish, French, Dutch, Polish, and other victims of Mauthausen. One particularly striking statue is the Albanian Memorial, which portrays an Albanian resistance fighter standing over a defeated Nazi soldier. He’s about to strike the Nazi in the face with his rifle stock.
A beer-drinking, Nazi-fighting brown bear named Wojtek was an unlikely but beloved member of the 22nd Artillery Transport Company. The Polish 2nd Corps adopted the orphaned bear in Iran in 1943. To bypass a rule that forbade soldiers from bringing pets into theaters of operations, Wojtek was enlisted and accordingly given an official number and the rank of private.
Private Wojtek served with the Poles for the rest of the war, most notably during the pivotal Battle of Monte Cassino, when he voluntarily helped move crates of ammunition. He was so popular among his fellow soldiers that a graphic of a bear carrying an artillery shell became the official emblem of the 22nd Company.
After the war ended, Wojtek was moved to the Edinburgh Zoo. His old Polish brothers-in-arms visited him regularly, as did the scores of new admirers he gained during the remainder of his life.
Unveiled on November 7, 2015, the bronze statue in Princes Street Gardens commemorates not only the much-beloved bear, but also the Polish soldiers who bravely shared the same harrowing journey.
It’s not clear what anyone should expect to discover in a place with a name like “Lost Lagoon,” but after water levels dropped in the picturesque Canadian body of water—an artificial lake in Vancouver—researchers were still surprised to discover slimy, brain-like blobs.
Per a story in National Geographic, a population of strange creatures called bryozoans has been found in the lagoon. Bryozoans are actually colonies of tiny invertebrates, called as zooids, that clump together to form a coherent mass. In the case of the bryozoans of Lost Lagoon (which is somehow not the name of a Hardy Boys adventure), this takes the form of a roughly football-sized lump that looks something like a swamp creature’s brain.
It’s unclear whether the weird blobs have been in the area since the lagoon was formed by the construction of a causeway in 1916, or they took up residence more recently due to rising temperatures. If their numbers grow to sufficient size, the bryozoans could disruptive the lagoon environment. But for now their greatest impact is on the people who discover them and get grossed out.
The vast majority of the lobsters pulled up from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean are a greenish brown; they turn red when they're cooked. But every now and then, a lobster comes up wearing a shocking shade of blue. About one in every two million lobsters carries the mutation that causes this shade, but blue isn't the only special colorway for the crustaceans. As a lobsterman from Massachusetts recently discovered, they come in yellow, too.
The bright yellow lobster was donated to the New England Aquarium in Boston, where it will join other unusually colored lobsters in tanks and touch pools. One in every 30 million lobsters is yellow, so this one was a lucky catch. The aquarium is also home to an orange lobster (one in 30 million), a calico lobster (one in 30 million), and a lobster that is half normal, half orange (divided right down the middle—one in 50 to 100 million). Bright red lobsters, like the ones in cartoons, have also been found, a one in 30 million occurrence as well. Just like the usual brown lobsters, all these colorful specimens would turn bright red if cooked.
Just as flamingos turn pink because of their diet, lobsters turn red when heated because they eat mollusks and other seafloor creatures that contain a carotenoid molecule known as astaxanthin. Some astaxanthin ends up in their shells, where it binds to different proteins to form different pigments. Genetic mutations that limit certain proteins that bind with astaxanthin produce lobsters with different coloration. Cooking a lobster releases the carotenoid from its molecular binding, letting its true red color show through. The only exception would be ghostly white albino lobsters, which have no pigment at all.
In 1660, the stage designer Gaspare Vigarani came into an unexpected windfall. The Louvre was expanding, and the Grande Salle du Petit-Bourbon—a massive theater that had housed operas, plays, and ballets for nearly a century—was being destroyed to make room. Vigarani was told to grab everything he could from backstage and move it to his own theater, the Salles de Machines, which was then under construction.
Vigarani could have jumpstarted his new venture with a warehouse's worth of set dressings, stage machinery, dropcloths, and everything else a young theater could ask for. Instead, he burned all of it to cinders—"ay, to the very least," as the actor and theatrical historian La Grange wrote afterwards.
Why did he do this? Pure professional jealousy. As La Grange put it, "He made these decorations be burned... in order that nothing should remain of the invention of his predecessor, the Sieur [Giacomo] Torelli, whose very memory he wished to bury in oblivion."
At this last part, he did not succeed. The legacy of Giacomo Torelli, the creator of the burned machinery, persists to this day. "He fundamentally changed the staging of opera," says Evan Baker, a set design historian and former stagehand. Among those in the know, Torelli still keeps the nickname he earned in the 1640s—"il gran stregon," or "The Great Wizard."
Not much is known about Torelli's early life. He was born in 1608, in Fano, Italy, a small city located on the upper calf of Italy's boot. After doing some set design for local amateur productions, he moved to Venice in 1640, and found engineering work at the military shipyards there. It's thought that the days he spent there, learning how to manipulate huge ships and cargo loads with judiciously placed ropes and pulleys, helped to inspire his later theatrical contraptions.
After a long day squinting up at the riggings, Torelli and his fellow engineers likely spent at least some evenings taking in one of Venice's favorite entertainments: the opera. As Baker writes in From the Score to the Stage: An Illustrated History of Continental Opera Production and Staging, Venice was where opera went from a royalty-only pursuit to one that at least certain members of the public could enjoy. Starting in the mid-1630s, anyone who could afford a ticket was able to attend, say, the Teatro Santi's production of The Evening: Bride of the Sun, or The Thunderstruck Sorceress at the San Cassiano.
For many of these shows, decadent set pieces made up part of the appeal. Shows like the San Cassiano's 1636 production of Andromeda featured bright seascapes, verdant woods, starry skies, and gods riding across the clouds in peacock-drawn chariots, each set replacing the next as the story required. At the time, Baker explains, operatic set-changing like this was a massive team effort. If a scenic transition called for, say, an oceanscape to replace a mountain, this required at least two stagehands to roll each piece of the mountain scenery off the stage on a special wagon, wrestle it down, replace it with the corresponding piece of oceanic set, and shove it onstage again.
Other special effects, like roiling seas, descending gods, or terrible hellfire, all required special effort. (In the words of one set designer of the era, "fools and thick-witted persons" must be kept away from such effects, else "mishaps result.") Even just hiding the lights, crossbeams, and other guts of the theater meant several men had to heave-ho huge canvas strips up into the rafters, by way of a rope-and-pulley mechanism.
Sometime in 1640, Torelli left the shipyard and began working at a brand new theater, called, fittingly enough, the Teatro Novissimo. He set about making a machine that would take all this motion—the up and down, back and forth, and side to side—and condense it. Torelli's innovative contraption, the heart of what is sometimes called his "pole-and-chariot method," sat beneath the stage, and was made up of a giant rotating drum attached via ropes to a number of trolleys.
Each trolley had a pole coming off of it that went through a slot in the stage and attached to a different scenic flat. When someone turned the drum, all the trolleys moved at once, rolling the old set offstage at the same time as the new set came on. Simultaneously, thanks to an ingenious combination of ropes and pulleys, dropcloths rose and fell. The result was an all-in-one scene machine that was like ten stagehands put together, all centered around a single rotating winch.
The first production Torelli worked on—La finta pazza, or ThePretended Madwoman, a tragic Greek romance by Francesco Sacrati—opened just a year after he arrived in Venice. By that time, he'd outfitted the brand new Teatro Novissimo with his sorcerous contraption. The show provided plenty of draws: heroes, gods, feigned insanity. But when the curtain dropped and people left the theater, they were talking about the sets. Under Torelli's tutelage, "clouds for gods transformed seamlessly into royal courtyards or woodland glades," all in front of an enraptured audience, writes Baker.
Meanwhile, behind the scenes, sweat, stress and stubbed thumbs had been replaced by calm. Cranking the drum was so easy, a single 15-year-old could do it. "It was a transformation," says Baker. "Suddenly, everything could happen all at once."
The show was an instant hit, and Torelli an immediate sensation. Critics described his work rapturously: his sets "moved with such speed and cohesion as to defy the intellect"; they "astounded the audience with [their] natural magic," and should "ensure the designer unceasing praise." So many people flocked to the show, Baker quotes one reviewer as writing that some "cursed their own laziness when they arrived and could not find a place to sit."
After a few more years and a few more shows in Venice, Torelli moved to Paris in 1645, at the request of some nobles who were curious about Italian opera. There he restaged ThePretended Madwoman at the Grande Salle du Petit-Bourbon, where it was once again a great success. Over the course of his Parisian career, he built bigger and better sets, incorporating other modern effects—flying people, rotating stages—and taking on more and more lavish stories.
After one six-hour production of Orpheus proved too long for even the most dedicated fans, a writer was commissioned to write a new opera specifically to repupose Torelli's sets, which had been the most popular part. The result, Andromeda, was a greater success, with critics admiring the "open sea, which appears so vast that one would swear that the ships floating on the horizon are more than six leagues from the spectators," as well as the "ingenious artifice of perspective" that made an orange grove seem infinite.
Torelli's career in France eventually ended after he lost favor with Louis XIV (he'd accidentally been caught up in the fall of the king's disgraced finance minister). He returned to his birthplace of Fano, and staged one last show before he died in 1678. He left all his money to the poor, Baker says. (His wife, a French noblewoman named Francesca Sué, had passed away a few years earlier.) The machines and sets he built for the Petit-Bourbon continued to be used until Vigarani burned them; elsewhere, his creations and others he inspired remained in place for about 200 years, says Baker, at which point they were replaced by new innovations in turn.
One theater, though, hasn't let go: Drottningholms Slottsteater, in Stockholm, still uses a Torelli-style machine from the 18th century for all of its shows. To be safe, a team of men, rather than one 15-year-old, turns the understage winch, rushing to their places as soon as a light on the wall turns red, says Baker, who visited a few years ago. As they push the drum, the scenery above switches, in one big analog swoop. "It was an epiphany for me to see it in action," says Baker. "You watch as the scene changes. You hear the rumblings of the chariots. It's magic! I thought I'd died and gone to heaven." That can happen when a bank of clouds appears seamlessly before you, replacing the Earthly scene that came before.
Monica Gagliano began to study plant behavior because she was tired of killing animals. Now an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Western Australia in Perth, when she was a student and postdoc, she had been offing her research subjects at the end of experiments, the standard protocol for many animals studies. If she was to work on plants, she could just sample a leaf or a piece of root. When she switched her professional allegiance to plants, though, she brought with her some ideas from the animal world and soon began exploring questions few plant specialists probe—the possibilities of plant behavior, learning, and memory.
“You start a project, and as you open up the box there are lots of other questions inside it, so then you follow the trail,” Gagliano says. “Sometimes if you track the trail, you end up in places like Pavlovian plants.”
In her first experiments with plant learning, Gagliano decided to test her new subjects the same way she would animals. She started with habituation, the simplest form of learning. If the plants encountered the same innocuous stimulus over and over again, would their response to it change?
At the center of the experiment was the plant Mimosa pudica, which has a dramatic response to unfamiliar mechanical stimuli: Its leaves fold closed, perhaps to scare away eager herbivores. Using a specially designed rail, Gagliano introduced her M. pudica to a new experience. She dropped them, as if they were on a thrill ride in an amusement park for plants. The mimosa plants reacted. Their leaves shut tight. But as Gagliano repeated the stimulus—seven sets of 60 drops each, all in one day—the plants' response changed. Soon, when they were dropped, they didn’t react at all. It wasn’t that they were worn out: When she shook them, they still shut their leaves tight. It was as if they knew that being dropped was nothing to freak out about.
Three days later, Gagliano came back to the lab and tested the same plants again. Down they went, and … nothing. The plants were just as stoic as before.
This was a surprise. In studies of animals such as bees, a memory that sticks for 24 hours is considered long-term. Gagliano wasn’t expecting the plants to keep hold of the training days later. "Then I went back six days later, and did it again, thinking surely now they forgot," she says. "Instead, they remembered, exactly as if they had just received the training."
She waited a month and dropped them again. Their leaves stayed open. According to the rules that scientists routinely apply to animals, the mimosa plants had demonstrated that they could learn.
In the study of the plant kingdom, a slow revolution is underway. Scientists are beginning to understand that plants have abilities, previously unnoticed and unimagined, that we’ve only ever associated with animals. In their own ways, plants can see, smell, feel, hear, and know where they are in the world. One recent study found that clusters of cells in plant embryos act a lot like brain cells and help the embryo to decide when to start growing.
Of the possible plant talents that have gone under-recognized, memory is one of the most intriguing. Some plants live their whole lives in one season, while others grow for hundreds of years. Either way, it has not been obvious to us that any of them hold on to past events in ways that change how they react to new challenges. But biologists have shown that certain plants in certain situations can store information about their experiences and use that information to guide how they grow, develop, or behave. Functionally, at least, they appear to be creating memories. How, when, and why they form these memories might help scientists train plants to face the challenges—poor soil, drought, extreme heat—that are happening with increasing frequency and intensity. But first they have to understand: What does a plant remember? What is better to forget?
Scientists have shied away from studying what might be called plant cognition in part because of its association with pseudoscience, like the popular 1973 book The Secret Life of Plants. Certain types of plant memories were mixed up, too, with discredited theories of evolution. One of the most well-understood forms of plant memory, for example, is vernalization, in which plants retain an impression of a long period of cold, which helps them determine the right time to produce flowers. These plants grow tall through the fall, brace themselves during winter, and bloom in the longer days of spring—but only if they have a memory of having gone through that winter. This poetic idea is closely associated with Trofim Lysenko, one of the Soviet Union’s most infamous scientists.
Lysenko discovered early in his career that by chilling seeds he could turn winter varieties of grains, normally planted in the fall and harvested in the spring, into spring varieties, planted and harvested in the same growing season. He was, in essence, implanting a false memory of winter in plants that need a cold signal to grow. Despite this insight, Lysenko was not a very good scientist. But after he published early work on vernalization in the late 1920s, the Soviet government, looking for an agricultural panacea, inundated him with money and prestige. As Lysenko gained power, he made outrageous claims about his original idea. Vernalization, he said, could transform all kinds of plants, including potatoes and cotton, and boost the bounty of Soviet lands.
The evidence for these claims was scant, but that didn't matter. By 1936, Lysenko led a major research institute and was a member of the Central Executive Committee, the nexus of Soviet power. With the help of a government-appointed philosopher, Lysenko developed a theory of his work that mixed Marxism with the discredited ideas of French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. The offspring of vernalized plants, he argued, could inherit that acquired characteristic, so that by changing their environment he could create new breeds of staple crops in a fraction of the time of traditional breeding techniques—just as, by changing the environment of the working class, communism could create a new breed of men.
"All the claims were based on a principle of malleability, that genes were not all that important,” says Loren Graham, an emeritus historian at Harvard who has tracked Lysenko's career. "Lysenko was a little unclear on the existence of genes."
In practice, Lysenko’s theory fell apart. He couldn’t breed new varieties of grains that inherited memories of winter. He had promised fields fuller than ever before, but his ideas couldn’t save the country from famine in 1946 and ’47. And when geneticists challenged his ideas, Lysenko denounced them, which led to imprisonment and death for hundreds of scientists. He is often said to be responsible for creating a missing generation of Russian geneticists, who either gave up their work, left the country, or were punished for going against him. Without them, Lysenko never could see where he was right (plants could form these memories of winter) and where he had gone wrong (this type of memory, at least, cannot be transmitted across generations). It took a generation of scientists, working in the West, to uncover the true secrets of the phenomenon Lysenko claimed as his own but never truly understood.
Even as Lysenko was making his grandiose claims, scientists on the other side of the Iron Curtain were trying to understand how vernalization works. Some of the most important investigations to examine this mystery took place in Tübingen, Germany, in the lab of Georg Melchers and Anton Lang. Melchers was a leading biologist of plant development, and Lang was a stateless, refugee Russian biologist. Together they studied vernalization in search of the biochemical secret of flowering, a hypothetical plant hormone scientists called “florigen.”
One of their study subjects was a nightshade called henbane, Hyoscyamus niger. Some plants flower after reaching a certain point in their development, like teenagers who hit puberty and start to parade their newfound sexuality immediately, regardless of the consequences. Other plants, though, behave more like teenagers who wait for summer break to go crazy: They only flower when they receive cues from their environment that it’s the ideal time to do so. Henbane is one of the latter and requires both a period of cold and the right light to bloom. Rather than growing and dying in one season, as annual plants do, certain varieties of henbane are biennials, with a life cycle that spans two growing seasons. In their first spring and summer, these plants grow as much as they can, but hold back from flowering. Only in the following spring do they burst into bloom—creamy white flowers smudged in their centers with red-wine purple that runs through the veins on their petals. For a biennial, these dual requirements make sense: They prevent the plant from flowering in the fall, when the light is right but the cold days of winter would doom their flowers.
While trying to understand how vernalization and day length work in concert to make henbane flower, Melchers and Lang probed the limits of the plant’s memory of winter. In one experiment, they vernalized the plants by chilling them in a fridge and then tried to reverse the process by blasting them with warmth. The plants, they found, formed lasting impressions of the cold relatively quickly. After a day or two of chilling, the scientists could still “de-vernalize” the plants, but after four days, that possibility had vanished—the plants remained vernalized. In practice, this means that a warm spell in February won’t trick henbane into forgetting the cold weeks they have experienced. In another experiment, they withheld the ideal day length. The vernalized plants continued to grow but never flowered. Even after 10 months, when they were exposed to the day length that told them it was the right time, they would still bloom. They had remembered that experience of cold for close to a year.
Melchers and Lang didn’t describe vernalization as a “plant memory,” but today it’s one of the most studied examples. Their experiments showed that plants could hold on to their pasts, for much longer than a person might expect, like undercover agents, fully trained but awaiting the signal to act.
When most people look at a plant, it’s hard to imagine that it’s waiting for anything. Plants don’t seem to have long-term plans. If they lack water, they droop. If it rains, they perk up. If they sense sunlight, they grow toward it. To our human way of thinking, it doesn’t seem like plants are doing very much at all. But we don’t recognize memories in people or dogs just by looking at them, but rather by their behavior. The dog comes when called by name; the person smiles in recognition. For the mimosa or henbane plants, something from the past changed how they reacted in the future—even if we don’t notice or understand why.
Scientists first started talking about “plant memory” explicitly in the 1980s. A team in France, for example, happened upon a type of memory in which a plant recalled a history of damage to a leaf on one side of its stem and therefore dedicated its energy to growing in the other direction. Since then, scientists have found that certain plants can remember experiences of drought and dehydration, cold and heat, excess light, acidic soil, exposure to short-wave radiation, and a simulation of insects eating their leaves. Faced with the same stress again, the plants modify their responses. They might retain more water, become more sensitive to light, or improve their tolerance to salt or cold. In some cases, these memories are even passed down to the next generation, as Lysenko thought they could be, though in an entirely different way than he imagined. We now know that plants are capable of much more than they’re given credit for. They can “hear” vibrations, which might help them recognize insect attacks. They share information by broadcasting chemicals through the air or from their roots. In the study of the memories they form, the next step has been to understand how they do it.
In Melchers and Lang’s time, hormones were the leading edge of plant science. The technique for discovering new hormones was elegantly brutish: Scientists ground up leaves before extracting and isolating the small molecules they released. They then sprayed the hormones back onto plants to see what happened. Gibberellin, for instance, stimulates growth. Today, it’s sprayed on grapes to make the fruit fatter and less tightly clumped. “A great deal of plant physiology was looking for these types of signals,” says Richard Amasino, a professor of biochemistry at University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But the signals in flowering had not been found, despite a lot of grinding up plants.”
By the 1970s and early ’80s, plant scientists still hadn’t found the biochemical secret to flowering. “When I began in science, this was a big mystery,” says Amasino. To understand it and begin to unlock plant memory, scientists needed the insights of molecular genetics and, in particular, epigenetics, the mechanisms that switch particular genes on and off.
In recent years, scientists have realized that the genome alone doesn't determine an organism's fate. There's a whole world of epigenetic activity around DNA that impacts which stretches of code get expressed, or translated into action. Florigen turned out to be a tiny protein, too small for the techniques of Lang’s generation to identify. Even if they had found it, they would have been missing a key to the mystery of what makes biennials flower. Amasino’s generation, on the other hand, finally found the right level of activity—the epigenetic level—to see this process in action.
For example, the mechanism that controls vernalization and flowering in Arabidopsis thaliana, or thale cress, a plant often used as a model in laboratories, is like a Rube Goldberg device of proteins and gene expression. The plant has a set of genes that create the proteins that cause flowers to form. Before vernalization, the cells are full of a second protein, named FLC, that represses those key, flower-promoting genes. But when the plant is exposed to cold, its cells slow the production of FLC until it stops, and the balance of protein power then changes. The cells start producing more and more flower-promoting proteins, until the plant is ready to burst into bloom. In this case, a simple way to think about this epigenetic action is as a switch. The cold acts as a signal to the cell to switch the way its genes are expressed, from "don't flower" to "flower, flower, flower." And even when the cold signal is gone, the switch stays flipped. So, when days lengthen, the plants know it’s the right time to bloom.
"Even when it’s spring and summer,” explains Amasino, “whatever the cold did remains as a memory.”
Are plants secretly soaking up memories, flicking their epigenetic switches on and off in response to every significant stimulus they receive? It seems unlikely. Last year, a group of plant scientists based in Australia argued in the journal Science Advances that, for plants, forgetting (or not forming memories at all) may be a more powerful tool for survival than memory, and that “memory, in particular epigenetic memory, is likely a relatively rare event.”
Peter Crisp, the lead author of the paper, now at University of Minnesota, makes it his job to stress plants out. He and his colleagues might stop watering plants and let them dry out before hydrating the thirsty plants and watching how they recover. It’s been established that in certain plants, epigenetic memories of drought, along with other stressors such as low light and herbivory, can even make the leap across generations. So Crisp and his colleagues might do this for multiple generations (it gets interesting after three) before testing if the plants remember the ordeal they’ve been through and become more tolerant of drought. “We don’t really see that,” says Crisp.
Plants, he points out, have incredible abilities to rebound from stressful conditions. In a paper published this summer, for instance, Crisp and his colleagues found that plants subjected to light stress rebounded rapidly—just think how, with the right care, a neglected houseplant can bounce back from a wilted, brown mess. Scientists have now reported plenty of examples of plant memory formation, but naturally they are less likely to publish results of experiments where plants could potentially form memories but don’t. One of the biggest challenges of the field of study is even identifying whether a plant has formed a memory or not.
When Crisp and his colleagues design lab studies, they have to control for any number of confounding factors to determine if any memories they observe are the result of the experimental stress. “It’s not as though the plant experiences something and says, ‘Oh, I remember this,’” says Steven Eichten, Crisp’s coauthor, from the Australian National University. “It happens to have this chemical marker, a change at a molecular level.” Identifying that change and attributing it to the experimental stress can be difficult. Even when scientists know a memory can form in one plant, they may not necessarily recognize it in another. The memory mechanism involving FLC that Amasino worked on, for instance, only works in thale cress. Beet plants and wheat plants have their own molecular mechanisms of vernalization, which serve the same function but evolved independently. Identifying a true memory out in the field is significantly harder.
In their experiments, however, Crisp and Eichten don’t observe many plant memories being formed. What if, they ask, plant memory is rare simply because it’s better for plants to forget? “Having a memory, keeping track molecularly of signals that you’ve received in the past from your environment, does have a cost,” says Eichten. “Since we don’t see memories all that often ... maybe plants don’t want to remember things all the time. Maybe it’s better to put their energies elsewhere.” Even when memories do form, they can fade. Another research group has shown, for example, that a plant might form an epigenetic memory of salt stress and pass it along across generations, but that if the stress fades, so does the memory. A plant that remembers too much might sacrifice healthy growth to be constantly on guard against drought, flood, salt, insects. Better, perhaps, to let those negative experiences go, instead of always preparing for the worst.
It’s inevitable that we try to understand plant memory and cognition through our own experience of the world. To an extent, even using the word “memory” is an evocative anthropic shorthand for what is actually going on in these plants. “We use the term ‘plant memory,’ but you could find other ways to try to describe it,” says Eichten. But “semi-heritable chromatin factors” doesn’t quite have the same legibility. “Sometimes I have to try to explain my work to my mom, and you say, ‘Well, maybe it’s like a memory … ’ Even if you think about human memories, it’s still kind of an abstract thing, right? You can think about neural connections, but often in common dialogue, when you think of memory, you know what a memory is. At that level, maybe you don’t care about where it’s coming from or what specific neurons are tied to it.”
That’s closer to the position from which Gagliano, the ecologist, approaches plant memory. Unlike the molecular geneticists, she’s less interested in the specific mechanisms of memory formation than she is in the process of learning itself. “Of course plants can remember,” she says. “I know that behaviorally a plant will exhibit a change in behavior that is predictable—if condition A is met, then the plant should be able to do X. So by being able to do X, it means the plant has to remember what happened before, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to do X.”
The leaf-closing M. pudica isn’t the only plant that Gagliano can teach new tricks. In another experiment, she grew garden pea plants in a Y-shaped maze and tested whether they could learn to associate different cues, wind and light. Plants gravitate toward light, and in the experiment, Gagliano added an additional cue, airflow produced by a fan. For some of the plants, light and air flowed from the same side of the Y-shape. For others, light and air came from different directions.
“With the peas, I turned the dial up,” she says. “Not only did the pea need to learn something, but he learned something that meant nothing, that was totally irrelevant. Mimosa had to follow just one experience, the drop, ‘What does this mean?’ While the pea had to follow two events occurring”—the fan and the light.
After training the plants, Gagliano withheld the light. When she next turned on the fans, she had switched them to the opposite branch of the Y shape. She wanted to see if the plants had learned to associate airflow with light, or its absence, strongly enough to react to the breeze, even if it was coming from a different direction, with no light as a signal. It worked. The plants that had been trained to associate the two stimuli grew toward the fan; the plants that had been taught to separate them grew away from the airflow.
“In that context, memory is actually not the interesting bit—of course you have memory, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to do the trick,” she says. “Memory is part of the learning process. But—who is doing the learning? What is actually happening? Who is it that is actually making the association between fan and light?”
It’s telling that Gagliano uses the word “who,” which many people would be unlikely to apply to plants. Even though they’re alive, we tend to think of plants as objects rather than dynamic, breathing, growing beings. We see them as mechanistic things that react to simple stimuli. But to some extent, that’s true of every type of life on Earth. Everything that lives is a bundle of chemicals and electrical signals in dialogue with the environment in which it exists. A memory, such as of the heat of summer on last year’s beach vacation, is a biochemical marker registered from a set of external inputs. A plant’s epigenetic memory, of the cold of winter months, on a fundamental level, is not so different.
Nelson Bay, a biodiversity hotspot off Port Stephens in New South Wales, Australia, has a number of garish occupants. There's Pteraeolidia ianthina, or the "Blue Dragon," which is covered in neon spines. There's also Chromodoris splendida, which, with its striped horns and bright red spots, looks like a devilish clown. These creatures are nudibranchs, marine mollusks famed for their crazy shapes and colors and diverse lifestyles.
But the people of Port Stephens have a lesson for us all: Don't censor the nudis, census them instead! This weekend, citizen scientists will join forces with experts to search out, document, and photograph as many nudibranches and other sea slugs as they can for the area's annual sea slug count.
As the Port Stephens Examiner writes, there are a number of reasons to tally local sea slugs. For one thing, the area is full of all different kinds. Over 250 species have been identified there so far, and more crop up with every census. Nudibranchs are also very sensitive to ocean temperatures, so the level of their presence in Nelson Bay tracks well with the ecosystem's overall health.
Plus, it's fun, like a no-touch scavenger hunt. Volunteers pair up and then either dive, snorkel, or wade into rock pools to document the sea slugs, whose bright colors and slow speeds make them relatively easy to spot.
Afterwards, they pass along their findings to team leaders, sending in one photo per species. Finally, they eat lunch on the beach. "People travel from Sydney and as far north as Coffs Harbour to take part," Danny Eather, a tourism expert, told the Examiner.
Increasingly, conservation organizations and wildlife research groups have been looping the public into their projects, both to bolster awareness of their causes and to help scale their efforts. At the moment, interested parties can help out with everything from firefly counting in New England to ID-ing photos taken by camera traps on the Serengeti. (Atlas Obscura hosted a horseshoe crab count this summer, at Brooklyn's Dead Horse Bay.) The SciStarter website is a good place to find similar projects taking place near you.
The Port Stephens sea slug census was started back in 2013 by marine biologist Tom Davis, in partnership with a local underwater research group. Since then, they've held it four times a year.
This season's event will take place at high tide on the morning of Saturday, September 9th. If you're in the area and want to participate, you can register by emailing seaslugcensus@gmail.com. Otherwise, stay tuned to the census website for the results.
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.
Saturn's distinctive rings were first spotted by Galileo back in 1610, and for the next 407 years, humanity has had only one view of the rings—from the outside, looking in. But on August 20, the spacecraft Cassini captured the rings on camera from a new perspective as it passed between the rings and Saturn's atmosphere. The quick flyby shows just how thin the clouds of dust and ice that encircle the gas giant are. The rings are estimated to be only a kilometer (about 3,300 feet) thick at most, which is minuscule compared to the giant planet they orbit. The images are part of the final stream of data the satellite will send back to Earth.
Cassini, along with the Huygens lander, was launched in 1997 and arrived in Saturn's orbit in 2004. Cassini has had its mission extended three times as it keeps sending back valuable information about the second-largest planet in our solar system. Thanks to Cassini and Huygens, we know that some of the planet's moons are home to conditions that may support life.
As Cassini's mission winds down, it will complete a series of orbits between the rings and the planet before finally entering Saturn's atmosphere on September 15, when it will melt and be destroyed. The satellite's ending may be dramatic, but it allows scientists to collect data they otherwise wouldn't have access to, and destroying the satellite protects the planet's moons from potential biological contamination. It's a noble end for a satellite that's changed how we think about life in our solar system.
Häagen-Dazs ice cream is one of the most fascinating and strangest linguistic marketing attempts that’s ever actually succeeded. The company was founded in 1961 by Reuben and Rose Mattus, a Polish Jewish couple who, coincidentally, each emigrated to the U.S. in 1921. American Jews have a long history in the ice cream business, but unlike, say, Ben & Jerry’s, which was named after its cofounders, Häagen-Dazs was named mostly at random.
Reuben Mattus told Tablet Magazine in 2012 that the name for his company was inspired by Mattus’s admiration for Denmark’s treatment of Danish Jews during World War II, and that he sat around trying out Danish-sounding names until he hit on one he liked. But the phrase “Häagen-Dazs” not only has no actual meaning in Danish (or any other language), it does not follow Danish language conventions. There is no umlaut in Danish; it is found in some Germanic languages, including semi-archaic uses in English like the word naïve, as well as in French, Dutch, Spanish, Welsh, and a few other languages.
Technically speaking, those two dots above a letter can signify two different things. One is called diaeresis, which indicates that two adjacent vowels that would normally be pronounced as one sound should actually be given two syllables, each with its own sound. Naïve, for example, includes two adjacent vowels—called a digraph—of “a” and “i.” If you didn’t know better, you’d pronounce “naive” as “knave” or “knive.” The diaeresis tells you not to combine those two vowels into one sound, but to leave them be as separate entities, “ah” and “ee.” Diaeresis can also be seen in English words like cooperative (not “coupe-erative”) and names like Chloe (not cloh).
If we assume that the dots in Häagen-Dazs is a diaeresis, it should be pronounced “Hah-AH-gen dazs.” Which it is not.
Those two dots, though, are usually referred to as an umlaut, which is specific to German and a few other languages like Hungarian and Swedish. It has a completely different function than the identical-looking diaeresis, in that it just changes the sound a vowel makes. It has the same effect on any vowel it appears on, which is to “front” the vowel. “Fronting” is a linguistic term referring to the position of your tongue in the mouth; to “front” a vowel means to pronounce it with your tongue more forward, toward your teeth. Given an umlaut, “Häagen-Dazs” should be pronounced “Heh-gen dazs.” Which it also is not.
This is all sort of moot, because Danish, the culture and language that inspired Mattus to name his brand, does not have either an umlaut or a diaeresis. Danish does have the letter Å, though its sound is more like the vowel in “your.” This letter, considered a different letter than the letter A without the little circle on top, is the modern version of the digraph “aa.” But it would not be ever found as “åa,” because the accented letter replaced the digraph; you use one or the other. In any case, Håagen-Dazs would be pronounced something like “hoh-gen dazs” or “hoh-ah-gen dazs,” neither of which, we can all agree, is correct.
The “zs” ending is also a problem; it is found exclusively in Hungarian, and is a soft “J” sound, as in the word “usually” or the name “Jacques.” This would turn the newly Hungarian Häagen-Dazs into “hah-gen dazjh.” (English doesn’t really have a good way to indicate that consonant. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, it’s written as “/ʒ/” and referred to as a voiced fricative. If that ever helps you win a Jeopardy question or something, let us know.)
What Mattus was doing is a marketing tool known as foreign branding: the use of a foreign or foreign-sounding word to indicate something about that product. By definition, foreign-branded products are lies; this does not apply to a product, like, say, Fjällräven, which is a Swedish word for the arctic fox, because Fjällräven the company is actually Swedish.
There are plenty of examples to be found in North America. Cafe chain Au Bon Pain is from Boston. Ginsu Knives started out in Ohio. Pret a Manger is British. Popov vodka is made by the American subsidiary of a British brand. Agent Provocateur is British. Comme des Garçons is Japanese. A whopping two-thirds of all Italian-branded products—that might mean an Italian or Italian-sounding name, or a picture of Italy on the packaging, stuff like that—do not originate from Italy. (There’s a pretty decent chance your “aceto balsamico” is just red wine vinegar with flavorings and made in a vat in Massachusetts or California.)
Foreign branding is a touchy, difficult subject in multiple ways. There’s a distinct risk of causing offense through stereotyping or unintended meanings of words. Honda, for example, decided at the last minute to name the North American and European version of its Jazz hatchback as the “Fit” rather than the “Fitta,” because it turns out “fitta” is an extremely vulgar word for female genitalia in Sweden.
It’s also a difficult task to figure out exactly which foreign culture to imply. Different countries, and populations within those countries, have entirely different opinions of foreign nations. What exactly is the general opinion of Germany in Denmark? Of Japan in Argentina? Of Italy in Ghana? “Although it may be generalized as the customer’s nationality, it has been found that there are significant differences in how people with the same nationality, but from different subcultures (e.g. French vs. English Canadians) evaluate foreign products,” says Thomas Aichner, an assistant professor of marketing at Alfaisal University who studies how country-of-origin affects consumers. Does a long history of antagonism between French and Anglo Canada mean that Anglo Canadians do not have the same feeling about French products as do other former UK colonies like the U.S. and Australia?
Much of this stuff comes down to just knowing your audience. Take Switzerland. Around the world, certain products are thought to be high-quality if they come from Switzerland, like watches. But other products aren’t so simple. In Germany, says Aichner, a Swiss-branded cheese could do very well; Germans, at least according to marketers, believe cheese from Switzerland to be of high quality. (One of Germany’s most famous cheeses, Emmenthaler, comes from a Swiss recipe.) But in France, cheese from Switzerland does not carry the same weight. There has actually been a legal debate over where Gruyere comes from. (The French think it’s from France, the Swiss think it’s from Switzerland. The Swiss won that battle.)
Whether the fact that foreign-branded products are lies affects consumers who learn the truth is another risk. Aichner worked on a study informing customers in a German supermarket that Häagen-Dazs is not, in fact, Danish at all, but a hearty Bronx product. The willingness to buy Häagen-Dazs products dropped 68 percent. But things get weirder: 63 percent of customers decided if they were to buy, the price would have to decrease, but a third of all the customers were willing to paymore than before, now that they knew the ice cream was American. In the U.S., a Danish-sounding name might indicate quality to Americans, but in Germany, it seems, American-made ice cream is nothing to sneer at.
The weirdest part of the Häagen-Dazs story came in 1980. That year, a New York dairy began selling a brand of ice cream called Frusen Glädjé. That name translates, almost, as “frozen delight,” though the final accent on “Glädjé” should not be there and thus reduces the name to something more like “frozen delite.” Shortly after Frusen Glädjé launched, it was sued by Häagen-Dazs. A quote from the initial complaint: “Plaintiff concludes that defendants have intentionally packaged their product in a manner calculated to trade upon ‘plaintiff's unique Scandinavian marketing theme.’” That packaging included a clear list of minimal ingredients, a list of artificial ingredients not found in the ice cream, and a map of Scandinavia.
Häagen-Dazs lost the court battle, but Frusen Glädjé was soon sold to Kraft and then shuttered. Häagen-Dazs eventually stopped printing a picture of Scandinavia on its packaging, but the name—incredibly incorrect and all—remains.
The Greek hero Bellerophon sits astride Pegasus, the winged horse. Hercules tussles with a centaur. Cupid clutches a wreath. All this action unfurls in full-color glory on a Roman mosaic found last week in West Berkshire, England, in the closing month of a three-year archaeology project.
The Cotswold Archaeology dig, which has taken place over the last three summers, concentrated on the site of a possible Roman villa, based on 19th-century records of a nearby drainage ditch. Peeling off the top layer of soil, an excavator revealed the corner of the stunning mosaic, made up of thousands of tiny colored tiles. Although only one side is currently visible, the mosaic looks to be square-shaped and over 30 feet long, with a two-foot border of red roof tiles. The Guardian reports that, according to Anthony Beeson, an expert on classical art, it is "without question the most exciting mosaic discovery made in Britain in the last fifty years."
Experts have dated the mosaic to the 4th century and say that it has particular mythological elements that set it apart from many other Roman mosaics in the United Kingdom. In the mosaic, Bellerophon is seen in combat with a chimera, a terrifying fire-breathing monster with a goat's body, a snake's tail, and a lion's head. In many other British mosaics, chimeras flee their adversary. Here, the chimera fights back.
The dig, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, has involved over fifty local volunteers and other resident historians. Joy Appleton, a lead organizer, told Newbury Today that a discovery of that scale had been an unexpected bonus. "We could never have envisaged such a stunning project when we started in 2015," she said. "What a way to end a project."
But the full scale of the mosaic is yet to be revealed, with just a few letters in what looks like Greek peeking out from the mosaic's edge. For the other half to be uncovered, more funding for future digs will also have to be found—a far more prosaic process of excavation.
Back in 1977, NASA launched two of the most important craft in its history, the Voyager probes 1 and 2. Now on the 40 anniversary of their launch, NASA has released a handful of promotional posters to remind people that they are still out there, exploring.
The probes were originally tasked with studying some of the bodies in our own solar system, including Saturn and the moons of Jupiter. Voyager 1 is now floating through interstellar space beyond our solar system, further than any man-made object in history, while Voyager 2 is currently making its way through the "heliosheath," the outermost layer of the heliosphere. They are responsible for such historic cosmic feats as the famous “Pale Blue Dot” image, and they both carry a copy of the art- and information–packed Voyager Golden Record.
As per Science Daily, NASA released a series of posters to mark the 40th anniversary of the launch of the probes. While one of the posters has a fairly simplistic modern design, the other two are groovy retro-inspired images, one looking like it could be a flier for a disco concert, and the other looking as though it might be the cover of a pulpy sci-fi paperback. These come on the heels of another series of retro posters released to celebrate the Cassini mission.
In Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a mysterious being known only as V'Ger nearly destroys the Earth until Captain Kirk and the Enterprise crew realize that (SPOILER ALERT) it is in fact an old Voyager probe that has evolved into a living being. In the movie, they still remember the Voyager probes some 300 years in the future. If NASA keeps putting out cool posters to celebrate their incredible achievements, hopefully that kind of centuries-long legacy will come to pass.
In November of 1877, around 2,000 spectators gathered in an auditorium in Des Moines, Iowa, to watch a unique demonstration. Before them onstage a woman in her mid-30s perched on a stool, wearing a white smock, her hair pulled tightly back. She held several wooden paddles and a straw brush, and before her was an easel with a metal milk pan leaning on it, filled up completely with butter. Next to her was a full brass band.
The show began, and the musicians struck up a tune: "La Marseilles," the national anthem of France. As the woman scraped and brushed with her paddle, the butter on the easel formed wide cheekbones and a distinct forelock: Napoleon! The band switched to a different, more American song, and the artist quickly reshaped that first face, giving it furrowed brows and a strong nose: George Washington!
Suddenly, a low note from the tuba rattled the easel, and as Washington's shoulder began sliding off the easel, the artist caught it with practiced calm and stuck it back on the founding father's body. The room erupted in applause.
Today, butter sculpting is the purview of state fairs and agricultural halls, its subject matter heavy on cows, pop stars, and heads of state cuddling pandas. But from the mid-19th century through the early 20th, Caroline Shawk Brooks, aka the "Butter Woman," used it to bring herself widespread renown. By exploring the sculptural possibilities of dairy, Brooks took herself from an early life as a farmer's wife into a career full of national exhibitions, cross-country tours, and European travel—all despite naysayers who wanted nothing more than to melt her down.
Brooks had been artistically inclined from childhood, and she had shown a knack for unorthodox materials. As a kid, she'd sculpted a bust of Dante out of mud from a nearby creek. But as the art historian Pamela H. Simpson details in a short biography of Brooks, she didn't take up butter sculpture until economic necessity demanded it, in 1867—"the year the cotton crop failed" at her farm in Arkansas, as Brooks herself told an interviewer.
At the time, women farmers often took charge of making and selling butter while their husbands worked out in the fields, and some distinguished their wares by using pre-made molds to press patterns into them: flower, shapes, or their own brand names. Brooks decided to take this trend a step further, meticulously carving her butter into animals, shells, and faces rather than simply using a mold. It worked: "Her friends and customers greatly admired—and readily bought—them," writes Simpson.
The lean times eventually ended, and Brooks put butter sculpture aside for several years. But the idea kept churning, and the next time she needed a marketing gimmick, she turned to it once more. In 1873, when the local church's roof caved in, Brooks sculpted a butter portrait, which fetched enough at the church fair to fund the repairs. ("The people there called it—the Butterhead!" she later told the Akron Daily Democrat.)
This brought her to the attention of a Tennessee businessman, who commissioned a likeness of Mary, Queen of Scots for his Memphis office. (By this point, Brooks had perfected her preservation technique, which involved fitting each sculpture into a flat metal milk pan and setting it inside a larger pan, which she kept filled with ice.) People flocked to see it: "To Mrs. Caroline Brooks of Ark. belongs the credit of combining the poetic with the edible, and affording the household on its daily bread a work of art," wrote the Chicago Tribune.
Later that year, Brooks came across the character that would become her lasting muse: Iolanthe, the innocent princess at the center of a popular play called King Rene's Daughter. After losing her sight in a fire, Iolanthe spends her youth hidden away in a cottage, unaware of her blindness and plunged each night into an enchanted slumber by an attending physician. When she is 16, Iolanthe accidentally learns the truth about her condition, but after falling in love with a prince, she is finally cured.
The tale moved Brooks, and for the first time, she took up her butter-sculpting tools solely out of inspiration. "Brooks chose to depict that last moment of innocence before Iolanthe awakes to a new life," writes Simpson. The result, Dreaming Iolanthe, pleased the artist enough that she brought it with her on a visit to Cincinnati. There, acquaintances of hers put it on display in a local art hall, where 2,000 visitors paid 25 cents each to see it. It even attracted the attention of TheNew York Times, which called it "a face that may yet make [Brooks] famous."
Brooks kept creating new sculptures, which she displayed in several venues in Cincinnati. She was particularly attached to Iolanthe, though: even after she perfected a butter-based plaster-casting technique that could have allowed her to make infinite copies of the work, she chose instead to carve the sculpture anew each time it was needed.
One of these occasions was the 1876 Centennial Exposition, in Philadelphia. Lucy Webb Hayes, the future first lady and a big fan of Brooks, commissioned her to carve a Dreaming Iolanthe for the Women's Pavilion. The sculpture was "beyond all comparison the most beautiful and unique exhibit in the Centennial," raved J.S. Ingram in his popular event guide. It drew such large crowds that it eventually made its way to the more central Memorial Hall.
So popular was Brooks's work that on October 14, she was asked to demonstrate her techniques live at the Judge's Hall. Armed solely with two different-sized wooden paddles, reporters and judges watched as Brooks worked, first piling the butter into a granite basin bit by bit until she had a twelve-pound blob, and then placing it in a nearby refrigerator to harden.
She brought it out again and began carving away at it, placing it back into the fridge for brief stints in order to restore the desired texture. "In one hour and a quarter after she began work," Ingram wrote, "the shapeless, golden mass was transformed into the relief bust of another sleeping beauty."
Brooks "may have begun as a farmer's wife trying to sell her dairy products," writes Simpson. But by the time the Centennial ended, bolstered by this critical and popular reception, she began "aiming for something more." After the Exposition ended, Brooks set off on an extended tour of the U.S., where she lectured art appreciators and demonstrated her techniques, sometimes with the aforementioned musical accompaniment. In 1878, she separated from her husband and opened a studio in Washington, D.C., where she began taking commissions from various upper-crusters eager to befriend the so-called "Butter Lady."
This nickname notwithstanding, over the course of Brooks's career, critics showed no qualms about encouraging her to switch over to what they viewed as a real material. "The talented lady should drop the butter paddle and take up the mallet and chisel," one wrote in 1873. As her reputation spread, similar sentiments were raised by fans and skeptics alike.
East Coast critics poked fun at her, suggesting that if more public sculptures were made out of butter, issues of changing historical opinions might be resolved. When she entered a contest to sculpt a memorial for Ulysses S. Grant, the other entrants were "somewhat miffed" that the butter lady was allowed to compete among them, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported.
But although Brooks did eventually begin working with other materials, even spending seven years with marble-cutting artisans in Italy, she never forgot her roots. No matter the finished product—the state seal of Nebraska; a dual portrait of Grant and Chinese diplomat Li Hung Chang with a friendship knot over them—each work's life began as butter, which she found to be better than clay at keeping its malleability, not to mention readily available. "I had previously modeled in everything workable, in clay, sea sand, mashed potatoes, putty and so on," she told the Akron Daily Democrat in 1893. "[But] I began my best work in butter, and with butter I shall end."
Brooks remained in D.C., sculpting, exhibiting, and hustling for commissions, until her death in 1913. "We know little of her final years," Simpson says, except that she kept that promise. Tomorrow morning, as you spread butter on your toast, pour out a drop for a woman who took an everyday condiment to new heights, and herself along with it.
Of all the abandoned hotels that photographer Shane Thoms captured for his book Haikyo: The Modern Ruins of Japan, the one he finds most compelling is the Royal Hotel. A vast, ornate, crumbling structure on the volcanic Hachijo Island, it has everything Thoms wants from a ruin. “Exploring this marvelous, massive and haunting structure was just like stepping into a Tim Burton film set,” he says. “Darkly enchanting in all the right ways, it harks back to my early beginnings in that I could once again fulfill my playful fascination with the macabre and experience a magically creepy place—I was so in love.”
As a child, Thoms was fascinated by the unsettling environments of horror films like Nightmare on Elm Street. “I was heavily drawn to the darkness and danger of any space that resembled Elm Street’s huge labyrinthine boiler room or Candyman’s dilapidated and derelict urban project housing.” He began to sneak into empty buildings for “some kind of thrilling, creepy experience for myself.”
Thom’s interest deepened when, in his twenties, he began to photograph abandoned buildings. He realized that they were more than just eerie spaces with broken windows. “These empty, former lived-in spaces became realms where human emotion and energy still lingered,” he says. “Each item in the space had been left like a prop on a stage where the observer could sit, watch and ponder the past.”
In Japanese, haikyo means both ruins and the urban exploration process of tracking down those abandoned, overgrown spaces. Thoms’s book focuses on Japan’s now-derelict spaces that once housed modern life: apartments, mines and, of course, hotels and leisure facilities. This includes not just the once-splendorous Royal Hotel, but also deserted onsens and one of Japan’s “love hotels”, the Fuu Motel. Here, rooms that were once hired on an hourly basis now have branches growing through the windows.
Even these encroaching weeds are appealing to Thoms. “Kudzu vine is considered a pest,” he says, but he still finds it “very beautiful and attractive. Seeing gigantic rollercoasters covered in kudzu vine is a truly magical experience and I adore it.” (One of Japan’s most famous ruins—also in the book—was Nara Dreamland, a Disney-inspired amusement park that is currently being demolished.)
Not all the nature he experiences is so appealing, however. When shooting, Thoms keeps a wary eye out for Japanese giant hornet nests, which can be found in many abandoned buildings. “They attack in numbers and can be fatal and very painful.” He is also very careful about potential structural issues and asbestos hazards.
For Thoms, photographing these abandoned spaces has a purpose beyond his own enjoyment. There is “an importance in documenting these spaces before the process of urban evolution (ie. demolition) erased it forever”, he notes. “I feel that much can be learned about ourselves and society by documenting the hidden fragments of our urban past.”
AO has a selection of images from Haikyo: The Modern Ruins of Japan.
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, in the heyday of steamboat shipping, Thunder Bay was one of the busiest and most dangerous ports on the Great Lakes. Sailing in and out of the port meant contending with tumultuous weather and rocky shoals, and so many ships went down that this area was called “Shipwreck Alley.”
This summer, researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Delaware located two long-lost wrecks in the bay—the remains of the wooden bulk freighter the Ohio, which sank in 1894, and the steamer Choctaw, which sank in 1915.
The Ohio was built in 1873 and was carrying a load of grain when stormy weather and a narrow channel led to its demise. It was one of the earlier experiments with designing steamships specifically for the Great Lakes. The Choctaw represents a relatively rare boat design, which was a variation on the Great Lakes’ iconic “whaleback” steamers.
There are thought to be about 200 wrecks in the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary, with about 100 yet to be discovered, reports the CBC. These boats were found as part of a shipwreck survey. At 300 feet deep, they’re unusually far down in the water; most of the known shipwrecks in the sanctuary were found at depths of less than 100 feet and almost all of them were discovered at depths of 200 feet or less.
