More than 100 years ago, New Orleans was on the forefront of urban infrastructure.

Since its founding in 1718, between the natural levee of Mississippi River banks and higher land along the shores of Lake Pontchartrain, the bowl-like city has never had adequate drainage. In its early days, New Orleans’s system of drainage ditches and canals “was totally inadequate, even for a town with as little runoff as early New Orleans,” according to a 1999 Army Corps of Engineers report on the city’s drainage history. During storms, each of the city’s blocks became an island surrounded by flood waters. One year, Mardi Gras parades waded through flooded streets. The soggy city was a breeding ground for mosquitoes and the diseases they carry.

In the 1890s, the city council decided to deal with the “extraordinary disastrous condition” of the city’s drainage. By the turn of the century, the city had built giant drainage canals (today mostly hidden underneath the streets, so big that a truck could drive through them).

But moving water out required pumps to get it up and over the higher land rimming the city. The canals carried water from pumping station to pumping station, until the end of the line, where it was pumped into Lake Borgne or, if necessary, Lake Pontchartrain. There were pumps built into the original drainage system, but in the 1910s, a local engineer, Albert Baldwin Wood, built New Orleans better pumps than any city had ever had.

“For their time, they were a real mechanical marvel. The real backbone of the current system is these historic pumps, and they work extremely well,” says Benjamin Maygarden, a historian and lead author of the Army Corps report. One early Wood pump is still working as a constant duty pump—for day-to-day drainage, rather than pulses of storm water—at Drainage Pumping Station No. 1, says Maygarden, who's now a project manager at Gaea Consultants in the city. “It’s still in almost daily use. They’re really remarkable mechanical things.”

Wood’s innovative pumping system made it possible for New Orleans to thrive and expand, despite the city’s less-than-ideal location. A century after their creation, his pumps are still engineering wonders. But they come with a caveat. Many of the pumps use an outdated electrical standard, and the city generates power just for them, with turbines that are difficult and costly to maintain. They're unreliable enough that this past summer a rainstorm caused the city to flood for days, and whenever hurricanes threaten—like Tropical Storm Nate, which is heading through the Gulf of Mexico this weekend—the system's weak spots are put to the test.

Albert Baldwin Wood was a New Orleans native, so dedicated to the city that he rarely left, even after other cities starting clamoring for his help. He started working for the Drainage Commission in 1899, as Assistant Manager of Drainage, and spent 55 years with the city’s Sewerage and Water Board, which had merged with the commission in 1902.

Wood’s original job was to address the city’s overwhelming and increasing drainage needs. He started designing pumps, and by 1915 had created the giant, horizontal screw pumps—the largest and most advanced pumps of their time—that are his legacy.

He had started small, by designing an experimental pump just a foot long. Whereas New Orleans's prior pumps had been vertical, this one lay on its side. A vacuum pipe sucked the water into the pump’s rotating center and through to the next canal or the lake at the end of the line. Wood scaled the original model up to 30 inches, then 12 feet. One of the genius aspects of Wood’s design is the ease by which the interior could be accessed for maintenance: Hatches on top let people pop inside, and the space was big enough to fit multiple people. The city ordered 13 of them.

In 1915, four of Wood’s 12-foot screw pumps went into action. “Getting the pump castings from the nearest railroad siding to the pumping stations, and then erected, was an engineering feat in itself,” Maygarden and his colleagues wrote in their report. Each pump, on its own, was 100 tons. Most importantly, though, they worked. An independent evaluator from Tulane University wrote, “Emergency service is probably the weak point of the old pumps. It is the forte of the new. Results show that the pumps easily answer all requirements and that they are the largest and most efficient low-lift pumps in the world.”

Wood’s system was so successful that it was replicated all over the world, from the Netherlands to China. The pumps only got larger, too: In 1929, 14-foot pumps started duty, with the aim of doubling New Orleans’s drainage capacity. By then, the original 12-foot pumps had been going for 10 years. In 1924, Wood wrote that the pumps didn’t show “any signs of wear or deterioration.”

That very first 12-inch screw pump is still in New Orleans, in Drainage Pumping Station No. 1. While that small pump is displayed as a relic, Wood’s pumps have been working to keep floods at bay for years. The city today has 120 pumps, and dozens of them are Wood screw pumps.

The electrical system that powers these older pumps, however, is a different matter. Older pumps, installed before the 1970s, run on 25-cycle power, which has long fallen out of use in favor of 60 Hz electricity. To make 25-cycle electricity, New Orleans is still running decades-old steam boiler turbines that require specially trained machinists to maintain them. When the turbines need repairs, the city often has to either order a bespoke part from an outside company or have it made specially, in-house. As the people who know how to keep these turbines running have retired, they’ve been hard to replace, and inadequate staffing has forced employees to work overtime.

The upshot of this is that, of the city’s four 25-cycle generators, one has been under repair since 2012. When they opened it up for refurbishment, “engineers kept finding more parts that need to be fixed and others that had to be built from scratch,” The Times-Picayune reported. This past summer, two more turbines were already offline when a fire shut down electricity in the fourth. In early August, a storm dumped nearly 10 inches of rain on the city and, without enough power, the drainage system couldn’t handle the storm. Neighborhoods flooded, and it took days for the working pumps to dry the city out.

There have been some rumblings about replacing these old turbines. A 2012 report, commissioned by a task force dedicated to reforming the system, recommended that the Sewerage and Water Board stop putting money into the old system, and instead convert to modern 60 Hz power. “The pumps are amazing, volumetrically, at what they can take on,” says Jeffrey Thomas, whose consulting company put together the 2012 report. “The Achilles heel is the power.” The type of flooding experienced in August, he says, was inevitable. Eventually the day would come when heavy rainfall coincided with problems with the pumps' power supply.

Right now, though, there are no workable long-term plans to change the technology. The Wood pumps were designed in “the age of over-engineering,” says Maygarden, which is why they're still chugging. Wood and the engineers of his day could not have anticipated the massive amount of runoff, from pavement and rooftops, that the pumps would have to deal with, but they were well-made enough to handle it. Some pieces of urban infrastructure do last hundreds of years. If the Wood pumps are hooked up to a more reliable power source, who knows how long they could last?

The kitchen is well equipped and stocked. There’s a stove, a refrigerator full of food, a table with a rolling pin and a bowl, and a sink with Ivory soap. The wall calendar, featuring with a sailing ship, says it’s April 1944. But there’s something else: Every item is miniature, hand-crafted, and a doll lies on the floor, apparently dead, cause unknown.

This is one of Frances Glessner Lee’s Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, a series of 1/12-scale dioramas based on real-life criminal investigation cases. They were used—and continue to be studied even today—to train investigators in the art of evidence gathering, meticulous documentation, and keen observation. And they were created by one of the most unlikely and influential figures in crime scene forensics.

Glessner Lee’s early life followed a trajectory unsurprising for a girl from a wealthy family in late-19th-century America. She was born in Chicago in 1878, and home-schooled along with her brother, George. He attended Harvard, while she did not, as her parents did not think tertiary education was necessary for women. Instead, she married a lawyer and had three children. They divorced in 1914, and it was later in life that Glessner Lee radically departed from expectations.

Through her brother, Glessner Lee became friends with George Burgess Magrath, a Harvard medical student who later became the Chief Medical Examiner of Suffolk County, Massachusetts. From him, she learned about crime scene forensics and how difficult it was to solve mysterious cases—in part because crime scene investigation lacked methodology and training. In writing about her dioramas in The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science in 1952, Glessner Lee emphasized the importance of keeping an open mind: “... far too often the investigator ‘has a hunch,’ and looks for and finds only the evidence to support it, disregarding any other evidence that may be present. This attitude would be calamitous in investigating an actual case.”

Once she came into her inheritance, Glessner Lee had the resources to formally support the development of forensics. She helped found the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard in 1931, to which she later made substantial financial contributions and donated the books that became the Magrath Library of Legal Medicine. She hosted dinners for investigators and listened to them talk about cases. And, just like a crime scene investigator, she absorbed the particulars and identified a culprit in many of the cases: a lack of training tools.

With some experience in making miniatures, Glessner Lee set to work on her first diorama. She wrote, without any overstatement, “No effort has been spared to make every detail perfect and complete.” A minuscule wedding photo is displayed on a dresser. Undergarments hang on tiny pegs above a sink. Very small newspapers have legible headlines in different sizes and fonts, just like a real newspaper.

It isn’t just that the dioramas are perfectly scaled and intensely detailed—they are also highly functional. The locks on the doors and windows and even a tiny mousetrap all actually work. A tiny rocking chair moves when pushed. And, because the purpose of each one was to recreate the scene of a crime that had actually happened, each corpse—from clothing to blood stains to level of decomposition—had to be made precisely.

Lee completed around two dioramas a year, with the help of a carpenter, starting in the early 1940s. The dioramas were then used in seminars. Students were given about 90 minutes to study two models, and then present their findings, after which, the true details of each diorama were explained. Glessner Lee threw in some curve balls. Not every one represents a homicide, and one particularly knotty case involves a brain hemorrhage.

But Glessner Lee was adamant that the dioramas are not simply puzzles to be solved. “It must be understood, these models are not ‘whodunnits’—they cannot be solved merely by looking at them. They are intended to be an exercise in observing, interpreting, evaluating, and reporting—there is no ‘solution’ to be determined.”

According to Kimberlee Moran, Director of Forensics at Rutgers University, both the level of detail and the form are fundamental to teaching necessary skills. “With dioramas fortunately you can’t move things around and mess things up like you could an actual scene or a staged scene, so they’re teaching documentation skills, critical thinking, problem solving, and observation.”

Despite her scientific intentions and criminal justice motivation, there is no doubt that Glessner Lee also showed creative talent. “Frances didn’t think of herself as an artist, probably largely because her main concern was that the dioramas be taken seriously as scientific tools,” says Nora Atkinson, curator at the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, “but that doesn’t negate the art in them, or that, in fact, the origin of her ingenious solution was her background in feminine crafts."

Atkinson also points out that while the dioramas are based on real cases, Glessner Lee made all the other decisions, including where objects and other pieces of stage-setting appear, unrelated to specific evidence of the crime. “In her attention to these details and selection of cases, her work shines in a way that might be overlooked if these were looked at purely from a scientific perspective," she says. "There’s a great deal of metaphor that can be intuited in these, and a great deal of biography.”

Glessner Lee chose to set the crime scenes in locations far from her own privileged upbringing: a boarding house, a saloon. For the most part, the victims’ houses suggest they are working-class. Of the 19 dioramas still in existence (it's believed 20 were built), 11 of the victims are women. “An effort has been made,” wrote Lee, “to illustrate not only the death that occurred, by the social and financial status of those involved, as well as their frame of mind at the time the death took place.”

Glessner Lee eschewed the conventions of women of her class—and her age. She first creating the dioramas in her early 60s (a 1940s magazine article about her was titled "Grandma: Sleuth at Sixty-Nine"). Yet, thanks to her inventiveness and creativity—and her financial support of the field—she altered the training methods for crime scene investigators to such an extent that she has been called the "Mother of Forensics." In 1943, she became the first woman in the United States to be appointed a police captain.

Perhaps more clues lie in the dioramas than Lee intended. Atkinson’s two favorite models are Three Room Dwelling, the only multiple homicide, and Attic. The first, unlike the other Nutshell Studies, depicts “a young, seemingly happy family, in a neat, well-appointed middle-class home surrounded by a little white fence, with toys strewn about the porch,” says Atkinson. The Attic diorama shows an older woman who appears to have hanged herself. “From the mess around the room, evidence suggests she may have become despondent from loneliness,” she adds. “Old letters are strewn about the room and dusty, antiquated objects fill the space, sort of metaphorically suggesting she herself may [have felt] antiquated and no longer of any use to anybody.”

“When I look at this young, idealized family, I think about Frances’s experience of domestic ‘bliss’ that instead ended in divorce,”says Atkinson. “And when I look at this old woman, I remember that Frances was only finally free to pursue what she loved when she reached her mid-60s, so for her, old age meant freedom.”

Glessner Lee’s influence has endured long after her own death. Her dioramas are still used in training seminars today, for their original purpose: "to convict the guilty, to clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell." For the first time since 1966, all 19 existing Nutshell Studies will be presented to the public, at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. Atlas Obscura has a selection of images of the dioramas, which will be on display from October 20, 2017, through January 28, 2018.

Attic, 1943–48

Living Room, 1943–48

Striped Bedroom, 1943–48

When S.S. Makambo ran aground in 1918 at Lord Howe Island, off Australia's eastern coast, black rats made their way ashore. Before long, five birds and 13 insects had gone extinct. But one of those insect species managed to survive, by clinging to rocks on a nearby island. That giant bug, the Lord Howe Island stick insect, was only rediscovered in 2001 on Ball's Pyramid, an inhospitable shard of rock jutting out the ocean—one of the bits of the sunken continent of Zealandia that breaks the water's surface. Some of the insects found on this nearly inaccessible island were taken to the Melbourne Zoo to start a breeding program that could help restore the species to Lord Howe Island. But some scientists always had a nagging doubt about this plan. The surviving bugs didn't look quite like museum specimens from Lord Howe Island. Is it possible that they were two separate species?

A new study compares the genes of modern specimens, from the Melbourne Zoo, with museum samples in the Australian National Insect Collection, collected before the extinction on Lord Howe Island. The researchers, from Japan and Australia, looked specifically at their mitochondrial genomes, and found that the insects differed by less than one percent, which means that despite the surprisingly apparent visual differences, they really are one and the same species.

The Australian government is planning to start a rat eradication campaign on Lord Howe Island in 2018, in the hopes of finally ridding the unique ecosystems of the rodent scourge. Now that they know they have the right insect, one that should be well adapted to Lord Howe Island, there's a better chance they'll be crawling all over the place once again—once all those pesky rats are gone.

Art history has its share of mysteries. Is a long-lost Da Vinci fresco hidden behind another mural? Did Michelangelo plant secret messagesabout brains in the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? How did Dan Brown sell so many books?

Recently, an artistic mystery has been solved thanks to an attentive conservator who figuratively scratched the surface of a 17th-century painting hanging in the hallway of Yale Divinity School on Connecticut.

The dark-toned painting by an unknown artist depicts Martin Luther, head of the Protestant Reformation, surrounded by more than a dozen other Reformation figures, including John Calvin and Theodore Beze. During conservation work on the painting, conservator Kathy Hebb was looking at the painting’s largely gray foreground under a microscope and saw bright colors breaking through some of the cracks. She then checked other works depicting the same subject, including an engraving held at the British Museum, and found out that they feature four additional figures there in the foreground—a cardinal, a bull, a pope, and a monk.

It became apparent that the Yale painting had been altered with a layer of gray oil paint. Hebb worked to reveal those hidden subjects. “It is a matter of very delicately removing one layer from another,” she said to Yale News. All four were there, present and accounted for.

The hidden portion of the image reveals a much stronger anti-Catholic tone for the painting than previously thought. In the “camouflaged” version, Luther and his Reformists sit around a table, an evocation of Jesus’s last supper, with an open Bible and a lit candle. The composition is a symbolic rejection of Catholic belief. The four newly revealed figures are trying to blow out the candle—a representation of the Catholic Church's attempt to snuff out the "light" of the Reformation. The British Museum engraving of the same scene includes the inscription, “The candle is lighted, we cannot blow out.”

Why was this anti-Catholic element covered up in the Yale painting? “Perhaps it was done to prevent offense to Catholics,” Felicity Harley-McGowan, an art historian at Yale Divinity School, said to Yale News. “Or maybe at a time when the meaning of the image had been lost, an art dealer thought the painting would sell more easily without the Catholic figures and the labels. We don’t know.”

The painting is back on display just in time for 500th anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation, when Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of All Saints' Church in Wittenberg, Germany, on October 31, 1517.

Each year, wildfires scorch large swaths of the West, and scientists try to predict just how bad the fire season will be for an upcoming year based on moisture levels, weather, and a host of other factors. But fire season isn't the only annual environmental event that can have catastrophic impacts—take the hurricane or tornado seasons, for example. We can now add hypoxia season to the list, thanks to a familiar culprit—the same one that's likely been fanning fire season.

Along the West Coast, low-oxygen levels in bottom layers of the ocean, known as hypoxia, have become a big concern for scientists and fishers alike—fish and crabs are vital to ecosystems, research, and an entire industry. "We're always on the lookout to see, is this going to be a bad year?" says Francis Chan, a marine ecologist at Oregon State University who studies the effects of ocean chemistry. And by all accounts, 2017 shaped up to be a bad year.

Scientists first got reports of crabs dying in pots off the Oregon coast back in 2002. Since then, says Chan, there have been some years when the oxygen levels in some places drop to zero and stay that way for weeks or even months. A lot of marine creatures are resilient, but when oxygen levels stay low for a while, like they did in 2006, says Chan, "very few things make it." This summer's hypoxia season apparently started in July, when scientists with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife noticed crabs in a research pot had died. A camera trained on the pot "caught the low-oxygen zone red-handed." Researchers taking samples of juvenile fish barely caught anything. It wasn't until mid-September, when a storm stirred up ocean layers, that oxygen levels went back to normal.

These low oxygen levels aren't happening way out in the open ocean. "Right past where the waves are breaking, that's where it starts," says Chan. While the effects may be seen close to shore, hypoxia is actually related to changes in water chemistry all the way out in the middle of the Pacific. "Our coastal ocean is connected to the global ocean in a very intimate way," he adds.

To keep track of ocean chemistry and oxygen levels, scientists start putting out sensors in April that can measure oxygen level, current, and temperature. "This gives us a good idea of how things are evolving," says Chan. They also pay attention to reports from fishers and crabbers. "We don't have sensors everywhere," he says, so a pot full of dead crabs can tell them where pockets of low oxygen are located.

And, just as fire seasons are getting more intense and widespread year after year, hypoxic conditions are becoming increasingly common and longer-lasting. When Chan examines water data from the 1950s and '60s, he says, "I can't find [low oxygen] values that we're seeing today on a regular basis." Ocean waters are warming, and as a result, holding less oxygen. Shifts in weather patterns are affecting how the ocean's layers mix, and where oxygen-less pockets form. Chan says there's really one thing to blame: "The culprit we point to is a changing climate."

In many parts of the world, it’s easy to take for granted the availability of incredibly detailed digital maps. From my apartment, I can look up my address and not only does Google Maps show the outline of every building in my very dense neighborhood, but it also knows about the yoga studio, the tiny pasta shop, and other local businesses tucked into otherwise residential buildings.

“When you go someplace like Dominica, you simply don’t have that,” says Tyler Radford, the executive director of Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, a nonprofit that does emergency mapping in the wake of disasters. “If you pull up a map, you won’t see the outline of each building. You’ll only see the major roads.”

These mapping disparities matter for governmental and humanitarian organizations delivering aid after a hurricane, earthquake, or other disaster. Radford’s organization mobilizes volunteers from around the world to try to fill in those gaps, fast. Currently, they have a call out for volunteers to help improve digital maps of Puerto Rico and Dominica, in the wake of Hurricanes Maria and Irma, areas of Mexico City affected by the earthquake, and Bangladesh and Nepal, which experienced extreme flooding in August. Anyone can sign up to help create maps that will aid workers on the ground.

The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team was initially organized after the Haiti earthquake in 2010. At the time, the maps available of the country were on paper, and mostly out of date. A loose network of volunteers started using OpenStreetMap, which uses open-source geospatial data, and satellite imagery to create better, digitally available maps of the area. In the wake of that earthquake, hundreds of maps were made with the aim of helping people on the ground—too many to be helpful, actually. In the years since, emergency disaster mappers have worked to coordinate their responses to provide more limited, more directed, higher quality maps—so the disaster response workers might be able to use them.

In this case, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team works with partner organizations in the field to identify real needs. It also has a system for helping coordinate thousands of volunteers, so they’re not duplicating efforts. “We can have people looking over hundreds, sometimes thousands of square kilometers of area in a short amount of time,” says Radford. “You add all those bite-sized chunks together and it’s a lot of area quickly.”

Here’s what this work looks like in practice. On the left is a map before volunteers went through and marked all the buildings on satellite images of Añasco on the western side of the island. Their results are on the right.

By mapping buildings in affected areas, for instance, volunteers can help the group’s partner organizations understand how big the communities they’re trying to reach are, and what scale of aid they might need. With detailed maps of an area before a disaster strikes, it’s also possible to compare those maps with satellite photos, to get a sense of the damage.

Helping out with this effort is easy. You just need to sign up for an OpenStreetMaps account, spend five to ten minutes learning to use the simple tools, and follow a set of simple instructions. (i.e., “Simply draw round the outline of the building and tag them as ‘building’.”) And there's still plenty more work to be done.

After my father died in mid-2016, the family was faced with a daunting question: "What to do with the collection?" Dad had been acquiring and restoring all manner of curious antiques since the 1960s. His vast collection filled "the studio"—a huge, barn-like building adjacent to his home in Horokiwi, New Zealand.

In recent decades, Dad's interests had turned to stage magic props and the studio had become an unofficial museum of New Zealand magic history. Houdini-style manacles and a straitjacket hung from hooks alongside dangling marionettes. Row after row of shelves held all manner of tricks and gimmicks: vanishing bird-cages, spring-loaded feather-flower bouquets, mysterious little boxes that could seemingly transform dice into coins and back again.

I'd inherited some of Dad’s interest in stage magic history, especially the history of "spookology," the use of magic tricks to create the illusion of the truly supernatural, a practice made infamous during the fake séance craze of the early 20th century. When my mother decided to donate or auction many of the collection items, I began the task of cataloguing them.

It was while digging through and itemizing the collection that I discovered what might have been Dad’s most fascinating curio: a “Spook Show,” also known as a ghost show, inside a vintage leather case, measuring 20-by-17-by-12 inches.

The first object I pulled out was a black-painted, Y-shaped wooden handle with white gloves fitted on each branch. I recognized this peculiar item as a classic séance prop. Coated with luminescent paint and manipulated by an unscrupulous "spirit medium," the glowing gloves would seem to float, ghost-like, in the gloom of a shadowy séance parlor.

I was stunned. I had been reading about these sorts of props for years, but I’d never suspected that my father had owned a set of them.

With mounting excitement, I continued to search through the case. Here was a "spirit lamp" (helpfully labeled "spirit lamp"): a small metal flashlight, its lens covered with a film of dark red cellophane, used to conjure a sinister red glow in the dark.

But that wasn’t all. The case also contained two parchment skull masks inside a battered cardboard box, alongside two pairs of skeleton-fingered gloves; green glass jars of luminous makeup; a glowing cardboard skeleton and two full skeleton bodysuits; and fragile sheets of luminous cellulose, cut into classic ghost silhouettes and trailing tendrils of "ectoplasm."

I knew that this was a rare find and I immediately wanted to discover its provenance. There were, luckily, a few solid clues. Documents found in Dad’s files dated the props to the late 1950s. According to Bernard Reid, a New Zealand magic historian and a colleague of my father’s, he’d received the case and props from the estate of Graham Pratley, a magician based in Christchurch, New Zealand, who had performed magic, hypnotism, fire-eating, and ghost shows under the name "Gordon Graham."

A label on one of the cardboard boxes bore the name “Nelson Enterprises,” a reference to an Ohio supply company that had been owned by Robert Nelson. During the mid-20th century, Nelson’s business was nicknamed the "Ghost Factory."

In the years during and following the First World War, many magicians had taken exception to con-artists playing the “ghost racket” on bereaved families. Some, including Harry Houdini, crusaded against phony spiritualism. Others created their own occult-themed magic shows, in which “spirit manifestations” and other staples of the séance were overtly presented as conjuring tricks rather than as proof of life after death.

From the early 1920s until his death in the early 1970s, Robert Nelson had invented, manufactured and sold all manner of spookology gimmicks. His customers included both fraudulent mediums looking to spice up their séances and magicians seeking to outdo and expose the fakery of the spiritualists. Nelson was also a well-regarded performer in his own right. During the 1930s he had toured with a theater act called “Bob Nelson and His Ghost Friends” and later he also claimed to have served as an advisor for Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion ride.

These props, tricks, and lore persisted in the magic trade after the séance craze had faded away. They made a pop-culture comeback during the horror movie boom of the 1950s and 1960s, when ghost shows became popular as pre-show entertainment in movie theaters. Frequently outfitted by Nelson’s Ghost Factory, these traveling shows were presided over by “mad scientists”—Dr. Evil, Professor Zomby, Dr. Silkini and others. They typically combined broad comedy, magic and mind-reading trickery with the type of theatrical special effects associated with haunted house attractions today. The highlight was always the "blackout" moment when the pitch-dark theater would be filled with glowing, flying ghosts and monsters.

The midnight spook show circuit finally gave up the ghost during the 1970s and has since been largely forgotten. Director Joe Dante, however, paid it an affectionate homage in his 1993 movie Matinee, set during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and starring John Goodman as a schlock horror movie director/showman who delights in devising scary in-theater promotional gimmicks.

In more recent years, these shows have occasionally been staged at magic conferences and by indie cinemas, especially around Halloween. As movie houses employ ever more creativity in enticing patrons away from their streaming videos and home theaters, perhaps these performances will undergo a resurrection.

Most of my Dad’s “magic museum” has now been donated or auctioned to fellow collectors of magicana, but not the Spook Show. As a memento mori, it has quite a storied past.

After nine weeks of poking, prodding, and drilling, a group of international scientists recently made waves when their research confirmed the existence of the lost continent of Zealandia. They unearthed its hidden history and revealed that the submerged terrain is the world’s eighth continent, having sunk beneath the Pacific Ocean after breaking off from Australia millions of years ago.

Yet people have actually been exploring Zealandia for ages in the places where it peeks above the water, albeit unaware they were treading on a long-lost landmass. Even after most of Zealandia slipped beneath the sea, six percent of its land managed to remain above the surface. These places are currently home to approximately 5 million people.

New Zealand and its outlying islands make up a whopping 93 percent of Zealandia’s total land area, including the continent’s highest point, Aoraki (Mount Cook). But the towering peak isn't the only awe-inspiring Zealandia location worth visiting. Here are eight fascinating places you can visit to witness the wonder of Earth's rediscovered continent.

Milford Sound

Milford Sound, New Zealand

When glaciers carved through the granite cliffs along the edge of the Tasman Sea, they created a magnificent waterway called Milford Sound. The water here is home to an abundance of unique flora and fauna. The remains of ancient clams are buried beneath the fjord’s floor, and the world’s largest population of black coral trees also lives under the water's surface. Visitors can take a boat ride through the watery wonder, where they may be accompanied by seals, dolphins, penguins, and even perhaps the occasional whale.

Waitomo Glowworm Caves

Waitomo, New Zealand

The depths of the caves in Waitomo, New Zealand, come alive with the blue-green glow of bioluminescent bugs. Riding atop an inflatable raft through the dark caverns is like floating within a surreal subterranean cosmos. Though the mass of twinkling lights looks almost otherworldly, it's actually just a bunch of fungus gnat larvae clinging to the rock walls. They use long strings of sticky mucus to attract and trap their food, and, subsequently, dazzle the tourists who pass through.

The Lone Tree of Lake Wanaka

Wanaka, New Zealand

Much like the surviving lands of Zealandia, this stalwart tree refused to sink. It pierces through the surface of Lake Wanaka against the stunning backdrop of the Southern Alps. Called "the lone tree of Lake Wanaka," it's said to be among the most photographed trees in all of New Zealand. But it's actually a fairly secluded spot, accessed only by wandering off the beaten path.

Whakaari: White Island

Ohope, New Zealand

This small volcano is bursting with bright colors, despite its bland English name. Yellows, greens, teals, and reds paint the terrain, hidden beneath swirls of pearly smoke. Though the Māori called it "The Dramatic Volcano," the landscape earned its second name after Captain Cook sailed by in 1769 and found the island blanketed by white clouds. The Māori name is perhaps a bit more accurate: The small landmass is actually the tip of a much-larger submerged volcano, which still spews the colorful sulfur that adds to the island's rich palette.

Lord Howe Island

Lord Howe Island, Australia

Lying 370 miles east of mainland Australia, this South Pacific island chooses to mark its time a bit differently. It’s the only Daylight Savings Time-observing region in the world that switches its clocks forward by 30 minutes instead of a full hour. The governor, fueled by an unknown personal desire to briefly share a timezone with New South Wales, organized a referendum to set his unconventional time preference into law. In addition to its quirky way of keeping time, Lord Howe Island was also home to a century-long war against rats.

Ball's Pyramid

Ball's Pyramid, Australia

This barren sea spire is home to the world’s rarest insect, the Lord Howe Island stick insect (also called “land lobsters” and “walking sausages”). They were believed to be extinct until 2001, when scientists found a colony of the elusive bugs living under a single bush about 100 feet up the otherwise entirely infertile islet. Somehow, a few of the weird wingless insects had been able to escape a rat-induced extinction on Lord Howe Island and made their way over 14 miles of open ocean to settle on the spiky rock.

Nepean Island

Nepean Island, Australia

This tiny, uninhabited islet is just under half a mile from Norfolk Island, an Australian territory in the South Pacific. Yet unlike its neighbors, this chunk of land isn’t the tip of a submerged volcano. It was actually formed by a mixture of sand blown from dunes and rock fragments, all glued together by dissolving limestone. Though many of the island’s trees were felled by the European settlers of nearby Norfolk Island, the roughly 25-acre landmass is now a haven for locally endemic wildlife.

Lake Rotomahana

Waimangu, New Zealand

Zealandia, a lost wonder in itself, was home of another lost wonder once dubbed the “Eighth Wonder of the World." The famous Pink and White Terraces of New Zealand were a hot spot for British tourists during the Victorian era until they were annihilated in a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in 1886. Though the rose-tinted terraces were believed to be gone for good, recent research has suggested that some fragments are hidden within the waters of Lake Rotomahana, buried beneath layers of ash.

Naming beers is a tricky business in the age of the microbrew. America has well over 5,000 breweries, and almost every beer name imaginable seems to have been taken. Cities, trees, weather patterns, and critters alike have been thoroughly mined, and brewers are wringing their hands (or, sometimes, getting embroiled in legal battles) in the effort to come up with a novel name for a new recipe.

Enter the neural network. Following a Gizmodo article about the dearth of new beer names, scientist Janelle Shane decided to sic artificial intelligence on this all-important task. And now, Old National Brewing Company, based in Williamston, Michigan, has launched what's almost certainly the first beer named by a neural network: The Fine Stranger, a New England Double Dry-Hopped Saison.

Shane has experimented with neural networks in the past, and trained them to generate Harry Potter fan fiction, guinea pig names, and adorably incompetent pick-up lines ("You are so beautiful that you know what I mean.") For this project, she took thousands of beer names from the site BeerAdvocate and ran them through an open-source neural network. But they did have to be sorted according to the beer style. On her blog, she notes: "Different categories of beers have their own distinct naming conventions; in theory, you should roughly be able to tell a stout from an IPA from a double IPA by the name alone."

Then Shane reached out the Old National Brewing Company, which was struggling to name their new saison, a bubbly, fruity pale ale. The brewers suggested keywords—juice, haze, New England, Vermont, citra, Belgium, spicy, clove, saison, farmhouse, "all these trendy new hazy IPA names"—and Shane poured them into the AI. Presto! An almost infinite number of name candidates. The network allowed Shane to dial up or down the creativity. At its lowest setting, the beers were very (appropriately) French:

Saison Du Bear
Saison Du Farmer
Saison De Man
Saison De Mountain
Saison Du Chard
Saison Du Pant
Saison De Life
Saison De La Mort

But as creativity was dialed up, "the good ones got better and the bad ones got a lot worse," she wrote. Until, that is, she pushed it up to full-tilt creativity, and the neural network went bonkers. "I stopped," she wrote. "Perhaps you can understand why."

Nerlious
Funky Ever
varumper
Saison De Mage
Clushing
Fleur Dull?
Beoobegie Nard
Stutty Rye
Undonchop
Plop Aged
The Sprong
Greenhunke
Mal?

The brewer eventually chose a name from one of the middle tiers, at the same creativity level as "Burcumber Jane Rad" and "Don’t The Mountain." The Fine Stranger sounds convincingly like a saison—but great beer names for other styles are still up for grabs. Anyone for a tall, frosty Yampy?

If you fly into the Toronto Pearson International Airport via Terminal One, you're welcomed into the city by three human-like figures, made out of stones placed on top of stones. One has its arms straight out, one has them raised, and one is making them into a sort of "L" shape.

To some travelers, the sculptures may resemble a trio of air traffic controllers (or, as someone said on Facebook, a few friends trying to hail a cab). But to those in the know, they're bearing a much more dire—and almost certainly unintended—message. These are inunnguat, traditional Inuit artworks that encode particular messages. And an inunnguaq with its arms raised up means, essentially, "Stay away! This is a place of violent death."

If you're looking to add some Inuit artworks to your airport, building some inunnguat isn't a bad idea. Along with inuksuit*—sculptures that, while also made of stone, take less humanoid forms—they are traditionally constructed as navigational and land-reading aids, meant to indicate good fishing spots, sacred areas, or places of danger. Because of this, they've become a symbol of Inuit culture itself: for example, there's an inukshuk on the flag of Nunavut.

Over the years, though, their usage has broadened, and now they are sometimes employed to represent Canada as a whole. Such a broadening can lead to a loss of the specific meanings that made the symbol important in the first place, something that many Inuit people have pushed back against. When Vancouver hosted the Winter Olympics in 2010, the Olympic Committee chose an emblem that resembled an inunnguaq, prompting backlash from several First Nations leaders. (It didn't help that they called it an inukshuk.)

A similar loss of nuance was probably responsible for these airport sculptures. As the CBC reports, the federal government commissioned these particular artworks back in 1963, from an Inuk artist named Kiakshuk. Save for a brief stint in storage, they've been standing near Terminal One since then, in these same positions. The concern about them is new, and was spurred when CBC Nunavutposted photos of the statues on Facebook, prompting a near-immediate response from Inuk readers. ("That kind of inukkuk/inuksuk signifies a bad [omen], a place of horrible death," one, Jessie Kaludjak, wrote.)

It's unlikely that Kiakshuk was trying to send a morbid message. So what happened? One possible answer comes from elder Egeesiak Peter, who helped Kiakshuk with the statues when he was a young man. Peter, who is now in his 80s, told the CBC that the original vision for the art differed greatly from what is now on display.

Kiakshuk, he explained, chose and shaped the stones to make one giant inunnguaq, and numbered them to aid in its reconstruction. Somehow, after it was shipped to the airport and rebuilt, it became three smaller ones instead, with raised arms.

Have you seen our Inukshuk? Built with rocks from Nunavut thanks to @FirstAir#NationalAviationDay#airportthrowdownpic.twitter.com/rxo9JxRthI

— Ottawa Airport (@FlyYOW) February 23, 2016

The airport told the CBC that they are working with Piita Irniq, an Inuk artist and former political representative, to "improve the presentation of the artwork."

Irniq has some very specific credentials: he designed and built the Ottawa airport's inukshuk, which is more pyramid-shaped, with a hole in the middle. Traditionally, this type of structure led people in the direction of good hunting and fishing areas—you could look through the peephole and see which way to go.

"[Irniq] said he believes this traditional meaning makes sense for an airport," the CBC writes. It's certainly better than telling everyone your airport is a death trap.

*While the CBC refers to the airport sculptures as inuksuit, we are calling them inunnguat, in accordance with Irniq's differentiation.

Four billion years ago, the Moon was going through a rough patch. During this age, now known as the Late Heavy Bombardment, the Moon (along with Earth) was being pummeled by asteroids. This had the effect of aggravating its core of liquid hot magma, the way a wound gets aggravated if you poke it one too many times. Lava exploded onto the Moon’s surface, leaving behind dark spots of volcanic basalt, cupped in the impact craters left behind by the asteroids.

Now, analyzing samples of the basalt collected in the 1970s, two space researchers have discovered that those eruptions also released a whole bunch of gas—so much that it formed an atmosphere around the Moon that lasted for 70 million years.

Looking at the composition of the basalt, Debra H. Needham, of the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, and Dr. David A. Kring, of the Universities Space Research Association, were able to determine that those lava flows would have released carbon monoxide, oxygen, hydrogen, sulfur, and other gases from the Moon’s surface. Though much of that gas would have been lost to space, some of it formed a temporary atmosphere around the Moon. That layer of gas was about 1.5 times the thickness of the atmosphere on Mars, but still only about 1.5 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere, as Popular Mechanics reports.

The Moon’s temporary atmosphere would have been thickest about 3.5 billon years ago and lasted for about 70 million years. If lunar atmosphere isn't exciting enough on its own, consider that the same events that led to its formation may have left behind materials that could further human exploration and life on the Moon—as NASA puts it, these compounds "may also provide the in-situ resources needed for sustained lunar surface activities."

If humans find a way to spend long stretches on the Moon, we may have four-billion-year-old asteroids to thank.

A limestone slab, 31 yards long, may have related the story of the end of the Bronze Age. An interdisciplinary team of Swiss and Dutch archaeologists have now deciphered the symbols thought to have adorned the frieze, almost 150 years after it was discovered and summarily destroyed. In 1878, villagers in Beyköy, a tiny hamlet in western Turkey, found the large, mysterious artifact in pieces in the ground, and saw that it was engraved with seemingly illegible pictograms and scribbles. It would be 70 years before that language, now known to be millennia-old Luwian, could be read by scholars.

According to Eberhard Zangger, the president of a nonprofit foundation called Luwian Studies, the symbols tell stories of wars, invasions, and battles waged by a great prince, Muksus. Muksus hailed from the kingdom of Mira, which controlled Troy 3,200 years ago. The inscription describes his military advance all the way through the Levant to the borders of Egypt, and how his armies invaded cities and built fortresses as they went. Such invasions from the east are thought to be among the causes of the collapse of the Late Bronze Age.

But these tales were very nearly consigned to oblivion. After the slabs were found in the 19th century, French archaeologist Georges Perrot painstakingly copied out every symbol—before the stone was used to build the local mosque. Accompanying bronze tablets, similarly inscribed, were found soon after by Turkish authorities, and have not been seen since. Later, Turkish scholar Bahadır Alkım found and copied Perrot's reproduction. That version, too, seems to have been lost, until yet another copy of it was found in the estate of James Mellaart, a famous archaeologist who died in 2012. His notes explain how the frieze had been discovered and the copies made, and the work he had done on it. Mellaart's son passed the documents on to Zangger.

Barely two dozen people in the world can read Luwian. Fred Woodhuizen, an independent scholar near Amsterdam, is one of them. Working with Zangger, he deciphered the inscription, and the team has now assembled a transcription, a translation, a detailed commentary, and the remarkable research history of the find. Their work will be published in December in TALANTA – Proceedings of the Dutch Archaeological and Historical Society. Zangger has also recently published a book about the frieze in German, Die Luwier und der Trojanische Krieg – Eine Forschungsgeschichte (roughly translated as The Luwians and the Trojan War – A Research History)

Luwian, closely related to Hittite, has around 520 symbols—a mixture of pictograms representing individual words such as bird, cow, and hand, and phonetic syllabograms that represent sounds. Beginning in the 1950s, a team of Turkish and American experts worked on translations of Luwian writings, but the publication of their findings kept being delayed and delayed until, by 30 years later, nearly everyone involved had died. Only Mellaart was left—and he could not read Luwian.

The work has sparked concerns from scholars not involved in the research, who suggest that the frieze and, in turn, stories it is thought to have contained, could be a forgery, reports Live Science. Until records of the inscription are found outside of Mellaart's notes, some say, it will be hard to confirm the age and authenticity of its contents. That said, an inscription that length (31 yards!) would be near-impossible to forge, say Zangger and Woodhuizen, especially given that Mellaart could neither read nor write the ancient script. In the meantime, this poorly understood corner of ancient history is finally getting a moment in the sun.

Algal or bacterial blooms in lakes and oceans—all too common these days—are known for being a bright, sickly green or maybe an alarming red. But right now, off the coast of Australia, it looks more like sawdust is floating on the surface of the water. The "sea sawdust," also called "sea scum," is a microscopic cyanobacterium known as Trichodesmium that can photosynthesize and convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. Its long, filament-like blooms were spotted by NASA's Landsat 8 satellite in early September.

Charles Darwin described passing through a Trichodesmium bloom off the western coast of Australia in The Voyage of the Beagle, published in 1839: "The whole surface of the water, as it appeared under a weak lens, seemed as if covered by chopped bits of hay, with their ends jagged. … Their numbers must be infinite: the ship passed through several bands of them, one of which was about ten yards wide, and, judging from the mud-like colour of the water, at least two and a half miles long." According to Darwin, a red-colored species of Trichodesmium is what earned the Red Sea its name, and Captain Cook's sailors gave the Australian blooms the name "sea sawdust." Some blooms can appear green, and when they wash up on shore, they tend to look a bit like an oil spill.

The cyanobacterium's population rapidly increases as the water gets warmer between August and December, the southern hemisphere's summer. Large blooms can deplete the oxygen in the water, and kill fish in the area. But the microbes are a vital part of the global nitrogen cycle. Their ability to convert nitrogen gas to ammonia, called nitrogen fixation, makes the molecule available for other photosynthesizing microbes, such as algae and bacteria, and releases oxygen in the process. They fix an estimated 150 billion pounds of nitrogen each year, a considerable fraction of the 200 to 400 billion pounds fixed annually in the ocean. That's a big impact for something so small.

With disaster relief efforts still in crisis mode in Puerto Rico, a number of private companies and citizens are doing what they can to help the island's residents. While some are providing food and other necessary materials, Project Loon, a division of Alphabet’s X lab (formerly Google X), is trying to set up temporary internet and cell service using giant balloons.

As Futurism is reporting, Project Loon has received expedited approval from the FCC to launch wireless data-providing balloons over Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands as soon as possible. The goal of Project Loon is to provide internet coverage to inaccessible or less developed parts of the world by floating large balloons in the stratosphere, at about 65,000 feet. The balloons carry signal relay points capable of communicating with service providers on the ground—in a sense they are more or less floating cell towers. According to Project Loon's website, the balloons can stay up for as long as 190 days at a time.

Once they're in place, the Loon balloons would be able to provide emergency cell service and high-speed internet to rescuers, workers, and citizens on the ground. Project Loon has provided similar disaster relief and testing in places ranging from France to Indonesia to Peru.

The exact number of balloons that will be deployed over Puerto Rico is still unclear, as they must first establish an on-the-ground base from which to transmit to the balloons. But with luck, Project Loon’s simple solution could speed recovery efforts and help save lives.

The impact of Ernesto "Che" Guevara is still all over Cuba (and the world): the ideology, the inescapable T-shirts, and the chess that most Cuban schoolchildren are taught. Today, the country is celebrating the 50th anniversary of the revolutionary's death with, among other things, a chess tournament in Havana, inaugurated by Cuban grandmaster Silvino Garcia.

Simultánea de #ajedrez CHE VIVE https://t.co/xfTh8y84LXpic.twitter.com/NmvcmF9AwR

— Cuba Olímpica (@CubaOlimpica) October 7, 2016

Born in Rosario, Argentina, in 1928 Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna was the son of an Argentinian landowners of Spanish and Irish descent. He learned to play chess from his father and started to play in local tournaments at age 12, and continued well into his days studying medicine at the University of Buenos Aires.

His revolutionary ardor pulled him away from the game, but he returned to it after the revolution, in 1961, when he served as director of the National Bank and Minister of Industries. One of his first initiatives was to relaunch the Capablanca Memorial, an annual chess tournament that had been interrupted by a coup in 1952, and to make it highest-paying tournament in the world. The 1965 edition of the tournament went down in history after American Bobby Fischer was forbidden from traveling to Cuba by the U.S. State Department. He ended up playing via telex from the Marshall Chess Club in New York.

Guevara himself was pretty good at the game of kings. It is said he played Polish-Argentinian grandmaster Miguel Najdorf to a draw. But according to the 1975 memoir of Czechoslovak-German grandmaster Luděk Pachman, Checkmate in Prague: The Memoirs of a Grandmaster Guevara wished he could dedicate more time to practice. “You know, comrade Pachman, I don’t enjoy being a Minister," he said. "I would rather play chess like you, or make a revolution in Venezuela.”

There were once, among the rogues' gallery of men who harass women in public, disreputable fellows known as mashers. The masher took a lady’s arm, the masher took liberties, the masher might, with the slightest provocation, take advantage. He approached a woman he did not know, to ask her to a dance or to ask if he hadn't met her somewhere before. The masher, above all, the Scranton Truth explained in 1914, was “just a plain cad ... a coward, too, for he knows that an unescorted girl can only express her resentment by ignoring him." But women had another tool in their arsenal to swiftly prick and deflate the masher’s inflated ego: the hatpin.

Between the late 1880s and the early 1920s, advertising was on the rise and increasingly targeting women. Among the alluring consumer goods pitched to them were hats: the more elaborate and precariously perched, the better. At the same time, women’s hairstyles began to climb higher and higher. They grew their tresses long, then pinned them up, sometimes stuffing them with bits of false hair or cloth. This, reported The New York Times, made it “impossible to fit a hat to a lady’s crown.” By 1901, fashionable hats had grown into towering monstrosities of taffeta, silk, ribbons, flowers real and fake, ostrich feathers, and even artificial fruit. Affixing these edifices to those hairstyles required stout hardware, sometimes of six, eight, even 10 inches in length. All the ingredients were there—ridiculous hair, even sillier hat—for a perfect hatpin storm.

This period also saw more women were walking alone or in unaccompanied groups, which some men found either morally affronting or desperately alluring. Unchaperoned women began to experience sexual harassment on the street or on public transportation more than ever before. But, for “perhaps the only time in American history,” writes Kerry Segrave, in The Hatpin Menace: American Women Armed and Fashionable, 1887–1920, “virtually all American women went out and about armed with a deadly (though legal) weapon.” That weapon attached their hats to their hair—and it was so effective that within a decade, proposed legislation to curb these accessories to assault had bubbled up across the United States.

Initially, hatpin injuries were relatively innocent, and occurred in the crush of train carriages or busy streets. They were hazards for men wooing even approving women, said the Times. “Nonetheless, young men with streaky scratches on their right cheek have been turning up at their places of business of late with a variety of explanations savoring of more ingenuity than truth as to how they won their wounds; and most engaged young girls have a hat for evening walks that is independent of hatpins.” But women swiftly realized that the oversize pins they carried could also be used to fend off undesirables. Injuries from this kind of use were usually“not serious, although very painful,” the Times reported—and served as a swift lesson to a masher's wandering hands.

Hatpins were used to help pin down a burglar, for example, or by a “plucky typewriter” facing two robbers on a Chicago train. (They “jumped off the car without having got anything except wounds,” the Times said.) As a method of self-defense, they gave women independence. In Chicago, in 1910, a woman wrote this letter protesting potential legislation: “I always feel safe going home late at night with a hatpin available for protection. Before leaving a streetcar, I always carry a hatpin ready in my hand until I am safe within the door of my house.” She added: “Thousands of other women undoubtedly can speak from their experience of how a stout hatpin has been an effective defence in times of danger.” A raunchy music hall ballad of the time, “Never Go Walking Out Without Your Hat Pin,” echoed the sentiment.

My Granny was a very shrewd old lady,
The smartest woman that I ever met.
She used to say, Now listen to me, Sadie,
There’s one thing that you never must forget.

Never go walking out without your hat pin.
The law won’t let you carry more than that.
For if you go walking out without your hat pin,
You may lose your head as well as lose your hat.

…

Never go walking out without your hat pin.
Not even to some very classy joints.
For when a fellow sees you’ve got a hat pin
He’s very much more apt to get the point.

Men generally loathed these hats, and the pins that held them in place. They were cumbersome, and impossible to see over in crowds or theaters, churches, concerts, or any other place of entertainment. Even under innocent circumstances people were at risk. In crowds, cheeks were scratched, eyes narrowly avoided gouging, and the tiniest of accidental scratches could lead to nasty infections. Even death was not unheard of, whether as a result of blood poisoning, or worse. On February, 1898, Parisian tourist Bartholomew Brandt Brandner was murdered with a hatpin in a Chicago saloon: "a small puncture which began near the corner of the left eye and expanded far into the interior of the skull." The details of the scuffle died with him.

Something had to be done. Churches and theaters began to put up signs instructing people not to wear large hats inside. By 1910, hatpins had become a national, and then international, threat. Lawmakers from Chicago to Kansas City and Hamburg to Paris began to write legislation that limited hatpins’ length or demanded that women put protective sheaths over the ends. In Chicago, women could be fined $50 for wearing hatpins more than nine inches long. Similar ordinances were passed everywhere from Milwaukee to Pittsburgh to New Orleans.

But the laws were somewhat ineffectual. “Even when this was accomplished, the police were said to be too bashful to approach women in the streets to enforce those laws,” writes Segrave. “Men were genuinely trepidatious about taking public transit, as all those protruding hatpins threatened and endangered them.” A 1917 article in the Chicago Day Book, observing that men could get women arrested for their rogue hatpins, instead concluded chivalrously, “Far be it from us to pick on the ladies. Let’s try and see that they all get a seat so they won’t have to swing around on a strap.”

Furious women often refused to abide by the laws. In November 1912, 60 women in Sydney, Australia, were arrested and sent to jail over refusing to pay the fines for their overlong hatpins. “They declare that the law prohibiting protruding hatpins is ‘iniquitous and unnecessary legislation’, and they will not submit to it,” wrote the Times.“What is more, if they are kept in jail long, they will starve themselves to death. So there, now!” It is no coincidence that the rise of the hatpin self-defense coincided with the campaign for women’s suffrage: Walking the streets safely began to be seen as a right not to be infringed upon.

For all their utility, the hatpin was most of all an unexpected consequence of the extraordinary hat. Without the headwear, the pins were just weapons. Fashionistas of the time favored hats with real plumage, which led to the slaughter of thousands, even millions, of birds every year. Lobbyists called for an end to this needless killing, lest the birds go extinct. In 1918, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act made it illegal to kill, sell, or transport certain birds and feathers. It was a hatpin through the heart for these millinery miracles. By the 1920s, women were bobbing their hair short and wearing cloches, turbans, tam o’shanters. Hatpins were largely retired—and mashers breathed a skeevy sigh of relief.

Durian, a large and prickly fruit with a polarizing smell, has its detractors (“absolutely disgusting,” “like wet garbage,” “the most foul-smelling fruit in the world”) and its fans. Those fans, though, are very invested in understanding the secrets of this much-besmirched fruit. As the BBC reports, “a group of anonymous durian lovers” funded a project that sequenced the durian’s genome and located the exact source of its very special smell.

There have been previous inquiries into the fruit’s smell. Back in 2012, a group of German scientists analyzed the durian's aroma extract using mass spectrometry and gas chromatography, Smithsonian reports. They found 50 compounds that contributed to durian’s smell, including four that were complete mysteries. The smell, according to this study, came from the unique combination of chemical odors that ranged from “fruity, skunky, metallic, rubbery, burnt, roasted onion, garlic, cheese, onion, and honey.”

More recently, though, a team of scientists identified the dominant compounds in the smell, which include aromas akin to “rotten onion” and “rotten cabbage.” But just two of those, they reported, could mimic the smell—one which smelled “fruity” and another that smelled like “roasted onion.”

This new study looked to identify the source of the smell. By mapping the durian’s 46,000 genes, a team from the National Cancer Centre Singapore (NCCS) and Duke-NUS Medical School found a class of genes dedicated to producing volatile sulfur compounds, a major contribution to the fruit’s smell. These genes work overtime to make these compounds—part of the reason the durian doesn’t have just a faint, devilish whiff but a pungent, soaking smell.

The genetic analysis also traced durian’s origins back to the cacao plant. For people with a well-developed sense of smell this might not come as a surprise. One taster in this Buzzfeed video described the smell as "like a box of chocolates, but a bad box of chocolates.”

Consider that next time you enjoy a chocolate bar. Maybe durian isn’t so gross? After all, what we think tastes good often comes down to what we think should taste good.

What if your last breath was only a poor assumption, a supposition? What if your family, the doctor, the coroner were all wrong, and you found yourself buried alive? You’d scratch and claw, scream and shout, and no one—no one—would hear you. There’s a name for this feeling: taphophobia, the overwhelming fear of being buried alive.

For centuries there have been stories, many of them myths, about people who met this panic-inducing fate. And real mistakes have indeed happened. According to Christine Quigley in her book The Corpse: A History, “in the early 1900s, a case of premature burial was discovered an average of once a week.” Once a week! That’s not just something to worry about—it’s something to get to work on preventing. So, how to make sure that the dead are really dead?

There’s always the ancient Roman method where mourners waited eight days to bury a body, giving the supposed deceased ample time to snap out of it. But maybe this seems far too passive. Enterprising taphophobes throughout history, and especially in the 19th century, have deployed a wide array of methods to ensure that dead means dead.

The Housecall

Fearing a premature burial, Hannah Beswick, an 18th-century English woman, left her entire estate to her doctor, Charles White, with just one stipulation: her body could never be buried. Never. Instead, Dr. White was required to check on her corpse every day until he could be sure, really sure, that she was dead. This was a lot to ask, and at some point, White embalmed her body. He kept her mummified remains in his collection of anatomical specimens, and every day, for several years, the good doctor and two witnesses unveiled Beswick and made sure she was still dead. He later moved her body into an old clock case, and as Jan Bondeson writes in his book A Cabinet of Medical Curiosities, the doctor opened the case “once a year to see how his favorite patient was doing.”

The Security Coffin

U.S. patent number 81,437 was issued in 1868. This particular invention was for a security coffin, which came with all the bells and whistles the not-quite-dead-yet could ever need. The design includes a rope, ladder, and bell. Wake up in the coffin? Ring the bell which has helpfully been attached to the rope you’re holding. Nobody around to hear that bell? Try the ladder, which inventor Franz Vester imagined would allow a person to “ascend from the grave.”

The Grave Window

Like Hannah Beswick, Timothy Clark Smith, a Vermont taphophobia sufferer, decided to rely on others to make sure his death wasn’t announced too early. Smith asked to have a window installed on his grave, “six feet above him and centered squarely on his face,” when he died. Today the glass has clouded with age and it’s impossible to get a look at Smith, but imagine a breathy fog covering the glass, and Smith waiting for someone to notice. Of course, by all accounts Smith never had to have the assistance of a helpful passerby, and he died without incident in 1893.

The Easy-Opener

How, exactly, would the newly awakened lift those heavy coffin lids? Johan Jacob Toolen had it covered. His 1907 patent understood that the prematurely buried might be a little tired and incorporated easy-open lids so that the presumed dead wouldn’t have to struggle for freedom. His design was tailor-made for the self-reliant not-dead person. “With very slight exertion on his part,” Toolen explained, the apparently, but not really, dead “can immediately obtain a supply of fresh air and may afterwards leave the coffin.”

The Emergency Airway

Forward-thinking safety-coffin designers thought of everything. Gael Bedl’s 1887 design came equipped with an air pipe that would be opened if there were movement in the coffin. It also featured an “electric alarm apparatus,” which emitted an audible sound when the air pipe engaged. Bedl’s patent application noted that the air pipe could be made of any decorative material. The day’s been tough enough, being buried alive and all, no need to sacrifice style.

The Completist Approach

William Tebb was a busy man in 1896. The businessman had devoted much of his life to his various pet causes (animal rights, anti-war, anti-vaccines), but one meeting in particular gave Tebb a chance to step into his role as advocate for the prematurely buried.

Tebb met Roger S. Chew, a doctor who, through the eagle-eyed observations of a family member, narrowly avoided an early grave himself, in the early 1890s. After surviving his brush with burial, Chew devoted himself to medicine and to saving others from his almost-fate. Meeting Chew sparked something in Tebb, and in 1896 he founded the London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial. Tebb, along with Dr. Edward Vollman (himself a survivor of a near-burial), eventually published the book Premature Burial and How it May Be Prevented in 1905.

The book outlined the various ways one might be mistaken for dead (trance, catatonic state, “human hibernation”), and provided case studies of humans and animals who, although thought dead, were revived. The book also included various techniques that had been used in the past (with varying success) to prevent this from happening. The authors explored every option, from using fire to blister the hand of the presumed dead person (which, they admitted, might not be effective because the person may be so out of it that they may not respond “even to the application of red hot irons”) to injecting the presumed dead with morphine or strychnine, which, well, if they weren’t dead before...

Premature Burial also explored artificial respiration and electric shock, which were both new ideas at the time. Ultimately, the authors admitted that all of their work might not actually be that effective. Dead would always be dead to the unimaginative and, as they wrote, “the appearance of death is generally taken for its reality.” When Tebb died, he didn’t take any chances—he was cremated one week later.

Our fear of being trapped in an untimely burial plot isn’t just a lingering 19th-century fascination; as recently as 2013, designs for coffins and instruments that claim to prevent premature burial have been submitted. Somewhere deep inside all of us is a lingering worry that what was supposed to be a final resting place might actually be what kills you.

How do you work out changes in air pollution over a century? You can't get air samples from the past; buildings get cleaned up; historical data may be inaccurate. Scientists at the Field Museum and the University of Chicago have developed a novel approach: looking at the soot on the feathers of birds in museum collections. Where modern-day songbirds have dazzling white bellies, many specimens from the turn of the 20th century are blackened with soot. When birds fly through sooty, smoky air, black carbon dust collects in their wings and feathers. This, in time, stains them a deep gray.

"We went into natural history collections and saw that birds from 100 years ago that were soiled, they were covered in soot," researcher Shane DuBay told the BBC. "We saw that birds from the present were cleaner and we knew that at some point through time the birds cleaned up—when we did our first pass of analysis using reflectance we were like, 'wow, we have some incredible precision.'"

In their analysis of over 1,000 birds, DuBay and his study co-author Carl Fuldner were able to measure and quantify just how sooty the air of Rust Belt cities has been over the last 135 years. Black carbon levels, the birds revealed, hit their apex in the first ten years of the 20th century.

Measuring the soot levels turned out to be astoundingly accurate. On the one hand, birds molt and grow a new set of feathers every twelve months or so. That makes it easier to date soot levels to a particular year. On top of that, the degree of the color's darkness is a clear indicator of how much soot there was in that year. To measure that precisely, DuBay and Fuldner photographed the birds and measured how much light reflected off them.

Soot levels on the birds closely matched what researchers already knew, or assumed, about coal use over time. During the Great Depression, for instance, coal consumption dropped. Birds, correspondingly, got a bit snowier. Throughout World War II, wartime manufacturing meant coal use soared, and the little songbirds once again became grayer and grayer. Then, in the 1950s, natural gas replaced coal to heat Rust Belt homes. Birds started to clean up once again.

Air pollution today might not dirty birds in the same way, but that doesn't mean that all is well. "While the U.S. releases far less black carbon into the atmosphere than we used to, we continue to pump less-conspicuous pollutants into our atmosphere—those pollutants just aren't as visible as soot," DuBay said in a press release.

Few people knew the unapologetic sensationalism of Victorian popular culture better than Marie Grosholtz, better known as Madame Tussaud of wax-museum fame. Born to a family line dotted with public executioners, and apprenticed to her mother’s employer, an anatomist who sculpted in wax, Marie was not exactly the sort of girl who dreamed of white lace and piano lessons: instead, she honed her skills making death masks from guillotined heads during the French Revolution.

Marie was born in 1761. Her mother, a widow, was housekeeper to the famous waxmaker and anatomist Philippe Curtius, who all but adopted Marie (rumors abounded: was Curtius her uncle, her father, or a convenient cover for parentage by some unknown noble?). Curtius considered the girl a prize pupil, and in his wax salon, Marie encountered many of Paris’ prominent citizens. Her first sculpture was a likeness of Voltaire.

In the 18th century waxworks became popular as a public, paid attraction; and women—including London’s famous Mrs. Salmon, and Patience Wright in Philadelphia—were surprisingly prominent in the trade. Perhaps this was because wax was seen as a “lesser” medium for sculpting, or because male academics and artists satisfied themselves it was an amateur pursuit; but whatever the reason, Marie ran with it, bringing along her artistry, an iron stomach, social savvy and a liberal definition of educational entertainment.

The French Revolution created a new demand for wax figures. As Pamela Pilbeam details in her book Madame Tussaud and the History of Waxworks, the sculptures—typically wax heads mounted on costumed mannequin bodies—became a sort of real-time political commentary for Parisians in salons like those Curtius operated. And while Curtius was out participating in the city’s political and military life, it often fell to Marie to make death masks of the Revolution’s recently decapitated victims.

The work required equal comfort in palaces and in prisons, and a certain ease with the grotesque: in her memoirs, Tussaud claimed that she sat “on the steps of the exhibition, with the bloody heads on her knees, taking the impressions of their features.”

Success in waxworks involved not only artistic skill and patience, but an ear to the ground and fast feet: when Charlotte Corday murdered the radical Jean-Paul Marat in his bathtub, Marie got to the scene so fast, the killer was still being processed by law enforcement as she started work on Marat’s death mask.

In 1802, 40-year-old Marie was saddled with a lazy, spendthrift husband, two children and the faltering business Curtius had left her on his death, and she decided to seek her fortune abroad. She left her youngest child with her mother and aunt, packed up her four-year-old son and a duffel bag of disembodied aristocratic wax heads, and left for England to achieve a “well-filled purse,” according to Kate Berridge in Madame Tussaud: A Life in Wax.

Marie wanted to provide for her sons; she knew that her spendthrift husband would get any money she had if she returned to France; and the Napoleonic Wars made it difficult for her to travel anyhow. So she doubled down on her hustle: Marie found her footing, bought out her contract with Paul Philipstal, a Curtius colleague with whom she had tentatively partnered on arrival in England, and toured for more than 20 years throughout England and Scotland, establishing her traveling show as a cultural fixture. She was known to seize quickly upon every trend and fashion, making new models to explore what Pilbeam called “the snobbish glamour of royalty as well as the thrill of being au fait with the latest gruesome murder or assassination.” Moreover, she had authenticity on her side: anyone could make a diorama, but only Marie Tussaud could claim she had taken her casts from the very individuals portrayed.

As she got older Marie capitalized on the chance to rein in her travel and tap into the growing “promenade market” of families with discretionary income. She settled into a standing location in London’s fashionable Baker Street in the middle 1830s, when she was 74 and still greeting guests personally. Tussaud’s Baker Street gallery featured a 5,000-square-foot grand salon, covered in ornate drapery and offering comfortable seating where visitors could take in the sculpture (helpfully flattered by large mirrors on the walls, generously reflecting the figures from every angle).

Madame Marie knew that the public, then as now, would go nuts for two things—royal fever and horror shows—and she gladly provided immersion in both. Insinuating herself with the upper class, Tussaud grew her popularity to the point where she was able not only to model Europe’s elite, but to purchase King George IV’s coronation robes and Napoleon’s own carriage, all the better to ornament displays in the “Golden Chamber.” In the early 1840s, Tussaud put together a royal display with Albert sliding the wedding ring onto Queen Victoria’s finger; and commissioned (with the Queen’s permission) a precise copy of her wedding gown, at a cost of a thousand pounds.

The “Chamber of Horrors,” often euphemistically referred to as the “Adjoining” or “Other” room for decorum's sake, featured grisly recreations of murder scenes so infamous that criminals headed for execution would sometimes donate their own clothing to the gallery in the interest of veracity.

The Chamber of Horrors paid tribute to the Revolution with a working scale-model guillotine, and the heads of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and Robespierre—the latter grimly squashed in, to reflect the botched suicide attempt in which Robespierre allegedly shot off half of his own jaw. (A catalog of the gallery helpfully distinguishes “large figures” from “heads.”)

Famous figures in the forbidding salon included an array of British murderers cast from life at their trials, among them James Rush, executed for the triple murder of his landlord and family; and Maria and George Manning, a couple arrested and executed before 50,000 people for the 1849 killing of Maria’s lover.

The body-snatchers William Burke and William Hare were a popular tableau: when a lodger in Hare’s house died, the men decided to sell his body to willing Edinburgh surgeons faced with a cadaver shortage. It worked out so well (and, unlike grave-robbing, no sweaty digging involved) that Burke and Hare killed 16 more people to repeat the transaction, bringing them in sacks to the hospital for no-questions-asked sale. Marie cast Burke’s head three hours after his execution in 1829. Hare turned King’s evidence and escaped the gallows, but was modeled from life by Tussaud’s sons, who had by that time joined her in business.

Presiding over a gallery full of wax royals, dead revolutionaries, and serial murderers, Marie would brook no criticism, instead proclaiming what a public service she was offering:

“Madame Tussaud, in offering this little Work to the Public, has endeavoured to blend utility and amusement. The following pages contain a general outline of the history of each character represented in the exhibition; which will not only increase the pleasure to be derived from a mere view of the figures, but will also convey to the minds of young persons much biographical knowledge—a branch of education universally allowed to be of the highest importance."

Marie Tussaud was a hustler, and did her part, as her contemporary P.T. Barnum did in the U.S., to create what we recognize as the modern concept of celebrity—renown not being something you achieve after death with a sober legacy, but something you cultivate in life by slaking the public thirst. She died in 1850 with credit for England's most popular tourist attraction, and even the usually grumpy satirical magazine Punchhad to admit: “In these days no one can be considered properly popular unless he is admitted into the company of Madame Tussaud’s celebrities in Baker Street. The only way in which a powerful and lasting impression can be made on the public mind is through the medium of wax.”