San Juan Island is, by any account, a small piece of land—19 miles long and seven miles wide—just off the coast of Washington state. Today farms spread over the island, and a ferry brings tourists ready to soak in the vibes of the Pacific Northwest. It’s not an obvious site for an international conflict between the United States and England. But in 1859, both countries were amassing troops here, ready to start a war over the rights of the farmers who had settled here. It is known today as the Pig War, but before any pigs were involved, there was a fight over sheep.

The Pig War began with a problem specific to the Age of Exploration: A number of different countries had sent men in boats to sail along the western coast of North America and map parts of the interior. Those countries all believed, by virtue of this act, that this large stretch of land now belonged to them. (The people who had been living in these lands before they were “discovered” by European powers were not considered in this political calculus.) In the early 19th century, Britain, the United States, Russia, and Spain all had designs and claims on what was called Oregon Territory, which stretched from what’s now the southernmost border of Alaska, down to California, and east to the Rocky Mountains.

Over time, the United States and Britain convinced Russia and Spain to back off their claims, and through the 1840s agreed to a joint occupation that left the issue unpressed for a spell. As white settlers began to arrive in greater numbers, though, this uncomfortable arrangement became a problem. In 1846 the Treaty of Oregon drew a line along the 49th parallel, cutting the territory into two and creating what’s now the U.S.-Canada border.

But at the edge of mainland, the border went down, according to the treaty, “to the middle of the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver Island and thence southerly through the middle of the said channel.”

This is the flashpoint of the Pig War. Even when the treaty was signed, the negotiators knew there was a problem: There was more than one channel this line could describe. One, the Rosario Strait, was closer to the mainland and granted San Juan Island to the British. The other, the Haro Strait, was farther west and gave San Juan Island to the United States. It’s easy to guess which country favored which interpretation. For the next few years, this ambiguity remained an abstract problem—until settlers started edging closer to the contested island, at which point a British official sent in the sheep.

James Douglas had risen through the ranks of Britain’s colonial hierarchy to become governor of British Columbia, and he was determined that San Juan Island would remain a British possession. British-held Vancouver Island, valued for its climate, water power, coal, and fisheries, lies just across the Haro Strait from San Juan Island, and controlling both would mean control of access into the Strait of Saint George, and the city of Vancouver. But the political and strategic implications went further. Both sides, writes historian Scott Kaufman in his book, The Pig War: The United States, Britain, and the Balance of Power in the Pacific Northwest, 1846-1872, “believed that whichever country possessed the island would have the upper hand in the balance of power in the Pacific Northwest, with enormous implications for both countries’ regional economic and military interests.”

At first, Douglas tried to convince the people of British Columbia to settle San Juan Island, but, Kaufman writes, they were reluctant to leave the town of Victoria for so isolated a place. Instead, at the end of 1853, Douglas had to be satisfied with having the Hudson Bay Company send sheep, more than 1,300 of them, along with one British man, Charles Griffin, to run the island’s newest farm with the help of native shepherds.

This influx did not escape the notice of American officials, and the local collector of customs, Isaac Ebey, decided that Hudson Bay Company, a de facto arm of the British government, should pay taxes on the sheep. He sailed to San Juan Island to present Griffin with a bill and, when it went unpaid, deputized a tax collector, Henry Webber, to oversee the island. When Webber arrived, he set up his camp directly behind Griffin’s cabin and raised an American flag.

That did not sit well with Griffin, who deputized one of the shepherds, Thomas Holland, to arrest Webber. When the newly appointed constable tried to serve the warrant, though, Webber pulled a gun and leveled it at shepherd’s chest. This was first threat of violence in the conflict, but neither side pressed the issue. Griffin had Holland back down, and Ebey ordered Webber to stay on the island and keep track of the taxes Griffin owed without trying to collect them. For a few months, things were quiet.

Later that year, though, another American official, the commissioner of newly formed Whatcom County, William Cullen, took an interest in the sheep. Like Ebey, Cullen believed San Juan to be an American island and decided Griffin owed taxes. Four times, the county sheriff demanded $80.33 in back taxes from the sheep farm, as Mike Vouri writes in The Pig War: Standoff at Griffin Bay, and in March of 1855, when Griffin once again refused to pay, the sheriff brought a group of Americans to the island for a tax sale. They rounded up a portion of the sheep, auctioned them off, and got 34 of them into boats before Griffin and his herders knew what was happening. Griffin called in reinforcements, and a British ship pursued the Americans, in their sheep-filled boats, through the contested waters before giving up the chase.

For the next few years, tensions on the island stayed low, as Griffin oversaw the growth of the farm to close to 4,500 sheep, along with pigs and other animals. But in 1859 American settlers started arriving, intent on setting up their own farms. One brought 20 cattle. These newcomers did not take much stock in Griffin’s presence there. One new farm was located smack in the middle of one of Griffin’s best sheep runs.

Despite their best efforts, the humans on the island had managed to avoid direct conflict, but the animals were less discreet. In summer 1859, one of the pigs from Griffin’s farm discovered a plot of tempting tubers on the farm of American Lyman Cutlar and availed himself of the delights. Cutlar, having fended off this same pig before, could not stand for this theft. He shot the pig.

That unceremonious execution quickly escalated. Griffin wanted payment for the dead pig but dismissed Cutlar’s offer of $10. The price, he said, was $100, a bounty Cutlar was unwilling to pay. According to Cutlar’s account, Griffin then lost it, as Vouri recounts in his book. “It is no more than I expected,” Griffin allegedly told him. “You Americans are a nuisance on the island, and you have no business here. I shall write Mr. Douglas and have you removed.”

Cutlar, by his own estimation, stayed cool. “I came here to settle for shooting your hog,” he said, “not argue the right of Americans on the island, for I consider it American soil.”

To be fair to the poor deceased pig, Cutlar’s decision to fire was not the only source of tension on the island. When General William Harney, who commanded U.S. military forces in Oregon, visited the island, the settlers regaled him with many tales of woe. But the pig story stuck in Harney’s head. After hearing about the settlers’ tensions with the British and native tribes, Harney decided to dispatch a small unit of troops to protect the Americans there—and in his report to his superiors about this decision, the pig incident loomed large.

By the end of July, a unit of 66 American soldiers, led by Captain George Pickett, had settled on the island. The British couldn’t abide this, and two days later a British warship showed up off the coast. Douglas, the governor, urged the Navy to send still more ships and land troops on the island. By August 3, there were three ships off the coast. In a parlay with British naval officer in command, Captain Geoffrey Phipps Hornby, the American Pickett held fast to his position that if British troops attempted to land, he would have to stop them.

Once again the two sides had come to the brink and cooler heads prevailed. Hornby held back, but both sides built their forces over the next few weeks, until there were hundreds of American soldiers on San Juan, and more than 2,000 British sailors in ships. Meanwhile, the island’s settlements had grown to include more than one groggery, and shacks brought over from an abandoned camp in Bellingham Bay, where soldiers could find whisky and women. Civilians from Victoria also sailed to the island to watch the conflict unfold.

When leaders on both sides heard about what was happening, they immediately decided to to de-escalate the conflict. By the fall, both sides had agreed to draw down their forces, until there was just one company of American soldiers on the island and one British ship off the coast. In March, the two countries agreed to jointly occupy the island, with an American camp on one end and a British camp on the other.

This was the situation for the next 12 years. In 1871, a few years after William Gladstone became Prime Minister of England, the countries agreed to decide their remaining land disputes through arbitration. Both made their cases before a commission appointed by Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm I. The next year, the conflict was finally resolved. The border would go through Haro Strait, and San Juan Island would be American. In the end, the only life that was lost was that of the hungry pig that gave the war its name.

In southwest China, near the village of Gulu, there’s a cliff that has a mysterious talent. It lays eggs. More precisely, beautifully round, egg-like rocks stud its face, MetroUK reports. Eventually, over the course of about three decades, those rocks emerge until they drop from the cliff face to the ground—smooth and nearly spherical.

In pictures, the cliff looks like it’s decorated with candy buttons or developed a strange skin disease. The rocks themselves are like the large versions of the silky pebbles on a beach or riverbed. Locals consider them good luck and collect them when they fall, but no one has known what, exactly, is responsible for this phenomenon.

According to MetroUK, experts have now analyzed this section of cliff and found that it’s made of calcareous rock—sedimentary rock that is chalky, with a high proportion of calcium carbonate. Erosion patterns may be responsible for forming the egg-shaped rocks, they think, but the precise geological mechanism at the cliff hasn't been determined.

Sedimentary rocks are known to form what are called concretions, in which a mineral cement holds sandy particles together. Under the right conditions, these concretions can form particularly round rocks that emerge when the less durable material around them erodes. Often they’re much larger than the Chinese example, and found on horizontal planes rather than vertical cliffs. But they range widely: a forest in Arkansas, a beach in New Zealand, and on Mars.

The Ishaqbini Hirola Conservancy in Garissa County, Kenya, is famous for its rare hirola antelopes: quick, sharp-horned ungulates endemic to the area. Back in early June, though, a resident walking near the conservancy saw something else unusual: a ghostly, tall animal, stepping through the brush.

The villager informed a ranger, who ferried the news to researchers at the nearby Hirola Conservation Program. "We hurriedly headed to the scene as soon as we got the news," one researcher recalled recently, on the Program's blog. "And lo! There, right [in front] of us, was the so hyped ‘white giraffe’ of Ishaqbini conservancy!" Just seconds later, another surprise was in store. There were not one, but two white giraffes: a mother and a calf.

As the researcher explains, these two giraffes have what is called leucism, a heritable genetic condition that reduces an animal's ability to produce pigment. Unlike albinism, leucism doesn't disrupt pigmentation entirely: affected individuals may display ghostly traces of their normal patterns. That's true of the young giraffe in this video, whose spots remain slightly visible (he looks a bit like he's just rolled around in flour).

Leucism has been noted in many different animal species, from pythons and crocodiles to lions and tigers. Although leucistic giraffes seem to be fairly rare, the wildlife biologist Zoe Muller writes that sightings have been reported as far back as 1938, and again in 1956, 2005, 2011, and 2015. (Muller points out that several of these leucistic giraffes were originally mischaracterized as albinos.)

In early 2016, camel herders in Garissa County started spotting another white giraffe, which researchers managed to photograph in April of that year. (It's unclear whether this is the same giraffe as the mother with the calf.)

Since then, the HCP researcher writes, "sightings have become a common occurrence," and community members are keeping their eyes peeled. "'This is new to us,' the researcher quotes a local ranger as saying. 'I remember when I was a kid, we never saw them.'" Now, they have at least two to look out for.

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.

Elephants never forget, we learned as children. Now, in less innocent times, we learn that they also have an uncanny ability to know when their lives are in danger. New research from the University of Twente in the Netherlands, Save the Elephants, and the Kenya Wildlife Service has found that these giants change their behavior when there is a high threat of poaching. At night, they spend less time sleeping and more time foraging and traveling than they normally would.

A famous example is Morgan, a Kenyan bull elephant who made a long march from his home last year. Researchers tracked his journey with a GPS collar, and the world watched as he briefly crossed into war-torn Somalia—once home to thousands of elephants. It's not known why Morgan made this 130-mile journey, though it's thought he may have been searching for a mate. Seemingly guided by some internal compass, he moved only when the sun was down. During the day, he studiously concealed himself. And he survived the trip.

For this new study, researchers tracked some 60 elephants between 2002 and 2009, when poaching levels were more moderate, and 2010 and 2012, when demand for illegal ivory soared, sparking a poaching crisis. "The escalation of poaching has become the greatest immediate threat to the survival of elephants," the study's lead author, Festus Ihwagi, said in a statement. "As most poaching occurs during the daytime, their transition to nocturnal behavior appears to be a direct result of the prevailing poaching levels."

As more and more elephants were killed, the survivors began to spend their nights journeying and their days hidden in thick jungle, much like Morgan. This was especially true for female elephants, who have far more to lose than males. Many travel with a calf in tow, and they live in a tightly bonded family structure.

"This study shows the adaptability of Earth's largest land mammal to adapt their behavior flexibly in order to stay safe," Save the Elephants' founder, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, said in the statement. "This alteration in movement behavior by elephants has implications for their foraging strategy, reproduction and survival, which are not yet fully understood." It's also not yet known how this striking new behavior can be used to help conservationists and wildlife managers protect the animals. At least, researchers suggest, it could constitute a kind of "early-warning system," a way for elephants to communicate to us a threat that we don't see and feel as they do.

Squirrels may seem to stash their food reserves willy-nilly as they rush to make sure they have enough for the winter, and to keep their caches hidden from freeloaders, like other squirrels, birds, and even bears. But according to a new study, sometimes they actually use a system for that organizes those stored nuts by size and species. They use a technique psychologists call "chunking," in which similar items—whether nuts or pieces of information—are lumped into more manageable and memorable chunks.

The study's field work didn't take the researchers very far afield at all. They tracked 45 squirrels on campus at the University of California, Berkeley for close to two years, and fed their subjects nuts (almonds, hazelnuts, pecans, and walnuts) in different sequences and places to see how they cached the windfall. The scientists found the squirrels were careful to hide the food in new places when it was given out in different places, but that they cached the nuts by type, and sometimes by size, when they were distributed from a central location.

“Squirrels may use chunking the same way you put away your groceries. You might put fruit on one shelf and vegetables on another. Then, when you’re looking for an onion, you only have to look in one place, not every shelf in the kitchen,” study coauthor Lucia Jacobs said in a press release. That means the squirrels don't have to put as much energy into remembering where they stashed their pecans.

Squirrels aren't the only animals that use chunking. Lab rats do it to remember where different types of food rewards are in a maze. Other animals have also developed strategies for remembering cache locations. In one study, scrub jays remembered where they stored wax worms based on when they stashed the food. For animals like these squirrels that cache thousands of nuts and seeds each year, knowing where everything is stored is critical to survival.

Sea silk sounds like the stuff of legend. Harvested from rare clams, this thread flashes gold in the sunlight, weighs almost nothing, and comes with a heavy load of misunderstanding, misinterpretation, and misinformation. But the fiber itself is no myth. Its flaxen strands come from Pinna nobilis, or the pen shell, a giant Mediterranean mollusk that measures up to a yard in length. To attach themselves to rocks or the seafloor, some clams secrete proteins that, upon contact with seawater, harden into a silky filament called byssus. The byssus of the pen shell makes sea silk, the world’s rarest thread.

The BBC reports that only one person alive knows how to spin this clam fluid into golden twine, and this is where the myth begins. By the light of the moon, 62-year-old Chiara Vigo dives up to 17 yards deep, into a network of secret underwater caves off the coast of Sardinia, where the clams can be found. As the Italian Coast Guard watches protectively from the shore, she may dive 100 times to produce a single ounce of the fibers, by trimming the byssus from each bivalve with a tiny scalpel. These beard-like growths can be up to six inches in length. The BBC further describes how she says a prayer before each dive, and adheres to a so-called ancient, sacred “Sea Oath” that prevents sea silk from being bought or sold.

Vigo’s oft-repeated claim to sole ownership of the clams’ secrets are likely untrue. Up until the 1950s, Sant’Antioco, a small island to the southwest of Sardinia, was among a few places where sea silk was manufactured. Italo Diana, a famous sea silk weaver, passed on her knowledge to many locals, including Efisia Murroni, who died in 2013, but not before teaching many others. In her 2015 book, Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells, marine biologist Helen Scales tells the story of Giuseppina and Assuntina Pes, two sisters on Sant’Antioco who learned the preparation of sea silk from Murroni, as did other neighbors and friends who have received less media attention than Vigo. Scales describes their process. First, the filaments are soaked in seawater, then in fresh water. Next, the women tease them out with a spiky comb, and then spin the filaments to a fine thread with a spindle. Lemon juice brightens and clarifies the thread, which is anywhere from bronze to blonde in color.

Since 1992, the European Union has enforced a blanket ban on harvesting or harming the pen shell mollusks. The Pes sisters pull their supply of byssus from their own dwindling stockpile, and the occasional dead shell found by a fisherman, But their days of spinning the threads are likely numbered. “Assuntina and Giuseppina see no way to obtain sea-silk, but it’s something they seem calmly resigned to,” writes Scales. Vigo holds that her scalpel method, like giving the clams a haircut, does not harm them. This allows her to continue to harvest byssus and then push the clams back into the mud. Vigo told the BBC that her family has been passing on the tradition of the thread for almost 1,000 years, including this particular trimming method. However, researchers say, almost nothing is known directly about the history of sea silk before about 1700—though its myth-shrouded history seems to date back much further.

Adoro gli incontri "casuali", oggi ho conosciuto una donna speciale, l’ultimo Maestro di bisso, non solo in Sardegna. Al mondo! Un sapere antico tramandato in modo matrilineare. Di generazione in generazione. Lei si immerge per raccogliere la seta del mare. La bava della Pinna nobilis, mollusco che si ancora ai fondali di sabbia. La taglia, la porta in superficie, la dissala poi comincia il procedimento di filatura. Canta di continuo mentre lavora, è emozionante. Per creare quello che ha tra le mani ci sono voluti 5 anni di lavoro. L’unica al mondo a tessere la seta usata dai patriarchi biblici . Lei dice che Il bisso non si può comprare e non si può vendere. Nonostante sia evidente la ricchezza spirituale di questa donna il famoso museo del bisso di chiara Vigo di Sant'Antioco è stato chiuso. E penso che noi sardi dovremmo fare qualcosa per tenercela stretta. #chiaravigo#sardegna#creatoadarte#arte#natura#mothernature#celtic#visualsofearth #gold #sardinia_people#sardinia_history#focusardegna#sulfilodellatradizione #sardegnartecultura#donnasarda#volgosardegna#storia #sardinia_exp #labellasardegna #unionesarda#naturelovers #lanuovasardegna#tradizioni#santantioco #videolina#lauralaccabadora #igersardegna #ig_mood #ig_italia

A post shared by Maria (@mariandsky) on Sep 2, 2017 at 7:33am PDT

But there’s a complicating linguistic factor to teasing apart this history. The Latin term "byssus," in ancient writings, can appear to refer to both fine linen and sea silk. Because of that, it has been hard for researchers to ascertain whether the byssus mentioned on the Rosetta Stone, for example, is ordinary or extraordinary. The word crops up again in descriptions of ancient Egyptian burial customs, as the cloth used to wrap mummies. In the Bible, too, byssus is mentioned in multiple places. Researchers have questioned whether this holy textile, finer than the skin of an onion, comes from a plant or the sea. Moreover, the linen byssus was reserved for sacred use, says researcher Felicitas Maeder. “Only in the 16th century [was] the fiber beard of the Pinna named Byssus, in analogy of the fine Byssus of the ancients. Not vice versa,” she told The Thinker’s Garden. “This fact led and still leads to the misunderstandings dominating the discussion today.” To complicate matters, it’s now also used as the general scientific term for some clams’ anchoring filaments.

One place byssus certainly doesn’t come from, however, is a water sheep. These fictional beasts appear in stories from Chinese traders dating back to the second and third centuries. Water sheep, with duck-like webbed feet, were said to live beneath the waves of the Roman Empire, and occasionally leave tufts of their golden wool on rocks. Though references to aquatic sheep could have been something of a joke, the idea seems to have given rise to an ancient term for the fiber, mentioned by the Greek writer Alciphron: wool of the sea. (Researchers have wondered whether these fabled ovines were the source of the famous Golden Fleece—they now doubt it.)

Similar stories appear in the accounts of 13th-century Arab traders: “One of the wonders of this sea is what is told regarding a certain animal which comes out of the water to rub itself on the sure, whereby its hair falls out. These have the color of gold and the softness of [embroidery silk] …. The value of a garment amounts to more than a thousand gold-pieces, owing to its beauty and rarity.” Export of this cloth was apparently forbidden.

Vigo and the Pes sisters seldom get to make proper cloth these days. The fibers are simply too rare and the spinning process much too time-consuming. Vigo, who does not accept payment for sea silk, sometimes uses it in the embroidery of a child’s christening gown, and only occasionally to make larger pieces. She reportedly rejected a $2.99 million offer from a Japanese businessman for a square measuring 18 inches on a side.

About 60 examples of sea silk garments persist in museum collections around the world, most dating from the last few centuries. If current trends in pen shell populations persist, the thread may be cut once and for all.

It's already been a terrible year for tropical storms. Hurricane Harvey led to unprecedented levels of flooding in Texas, followed by Hurricane Irma's battering of the Caribbean and the Florida coast. And the 2017 hurricane season is far from being over. With so much destruction having been unleashed in such a short period of time, many Americans have asked (in their way): why can’t we fight these things?

One tongue-in-cheek Facebook event tried to rally people to point their fans at Irma in an effort to just blow it away (receiving almost 60,000 confirmed attendees), while another suggested that people shoot their guns at the storm (for the record, DO NOT SHOOT AT A HURRICANE). These ideas are obviously far-fetched, but in fact the U.S. has a history of serious attempts at "killing" hurricanes.

One of the earliest, and certainly one of the most sensational, attempts to divert or destroy a hurricane came from the work of the pseudoscientist and sexual revolutionary Wilhelm Reich. A psychoanalyst who trained under Sigmund Freud, Reich came to America in 1939 to spread his discovery of what he called “orgone energy.” According to Reich, orgone was a natural force of life energy that floated in the atmosphere and was often experienced by humans during orgasm. Reich developed cabinets called “orgone accumulators,” which he claimed could collect and store orgone. The cabinets became a hit among bohemians of the time, ranging from William S. Burroughs to Sean Connery.

As Reich’s theories about the nature and power of orgone evolved, he came to think that it could also be used to modify the weather.

This notion led Reich to develop the "cloudbuster" in the early 1950s, which was essentially an array of metal pipes designed to shoot orgone at the sky. Supposedly, a cloudbuster would be capable of both creating and dispersing clouds, and maybe even diverting hurricanes. According to the book Reich and Gurdjieff: Sexuality and the Evolution of Consciousness, Reich hypothesized that hurricanes themselves may have been an expression of orgone acting on the atmosphere. Their general shape mirrors that of a spiral galaxy, which he figured would have taken shape thanks to orgone as well.

Reich’s work had always been controversial, and before he had the opportunity to test a cloudbuster on an actual hurricane, he was jailed for breaking an FDA injunction on promoting and selling his accumulators. Literal tons of his books and works were burned, and Reich died less than a year after being sent to prison. He never got a chance to try and stop a hurricane.

But Reich wasn’t the only one dreaming of fighting hurricanes head-on around this time. An official U.S. government effort to experiment on hurricanes began in 1947, with Project Cirrus. One aspect of this early weather modification project was the first attempt at altering a hurricane using the emerging science of cloud seeding. Cloud seeding is a method of weather modification that involves lacing a cloud layer with materials that are meant to change the power and content of a storm. Today, despite a great deal of skepticism about its efficacy, this is most often performed in an attempt to create rain or to diminish fog or hail. But in 1947, Project Cirrus first tried it on a hurricane.

During the single performed run, pilots flew over a hurricane that was headed out to sea, and dropped a 180-pound payload of crushed dry ice into the storm in an attempt to alter the temperatures of the hurricane clouds, which would in theory slow down the storm’s wind speed. Initially, the pilots said they did notice some change, but it was not actually clear if the changes they observed were caused by the ice.

After the hurricane had been seeded, it took a directional turn, making landfall in Savannah, Georgia, and doing extensive damage. After reading about the seeding experiment in the newspaper, some Savannah residents threatened to sue the government. The legal action came to nothing, but the incident cast a pall on the idea of trying to alter hurricanes.

It wasn't until 1962 that the next official attempt to alter hurricanes got underway. The National Hurricane Research Project launched another cloud-seeding initiative, this time specifically to combat hurricanes, called Project Stormfury. This project set out to disrupt hurricanes by seeding the walls of the hurricane’s eye with silver iodide, a compound that has a molecular structure similar to ice. The intended effect was the same as before, but the science was more advanced.

After having trouble finding a worthy storm to try seeding, Stormfury finally tested their theory on Hurricane Beulah in 1963, which never made landfall, but was close enough for the seeders to reach and observe. The storm’s wind speeds did appear to drop, but ultimately it was too difficult to tell whether the giant storm was affected by the chemical sprinkle, or had just died down a bit on its own.

The last hurrah for Project Stormfury came in 1969, when they were able to seed Hurricane Debbie for a number of days. Storm winds were observed to drop up to 30 percent, seemingly proving the project’s hypothesis. However the complicated, expensive nature of seeding hurricanes combined with a lack of concrete conclusions ultimately doomed the project. Stormfury continued on in a lesser form until 1983, when it was finally shut down. While altering hurricanes with cloud seeding turned out to be a bust, the decades of research added a great deal of new knowledge to our understanding of hurricanes themselves.

Stormfury was the last official U.S. program directed at attempting to kill tropical storms, but since then both civilians and scientists have continued to put forth plans to combat hurricanes that are decidedly out of the box.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), every hurricane season since about the 1960s, the agency fields questions about whether we could just explode a hurricane with a nuclear bomb. But as the NOAA points out on a webpage they've dedicated to debunking this idea, in addition to the nuclear fallout that would be dispersed into the storm, a nuke simply wouldn’t be powerful enough. The page compares the heat released by a fully formed hurricane to be equivalent to “a 10-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every 20 minutes.” If anything, setting off a nuke near a hurricane might strengthen the convection forces, and create a raging, radioactive hellstorm.

A 2007 Canadian documentary called How to Stop a Hurricane proposed several more possible ideas, including: introducing a film on the surface of the ocean that would reduce evaporation; creating a pump that would bring cold sea water to the surface to disrupt the temperature of a storm and weaken it; cooling ocean water with liquid nitrogen. Still others have hypothesized that satellite-based microwave lasers might be able to alter the course of hurricanes, or that supersonic jets could be flown through them to create a counter-current.

In theory, anything's possible in the long-term, so maybe one day we might actually be able to exert some control over the weather. But hopefully we’re never at a point that we’re desperate enough to try nuking a hurricane.

There are statues of many people in the city of New Orleans. But Oscar James Dunn isn’t one of them, despite having made his mark as the nation’s first African-American lieutenant governor who served in Louisiana from 1865-1871.

New Orleans native Brian K. Mitchell remembers his great-grandmother lauding his distant relative’s accomplishments, but when he got to school, he discovered no one else had ever heard of his great-great-great uncle Oscar Dunn.

After Dunn’s death in 1871, $10,000 was appropriated by Louisiana State Legislature Act 57 to erect a monument in Dunn’s honor. However, it was never used. By Mitchell’s account, the monument should have been grand, given the vast amount of money given to the project. But it didn’t happen, and there’s no record as to why. “I’ve never come across a document that clearly states why the monument wasn’t constructed,” Mitchell says.

A significant political figure in Reconstructionist Louisiana, Dunn rose to prominence after the Civil War, ultimately becoming the first black lieutenant governor of the United States. But after his untimely death in 1871, Dunn faded into obscurity. Today, there are no monuments, no statues, no major streets named for him in New Orleans.

“There was a purposeful rewriting of history after Reconstruction,” says Mitchell, an assistant professor of history at the University of Arkansas Little Rock. “Whites believed blacks couldn’t function without them, so exceptions were made in the historical record.”

To remove the shroud of mystery surrounding his ancestor, Mitchell wrote his dissertation on Dunn. He gleaned much of the information from the personal correspondence of Dunn’s long-time friends John Parsons and J. Henri Burch, as well as press clippings and other official documents.

Dunn was born a slave in 1822 in New Orleans. In 1831, his mother married a free man of color named James Dunn who bought her freedom, and that of Dunn and his sister, for $800. Dunn assumed his stepfather’s surname and received a traditional English education, Mitchell wrote, which likely meant he attended the Grimble Bell School, an institution that educated free black people in Louisiana. He also apprenticed as a plasterer, becoming extremely skilled at the craft. That work led him to leadership positions in Louisiana’s black masonic lodges, which, according to Mitchell, were extremely influential in Reconstructionist politics in the South.

After the Civil War, black people did gain some rights in Louisiana’s 1864 Constitution, which was passed so the state could rejoin the union. The new Constitution gave African Americans freedom from bondage, the right to acquire and own property, make contracts and testify in court. Those specific parameters were put in place largely to prolong the plantation economy. Plantation owners often offered poor wages to former slaves so they would continue providing labor.

Dunn set about to protect freed men by securing fair wages. While he never sat for the bar exam, Dunn was a scholar of the law. According to a biography written by his friend John Parsons and published in an 1871 issue of the Weekly National Republican, “his habits of study had given him an ample amount of legal learning.” That legal knowledge was the impetus behind his contracts office that operated on Canal Street in New Orleans. Contracts were used to ensure newly emancipated slaves were fairly compensated for the labor they provided on plantations.

During this time, Dunn also dipped his toe into the political arena. He was appointed to the city council of New Orleans and led efforts to push for universal suffrage for black men. While the 1864 Constitution did offer some rights to freed men, the right to vote was not one of them. That right came in 1870, after years of campaigning by people like Dunn who organized efforts to register newly freed men to vote, thereby showing elected leaders the potential power of the black vote.

Some members of the Democratic Party in former Confederate states were opposed to the enfranchisement of African-Americans, and waged a war of misinformation and terror to keep black Americans from registering to vote. Black people were told their registration would be used to draft them into military service or that they would be lynched.

The threats didn’t stop Dunn from voting or running for office. In 1865, Dunn won a seat representing New Orleans' fourth district in a Universal Suffrage State Convention. He also held leadership positions in other social welfare endeavors such as the Louisiana Association for the Benefit of Colored Orphans, the Freedman’s Aid Association of New Orleans, and a movement to establish a cooperative bakery. The People’s Bakery was a way to teach freed African Americans agrarian and business skills, and despite the fact it wasn’t commercially successful, it represented a first attempt by New Orleans’ black population to take control of their community's economic destiny.

Despite a deeply factioned party, Republicans met in January 1868 to elect Louisiana gubernatorial candidates. There were essentially two divisions within the party: the Pure Radicals, who wanted to better conditions for freedmen, and the White Republicans. In his book Those Terrible Carpetbaggers: A Reinterpretation, historian Richard Nelson Current says the White Republicans wanted to use the black vote to reach office and then appoint “docile” black people to secondary positions within the government so they would “do the bidding of the White Republicans.”

Dunn was nominated for the post of lieutenant governor by P. B. S. Pinchback, a black Carpetbagger from Ohio and supporter of Henry C. Warmoth, who was elected governor in 1868. Dunn had serious reservations about running on the ticket with Warmoth, whom he felt would only use him to secure favor among black voters.

Dunn won the lieutenant governorship, despite being opposed by Democratic and independent candidates. He presided over the Louisiana State Legislature's civil rights bills and the ratification of the 14th Amendment, which granted citizenship to anyone born or naturalized in the United States, including former slaves. Warmoth ultimately betrayed Dunn by vetoing a civil rights bill that would have offered protections for black Americans.

Warmoth ultimately lost power. The Democrats wouldn’t support a Northern carpetbagger and Radical Republicans wouldn’t support a governor who didn’t work to bring protections for black people. There was talk of impeachment, which would have left Dunn as governor, but Dunn died before the governor’s impeachment trial.

In 1869, and during his tenure as lieutenant governor, Dunn traveled to Washington D.C. where he sat for a portrait by Mathew Brady, the famed Civil War battlefield photographer. The portrait is one of the few remaining pictures that exist of Dunn. While in Washington, Dunn also had a audience with newly elected president Ulysses S. Grant, where he discussed political appointments.

Even though he was out of the Reconstructionist South, Dunn encountered mistreatment during his visit to the North. He wasn’t granted a sleeping car on a train, he was forced to share quarters with staff in a Philadelphia hotel while his white traveling companions were granted rooms and, as a joke, brokers hired a barber to impersonate the lieutenant governor during a visit to the New York Stock Exchange.

“The hoax at the New York Stock Exchange further elaborated the disrespect and maltreatment that the Lieutenant-Governor was subjected to as he visited the north," Mitchell wrote in his dissertation. "The brokers who played the prank were not publicly admonished or disciplined for disrespecting a visiting dignitary.”

Shortly after attending a public dinner in 1871, Dunn became violently ill. He died two days later. The official cause of death was “congestion to the brain and lungs,” or natural causes. Several doctors examined his body, with some saying his death appeared to have been the result of arsenic poisoning.

Dunn’s supporters in New Orleans were shocked at news of his untimely death. His funeral brought the biggest funeral procession the city had witnessed to that point. Some 50,000 people took part in a second line—basically a parade—extending from Dunn’s home on Canal Street to Magazine Street. He was interred in St. Louis Cemetery Number 2 where mourners lingered until dusk to discuss his life and contributions to the Louisiana political scene.

Supporters held Dunn up as a hero, a martyred prophet whose mission to bring about political reforms for newly freed slaves was cut short. White political rivals in the Democratic party viewed Dunn’s rise to lieutenant governor as a “perversion of the natural order” and maintained that his contribution to the Louisiana political landscape was insignificant. They feared the “Africanization” of society and delighted when a popular black politician was no longer a threat.

Indeed, members of the Conservative Democrat party celebrated Dunn’s death. The Mystick Krewe of Comus made a mockery of Dunn and the Republican party’s efforts to establish equal rights for blacks. One of the first, modern Mardi Gras krewes, Comus was founded in 1857 and held a celebration and parade followed by a lavish ball on Mardi Gras night. At its annual Mardi Gras ball in 1873, the king of the krewe wore a gorilla costume in open mockery of Dunn.

Today, very little remains of Dunn’s legacy in New Orleans. His mansion on Canal Street is long gone and there are no paintings of him, or monuments on display. Dunn’s tomb was restored in 2000 by the Friends of New Orleans Cemeteries and a plaque installed with a brief account of his life. The only surviving portrait of Dunn is held in a private collection in California, Mitchell says.

As the nation’s first black lieutenant governor, Dunn’s legacy should be well known in Louisiana and elsewhere. But thanks to political rivals downplaying his contributions, he has largely been lost to history.

Is a Magic 8-Ball superior to Matchbox cars? Is toy food more fun than the paper airplane? Is sand a more enduring source of joy than Risk? These are just some of the questions posed by this year’s nominees for inclusion in the National Toy Hall of Fame.

The Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, has just announced the finalists for 2017 induction. The 12 playthings up for consideration are the games Clue, Uno, and Risk; brand-name classics Matchbox cars, My Little Pony, Transformers, and PEZ dispensers; vintage holdovers the Magic 8-Ball and the Wiffle ball; and a few broader categories of toys—play food, paper airplanes, and sand!

The National Toy Hall of Fame, curated by the Strong Museum, currently recognizes 62 other toys from over the years, including Etch-A-Sketch, LEGO, the ball (all of them), Star Wars action figures, and the Slinky. In 2016, both Fisher-Price Little People and Dungeons & Dragons made the cut. The museum, billed as the National Museum of Play, has special exhibitions of the selected toys, which are chosen for their ability to inspire imaginative play and wonder over generations.

This group of finalists all seem like heavy hitters, but at most a handful will be chosen for induction, so it’s anybody’s guess. Transformers and My Little Pony have high modern profiles, but neither can match the simple, universal appeal of the paper airplane or a Matchbox car. And it’s hard to imagine any more basic and primal toy than sand (maybe the first toy?) with which kids can excavate pits, build castles, or bury their parents.

The honorees will be announced in a ceremony on November 9, 2017, but until then, let the playground arguments commence!

The first brown leaves dangling from tree branches are an unmistakable sign that fall is coming. But over the past two weeks, visitors to a Chicago park have spotted something a little more unexpected dangling from above: rope swings.

At least two swings made of wood and rope have been reported in different sections of Logan Square Park, as reported on social media and the local news site dnainfo. So far no one knows who hung them up.

mysterious rope swings delight logan square, get all-american rejects song stuck in reporter's head https://t.co/e0nWkVwcb1@DNAinfoCHIpic.twitter.com/rlbtDdMLNV

— Mina Bloom (@mina_bloom_) September 13, 2017

The unexpected arrivals have sparked a range of reactions on social media, from enthusiastic parents praising the distraction they provide, to worriers who see the mysterious swings as “lawsuits waiting to happen.”

It is, in fact, illegal to hang anything from public trees in the Windy City. According to Chicago Municipal Code: "no person shall secure, hang, fasten, attach or run any rope, wire, sign, decoration, electrical device or other material upon, around or through any public tree without a permit to do so," a statute that came up once before in a discussion over illegal hammocks.

A few months ago the same area was home to another mysterious outdoor play apparatus—a black-and-blue trampoline that migrated to a few different locations. Investigations revealed that the trampoline's owners were moving it around for passersby to enjoy.

There didn't appear to be any permit involved, but at the end of the day it led to more smiles than lawsuits.

On Monday, September 11, the marathon swimmer Elizabeth Fry, of Westport, Connecticut, joined the short list of people who have successfully swam solo across Lake Ontario. Like her predecessors, Fry crossed the lake with minimal equipment—just a swimsuit and goggles—and trained for months, in pools and in Long Island Sound.

Unlike many of them, she also had two secret weapons: a famous mentor, and a whole lot of cookies.

At 58, Fry is the second-oldest person to ever complete the 32.1-mile swim across Lake Ontario. An extremely accomplished distance swimmer, Fry has twice completed what's known as the "Triple Crown of Open Water Swimming": the English Channel, California's Catalina Channel, and a circumnavigation of Manhattan. As Fry told the Canadian Press, this latest venture into Canadian waters was inspired by Marilyn Bell, a friend and mentor.

In 1954, Bell became the first person to swim solo across Lake Ontario, and she was famously young—only 16—when she did so. A park near the lake was subsequently named after her, and Fry set up her swim so that she would "finish right at the ladder at Marilyn Bell Park," she said.

Fry started swimming at midnight, and finished around 3:45 p.m., spending a little over 15 hours in the water. Her coaches rode in a boat just in front of her. To keep her going, they dropped a water bottle over the side—along with the occasional cookie, which, the Canadian Press writes, "she would try and scoop into her mouth."

"My only sense of feeling comes in the form of cookies," Fry told the outlet, saying that the crunch broke up the monotony of fresh water, pond water, and energy gel. (She used the same strategy during her record-breaking 2009 swim around Manhattan, fueling up with ginger snaps and at least one chocolate bon bon.)

Fry enjoyed her swim, which she described as "fun and challenging and cold and bumpy and all those things." Not to mention historically inflected, and occasionally delicious.

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.

How do you represent nothing? It sounds like a Zen kōan. If you’d never heard of the idea of "zero," then it would be a little mind-bending to imagine what nothing ought to look like. (Europeans, notably, had a hard time when first presented with the concept.) But it is a useful concept, so over the centuries, mathematicians around the world have come up with symbols to use to denote an absence of value. Sumerians used a double-wedge, the Maya had an eye. In India, it was a dot, and that’s the symbol that eventually became the "0" used today.

For a time, the oldest known example of the dot-zero was located a temple in Madhya Pradesh and dates back to the 9th century. More recently, a 7th-century dot emerged as the oldest known example, on a bill of sale from Cambodia.

Now, however, an South Asian manuscript with hundreds examples of the dot-zero has been radiocarbon-dated, and at least part of it even older. Some fragments of the Bakhshali manuscript, held at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, date back to the 3rd or 4th century, making its zeros the oldest known examples of that symbol, The Guardian reports.

The Bakhshali manuscript was originally discovered in 1881, by a farmer working fields in what is now Pakistan. The fragmentary manuscript contains what appear to be math exercises for merchants on the Silk Road, intended to teach the calculations they’d need to conduct business.

For many years, though, the date of these birch bark documents was debated. The most accepted analysis put them somewhere between the 8th and 12th centuries, based on their contents. The Bodleian tested three different samples, which produced three different ages. The most recent fragment dates to sometime between 850 and 993, and the oldest to between 224 and 383.

The dot-zero wasn’t exactly used as a number—it was more of a place-holder. The idea of zero as a number in its own right came later, in a 628 text by the Indian mathematician Brahmagupta. As the concept of zero grew in use, the dot symbols started to expand, until they had that familiar gaping hole in the middle.

Much of life in post-World War I Russia was pretty much what you’d expect it to be: bleak. The country had suffered unimaginable losses during the war, with estimates of those killed climbing as high as 1.8 million. Death hung in the air.

But hanging there right alongside it was something else—revolution. A growing number of Russians wanted to remake their world, even though they knew, perhaps better than anyone, that it would be a long and hard process. If the war had taught Russians anything, it was that life is finite and fleeting. But what if there was a way to live forever? To stop time? Stop the world from spinning while it’s remade into something better? It was in this spirit that, in the aftermath of the war, a small group of writers, artists, and anarchists published a 14-page poem about cryonics, a fledgling theory mixing science and mysticism that advocated for the ultimate revolutionary tool: immortality.

This group, who called themselves the Biocosmists-Immortalists, felt that humans had two basic rights: the right to exist, and the right of free movement—and that these rights came with no expiration date. The group proclaimed in their 1922 manifesto, Izvestiia, that “immortality, resurrection, and rejuvenation” weren’t just ideas, they were the basis of their new movement. Death was just a roadblock on the road to revolution.

According to the researcher Nikolai Krementsov, author of Revolutionary Experiments: The Quest for Immortality in Bolshevik Science, the Biocosmists-Immortalists believed in abolishing death because it was “logically absurd, ethically impermissible, and aesthetically ugly.” Living while death surrounded you was the ultimate act of resistance. Living forever while others died? Well, that was a revolution.

Later that year, the group’s leader, the poet Alexander Iaroslavskii, published “Poem of Anabiosis,” a 14-page polemic explaining exactly what the Biocosmists-Immortalists had in mind. They would freeze the planet in a state of suspended animation, while they, the “biologist, poet, worker[s]” of the world, got to work remaking the planet:

Between Life and Death
Will ram a heavy wedge, A third door opens,
For the world, anabiosis.
[...]
And when all the work is done
And, when as a perfect toy, Earth—
Wake up, the living, again

They based their manifesto on the theories of the Russian scientist Profirii Bakhmet’ev, whose experiments with freezing insects and small mammals made the science seem tantalizingly possible. With the “chemist, and physicist, engineer, architect, and poet [...] bacteriologist and biologist,” Iaroslavskii wrote, he and his group would not only fix their dismal post-war conditions through immortality, they would raise the lost city of Atlantis, control the weather, eliminate diseases, and revive the great thinkers of the past, including Shakespeare and Socrates. They’d remake the world one day at a time, one year at a time, forever.

“The Poem of Anabiosis” is, according to Krementsov, “one of the first literary renderings of anabiosis,” but it certainly wouldn’t be the last. Countless dreamers have played with the idea of pressing the pause button on life. The idea of an icy half-death has found its way into popular imagination well past Iaroslavskii’s time and into our own, including a 1931 science-fiction story that influenced Robert Ettinger, the so-called “Father of Cryonics.” But it was a poem-as-revolutionary-manifesto from a Russian anarchist that gave us one of the 20th century's earliest chances to ponder the potential of cryonics.

Snow leopards have been a symbol of endangered species for years, and have made memorable appearances in the Planet Earth series and other nature documentaries, and a memorable non-appearance in Peter Matthiessen's National Book Award–winning The Snow Leopard, about the efforts of biologist George Schaller. But the enigmatic cats are no longer quite as in trouble as they used to be. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) now lists the snow leopard as "vulnerable," a cautious step up from "endangered." They're still at risk of extinction, the organization says, but conservation efforts appear to be slowing the decline of the secretive species.

The roughly 4,000 mature adult snow leopards alive today are found in mountains ranges, such as the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush, across 12 Asian countries, from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan. Biologists are concerned that the snow leopard's extensive range—about a million square miles—makes it difficult for adults to find one another to breed. The cats also face significant risk from poaching for their thick fur, and from killing as retaliation for livestock deaths that some farmers blame, correctly or not, on them. Their common prey species are also declining as climate change and human development destroy native grasslands. The IUCN estimates that the snow leopard population will still decline by at least 10 percent over the next three generations, or about 23 years. But this is much slower than previous estimates, and the IUCN chalks that up to conservation programs.

In fact, the IUCN says the snow leopard actually should have been listed as vulnerable back in 2008. That was the last time the population estimates were reviewed by the conservation organization, and a lower estimate was accidentally used. "The revised estimate of the number of mature individuals addressed the earlier mistake, in combination with new information, and the change from [Endangered] to [Vulnerable] is therefore a non-genuine change," the IUCN notes in their explanation. But conservation groups such as the Wildlife Conservation Society and Panthera still praise the change. It's a sign that conservation programs work, and hopefully means we'll get moreglimpses of the glorious cats in the future.

Kia ora! The expression, in New Zealand's indigenous language, te reo Māori, means different things to different people in different contexts. It may mean "hello," "thank you," "goodbye," "I agree," or, to people very far away, a concentrated orange juice drink. For many New Zealanders, it's the only te reo Māori they know. Perhaps because of that, it's also the theme of this year's Maori Language Week (Te Wiki o Te Reo Maori, that is), currently taking place in a country commonly thought of as home to The Lord of the Rings and a whole lot of sheep.

But te reo Māori, and New Zealand's indigenous population, were there before either. When the British colonized the country in the 19th century, they brought English with them, and it became the most commonly spoken language nationwide. By the 1970s, te reo Māori was identified as being at risk. Māori parents who had been discouraged from using it when they had been in school were not passing it on to their children, and it began to fade from regular use. On top of that, people feared the language's small vocabulary meant it would have difficulty adapting to modern usage. There are between about 10,000 and 20,000 te reo Māori words in common use, to English's 140,000 or so. Words that don't exist are often borrowed: "secretary," for instance, becomes "hekeretari."

People acted quickly to try to save the language. One of the first moves, in the mid-1980s, was the establishment of Kura kaupapa Māori—Māori-language immersion schools that serve children between five to 18, and where between 80 and 100 percent of classroom learning is done in Māori. Nearly 18,000 children are enrolled in Māori-language education. Following the introduction of a Māori Language Bill, in 1987, there are now two Māori television channels (one bilingual, one exclusively in te reo Māori) and 28 radio stations. It's been used in films and albums, on restaurant menus and bathroom doors. Along with English and New Zealand sign language, it's one of New Zealand's three official languages, and more than 700 Māori words appear in New Zealand English language dictionaries. Even Google is on board, with its search engine and translation services available in Māori. A little fewer than 150,000 people speak it conversationally, while 55 percent of Māori adults report "some knowledge" of it. But despite all these efforts and official recognition, the language remains "vulnerable," according to UNESCO.

In 2016, an updated Māori Language Bill acknowledged that the language was a taonga, or treasure, and took responsibility for past policies that had caused its decline. Part of that bill was a promise to protect and promote it—and Māori Language Week is just one part of that. For this week, which ends on Sunday, schools, libraries, broadcasters, and artists are releasing songs, making a particular effort to speak the language on air, and highlighting historic Māori-language resources. A celebratory parade of thousands took to the streets in the capital, Wellington. But the real question is whether the enthusiasm around the week can spill into the rest of the year. "Te Reo Māori Week should be an everyday event, not just for one week," artist and activist Tame Iti told Radio New Zealand.

"We've got work to do, but also we're in this amazing space now where we've got resources," said Victoria University lecturer Vinni Olden-Reeder to Radio New Zealand, "we've got people [and] we've got all of this stuff in behind us to help us really make a good go of it." For a country haunted by a history of extinction, this is one taonga worth the effort to save.

“I felt as free as a bird,” says Hend Al-Khodary.

Last October, the 22-year-old woman was working as a translator for Jennifer Higgins, 30, an Irish circus trainer who works as a consultant in Gaza for a psychological support project. During her free time, Higgins was training a group of young men at the Gaza Circus School—which has all male students, as the Islamic society requires gender segregation. The only circus school in Gaza, it's an initiative implemented by young residents, and has been operating since 2011.

Higgins had always encouraged Al-Khodary to practice circus, but she refused. She had never thought she could do any circus movements, as she believed that circus requires a lot of flexibility and fitness. But when she tried it, she was surprised by her abilities.

“One day, we waited for the boys to leave the training hall, then Jenny helped me climb the circus silks,” she says. “The feeling was amazing.”

Al-Khodary invited two of her friends to join her in circus training at Al-Mishal Cultural Center in Gaza City. The circumstances were not perfect, with no electricity and a poorly equipped stage, but the young women were very excited to experience this art and to discover how it feels to be “flying high,” as Al-Khodary describes. “We felt flexible and creative.”

After two weeks of training, the Gaza Circus School organized a show at Al-Mishal Cultural Center, but Higgins and the three women were not allowed to perform. “Local authorities didn’t allow any girl to perform as it’s not allowed to have any kind of mixing at public events,” says Al-Khodary. “It was a big disappointment.”

After this experience, Higgins contacted the Irish Ministry of Culture and held a fundraising campaign to help the Gaza School of Circus launch a women’s project.

“In March, I came to Gaza with another circus trainer and a photographer,” she says. “We brought 62 kilograms [137 pounds] of circus equipment: trapeze, silks, and some juggling tools. We held advanced training with the circus school and started to gather information for the girls’ project.”

Meanwhile, Higgins held brainstorming meetings with 20 young women to understand their needs and imagine the perfect conditions for the project. “Girls prefer to be in a closed place with no men around,” says Higgins, “to feel more free.”

Since then, she has been working hard to find funders and to coordinate for the project which will be launched in January, “if all goes to plan.”

The project will include 20-25 women aged between 18-25 years old. “We will have initial three-week training,” says Higgins. “We will also concentrate on juggling, yoga, silk, and trapeze techniques. I will train those young women to be trainers and to train other girls all around the Gaza Strip. I dream to have 400 Gazan girls practicing circus at the end of the project.”

Conditions at the school are not always favorable for practicing acrobatic movements. Power in Gaza may be cut for up to 20 hours a day, which can be especially challenging during the summer months.

“It’s very hot in those days,” says Higgins. “With no air conditioning or cold water, the trainings are very difficult.”

Mohammed Al-Ijla, 21, one of the participants at the Gaza Circus School, says circus formed a turning point in his life. For him, circus is a more advanced and complicated way to benefit from his sports and fitness skills, which include bodybuilding since the age of 12.

“It’s really great to give the chance for girls to practice this amazing art,” he says. “Although we, men, won’t be able to watch or join their performances, we will be very happy for them. We dream to make circus more popular in Gaza and this project will help us do so.”

Now, Hend Al-Khodary waits eagerly for the beginning of the project. She also looks forward to meeting friends with whom she will practice circus for first time in Gaza. “I’m sure that it will be outstanding,” she says. “I believe that this art will change us. It will change our perspectives and expand our imagination. Circus will help us feel that we are out of Gaza and far away from any pressures or difficulties.”

Peacock spiders are not only one of the strangest looking, most colorful arachnids on the planet, they are also really good dancers. Along with his recent naming of seven new species of peacock spiders, one researcher recently showed off their skills by releasing a delightful video of the creatures dancing to the Beegees.

As Live Science is reporting, the zoologist Jurgen Otto recently released a pair of papers identifying seven new species of the Australian spider, bringing the total species count to 67. Measuring just millimeters in length, the male peacock spider gets its name from the vivid patterns found on their abdomens, which they shake and move in elaborate mating displays. Their bizarre courtship gyrations see them motioning with their spindly legs, and flapping their butts in the air in what can only be described as dancing.

Each of the new species is differentiated by the patterns on their abdomen. The Maratus cristatus has little spikes of white fur that protrude from its rear, while the Maratus trigonus has a more triangle-shaped body that is darker but includes strips of brighter fur. The Maratus nimbus has a lightly colored white-and-blue hue, like a cloud, while Maratus melindae corus and Maratus gemmifer both have bold electric blue fur. Assuming you aren’t an arachnophobe, they are stunning to see, but even more stunning to see dance.

Otto pieced together a video of some of his new spiders busting a move, set to the disco classic “Stayin' Alive.” But he’s not the first to realize that peacock spiders were made for the dance floor. A similar video was released in 2013, also based on some of Otto’s footage, that had the spiders dancing to the Village People’s “YMCA.” There’s one from 2014 that set them dancing to Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies,” and many more on YouTube.

Finding new species is fun, but finding new species of dancing spiders is hard to beat.

For the past 45 years, volunteers working with Chicago's Field Museum have spent mornings walking tight circles around McCormick Place, a massive, glassy convention center in the middle of the city. There, they find and collect the many birds that have crashed into the building and died. Over the years, they and other salvage groups around Chicago have collected tens of thousands of birds in this way, and sent their bodies to the Field Museum, to aid in various studies.

Every once in a while, though, the volunteers come across something a little more mammalian: a crumpled bat. Records show that between 1972 and 2003, volunteers found and reported at least 107 dead bats scattered around the building. Still more survived the collision, they noted, but ended up injured or stunned.

We've long known why birds fly into buildings: they get dazzled by the urban lightscape, or confuse plate glass for open air. Bats, though, have a particular set of skills. Decades of corrective science have taught us that, despite the idiom, they are far from blind. Many bats can see both at night and during the day, and some can even distinguish colors.

On top of that, they can echolocate, bouncing sound waves off of objects and surfaces to develop extremely precise ideas of where they are and what's around them. Combined, these two senses form what one science journalist described as "a kind of 20/20 super-vision." So why do they keep flying into the biggest convention center in North America?

It's hard to imagine a sense you don't have, which is one reason it took humans so long to discover echolocation in the first place. In the late 18th century, an Italian scientist named Lazzaro Spallanzani got the ball rolling, undertaking a series of experiments in which he systematically denied bats the ability to use one or more of their senses, and then released them in his pitch-dark bedroom. He scrupulously recorded the results, and found that bats with hoods on crashed into the walls, while bats with opaque discs placed over their eyes flew perfectly.

"My astonishment at this bat which absolutely could see although deprived of its eyes is inexpressible," Spallanzani wrote after one early experiment, in which he straight-up blinded his poor subject. Inspired by these experiments, some of Spallanzani's peers plugged bats' ears or nostrils with pitch, or coated their bodies entirely in grease. Spallanzani came to the conclusion that bat navigation had something to do with a mysterious "sixth sense," and the mechanisms of echolocation wouldn't be teased out until 1940, when a biologist named Donald Griffin turned an acoustic receiver on some bats and started picking up high-pitched squeaks.

Even now that we know more about how bats' senses work, imagining how they actually experience the world requires a kind of robust metaphorical imagination. "The most exciting thing about bats is that they are active-sensing animals," says Stefan Greif, currently a postdoc researcher at Germany's Max Planck Institute for Ornithology. Provided there's enough light around, sighted humans don't have to do anything in order to see: we do it continuously, as soon as we open our eyes. Bats, on the other hand, "have to emit something—their calls—before they can start perceiving their environment," Greif explains.

Because these calls are intermittent, bats also have to piece together discrete bits of sound data in order to figure out what's going on around them. (Picture trying to get around your kitchen at midnight, armed only with a flashlight with a dying battery, Greif suggests.) "It's not a continuous world," he says. "It's more stroboscopic."

Greif has been studying bats for years. He's helped to figure out how certain bat species can use light polarization as a kind of compass, and that they actively "eavesdrop" on—and then eat—copulating insects. More recently, though, he's been preoccupied by another question: is there anything that bats can't sense properly? "We understand very well how bats perceive small things, like prey or a place they want to land" says Greif. "But it's hard for us to imagine how they perceive big things, like surfaces, vegetation structures, or habitats."

Greif had a hunch that bats might rely on a kind of sonic shorthand for these larger problems. "I thought they might have simple rules, like: 'If it's smooth underneath me, it's a water surface,'" he says. And so in 2010, he, like Spallanzani before him, set out to test how his research subjects would fare in a few different artificial situations.

As he and his coauthors explain in a paper in Nature Communications, they first created a small bat obstacle course, placing two metal plates—one rough, one smooth—on the floor of a small flight tunnel. They then had a couple of dozen bats fly through the tunnel, and filmed how they responded when they encountered each plate.

The bats ignored the rough plate. But when they flew over the smooth plate, the authors write, "all 24 bats… spontaneously tried to drink," swooping down, dipping their heads, and opening their mouths to try and take a sip. The researchers then tried the same scenario with eleven more bats, each a different species. All those bats tried to drink, too. Echolocation is a powerful tool. But in this particular case, it was letting them down. Greif refers to the horizontal plates as a "sensory trap": a cue that is easily mistaken for something else, sometimes with disastrous results.

At one point during that first study, Greif happened to prop up one of the smooth metal plates vertically against the wall, just to get it out of the way. "Every now and then, behind my back, I heard a 'Foop!'" he says. "I'd turn around, and a bat would have flown into the smooth surface." Greif began to suspect he'd found another sensory trap. So in a second study, published last week in Science, he and his research team took their original problem and quite literally flipped it on its head. If bats interpret smooth horizontal expanses as water, they asked, how do they react to smooth surfaces that are vertically oriented instead?

To find out, they made another bat obstacle course inside a flight tunnel, this time with the poster-sized metal plate hung on one wall. They then let 21 greater mouse-eared bats fly one at a time around the tunnel, recording their movements with high-speed cameras, and their calls with an ultrasound microphone. Once again, echolocation failed the bats. Out of all the journeys made to the relevant end of the tunnel, 22.8 percent ended with them slamming into the vertical plate. (The tunnel's small size ensured that none were injured.)

Analysis of the recordings revealed that this was less a mistaken shorthand and more a kind of echolocation illusion—until they were right next to the plate, the bats thought there was nothing there at all. (Imagine again you're in the dark with that faulty flashlight again, Greif suggests, but this time you're approaching a mirror. Unless you're approaching the mirror dead-on, the flashlight's beam will get reflected elsewhere, off at an angle, where it's essentially useless.)

Greif and his colleagues later redid these experiments in the wild, placing similar plates outside of a few different roosts after the bats had left for the night. As the colonies returned home in the morning, multiple bats flew into the plate, like Wile E. Coyote running into one of those false tunnel entrances. Greif also realized he had already been seeing this happen in the wild for years, without realizing it: "In front of one of the caves where we usually try to catch bats, there's a big metal information plate," he says. "I noticed that every now and then, some bats collided with it [as they leave the cave]… they look left and right, see an opening, and then fly to the right into the opening, which turns out not to be an opening at all."

Sensory traps are increasingly common in nature, as manmade structures replace, imitate, or interrupt the natural signs that animals and plants have evolved to recognize. Just-hatched sea turtles, thinking they're following the moon into the ocean, instead end up under highway streetlights. Birds mistake plate-glass windows for open sky. Moths fly into lamps or flames.

As humans, gifted with a particular set of senses, some of these problems are easy to understand, and therefore somewhat intuitive to solve. Over the past few years, certain beachfront towns have adopted lights-out-after-dark policies during hatching season, and large buildings in some major cities have started doing the same during the spring and fall migrations.

Other ones, though—like these bat mistakes—require a bigger leap to understand. The extent to which artificially smooth surfaces actually confuse or hurt bats has not yet been studied rigorously, and experts have argued that there are much bigger threats to puzzle out, like white nose syndrome and wind turbines. But now that we know this little thing about how bats experience the world, Greif argues, it will be that much easier to make sure that, as we continue to reshape it, we can do our best to keep from confusing them. "My biggest hope from this paper is that people start paying more attention," he says. We just need multi-species, extra-sensory empathy to do it.

After 20 years of hurtling through space, Cassini is now nothing but molecules scattered in the Saturnine atmosphere. The satellite had a epic, productive life. It deposited a probe on Titan, flew through icy plumes of vapor erupting from Enceladus, gave us the first view from inside Saturn's rings, and told us more than we could ever have imagined about the second-largest planet in our solar system. To avoid contaminating any of Saturn's potentially life-hosting moons with hitchhiking Earth bacteria, Cassini was maneuvered to make a final, fatal plunge into the gas giant's atmosphere, where it was vaporized, while sending valuable data back to Earth until the very end. Plenty of landers and satellites have had less dramatic ends, and now sit silently on the Moon, Mars, and even a comet. But Cassini isn't the only spacecraft humanity has intentionally and catastrophically doomed in the name of science. Here are the some of the most spectacular, destructive, data-generating unmanned space missions.

The Venera Missions

From the 1960s to the 1980s, the Russian Venera missions traveled to Venus with orbiters, probes, and landers to learn more about our hot neighbor's mysterious surface and thick, obscuring atmosphere. Unlike several landers sent to Mars, the Venera landers weren't designed to roll around. They stayed put and transmitted data for as long as they could. Venera 13 lasted the longest—127 minutes. That's pretty good, considering the surface temperature on the planet is roughly 900 degrees Fahrenheit and the atmospheric pressure is 90 times Earth's. Before the landers dropped their connections and were crushed by the atmosphere, they did manage to take photos, acquire data on atmospheric composition, and analyze some soil. They may not gone up in flames, but being crushed by a planet's atmosphere in a rain of hot sulfuric acid is an epic way to go.

Galileo

After 13 years in space, full of mishaps and magnificent discoveries, NASA's Galileo satellite was limping along, low on fuel and riddled with radiation damage. Much like Cassini, the Galileo mission had discovered conditions on one of another planet's moons (Jupiter, in this case) that potentially could support life. In 2003, the satellite made a planned descent into Jupiter's atmosphere at about 108,000 miles per hour, and was incinerated.

Deep Impact

Launched in 2005, the Deep Impact probe was designed to study Tempel 1, a small comet that orbits the Sun every five and a half years. Deep Impact itself didn't collide with the hunk of rock and ice, but instead released a special impactor that slammed into Tempel 1 at a brisk 23,000 miles per hour. The resulting crater allowed scientists to look for clues about the solar system's early days, when the comet formed. The impactor sent back images up until three seconds before contact, while Deep Impact captured the event from afar. Deep Impact went on to fly by two more comets before scientists lost contact in 2013 thanks to a computer glitch. It's still drifting out there somewhere.

A Bunch of Missions to the Moon

The Moon's proximity made it an obvious first choice for extraplanetary exploration. As a result, we've left a lot of unmanned junk on our planet's rocky companion. Russia started the trend when it crashed Luna 2 into the surface in 1959, and the United States got in on the action in 1962 when Ranger 4 slammed into the lunar surface. Since then, humans have intentionally crashed plenty of rocket boosters, probes, satellites, and impactors into the Moon, often to test equipment or simulate meteor impacts. More recent collisions include Lunar Prospector in 1999 and LCROSS in 2009, which were both done in search of lunar water—only LCROSSwas successful.

MESSENGER

Just over 10 years after it launched, the first probe to orbit Mercury ran out of fuel. MESSENGER's orbit decayed over time, but it kept sending images and data to scientists. Its last images of Mercury's surface were delivered on April 30, 2015, eight hours before it crashed to the surface. Future missions to Mercury will look for MESSENGER's impact crater, which should help scientists better understand just how much Mercury's surface changes over time thanks to space weather.

Mariner 9 and Juno

Cassini won't be the last solar system satellite to meet this fate. Mariner 9, which reached Mars in 1971, is for the moment still lifelessly orbiting our neighbor. The satellite was turned off in late 1972, after having mapped the Martian surface, when it ran out of power, but it's expected to enter Mars's atmosphere in 2022. And Juno, the successor to the Galileo mission, will someday have to burn up in Jupiter's atmosphere, for the same reason as Cassini, to protect any extraterrestrials that, in Juno's case, may be swimming in the oceans of Europa.

A team of linguists at the University of York has excavated 30 “lost” words from the English language. These words, they say, have fallen out of use but could be plenty useful again in the world of today. They found them by looking through old books and dictionaries, the BBC reports.

According to the York Press, the words include:

• Snout-fair: Having a fair countenance; fair-faced, comely, handsome
• Betrump: To deceive, cheat; to elude, slip from
• Coney-catch: To swindle, cheat; to trick, dupe, deceive
• Slug-a-bed: One who lies long in bed through laziness
• Momist: A person who habitually finds fault; a harsh critic
• Peacockize: To behave like a peacock; esp. to pose or strut ostentatiously
• Sillytonian: A silly or gullible person, esp. one considered as belonging to a notional sect of such people
• Merry-go-sorry: A mixture of joy and sorrow
• Teen: To vex, irritate, annoy, anger, enrage / To inflict suffering upon; to afflict, harass; to injure, harm
• Wasteheart: Used to express grief, pity, regret, disappointment, or concern: "alas!" "woe is me!" Also wasteheart-a-day, wasteheart of me
• Dowsabel: Applied generically to a sweetheart, "lady-love"
• Ear-rent: The figurative cost to a person of listening to trivial or incessant talk

So perhaps you are feeling like a slug-a-bed this morning. Now you can complain about paying ear-rent to your dowsabel, who, to be honest, has a tendency to peacockize.

This project was sponsored by an insurance company that is now running some sort of contest where people can vote on which of these words should be re-embraced by English speakers. Wasteheart! Does that make you feel betrumped or coney-catched, like a sillytonian? Does it bring a bit of merry-go-sorry to your day? Well, don’t be a momist, or let this teen you. Words don’t belong to anyone. Check out the full list, then get rouzy-bouzy and try a few more.