As the Local reports, an anonymous donor has given one million francs—about 1,080,000 American dollars—to renovate the Anna Göldi Museum. The museum, which is located in Ennenda, Switzerland, is focused on human rights and women's rights, topics it explores through the story of the wrongful execution of Anna Göldi, known as "the last witch in Europe." It's currently only open in the summers, but will use the money to operate year-round.

Göldi was, of course, not really a witch at all. Born to a poor family in Sax, Switzerland, and subject to a series of misfortunes during her younger years, Göldi eventually fled her hometown for the canton of Glarus, where she worked as a domestic servant for a doctor and aspiring politician named Jakob Tschudi. Göldi looked after the household for 17 years, until one day Tschudi fired her.

Soon after, he reported her to the authorities. He claimed that he had found needles in the family's bread and milk, and that Göldi was using witchcraft to try and poison his children. But modern scholars think it's more likely that Tschudi was having an affair with Göldi. When he fired her, she threatened to expose this fact, and rather than risk his political career, he decided to use the law to get rid of her. As scholar Walter Hauser told the BBC, "Anna Göldi was a threat to powerful people. They wanted her out of the way."

Göldi was tortured until she admitted to colluding with the devil. She later retracted that confession, but after she was tortured again, she re-confessed. She was found guilty, and in 1782, she was beheaded in the public square. This execution caused a backlash in her time as well: "Educated people [in Switzerland] did not believe in witchcraft in 1782," Hauser said.

Over the past few decades, Göldi has found a kind of second life as a symbol of women's rights, human rights, and what can happen when the powerful are allowed to abuse their authority. In 2008—after much lobbying from Hauser—the parliament of Glarus officially exonerated Göldi, deeming her trial a miscarriage of justice. The local courthouse now has a memorial to her, consisting of two perpetually-lit lamps. There have been books and movies dedicated to her story, and there is even a new musical about her, which opened last fall.

There is also the museum, which first opened in early 2017, and moved to a new location—a historic textile building—that same summer. The large donation will fund the building's heating and insulation, as well as the construction of a new staircase that will enable easier access.

"With this investment, we can open the museum all year long," says museum board member Maggie Wandfluh. It's too little, too late for Göldi—but, perhaps, just in time for the rest of us.

Pablo Picasso was one of the most prolific painters of the 20th century. It is estimated that in his 75-year career, he created about 50,000 works of art, including 1,885 paintings. Perhaps as a result of his frantic productivity, he was known, like some of his contemporaries, to sometimes "recycle" existing works of art into new paintings.

Now a group of researchers has revealed that the Spanish master made use of this "recycling" technique for the creation of one his Blue Period masterpieces, the 1902 La Miséreuse accroupie (The Crouching Woman).

The painting, an oil on canvas piece depicting a crouching woman wearing a cloak, displays Picasso's typical Blue Period palette: grey, green, blue, and white. But in 1992, as The Guardianreports, curators at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), where the work is currently kept, noticed some colors and textures peaking through the painting's crack lines that did not match the composition as we know it. X-ray radiography revealed that, hidden behindLa Miséreuse accroupie, is a landscape composition.

More recently, researchers from Northwestern University, the Art Institute of Chicago Center for Scientific Studies in the Arts (NU-ACCESS), and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., decided to further examine the painting using some of the most recent non-invasive scanning tools, including X-ray fluorescence scanning.

These techniques revealed that Picasso rotated the landscape portrait, which was created by another artist, by 90 degrees and painted his own work right on top. However, further analysis showed that he did not simply "recycle" the existing work as canvas but actually incorporated some of its features into his own work. For example, the lines of the cliff edges of the landscape have been incorporated into the cloaked woman's back.

The state-of-the-art technologies also allowed researchers to learn more about the different phases that led to Picasso’s final creation. They discovered that the artist had previously painted his subject holding a disk in her right arm, a detail that was later covered with the green cloak.

“Picasso had no qualms about changing things during the painting process,” Marc Walton, a Professor at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and co-director of NU-ACCESS, said in a release. “Our international team—consisting of scientists, a curator, and a conservator—has begun to tease apart the complexity of La Miséreuse accroupie, uncovering subtle changes made by Picasso as he worked toward his final vision.”

In the history of Earth, one of the most crucial developments, in the billions of years of the planet’s existence, was when plants evolved to colonize the land. So much followed from this one big move: rising levels of oxygen, layers of rich soil coating the ground, new habitats for animals to explore and make home.

But there are giant gaps in our understanding of land plants’ beginnings. Only a scattering of tiny, early land plants have been preserved in the fossil record, and although scientists know of four major groups, they have had trouble puzzling out the order in which they evolved.

“Our understanding of where these plants sit in the tree of life is a bit of a shambles,” says Philip Donoghue, a professor of paleobiology at the University of Bristol.

Donoghue is the principal investigator of a multidisciplinary project that aims to answer some of the fundamental questions about how and when land plants evolved, by combining fossil records and molecular biology. In two new papers, one published last week in Current Biology and another published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, this team of researchers finds that the first land plants emerged earlier than once thought and may have been more complex than anyone believed.

Early land plants can be divided into four major groups—liverworts, hornworts, mosses, and vascular plants. Those first three can be grouped together as bryophytes, which tend to be small and scrubby and reproduce via spore. Vascular plants have veins that can carry water and minerals to different parts of the plant. The relationship between these four big groups, though, has been a mystery. Did vascular plants branch off on their own evolutionary journey? Or, perhaps, did a shared ancestor of liverworts and mosses split off from the shared ancestor of hornworts and vascular plants?

In their work, Donoghue and his colleagues considered seven competing versions of this plant family tree, each consistent with existing evidence. But based on their analysis of genomic evidence from algae and the four major land plant groups, they were able to narrow down the possibilities to three options. According to their results, liverworts and mosses make up one branch of early plant life; their work also suggests, though, with less certainty, that hornworts are part of that same branch.

Those results cut against some existing ideas about how early plant life evolved. Often, liverworts, which are extremely simple plants, have been thought of as a more primitive form of early plant life, that presaged more complicated mosses and vascular plants. But these results indicate that liverworts actually evolved to become more simple—that the common ancestor of all four plant groups was a more complicated organism than previously imagined.

Whatever order these plants evolved in, though, the second paper suggests that they developed in a relatively short amount of time—within a handful of millions of years. (That counts as "short" in this realm. “It’s all relative,” Donoghue says. “Half a billion years ago, it’s all within the fumes of statistical uncertainty.”) In the PNAS paper, the researchers describe their efforts to pin down a timescale for early land plant evolution, by combining data from plant genomes and the fossil record. No matter which of those seven evolutionary scenarios the team considered, they found that land plants branched off as early as the mid-Cambrian era and vascular plants branched off in the late Ordovician or late Silurian periods, sometime approximately 440 to 420 million years ago.

“The branching events probably happened very close to each other in time,” says Donoghue. “It doesn’t matter how you resolve the tree. There’s been quite a lot of evolution happening in a short space of time.”

That timeline puts the origins of land plants earlier than previously thought, which could have large implications for our understanding of the early history of our planet. One of the reasons that scientists are interested in early plant development is because of the impact plants had on the Earth’s climate. Whenever land plants evolved, they started reshaping the planet and its climate; this is one of the beginning points for models of the Earth’s climate history.

If plants’ geoengineering work started back in the Cambrian period, “all that work has been based on the wrong assumption,” says Donoghue. The Earth in the Cambrian period wouldn’t have been characterized by bare rock and perhaps a bit of pond scum; it might have had a low, floral forest that would have already been greening the planet.

Compared to the elaborate forests of today, these low-lying plant covers wouldn't seem particularly majestic. Their descendants are still around today, in bogs, on rocky cliffs, in damp cracks, and mostly we don't pay much attention to them. But these are the types of plants that transformed the course of Earth's history.

“Most people are unaware of plants outside of flowering plants," says Donoghue. "All the action, all the fundamental evolutionary innovation, are in these miserable, boring-looking plants that grow in places people don’t want to be. These mosses are best modern model for plants that fundamentally changed our planet.”

The New Orleans icon Arthur James Robinson, known better as "Mr. Okra," passed away last Thursday at the age of 75.

Driving slowly through New Orleans' neighborhoods, Robinson sold vegetables the way other vendors dole out ice cream. Except he did so from a distinctive, decorated truck, emblazoned with the words "Be Nice or Leave" and packed to the brim with produce. His friendliness and familiarity, as well as his impassioned chant reverberating through a loudspeaker ("I have strawberries, I have grapes, I have spinach...") made him a beloved local celebrity.

Robinson's career as Mr. Okra began when he sold produce with his father as a young man. His father, Nathan Robinson, had started out selling from a pushcart, later trading it in for a horse and buggy. Back then, it wasn't unusual for street vendors to sell shellfish, baked goods, and produce. Arthur Robinson turned out to be one of the last produce vendors to still hawk his wares around the city. Despite his Mr. Okra moniker, Robinson's favorite things to sell were fruits such as cantaloupes and peaches.

Vendors using music or chants to sell food is a dying tradition. Even before Robinson's death, people had taken steps to honor and immortalize him. A photograph of Robinson and his truck is currently displayed in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. His voice lives on in recordings, too, as a toy called "Mr. Okra in Your Pocket," and also in songs that incorporate his unmistakable voice.

Mr. Okra's legacy will continue through his daughter, Sergio. After years of riding in the truck with her father, she had already taken on much of the business as his health worsened. Which means that the streets of New Orleans will be hearing Mr. Okra's song again soon.

The Boston Athenaeum—a 211-year-old independent library in the center of Beacon Hill—is home to about 150,000 rare books. Some are old, and some are brand new. Some are huge, and some are tiny. Some are made of lead, some are made of shredded army uniforms, and one is, famously, made of human skin. Until recently, Stanley Ellis Cushing was in charge of all of them.

Cushing began his career at the Athenaeum in 1970, right after he graduated from college. He ended up staying for 47 years—"longer than anybody else in the last hundred years or so," he says—working as a bookbinder and conservator, then as the Chief of the Conservation Department, and finally as the first-ever Curator of Rare Books. While in this last position, he began the library's artists' books collection, and took the opportunity to scoop up everything from bark cloth catalogs to anti-war tracts.

Cushing retired in late 2017 (he is now the Rare Books Curator Emeritus) but his legacy remains on the Athenaeum's shelves, in the form of the many additions he has made to them. He spoke with Atlas Obscura about his favorite books, his chain of accidentally strategic resignation attempts, and the various priceless treasures he has rescued from the open stacks.

How did you become a rare books curator?

It really started because I came here right after college and started working in the conservation department. I became head of conservation. We're in charge of restoring and taking care of the paper-based collections—not the art, but the books and the prints. I did that for about 30 years. It was great.

And then I got to a point where I was turning 50 years old, and I thought there must be other things I should do. I handed in my resignation to the director. And he didn't want to accept it, which surprised me.

He offered me several options: I could work full-time, or I could work part-time, or I could take a sabbatical summer off and become Curator of Rare Books. So I decided to take the sabbatical and become the curator. For a while I was both [the conservator and the curator], until we found my replacement, and then I started building the collections.

The director offered me the job, really, because I knew the most about the collections of anybody in the building, because I had been restoring rare material for 30 years. That longevity gives you a better idea of what's here and what isn't here. There were things I thought we should have that we had missed over the years. It gave me a chance to do some retrospective buying, and also to try to figure out what we should be adding right now that was new. For instance, I started building the artists' book collection.

What is an artists' book?

Typically at the Athenaeum, some of the things I liked to collect were books with beautiful bindings, beautifully illustrated books, and beautifully printed books. And obviously it's nice if they have good texts! But all those things are important to me. The really creative energy that was going on when I started, and is still going on now, was going into newer forms of book-making, where artists were making books as art. Sometimes people think of artists' books as books about art, but they're not: they're books that are art.

I had been a very conservative book person, because I had been restoring other people's books. When you're the head of conservation at a book conservatory, you don't try to put your personality in the books. You're trying to be as discreet and innocuous and unnoticed as possible and save the other peoples' work. Artists' books are different than that. They're trying to be more creative. So it sort of switched my brain into trying to be tuned into creative work, rather than preserving other people's work.

Artists' books were also a field that was really beginning to develop just about when I was [beginning to enhance] the collection, in 2001. They've gotten more and more important since then. There certainly were artists' books made before that, and I later had a chance to go back and do some retrospective buying. But often with artists' books, they're very small editions, or they're unique, so if you don't get them when you're new, you don't get them at all.

Were there any early acquisitions that you got really excited about?

The first artists' book that I bought that I still love is called Garment Register, by Harriet Bart. She lives in Minnesota. It's about women working in the garment industry in the early 20th century. She took images of union lists of women working in garment workshops, and used that as the background of a page. And then she would have a picture of a woman wearing a typical outfit from that era. And she also found fabric samples that were the same vintage. They made beautiful combinations. Then she added great quotes from various women authors. That was a handsome book, beautifully made, and got me going on it.

On the first floor [of the Athenaeum], there are still some cases with books that I bought. One of them is called the Squid Book. It's a fabulous book. It's printed on incredibly thin Japanese paper, it's fairly large, and it's bound in very flexible vellum and held together by magnets. It's about discovering a giant squid deep in the ocean off of Tokyo. Beautiful production, and very scarce—there weren't very many made. So that kind of thing is really cool.

I've bought books that were bound in glass, and books that were printed on lead. I got one about Marie Curie and radiation. It comes in a lead box. The pages are lead, and it's got pictures of her and her husband working on studies of radiation. Of course, had she known more, she would have protected herself with lead. As it was, she died of radiation poisoning because she didn't realize that lead was the key to blocking it. It's a fabulous and sort of weird book—it's very heavy, because lead is very heavy, and the pages are soft. They'll bend, and the box will bend. It has a set of glass tubes in it—each tube is a test tube, and there's a glass rod in each one. You take it out and there's a text rolled around the glass rod, and you can read about Marie Curie.

How did you get into this field in general?

I came to the Athenaeum right out of college. I discovered that there was a conservation department here. I wasn't hired to be in it, but I maneuvered my way into it quickly. And then there was a real change in staff, and I was the only one left in the conservation department, and I didn't know enough to be there without a mentor. I was basically an apprentice.

In fact, I resigned then, also. I told the director, you know, "I don't know enough and there's no one here to help me, I should just leave." And he said, "Oh, Stanley, have you got another job you're going to?" And I said no. And he says, "Oh, that's not smart, Stanley."

Was this the same director?

A different one! I've worked for five directors.

This director said, "If you'll stay, the Athenaeum will pay to train you. You can find a bookbinder and study with them." And I did. I found a woman who lived on Beacon Hill at that time, who had studied bookbinding in Paris. She took me on, and she became a real mentor for me. I went to Paris with her. I met her teachers, and bought leather and paper and equipment there.

She opened all sorts of doors for me. She introduced me to a fellow named Philip Hofer, who was a major collector at Harvard, and had helped found Houghton Library. He took me on as a student. We would go over to Houghton and we would go down in the stacks, and he would just pull rare books out and explain to me why they were interesting and why he had bought them. He took me to London and I met various dealers and book people there.

There have been a lot of people who have been very nice to me who, as I say, have opened doors and then pushed me through them. And I try to do that for people now. Over the years, I have tried to share that knowledge, because book knowledge is not easily absorbed. You can read about it, obviously. But the best thing is to see the books and handle the books.

What other things have you been able to do with the rare book collection?

My position has also allowed me to buy all sorts of radical political stuff, which the Athenaeum probably isn't known for. But I could slide in all sorts of great things that I wanted to get. I bought one of the first books by Combat Paper, which a group doing anti-war propaganda, really, I suppose. It's made from paper that is made from the pulped uniforms of people in war, people who went to Iraq for the American invasion. There's a picture of a soldier cutting the uniform off of his own body, and the uniform gets pulped and turned into paper, and they print the picture on the paper made from his uniform.

There's amazing creativity out there that I didn't know about when I was doing conservation. It gave me a chance to really add to the diversity here. I got gay lib books in here too, which interest me a lot. It's a really cool way to make the collection current.

How would you find rare books to buy? Did you go to where they were, or were you able to purchase them from far away?

I would almost never buy a book that I didn't handle. I would go to London and New York and out to California for antiquarian book fairs. But it's also interesting that when you're working for a well-known institution, and you're known to be buying things, people will bring them to you.

There was this one time—I had bought a book in London from a particular dealer. He called me up and said he was coming to New York for a book fair, and he wanted to come see me. I said fine. So he arrived, and he was a very stylish guy—a long hair, Mick Jagger sort of looking guy.

He had a leather male pocketbook on, not very big. It turned out he had come all this way to show me one book. I looked at it, and it was a spectacular book on architecture. Beautiful condition. And I bought it, and then he went back to New York.

How many books do you think you've purchased during your tenure?

Oh, I don't know. No more than one or two thousand, because they are expensive. But that's because a lot of them are really important, and some of them are world-class.

Does the Boston Athenaeum ever get rid of books, or do you only acquire them?

We basically only acquire them. The Athenaeum is an unusual library in that it doesn't de-accession. It doesn't de-accession by use: If you go into the stacks, and you see a book that hasn't been used in a hundred years, it's still waiting for you. And we're not going to get rid of it, because somebody intelligent bought it in the past, and we think someone intelligent will use it in the future.

When we run out of space, we have typically given whole collections to other institutions. Our medical books, which we used to have a lot of, we gave to the Countway Library at Harvard. We had an enormous collection of bound newspapers, which take up a huge amount of space. We kept the ones that are of local interest, but we gave a great number of them to the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, because they collect bound newspapers. We don't put them back on the market, but we don't have enough space to collect everything, which is what we used to do in the 19th century.

How has the library changed since you first started there in 1971?

It has become much less formal. I'm probably the last person who still wears a tie to work. When I first came here, I was totally intimidated. I came here as a reader when I was in college at Boston University. It felt like you were intruding to walk through the front doors, even though you were a member. It's a membership library, so it's got a different aura than a more public library. There's been an attempt to throw the net wider to get a more diverse group of people using us and enjoying us.

That's one of the things I think the administration likes about the artists' book collection—it attracts different people than you might think would come in just to study, say, American History. If you want people who are your age, who think, "What's cool, what's trendy," and they see these exotic books that they don't see anywhere else and they never have heard about, it gets a younger, more diverse group in.

What was it like being an out gay person working at the Athenaeum in the '70s?

I was the first staff member to come out. I felt we needed to break down some of that formality and some of that rigidity. I'm of the generation which first started to come out publicly, and it made all the difference in the world for me. I always felt at home here that way. Also, I've been able to buy all sorts of gay-oriented material for the library, which needs to be here.

I would come into work wearing gay lib buttons, and people would ask me, "What are those?" and I'd tell them. And then I'd go and talk to a colleague—a lesbian who was hired shortly after me—and I'd say, "This person reacted well! This person reacted badly!" It was a whole process of sort of loosening up the place. A little later, three of us who were by then out at the Athenaeum, we wrote a memo to the straight fellow who was in charge of buying books, and said "We're really terrible on gay subjects. You should be buying this, this, and this. And you should consult with us." And he did!

What's the most surprising thing you've ever found here?

I get surprised all the time. I mean, we have 150,000 rare books. It's just astonishing what we have.

One of the ones that still sticks in my mind as an amazing discovery, I found on our open shelves. It's now in the locked room, to give it more security. But it's by John J. Audubon. We have the Birds of America, the great big folio multivolume set of images of birds. But he also wrote an accompanying text about birds, in five volumes.

I came across one of our copies of that on the open shelf, and I realized that it was not only contemporary, but he had signed it, and he had given it to somebody in Boston here. And in order to adorn it, he had included two watercolor paintings of birds, which he had done. They were male and female scarlet tanagers. The male scarlet tanager has black feathers and scarlet feathers, and he had painted the black parts in paint, but he had glued in individual scarlet feathers to fill in the scarlet part of the tanager. It was on our open shelves. I found it. I was like, "This is amazing."

Another great thing I found, also on the open shelf, was a scrapbook of paper samples. It was a catalog of tapa cloth. If you've never run into tapa cloth, it's made from beating the inner bark of bushes that grow in the tropics. It can be very thin and supple. They would paint it with hand-done design work that looks very modern, but in fact it's not. It's early 19th century.

The scrapbook had probably come to Boston from missionaries to Hawaii. When it came in, long ago, nobody knew what it was. It was just given a generic catalog, as "paper samples." But in fact, tapa samples of that era are incredibly rare. And it's incredibly diverse stuff. It's beautiful. So I found that on the open shelf, but now that's not on the open shelf either.

If you go to the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, they have a great collection of tapa cloth, but people don't expect to find it in Boston. You have to realize what you've got. And since then I've just bought all kinds of great stuff about tapa cloth, and more samples, to make the story complete.

How can curating help complete a story?

I know Atlas Obscura has a thing on our skin book. The skin book has been here since before the Civil War. Unfortunately, it's one of the rare books we're known for, because it's so gruesome—bound in the skin of its author. In fact the text is very interesting, and we've put it online now, so you can read the story. He dictated it to the warden of the jail he was in when he was dying. It was here, in Charlestown [Massachusetts]. When I came to work here it was on display, and it was just sort of this oddity. It had been on display for like 40 years at least, and you don't leave things on display for that long, it's just not good for them. So I took it off display when I was finally head of conservation, and I had a box made for it and put it in the locked room. A custom, cloth-covered box.

Then in 2008, I was in New York at the New York Book Fair, and for sale was a set of manuscript journals written by the warden of that jail, who had taken down the memoir of the highwayman. And he mentions the highwayman dying there in his memoirs, in his journal. so I was able to buy the journal ,and coming with the journal also was this large oil painting, a portrait of the warden. Which is a really good painting, it turned out. And also his sword cane, which he had with him to protect himself while he walked through the jail.

This didn't work, because it turned out he was murdered in the jail by an inmate. And the murder is interesting. because the inmate was one of the first people who used the insanity defense to get off, and it worked. He was not killed for it, he was put in an insane asylum. And then he leapt out a window and killed himself.

But the whole story becomes a whole story then. You can put the book into this context. And you can see, it's not just a freak show, it's really part of American history. And I even discovered that the warden was a distant cousin of my great-grandfather, so that was pretty interesting too. The whole thing became kind of fascinating. If you can do that to this iconic book and make it part of a big story, it's like a setting for a jewel. It's very satisfying.

Did you have any restrictions on your collecting?

Of course, they can't just be because I like them. They have to also be suitable for what the Athenaeum collects. It's a humanities library, so anything in the humanities is pretty much fair game. The next person—because there's somebody else who's been hired now to take my place—he'll look at things differently. He'll say, "Oh, why didn't Stanley Cushing buy this? I love this!"

Do you collect books personally?

I don't collect books, because I figured it would be a conflict of interest. If some dealer brought me something that I really coveted, and I thought, "Well, I'll just buy that for me," that's really not ethical. And if it's really great, it should be going to the Athenaeum. So I thought I'd just stay out of that problem. I collect decorative arts for myself, and there is no conflict there. It uses up a lot of my collecting juices. I don't have to spend my own money looking for things for my husband and I, for our home, because I've used up a lot of that inquisitiveness trying to collect for here.

What do you hope people take away from the collection you're leaving behind?

Within our current day of digitization, and everything being on a computer, what I really want is for people to come in and see the books in the building. Artists' books don't digitize very well, because they work better as kinetic sculpture—you have to move with them. And that's harder to do in an effective way on the computer.

For instance, one of the books I've got is called the Stream Book. It's got pages of thick paper that are perforated, and strings run through them. As you turn the pages it makes a cat's cradle. They move and change. Every time you open the book it's a different arrangement. It also makes a sound—the sound of the string coming through those holes. The whole thing is best experienced in reality! It's best if you come in. And anybody can come in and see these books here, they just have to make an appointment. They don't have to be a member. The rare book collection is available for anyone who's interested in it.

Are you going to miss your job?

I'm definitely going to miss it. But it's the right time in my life to be letting other people carry this on day to day. I'm now the Emeritus Curator, so I can still be connected—I have my email account. And I'm a proprietor, so I can come in and use the place anytime I like. I bought a share here in 1973, the first time I resigned, because I figured that I wouldn't be able to use the collections, and I wanted to. So I expect I'll be using the collections as long as I'm living.

This interview was edited and condensed.

Joe Garden was at a barn auction in upstate New York when a mysterious box full of typed notebooks came up for bidding. “[The auctioneer] was describing them as ‘scripts,’” says Garden. It was only after winning the item that Garden discovered he'd acquired a rare collection of the Fun-Master Gag Files, a mid-century newsletter for the joke industry.

At first, Garden—a former features editor at The Onion who's currently working as an antique and second-hand dealer—didn't know what he was looking at. But as he started researching the Fun-Master Gag Files, he soon learned that its author, the comedy writer Billy Glason, had spent decades advertising monthly joke collections in the back pages of showbiz publications including Variety, Backstage, and Show Business. “Let a real professional train you!” promised one ad, alongside offers for Glason's longer titles, such as How to Master the Ceremonies.

“He had a lot of services. He had the ‘Blue Book,’ which was not X-rated, but R-rated jokes; he had the ‘Blackouts,’ which were old vaudeville and burlesque sketches,” says Glason’s one-time student, Tommy Moore, who now bills himself as “The Professor of Fun.” In the 1970s, Moore trained under Glason in the older comic’s cluttered Manhattan apartment, even purchasing a $3,000, multi-volume “encyclopedia” of jokes from the man. “He was a cranky old guy, but he knew his stuff. He was Yoda,” says Moore, who would later devote a chapter in his book, A Ph.D. in Happiness From the Great Comedians, to Glason.

Glason got his start in entertainment at a young age. According to the 2012 book The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville, Glason was born in Boston in 1904 (although the vaudeville historian Trav S.D. contends that he may have been older), and started singing funny songs at small venues in his teens. He eventually became a staple of the U.S. East Coast comedy circuit, making a name for himself as an opening act who was tough to follow. “Look, you bring ‘em in and I’ll entertain ‘em,” he was often quoted as saying. Like many performers of the day, Glason’s act mixed music and Borscht Belt one-liners designed to entertain any crowd, every time.

As the years went by, radio brought a new type of entertainment into the home, endangering a number of vaudeville careers, including Glason’s. By the 1940s, Glason had made a name for himself as a joke writer, selling gags to anyone willing to pay for them. Eventually, the Fun-Master Gag Files were born.

“He told me, [a comedy career] is like opening a store, and the products are your jokes,” says Moore.

The monthly Fun-Master newsletter, which cost a few dollars per issue, contained sometimes as many as 20 pages of jokes, broken up into subsections such as “Stories,” “Insults—Squelches—Sarcasm,” and “Humorous Views of the News.” The jokes and gags within ran the gamut from cleverly convoluted yarns to snappy one-liners:

“I know a Texan who rides on a solid gold saddle. Every time he hits a bump, he strikes it rich!”

“Last week I played golf on a real crummy golf course. It had holes in it!”

“He’s a real hypochondriac. When he goes to a cocktail party, he stirs his drink with a thermometer!”

Thanks to Glason’s constant back-page advertising, Moore says the newsletter became a well-known industry resource. Famous comedians including Flip Wilson, Dick Gregory, Bob Hope, and Johnny Carson reportedly subscribed, or otherwise got jokes and training from Glason—even if not all of them wanted to admit it. “Jackie Gleason didn’t want to be on record as buying the Billy Glason gag files, so he had his writer, Harry Crane, buy them,” says Moore. “It was the writer who bought them, but it was Jackie Gleason who ended up with them.”

While Glason made a brisk business of selling jokes, he was against stealing another comic's material. "He said, 'these jokes that I’m telling you are basic, old format jokes.' He said, 'you can take these because these are public domain. You can take these and reword them to suit your own style,'" says Moore. While much of the material in the gag files was undoubtedly Glason's original material, some of the jokes certainly came from comic traditions older than him. "In one of the ones I was flipping through, there was even a 'How to get to Carnegie Hall' joke," says Garden. "Even in the late '50s that one had whiskers."

It wasn't only comedians who took advantage of Glason’s jokes. Moore says that the newsletter was also bought by ventriloquists, DJs, and magicians. Anybody who needed some jokes in their act.

The Fun-Master newsletters were also often representative of the comedy of the day, for better and for worse. Jokes about nagging, controlling wives—or marriage as a prison sentence for men—abound, along with a number of ethnic stereotypes. Garden says that his auction haul also included another of Glason’s collections titled Pedro: A Compilation of Gags for the Spanish or Mexican Character, which he says is unsurprisingly filled with dated, offensive stereotypes and racially insensitive material. At the same time, during his career, Glason maintained a staunch insistence on working clean. "It used to really make him angry when people used profanity for the sake of getting a shock laugh," says Moore.

It’s not clear when the first Fun-Master newsletter, originally titled The Comedian, was released. Judging by the dates on later editions, Glason likely started producing them in the late 1940s. All of Glason’s newsletters and collections were hand-typed and reproduced on a mimeograph. His apartment on 54th Street in Manhattan became a literal joke factory. “The front room of his apartment was his office, and it was legitimately waist deep in mimeographed copies that he was putting together for his monthly edition,” says Moore.

Glason died in 1985, and Moore says that he later learned from Glason’s daughter that most of the vaudevillian’s copious writings had been disposed of, making Garden’s find even more amazing. As Moore tells it, Glason only produced 26 copies of his complete encyclopedia, which collected editions of the Fun-Master along with other material, and to his knowledge only three of those complete works survive.

But even as the memory of Glason’s work has faded somewhat from the public consciousness, Moore sees his legacy in the work of later comedians like Steven Wright. “Any one-liner comedian is affected by what [Glason] put out for all of those years,” he says.

As for Garden’s finds, he plans to split up the physical collection among friends, many of whom are fans of comedy history. But first he made sure to digitize them all. “This is the last time this particular collection is going to be in one place. So the comedy historian, the comedy person in me is kind of [inspired to document it,]” he says. Call them cheesy, call them offensive, you just can’t call the Fun-Master newsletters forgotten.

Spilling red wine may be the ultimate party foul, especially if it lands on the host’s couch or carpet. But for the ancient Greeks, a party wasn’t good unless the wine flowed freely. The Greeks didn’t just fling their glasses of wine about willy-nilly, though. This game of wine-slinging—known as kottabos—had a discernible target, and both pride and prizes were on the line.

Kottabos had two iterations. The preferred way to play, which is the iteration often depicted in plays and especially on pieces of pottery, involved a pole. Players would balance a small bronze disk, called a plastinx, on top of it. The goal was to flick dregs of one’s wine at the plastinx so that it would fall, making a clattering crash as it hit the manes, a metal plate or domed pan that lay roughly two-thirds down the pole. The competitors reclined on their couches, arranged in a square or circle around the pole a couple of yards away. Each then took turns launching their wine from their kylix, a shallow, circular vessel with a looping handle on each side.

A less common version of the game featured players aiming at a number of small bowls, which floated in water within a larger basin. In this case, the object of the game was to sink as many of the small bowls as possible with the same arcing shots. Since it lacked the resounding clang of the plastinx striking the manes, this version of kottabos has been regarded as the quieter, more civilized way to play.

Technique was essential to maintain elegant form, accuracy, and to avoid spilling on oneself. The player, sprawling on a drinking couch and propped up on their left elbow, placed two fingers through the loop of one handle and cast the wine dregs in a high arc toward the target. The technique has been likened to the motion of throwing a javelin, due to the way the player threaded their fingers through the handle the same way one held the leather strap used to throw the spear.

Critias, the 5th century academic and writer, wrote about this “glorious invention” stemming from Sicily, “where we put up a target to shoot at with drops from our wine-cup whenever we drink it.” While a handful of modern academics question the game’s Sicilian origins, kottabos definitely spread throughout parts of Italy (as the Etruscans played it) and Greece, too. The kottabos craze even resulted in industrious people building special round rooms where it could be played, so all competitors could be equidistant from the target.

Naturally, kottabos made a frequent appearance at drinking parties known as symposia. But a few years ago, Dr. Heather Sharpe, the Associate Professor of Art History at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, brought the game into a sphere that’s perhaps more evocative of how we use the word “symposium” today: academia. Having seen the game portrayed in so many of the pots they were studying, she and her students decided to play a few rounds of kottabos using kylixes that a colleague, Andrew Snyder, made for them using a 3-D printer.

Since they were on campus, Dr. Sharpe and her students used diluted grape juice rather than wine. “Within about half an hour there was diluted grape juice everywhere, which made me realize it must have gotten pretty messy,” she says. “You’re aiming at the target, but the funny thing is these symposia were typically held in a more-or-less square room, and you had participants on 3 ½ sides. So if you missed the target it wouldn’t have been surprising if you hit someone across the room.”

The recreation also proved that the temptation to take a shot at a rival across the room must have been strong. In fact, in Aeschylus’s play Ostologoi (The Bone Collectors), Odysseus describes how during a game of kottabos, Eurymachus, one of Penelope’s suitors, repeatedly aimed his wine at Odysseus’s head, rather than at the plastinx, to humiliate him. And it seems that players took the game seriously, too, in spite of their casual reclining poses. “It’s funny because they did seem to be pretty competitive about this,” says Dr. Sharpe. “The Greeks, in a strange way, loved competing against each other, whether in the symposium or out in the gymnasium.”

Nonetheless, these were not high stakes contests. A winner might typically receive a sweet as a prize. Playing for kisses or other favors from attending courtesans (hetairai, as they were called) was also a possibility. Vases portraying kottabos reveal that women played the game as hetairai, too.

But eroticism didn’t just stop at prizes. It was customary to dedicate one’s throw to a lover, with the implication that success at kottabos augured success in one’s love life. Others didn’t mince words. In one poem, Cratinus recalls a hetaira dedicating her shot to the Corinthian male organ: “It would kill her to drink wine with water in it. Instead she drinks down two pitchers of strong stuff, mixed one-to-one, and she calls out his name and tosses her wine lees from her ankule [kylix] in honor of the Corinthian dick.”

It seems that kottabos’s free-wheeling nature and prizes weren’t enough to sustain it as a game, though. It eventually disappeared from artwork and plays, which suggests that it faded from popularity in the 4th century BC. The experiments of Dr. Sharpe and others aside, it seems unlikely to see a revival. Part of that might be due to how difficult it is to play, which doesn’t get any easier after players have had more than a few glasses of wine. The inevitable cleanup afterwards is a deterrent, too.

Just ask Hugh Johnson, the wine expert and author, who once tried his hand at the game. “I have had a kottabos stand made, and practiced assiduously,” Johnson recalls in The Story of Wine. “From personal experience I can say it is not all easy … and it makes a terrible mess on the floor.”

Among science-fiction writers, only a minority strive for accuracy in their depictions of technology, physics, and protagonists being sucked out the bay doors without a fully functioning space suit. Even fewer worry whether the economy of an alien capital makes any sense. But Andy Weir is one such author, and he may make up a group of one.

Weir is best known as the author of The Martian, a novel about a wisecracking, stranded-on-Mars astronaut who was recently played by Matt Damon in a highly plausible movie of the same name. Weir is a former computer programmer who, in his own words, is the type of person who asks questions like “Why does the Federation have starships if they can beam people hundreds of light-years?” and complains that "lunar colonies in sci-fi usually have medium to high levels of bullshit in their economics."

So, when writing his latest novel, Artemis, Weir put a lot of thought into the economics of his own lunar colony. "Artemis" is the name of the colony, which is a resort town for tourists paying $70,000 for the trip of a lifetime.

That $70,000 figure didn't come from nowhere—Weir wrote a 10-page paper that describes his economic model of Artemis. (While Weir notes that he had to make assumptions about the development of spacecrafts and space tourism, his efforts won him praise from economist Tyler Cowen.) He also drew on the experiences of real-life astronauts—and the physics and chemistry of brewing coffee in space—to imagine the culinary landscape of the moon in 2080, when his story takes place.

I asked Weir about the quality of space-coffee, why he cares about economics in sci-fi, and the cost of fine dining on the moon. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The standard food on Artemis is algae, and it doesn’t sound like it tastes very good. Why do you imagine algae as the staple food?

Artemis doesn’t have a large volume—it just can’t afford to grow wheat, barley, potatoes, or any other common staple crop. Importing food from Earth would be cost-prohibitive for most of Artemis’s population. So they grow algae in vats. It’s the most space-efficient way to create human-digestible calories.

Also, chlorella algae (the type used to make “gunk”) is a superfood, providing all the nutrition a human needs. And it has a cool natural feature: It will make more protein or more sugars internally based on the amount of frequencies of light it absorbs. So it can be fine-tuned to be perfect for human consumption.

You have said that you want your books to be scientifically accurate, and that you tried to make the economy of Artemis as realistic as possible, too. Why is it important to you that your fictional world is realistic—all the way down to plausible food prices?

I just try to write stories that I would enjoy. And when I see a fictional society, the first question I ask myself is “How does this society sustain itself?” Without a functional economy, no society can survive. Also, the growth and nature of a city is heavily dependent on where its money comes from. So I wanted to “grow” Artemis in a plausible and reasonable way from the ground up.

One example of your economic modeling is that you tried to determine how much a good Cantonese meal would cost on Artemis in 2080. Which are the biggest factors that determine the price of Earth food on a lunar colony?

Really, there are only two factors that matter: the price of the food on Earth, and the cost of transporting it.

I wrote a 10-page paper on the economics of Artemis and how I arrived at the cost of transporting goods there. But the end result is this: It costs about $160 (in 2015 U.S. dollars) to transport a kilogram of cargo from Earth to Artemis.

It also takes seven days for the cargo to get there. So whatever Cantonese food or cooking ingredients you want to send have to be able to survive in space for that long. They can be frozen or preserved however they normally would be on Earth.

A good Cantonese meal for one at a high-end restaurant in the U.S. will run you about $60. The total dry mass of that meal will be on the order of 500 grams (because of course you’d dehydrate whatever you sent first). So that’s another $80 in transport costs. So a $60 Cantonese meal on Earth would cost you $140 on Artemis.

In your book, all the "Earthlings" hate the coffee on Artemis. Why is that, and what would need to change for us to enjoy coffee in space?

The main problem isn’t the moon or space, it’s the atmospheric pressure in Artemis itself. It’s one-fifth the pressure of Earth at sea-level. Perfectly fine for human health, but it has some bad side effects. One problem is that the boiling point of water is 61°C. That temperature makes for tepid coffee and also prevents it from brewing correctly. [On Earth, hot coffee is usually served at temperatures of 71°C or higher.] You could deal with this by brewing the coffee in a pressure-cooker, or by cold-brewing. But no matter what, when you drink it, it’ll have to be 61°C.

Another problem is that your taste buds don’t work quite right at lower pressure. That’s why airline food tastes so bad (in flight, the cabin of an airline is at a much lower pressure than sea level Earth). So Artemis would not be a great place to go if you’re a foodie.

If you made a city on the Moon/Mars/wherever that had a full atmosphere of pressure inside, all those problems would go away. But it adds an unnecessary amount of engineering to fully pressurize vessels.

One option (which I’m probably going to have in a sequel) is to have an entire restaurant that’s in-pressure. You go in, enjoy your delicious meal, then spend four hours decompressing in a chamber.

Thanks to the success of The Martian, you’ve talked to a number of astronauts and NASA people. Did they give you any insight on what’s different about eating in reduced gravity and what it’s like to eat on the moon?

I did learn a lot about eating in zero gravity. Turns out the experience there is even worse than what Artemisians endure. In zero-g, your sinuses and nose get stuffed up—like having a low-grade cold—because there’s no gravity to pull the fluids down into your throat. So, just as food tastes bland when you have a cold, food tastes bland for astronauts in zero-g. They deal with this mainly by having really flavorful food.

Scientists seem to appreciate your efforts to make your science-fiction novels accurate in terms of the technology. Do you think economists and econ nerds will applaud your efforts to make Artemis's markets and the lunar-Earth trade realistic?

I have received some positive feedback from my fellow economics geeks. Though econ geeks are far less common than space geeks.

Conspiracy theories, like jokes, do not translate easily across cultures. Rooted in the anxieties of the place that spawned them, theories popular in one part of the world may never penetrate another. In Russia, a conspiracy theory focused on an American plot to gut Russian culture—known as the Dulles Doctrine or the Dulles Plan—is so well known it has its own meme. But as The New York Times notes, this theory “may seem obscure to Westerners.”

A former employee of the Internet Research Agency, one of the organizations indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice for interfering in the 2016 presidential election, had to write an essay on the plan as part of his job application, the Times reports. In Russia, the Dulles Plan is “perhaps the most popular ‘indigenous’ post-Soviet conspiracy theory,” says Alexander Panchenko, a literary scholar at the the Russian Academy of Sciences, who's studying the plan and its influence. The faux document at the heart of the conspiracy theory is supposed to lay out a strategy for undermining Russian power by sowing “chaos and confusion"—to defeat Russia by destroying its people from the inside.

The Dulles Plan first bubbled up in the early 1990s, not long after the fall of the Soviet Union. Attributed to Allen Dulles, the first civilian head of U.S. intelligence, and supposedly written in the 1940s, the plan explains in grandiose prose how America can defeat Russia by undermining the country’s foundational values.

The idea, according to the text, is to “hammer into the people's consciousness the cult of sex, violence, sadism, and betrayal, in a word, immorality,” with the help of “our accomplices, helpers, and allies in Russia herself.” In this corrupted version of Russia, “Bureaucratic red-tape will be elevated to a virtue. Honesty and orderliness will be ridiculed as being of no use to anyone, an anachronism.” The whole country will be led into moral turpitude: “Rudeness and insolence, lies and deceit, drunkenness and drug-addiction, animal fear of everyone and everything, indecency, betrayal, nationalism, and strife between ethnic groups, and above all hatred for the Russian ethnos: we'll cultivate all of that, quietly and skillfully.”

References to the Dulles Plan first surfaced in a pro-Communist newspaper, Narodnaja Pravda, in 1992 and soon started popping up across the Russian media. From its first appearances, it was twisted up with other conspiracy theories: one early article, by a religious leader in the Orthodox church, put the Dulles Plan alongside the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an explanation for Russia’s moral decline.

But soon researchers and reporters sussed out an earlier, fictional version of the plan, published in the novel The Eternal Call (Vechnyi Zov). One of the book’s villains, a Trotskyite and Nazi collaborator, lays out this vision of a plan to defeat Russia after World War II. The book, says Panchenko, has an anti-Semitic undercurrent, too, eliding Trotskyism and Judaism into an enemy force. The book’s author, Anatoly Ivanov, first wrote the passage in the early 1970s, but it didn’t pass through censors and into print until the 1980s.

Even after the Dulles Plan was traced to this fictional account, though, its popularity did not diminish. “This fake document has been more influential in shaping the Russian popular historical consciousness and memory of the Cold War than any of the reams of genuine archival documents that have been declassified in recent decades,” writes the University of Melbourne’s Julie Fedor, who specializes in modern Russian history. It’s a useful tool for explaining the changes that have transformed Russian culture in the post-Soviet era. In the Dulles Plan meme, the text reads “план даллеса не существует но действует”—“The Dulles Plan: Does not exist, still works.”

But not everyone believes the plan is fake, either. “Now, its supporters would discuss either Ivanov’s prophetic gift that allowed him somehow mystically learn about the intentions of Dulles or his contacts with certain KGB officers that shared with him their knowledge of the CIA secret plans,” says Panchenko.

Though supporters of the theory have sometimes hinted they could produce documents proving the connection, there's no actual evidence of an American intelligence plot to undermine Russian culture. The power of the Dulles Plan comes from its worth as a catch-all explanation for any changes in Russia that are perceived as negative: If the culture is falling apart, don't look at anyone in power in Russia. It's obviously a CIA plot to rot the heart of Russia's power.

In the late 19th century, American squirrels flooded London parks. To Victorians, uninitiated to the perils of invasive species, these creatures were exotic, attractive, even cuddly. The native red squirrels, by comparison, seemed positively old hat. Wealthy landowners arranged to have the gray critters move into their own estates—the 11th Duke of Bedford, Herbrand Russell, liked them so much he gifted them to parks and properties across the country—and they gradually spread from the top to the bottom of the British Isles.

These animals, however fuzzy, have proven deeply deleterious to Britain's native population of red squirrels. Gray squirrels carry squirrel pox, which kills red squirrels. They're also bigger, hardier, and eat much more food. And a new study in the journal Animal Behavior suggests that gray squirrels have yet another string to their bow: They're better at problem solving than red squirrels.

In a study by scientists from the universities of Exeter and Edinburgh, in the United Kingdom, squirrels were given two tasks, each with a hazelnut reward. In the "easier" one, squirrels had to remove a transparent lid; a "harder" task required a more complex process of pushing and pulling levers. Red and gray squirrels alike removed the lid with aplomb, but a staggering 91 percent of the gray ones were able to crack the harder task, compared to just 62 percent of the red ones.

Despite having lived in the U.K. for millennia, red squirrels are now outnumbered by their foreign cousins by more than 15 to one. Researchers from the study have suggested that gray squirrels' cannier sensibilities may, in part, be to blame. "[Problem solving] might be especially important for an invasive species like gray squirrels, as they have evolved elsewhere and have to adapt to their surroundings," Pizza Ka Yee Chow, of Exeter's Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour, said in a statement. What's still not clear, Chow said, was whether they really were better problem solvers, or whether having to adjust to a new environment had forced them to up their game.

Either way, the prognosis for Britain's red squirrels is a little bleak—though there may be a silver lining. The red squirrels who were able to solve the trickier task, scientists said, did so quicker than the speediest gray squirrels. While gray squirrels may, on average, be better at these tasks, there's a special crew of ultra-bright red squirrels who would likely feel very pleased with themselves—if they weren't squirrels.

From peacocks to blue poison dart frogs, flora and fauna come in all colors of the rainbow. There’s so much color diversity, it can take scientists weeks to replicate a natural color—especially red—using electron beam lithography, a nanotechnology that moves an electron beam to “write” a color on a surface. Turns out, according to a new study, these natural colors have a replicable genetic code.

The study, conducted by biotech company Hoekmine BV and the University of Cambridge, examined how genetic alteration affected flavobacterium IR1, which reflects light at different wavelengths to create its own metallic green color. Flavobacterium IR1 is distinctive because it doesn't require pigments such as chlorophyll or melanin to produce its shiny hue. Rather, the colony-based organism has "structural color," meaning it relies on its internal organizational nanostructure to emit colors.

This structure made the flavobacterium the perfect specimen for the study, the results of which were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Each bacterium "is a rod shape around half a micrometer* in diameter," says lead author Villads Egede Johansen. "The colony pack in an orderly fashion like a pile of tubes or cylinders." The researchers genetically mutated the sizes and dimensions of the colony to see if the flavobacterium changed its green color. Not only did the engineering work, the researchers also captured the whole spectrum of the color scale from blue to red. Though it is difficult for the organism to capture non-spectral colors like white, pink, and brown, the bacterium can change spectral colors according to different angles.

“We mapped several genes with previously unknown functions and we correlated them to the colonies' self-organisational capacity and their colouration,” said Colin Ingham, CEO of Hoekmine BV, in a press statement.

Now that researchers understand the genetic code behind natural colors, they can create the bacterial equivalent of the Photoshop color eye-dropper tool and grow the vivid colors that are present in peacock feathers within 24 hours.

The researchers have a broader end game for their breakthrough findings. As Silvia Vignolini from the Cambridge's Department of Chemistry concluded in the press release, “the future is open for biodegradable paints on our cars and walls—simply by growing exactly the colour and appearance we want!”

*Correction: The story originally said each bacterium is about half a millimeter. They're even smaller.

It was a clear autumn day in Port Willunga, Australia. The sand was golden, the sun was high. The beach was speckled with colonies of birds at rest in front of the waves. Except they weren’t birds, exactly—they were plastic decoy ducks. Thousands of them. And a drone whirred above in an effort to tally them up.

Drones have become a common tool in researchers’ belts. The aircraft can be outfitted with sensors and other instruments; piloted remotely, they can climb or swoop to crannies or canopies that would be hard to access by foot. From high off the ground, they can telegraph information about ecology or activities across an expansive landscape.

But as scientists zip these gadgets through the sky, a few questions remain about how reliable the data is. “Drones have been used to monitor different animals that can be seen from above, including elephants, seals, and nesting birds. But, until now, the accuracy of using drones to count wildlife was unclear," said Jarrod Hodgson, a Ph.D. candidate from the University of Adelaide’s Environment Institute and School of Biological Sciences, in a statement.

To tackle the accuracy question, Hodgson and his collaborators stippled the shoreline with those fake fowl. Unlike flesh-and-feather birds, which have a habit of taking to the air or water, decoy birds stay put. Stationary objects are easier to count, and a known quantity was key to measuring the accuracy of a counting tool.

The researchers simulated 10 colonies of greater crested tern, Thalasseus bergii, each comprised of somewhere between 463 and 1,017 members. Experienced ecologists hoofed it over the shore to conduct a census by foot and binoculars. Meanwhile, the drone plunged and rose, snapping photos from various heights. Citizen scientists were tasked with counting the decoy ducks from these pictures, and the researchers also devised an algorithm to tally up the numbers.

Overall, the drone’s counts were much more precise than the ground counts, the researchers report in a new study in Methods in Ecology and Evolution. This accuracy increased with higher-quality images.

Decoy ducks aren’t likely to be rattled by drones, of course, but in other circumstances, researchers have wondered whether these aircraft bug the wildlife they’re dispatched to study. As Popular Science reported last year, one group of researchers noted that bears’ heart rates spiked when drones buzzed near them. Another drone-flying team noticed that murre birds would flee their nests when the machine hovered too close, sometimes toppling the eggs or fledglings in the process.

Conducting a bird census by foot can also be disruptive, David Bird, an emeritus professor of wildlife biology at McGill University, told Popular Science. “While you’re doing that, you’re disturbing the hell out of the birds,” Bird said. “They’re getting off their nests and flying around and crapping on people and pecking their heads so you have to wear hard hats, and people also step on the nests.” Foot traffic, however ginger, can trample ecologically sensitive areas. Drones aren’t a perfect solution, Bird also conceded—a gull thwacked his team’s drone from the sky and into the ocean. To keep things a little less exciting, future efforts might entail climbing to higher altitudes, keeping a greater distance, and painting the drone to resemble another type of bird. The key is to get the best data possible, with the smallest degree of intrusion.

Hodgson said there’s a compelling case for drone-assisted research, especially as species’ environments change dramatically and rapidly. (Already, researchers are using drones outfitted with thermal sensors to track how thawing ice affects Arctic polar bears.) "Our results show that monitoring animals with drones produces better data that we can use to proactively manage wildlife,” he said. Decoy ducks aren't in any particular danger, of course, but they can help researchers refine their tools for the real thing.

We know that the Romans liked boxing. Roman Emperor Augusts used to love watching matches, whether fought among professionals or street fighters, and he famously exiled the actor Pylades after he disrupted a match by giving the finger to a fellow spectator. Despite this popularity, it is rare to encounter boxing artifacts when digging around Roman sites, as boxing gear was mostly made of perishable materials, such as leather and wool. That's what makes the recent discovery of a pair of boxing gloves so notable.

In the summer of 2017, a team of archaeologists led by Dr. Andrew Birley, Director of Excavations at U.K. heritage charity The Vindolanda Trust, was digging in the ground at Vindolanda, a former Roman fort near Hadrian's Wall in northern England, when they unearthed what are considered the only surviving examples of boxing gloves from the Roman era.

As The Guardian notes, the two leather items are more like padded bands than actual gloves and are not part of a matching pair. The bigger one was cut out from a single piece of leather and was filled with an organic material that could protect the boxer’s knuckles. On the outside it was covered by leather, which showed signs of wear and tear. The smaller glove was filled with twisted leather fiber and was marked by the shape of the wearer’s knuckles.

The fact that the items did not contain metal, which was usually fitted into the gloves of professional boxers, suggests that they were used during training rather than in official boxing matches.

Sparring was a common training practice among Roman army troops and many soldiers enjoyed gambling on informal boxing matches set up among fellow servicemen. But the sport dates to well before the Roman era. The earliest depictions of a boxing-like activity date to the Bronze Age, during the Minoan and Mycenaean periods, about 2600 to 1100 B.C. By 688 B.C. the Greeks included boxing in the list of official Olympic disciplines.

“I have seen representations of Roman boxing gloves depicted on bronze statues, paintings, and sculptures, but to have the privilege of finding two real leather examples is exceptionally special," Dr. Birley said in a release.

Other notable finds unearthed at Vindolanda include some rare swords, copper horse gear, writing tablets, bath clogs, and leather shoes. The site is unusually rich in ancient organic artifacts as a result of oxygen-free patches in the soil. “There is no oxygen in the soil and therefore no erosion of what has been left,” says Sonya Galloway from the The Vindolanda Trust. “We find objects in almost perfect condition, just as they were left nearly 2,000 years ago."

It’s one thing to try and make the world’s largest pizza. Delivering it, though, is a little dicier.

Yet Mallie’s Sports Grill & Bar, a restaurant in Southgate, Michigan, took on the challenge of making the world’s largest deliverable pizza. Last week, they cooked a 100-pound pie that they’ll deliver right to your doorstep—provided that your doors are wide enough to accommodate a 6 foot by 6 foot pie. Alternatively, you can order the pizza at Mallie’s, though it’ll cost you and your 100-150 closest friends $300.

Mallie’s proprietor, Steve Mallie, says the restaurant made the extremely large pizza with a special convection oven they fashioned out of a shipping container. They first picked up the 50 pounds of dough from Caprara, a nearby bakery. Next, chefs generously doused the oven’s shelf with cornmeal and flour to keep the dough from becoming soggy and sticky, respectively. They added 35 pounds of sauce, 15 pounds of shredded cheese, and oodles of pepperoni, then plopped it into the oven for roughly two hours, according to local outlet MLive.com.

The oven, which is retrofitted with a shelf that acts like a cooking sheet, was first built to shatter another world record: the largest commercially available hamburger. Mallie and company made one that weighs a cool 1,793 pounds.

Since they first unveiled a 10-pound hamburger over a decade ago, Mallie’s has become something of a mecca for oversized-food enthusiasts. “We’ve had a two gallon ice cream sundae, we’ve got two-pound tacos, five-pound burritos, a spicy food challenge,” Mallie says. The restaurant is currently waiting to hear back from Guinness on their world record attempt for the largest commercially available pizza. But given that the current record is 54 inches, it appears they have this one in the bag.

An actual delivery does require some logistics on the eater’s part. For starters, Mallie’s needs at least a 24-hour notice on weekdays (and a 48-hour notice on weekends) to make the pizza. Mallie's can deliver the pie via a custom-made box that sits on top of a truck bed, but you'll need a large enough table. For customers making the effort, Mallie's is offering a perk: free delivery within five miles of the restaurant.

So far, Mallie says, the restaurant has sold two pies, and there’s more interest every day.

On the afternoon of Sunday, February 18, Las Vegas residents Stacey Taylor and Dave Schweiger did what they do pretty much every weekend: they swung by 6171 West Charleston Boulevard to check on the bunnies. Most days, there are hundreds of wild house rabbits there, hopping around on the grounds of a state mental health facility.

Taylor—the head of a local rabbit rescue group—and Schweiger, a longtime volunteer, visit the grounds often to feed and water the rabbits. That day, they also wanted to pick up a few of them, so they could get them checked out by a vet and take them to an upcoming adoption event.

Instead, they were confronted by a nightmarish scene. "We started seeing dead bunnies all over the place," says Schweiger. "We saw over 30. And we knew there were more underground that we couldn't see."

As Atlas Obscura reported last year, Las Vegas is full of "dump site bunnies": abandoned pets and their offspring, who have formed their own ad-hoc communities in the city's yards, state parks, and other green spaces. For about five years, volunteers like Taylor and Schweiger have been trying to help the animals: they lay out fresh food and water for them, and work to educate the public about what it really takes to own a bunny, so as to cut down on abandonment. When resources allow, they also hold local adoption events for rabbits they rescue from the sites.

It is unclear who killed the rabbits at 6171 West Charleston. On Monday, volunteers spotted an unknown person dumping vegetables at the site that seemed to be covered in antifreeze. (They've since sent the vegetables, as well as several of the dead rabbits, to get tested.) The Department of Health and Human Services has "asked for an investigation into the situation," writes Nevada Health Department Social Services Chief Karla Delgado in an email.

Even before this disaster, some sort of reckoning seemed imminent: On February 16, two days before the rabbit purge, the DHHS issued a statement saying that feral rabbits "can carry bacterial and viral illnesses," that feeding them "must cease immediately," and that "trapping activities" would soon begin. (In 2015, the state contracted with a local animal sanctuary to re-home the rabbits, an effort that was largely unsuccessful.) "The plan was and continues to be ... to work with Animal Control to humanely trap and relocate the rabbits," writes Delgado, who says the DHHS also plans to "reach out to the Bunny Rescue Groups."

As they search for answers, though, the volunteers are also taking action. Since the weekend, dozens of volunteers have been taking shifts at the dump site, luring bunnies into carriers and away from danger. Local pet stores have donated food, supplies, and space.

The volunteers have also been preparing for a well-timed "transport"—a new strategy they added to their arsenal just this past year. It works like this: First, local bunny-lovers gather up dozens of the dump site rabbits. They get them checked out at the vet, spay or neuter them, and kit them out with the necessary supplies. In the meantime, a couple of volunteers from elsewhere in the country start driving an empty van down to Vegas. When they get there, they load up with bunnies and drive back, stopping along the way to drop each of their fuzzy charges off with a family that is ready to take care of it.

Previous transports have spirited off a few dozen bunnies at once. This one—the biggest yet—was supposed to rescue 75. Given recent events, though, they've decided to send even more: "We're sitting here with well over 100 [bunnies]," says Schweiger, all checked out and ready to head to new homes across the country.

This still leaves a lot of bunnies in limbo, though. “We got 72 yesterday, and I don’t know how many more [before that],” says Schweiger. Volunteers are putting the rabbits up until they can find them permanent homes. (Schweiger took in five males, which are currently camped out in his backyard and garage.) The large transport is set to leave later this week, and the next one, which had been set for mid-March, might get pushed forward. Bunny-lovers far and wide are providing financial support through a GoFundMe fundraising campaign, which keeps outstripping its goals.

Whether or not the bunnies know that greener pastures await, their human helpers are thrilled to be able to send them along. "This has been chaos," Schweiger says. "But it's really rewarding to get these guys out of here."

In the Thomas the Tank Engine junction, Duncan the train is not Mr. Popularity. "Pushy puffer," huffs one engine. "Bossy boots!" adds another. He is mean-spirited and lazy—with a steaming temper. But far from the Thomas universe, in Gwynedd, North Wales, lives a train called Douglas. This train might have inspired the fictional Scottish steam train, but the similarities end there: Instead, the No. 6 locomotive is beloved, Welsh, and has been merrily chugging along for 100 years, the BBC reports.

The Talyllyn Railway is Britain's oldest continuously operated narrow gauge railway, founded in 1866 to ferry slate and passengers 7.25 miles from the quarries above the remote Welsh village of Abergynolwyn to the main station at Twywn. Douglas the train was originally built in 1918 for the Airservice Construction Corps—for the first 28 years of its service, it was used by Britain's Royal Air Force, before beginning service at the Talyllyn Railway in 1954.

The railway has been run by volunteers for many years, among them the Reverend Wilbert Awdry, the creator of the Thomas the Tank Engine books. Many of the stories and trains from the series were inspired by real-life events from this very junction, including curmudgeonly Duncan.

To celebrate its centenary, Douglas is getting brand new livery. For decades, it has been painted red, under the guise of "Duncan," to the delight of many visiting pint-sized Thomas fans. Now, however, the train has been repainted blue in an RAF-themed design, to coincide with the air forces' own 100-year anniversary.

For decades, scientists thought that all bigeye sixgill sharks, named for their distinct number of gills (most sharks only have five), belonged to the same species, Hexanchus nakamurai. But new research shows that sixgill sharks swimming in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean are actually a different species from those in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

A team of marine biologists led by Toby Daly-Engel, the director of the Shark Conservation Lab at the Florida Institute of Technology, analyzed 1,310 base pairs of two mitochondrial genes found in sharks from the three different oceans. Their results, published in the journal Marine Biodiversity, prove that the Atlantic sixgills are indeed a different type of shark. The newly recognized species is called Hexanchus vitulus, the Atlantic sixgill shark.

Despite this new discovery, there is still a lot that we don't know about these elusive creatures. They are mostly found in deep-sea waters that are out of reach for biologists. "What's amazing about this shark is that they're incredibly cryptic; the genetics was really the only clue [that they belong to a different species]," Dr. Daly-Engel says. "Part of it is that they're so big, and so deep, that they're rarely caught, and it's difficult to compare one specimen to another."

These ancient creatures evolved over 250 million years ago, before dinosaurs were around. They are known for their solitary lifestyle. They reproduce very slowly, which could become a problem as commercial fishing moves ever deeper into the ocean. Researchers hope that documenting sixgill diversity will raise awareness of the need to protect them.

"Because we now know there are two unique species, we have a sense of the overall variation in populations of sixgills," Dr. Daly-Engel said in a statement. "We understand that if we overfish one of them, they will not replenish from elsewhere in the world."

When you think of fake food, plastic restaurant replicas might come to mind. While these displays may seem like accurate representations of what you're about to eat, they often don't look particularly appetizing, or even that realistic.

Then there's the artist Huong Huynh, and her sewn felt creations of food, which are almost too real looking. It wouldn't be all that surprising to see one of her soft sculptures in a bakery case. Even worse—or better, depending on how you think about it—they're flawless, without any danger of melting frosting or withering fruit.

Huynh's superlative sewing skills are the result of long practice. The Houston-based artist opened her Etsy store Milkfly in 2010, and started out with 20 pieces. Unlike her now near-photographic accuracy, those early food sculptures still had some rough edges. "The felt food I made in the beginning [was] much more simplistic than the ones I make today," Huynh says. "I am always learning."

Parts of Huynh's journey have been rough as well. Her family fled Vietnam to escape the ravages of the war. Her parents, along with their first four children, spent a year in a Malaysian refugee camp. Huynh was born there, and shortly thereafter her family arrived in the U.S.A. After stints in Michigan and Louisiana, they settled in Houston, Texas, where Huynh still lives today.

Huynh attributes her creative spark to those difficult early years. "I was creative and crafty as a child simply because we didn’t [have] many toys to play with, when my family first arrived," she says, joking that she used VHS tapes as building blocks instead of Legos. Early on, she began crafting homemade doll clothes. Now, Huynh credits her lifelong interest in art to the encouragement of her elementary school teachers. "In the third grade, the art teacher gave me my first sketch book," she reminisces, and she went on to a degree in painting from the University of Houston. Her work with felt itself began 10 years ago, when she got her hands on a book of Japanese felt food.

To make a piece, she starts out with a sketch of the shapes she wants to work with, then cuts it out of felt fabric. Then, she sews and stuffs the structures, starting over and over again until she gets the form she wants. Huynh calls her passion for experimentation "borderline obsessive." But it's her painting skills, which implement color and nuance to these felt forms, that makes them so realistic. She uses a felting needle or a steam iron to give pieces bumps and ridges, and add texture to them. The iron also helps transfer printed images to felt fabric. So if Huynh is intent on making felt strawberries, she'll slice up a few, scan them, and print the image onto iron-on fabric.

Huynh finds herself more drawn to the visual aspect of food, rather than the cooking process itself. "The cooking I do for myself is simple and more out of necessity, [rather than] a creative culinary expression," she says, noting that she often turns to food photography for inspiration. She's unsure of why she mostly crafts food from felt, though. "Maybe because it’s necessary for our survival that we have an innate lust and gravitation towards it?" she muses. That's certainly borne out by fans of her work, who display her work as art, use them as pincushions, or give them to children as elegant toys.

While she's mum on her future projects, it seems that felt food may not be on the menu for long. "I don’t want to say exactly what it is so I don’t jinx or put pressure on myself, but it has nothing to do with felt or food," she says. "It’s a little scary taking a leap away from something that has been successful, but I have to at least try."

Every culture has its own distinctive mythological beasts. In Brazil, there’s the Headless Mule, a cursed creature whose decapitated head hovers above a fire-spewing neck as it gallops across the country. From Japan, the Kotobuki is a Zodiac Frankenstein's monster: it consists of all 12 signs, from the nose of the rat to the tail of the snake. Peru has the Huayramama, which looks like a vast snake plus the billowing hair and face of an old woman.

With such rich and broad source material to draw from, the artist Iman Joy El Shami-Mader has lately been pursuing one very particular goal: she wants to illustrate as many mythical beasts as she can find. Since October 2017, El Shami-Mader has been illustrating one such creature a day, which she then features on her Instagram account. To keep up a steady supply of beasts to draw, El Shami-Mader initially worked from books. “It all started with the book Phantasmagoria—which is great—but there are many creatures that are only mentioned in passing or without any description at all,” she says. So she ordered more books, researched online, and tried her local library. “I'm from a tiny town in the Alps, so other than local creatures, there was little to be found.”

Lately she's decided to try to crowdsource ideas to keep her project going. Through Instagram, she's asked her followers to send stories and descriptions of mythical beasts she's still missing. Her illustrated bestiary now spans mythologies from around the world and across a variety of time periods, and even includes the odd fictional character (she has a porg from Star Wars: The Last Jedi and an Owlbear from Dungeons & Dragons).

Atlas Obscura spoke with El Shami-Mader about her project, the challenges of depicting mythical creatures, and the appeal of the lovable Squonk. If you’d like to suggest a creature, email her at mythical.creaturologist@gmail.com.

Where did the idea for this project come from?

It actually started as a stress-relief strategy and 'self-challenge' last fall. I was working five jobs and felt extremely drained and worn-out all the time. I really needed something to balance out the lack of creative expression I was feeling and to get my mind off things, at least for an hour a day.

A few years back I did a series of fairytale illustrations and came across many amazing creatures, like the Bøyg in Per Gynt. Since I always wanted to deepen my knowledge about these creatures, I ordered the book Phantasmagoria by Terry Beverton and it arrived on my doorstep on September 30, just in time for me to begin a daily monster-drawing challenge I'd set myself for the month of October. I started to use my lunch breaks to have a quick snack and do a drawing of a creature each day. I was fairly sure I would give up after a week, but it really helped with the stress; for an hour or two each day, all that was on my mind was bringing a creature to paper, nothing else. It was also great to learn about a new monster each day, so when October was over, I didn't really want to stop.

Why mythical creatures?

I am generally a history buff and I love fairytales, sagas, myths and legends. In this already pretty epic realm, these beasts feel even more magical. I find them extremely interesting for so many reasons. They can give you an incredible insight to different cultures—what people were afraid of, and what simply was inexplicable at the time and needed to be put into a physical form. I feel like they also show humanity's need to have a reason for both good and bad things happening. Sometimes they are a ray of hope, the only thing able to cure an incurable illness; other times they bring plagues and death. They are wise helpful spirits, and they are malicious tricksters. It can also be really funny—you can tell that some only exist because of the bad descriptions the scholars wrote down.

Tell us a little bit about how you research and plan how these illustrations will look.

When someone tells me about a new beast, I still try to do as much research as possible and find the best description available, either on the internet or by asking more people from that region about their version of it. Sometimes the descriptions are very detailed, which makes it easy to come up with a general idea of how proportions and form should be; other times it just says "aquatic creature" or that it has "serpentine appearance," which makes it harder on one hand, because you cannot depict them "accurately" (as far as drawing a mythical creature can be, anyway), but on the other hand really lets your imagination run wild. I usually have an image in my head of how I'd like it to look. I start by slowly sketching out the first lines in pencil, then elaborate them a bit, and when I'm happy enough with the results I start tracing my pencil drawing with ink pens.

What’s the goal of this project?

Well, I've ‘tasted blood' now, and am on a mission: I would love to create a complete illustrated bestiary. There are many great books on creatures out there, but so far I haven’t found a complete one. I know this is a Sisyphean task, but I'm motivated. I'd love to turn my findings into a book, or—even better—a series of books that can be continually expanded. For now there is only an idea, but a friend of mine is a composer and we were thinking of collaborating on a trilingual 'monsters set to music' book. My current priority, however, is finding as many mythical creatures as possible.

Tell us about your favorite mythical creatures in this project.

That is really hard to answer—they are all so unique. I love the Dijiang, because I feel it's my spirit animal (living in a perpetual state of confusion, but fond of singing and dancing). I love the idea of a Valravne eating a king's heart and thus gaining human knowledge and becoming evil (eating another human's flesh was really thought to give you his strength at some point in history!). I think it's amazing that the Chouyu falls asleep when it sees people, and that the Ovinnik holds a grudge against barns, but is appeased by pancakes.

But if I had to choose a favorite one, it would have to be the Squonk, a creature from the forests of Pennsylvania, who was always sad over its hideous appearance. All the love for the Squonk!

1000-Piece 'Hell Puzzle'

From $20.98, Amazon

Consisting of pieces that are not only shaped the same, but all the same color, hell puzzles are for puzzle enthusiasts who also hate themselves. Oh and did I mention that the pieces are all really teeny?

The only way to solve a hell puzzle is through trial and error and stubbornness. But, when you’re finished, you can truly call yourself a puzzle master.

Hell puzzles are available in a few different piece counts. I suggest starting at 1,000 and working your way up to the madness of 2,000.