Alaska’s Denali mountain is the highest peak in North America and is home to beautiful wildlife, exquisite glaciers, and tons of poop.

The Associated Press reported that according to a new study by glacier geologist Michael Loso, from 1951 to 2012, 36,000 climbers have deposited anywhere from 152,000 to 215,000 pounds of human waste on Kahiltna Glacier. That’s roughly the weight of 71 Beluga whales, if anyone is counting.

It’s not surprising. Kahiltna is a major trekking route to Denali’s summit. Around 90 percent of people use it, so climbers and their excrement drop by.

Around 1,100 people climb Denali every year. Since 2007, the U.S. National Park Service has required that climbers who venture above 14,200 feet must use portable toilets—most of which resemble a large coffee can—for their waste. Climbers between base camp at 7,200 feet and 14,200 feet must throw biodegradable bags containing their poop deep into designated glacier crevasses. (Above 14,200 feet there are no crevasses, hence the need for the portable cans.)

According to Loso’s 10-year findings, however, poop flung into crevasses never actually makes it into the glacier’s abyss, so it doesn’t dissolve. Rather, it reappears in glacial meltwater.

His research team found this result by testing Kahiltna Glacier meltwater for fecal contamination and analyzed if bacterial waste could survive in different environments on the mountain, such as deep below base camp and at the summit for a year. While the water tests were clean, the waste at all four zones remained a little below freezing—conditions that keep bacteria alive.

Setting jokes aside, this can lead to serious consequences. Climbers and the National Park Service staff use Denali’s runoff snow for drinking water. If human excrement contaminates that water, dangerous bacteria like E.coli can fester in climbers’ intestines, cause diarrhea, and subsequent dehydration. When climbing up 18,000 feet at high altitudes, the last thing a climber needs is a deadly illness.

The research is frightening but encouraging news for the National Park Service. They told the Associated Press that they already have measures in place, but proposed regulations that would restrict mountaineers to a specific dump location at a certain elevation. Beyond that point, they’ll have to carry it.

"I think that's a pretty reasonable thing to do to promote cleanliness and to keep water coming out of Kahiltna Glacier reasonably clean," said Tom Kirby, an American Alpine Institute guide.

“Who would like to see a big pile of human waste?” asked Denali guide Colby Coombs. "That's disgusting."

There are millions of species spread across our planet’s land, sky, and water—and it’s nearly impossible to know exactly how many. A 2011 paper placed the estimate of known species around 8.7 million, but the figure is fuzzy. Scientists record thousands of new species each year, and often refine their tallies when new observations lead them to conclude that Earth is even more diverse than they thought. The entomologist Brian Brown, of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, recently told me he suspects that scientists have only documented 10 percent of the world’s fly species—a drop in a very deep pool.

Sometimes, though, the trend goes in the other direction, and a new grasp on evolutionary history leads scientists to walk back their counts.

In 2000, Kevin Omland, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, recorded two lineages of common ravens (Corvus corax). These inky corvids were once thought to be a single species worldwide, but Omland documented two genomic clusters: one in the southwestern U.S. (the California clade), and another wherever else the birds alighted (the Holarctic clade). Now, researchers at Omland’s lab, University of Oslo, University of Washington, and beyond have taken a closer look. In a new paper in Nature Communications, the scientists present genomic data suggesting that the California clade and Holarctic clades diverged, but have since been mingling for tens of thousands of years.

The researchers examined the genotypes of 441 common ravens. They took a few paths to collect the genetic material: Some was extracted from the liver or blood of specimens in museum collections, and for the regions for which those weren't available, the scientists sampled tissue from toe-pads of museum specimens, and also collected blood samples from live birds or carcasses in Montana and British Columbia.

"All our genomic data clearly suggests that speciation reversal in common ravens is ancient," says lead author Anna Kearns, currently a postdoc at the Smithsonian Center for Conservation Genetics. "The two lineages that are fusing came into contact a very long time ago—maybe at least 100,000 years ago, and it could likely be even more ancient than that."

Speciation reversal—where once-diverged lineages merge into a single species—has "probably happened in hundreds or almost certainly thousands of lineages all over the planet," Omland said in a statement. But it's often not clear exactly why.

To begin to answer that question, Kearns is now examining genomic data from museum specimens that date back at least a century. Urbanization expanded the birds' range, Kearns explains: "Ravens love the free food at dumps and congregate in big numbers there, and suburbs have created oases in the deserts." Comparing ancient DNA to more recent samples, Kearns adds, could help researchers determine whether human behaviors accelerated the speciation reversal by creating new habitats in regions where they once wouldn't have been feasible.

We don't know how many other species we're living alongside—and, with ever-more-precise genomic studies, any guess is liable to change before too long.

Alex, a 20-year-old YouTube star from Brisbane, Australia, has the kind of weekday routine that makes your average working stiff jealous. Each morning, he greets the sun and hydrates. He eats a leisurely breakfast of greens, that his manager, Annika Howells, prepares and brings out for him. (He sleeps on the balcony.) The afternoon is dedicated to napping, chatting with neighbors, and grooming to keep up his good looks.

Evening is when the movie magic happens. As Alex goofs around with his son and housemate, Dominic—a YouTube up-and-comer himself—Howells keeps her phone nearby, in case they come up with something really good. A video from early February, in which Alex honks at various kitchen items, has pulled in about 130,000 views: not exactly Gangnam Style levels, but certainly not bad for a bird.

Alex—who goes by Alex the Honking Bird on his various social media platforms—is a rare thing: a YouTuber who has crossed the species line. In his burgeoning career as a celebrity cockatiel, Alex has earned human admirers, who enjoy watching him perform his trademark honking song. But he also has a growing legion of bird imitators, who flutter over when they hear his voice, and spend their spare time practicing their own honks. There's that adage: On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog. But what if everybody, including other birds, knows you're a bird—and that's why they like you?

Howells didn't mean to teach Alex to honk. Young male cockatiels are very good at picking up sounds—as evidenced by a rash of birds that have learned to imitate microwaves, tooth-brushing, and that oneburblyiPhoneringtone—and their human companions will often take advantage of this skill by teaching them particular whistles. This is both fun and practical: parrots tend to pair-bond with their owners, and as one bird lover explains, "Even if your bird can't see you, they want to know you're still around." Establishing a particular "What's up!" whistle, or contact call, keeps bird and human reassured, even when they're in different rooms.

Howells can't whistle, so when she got Alex nearly 20 years ago, she found a creative way to keep up her end of the bargain: Instead of encouraging Alex to imitate her, she imitated him. "When I got him, he would do this little squeak and bob his head," she says. "So I would do the little squeak and bob my head back at him." He would mimic her in turn, she says, and "it just got exaggerated over time," until one day it had evolved into his full-on, foghorn honk.

Alex spent years happily honking and headbanging with the members of his household, from humans to his fellow birds to various home furnishings and appliances. Howells would occasionally film him doing something cute and upload it to YouTube, so she could share it with friends and family. Last summer, for whatever reason, other people started finding an older video, "Cockatiel reacts to plush toy version of himself," in which Alex makes friends with an enormous stuffed bird.

"I don't know if an algorithm got tweaked or something," Howells says, "but all of a sudden it was getting all these views." She licensed it to a viral video company, and it spread far and wide. When people started asking for more Alex, "I just kept running with it," Howells says. She made him a Twitter account and a Facebook page and started posting videos more regularly, and Alex now has tens of thousands of followers on each platform.

As a human myself, I feel confident diagnosing why Alex's videos are so popular with our species. Honking is funny, and the way Alex goes about it is particularly charming. As he loudly pistons around making his ceaseless racket, his big red cheeks make him look almost bashful: He can't help it, he's just gotta honk.

When putting together Alex's social media presence, Howells leans into this. On Facebook, she has listed his profession as "Motivational Speaker." "He's like a little Labrador in a bird body," she says. "Because he's so happy and positive, I try to make all of his tweets and stuff the sort of thing I imagine Alex would say."

Such things—"Just one honk at a time," for example, or "Anything is possible when you carry a honk in your heart"—slotted easily into Bird Twitter and other online bird communities, which tend to be wholesome places: a mix of affirmations, funny videos, and pop-culture references tweaked for maximum bird inclusion. "Wii Honk Channel," a video in which Alex's honks are remixed and pitch-adjusted so that he "sings" the Nintendo Wii theme song, has racked up millions of views across various platforms. ("As a musician, what I can appreciate about Alex's honks is that they have a consistent sound profile," says the video's creator, Anthony Armetta, who goes by Flaminglog. "That [and] he's just so darned cute.")

But if humans love his online persona, remix potential, and ebullient spirit, his avian fans, it seems, are mostly in it for the honks. Cockatiels and other parrots like hearing other birds, even onscreen ones, explains Rachel Binx, who has a cockatiel named Björd, and whose observations inspired this story. Owners will sometimes put on special mixes of cockatiel sounds, to keep their birds company while they're away. But the existence of online bird communities has added a meta-level to this socialization strategy. "There are all these people who love birds, who are watching a bunch of bird videos," she says. "And then their birds are interested in the videos too—they hear other birds and get really into it."

Cats sometimes meow at cat videos, and dogs may bark at canine cameos. But some of Alex's bird viewers take it one step further: they start honking, when they had never thought to honk before. Binx points out one cockatiel named Bob, whose owner regularly posts videos on the subreddit r/PartyParrot. When Bob hears Alex, his face lights up, and he now adds honk interludes to his singing. (When another user complimented the honks, his owner replied "Bob learned from the master.") In the most recent upload, Bob looks right into the camera, imitates a small chirpy song that Alex sometimes sings at the start of videos, and starts honking like a clown nose. (Bob did not respond to a request for comment.)

He's not only one. A ringnecked parakeet named Baby started honking after her owner, Bryanna Harper, played Alex videos in her vicinity. "She picks up on a lot of things that I watch, but Alex is probably the fastest one she's ever picked up on and clearly imitated," says Harper.

My bird Lucky honks, or maybe he squeaks. He always does this when I play one of your videos! pic.twitter.com/hEuHWduxEV

— Chey 🎹🎼 (@kalend_cheyenne) March 1, 2018

Another Bob, this one a ringneck from from Gotland, Sweden, likes to watch Alex videos with his owner, who goes by Lovis. In a video Lovis sent me, Bob stands near a window and releases a cascade of honks, like an aspiring opera singer practicing his scales. He, too, often sprinkles honks into other vocalizations, Lovis says: "It’s like his own personal spin on it."

Not everyone can honk, or wants to. Some birds instead will imitate Alex's squeaky kissing noises, or his distinctive head bobs. Others are afraid, or just indifferent. (After all, YouTube trends aren't for everyone.) Some humans actively protect their birds from Alex's influence. Binx, for instance, says she is careful about Björd's media diet: "I see him listening to [Alex]," she says. "But I have to keep in mind that any noise that I teach him or that he picks up, I will have to listen to for the next 20 years."

What is it like to live with a bird memelord? "It's very surreal seeing other birds making those noises," says Howells. "I feel like I need to occasionally put out an apology to all of the humans—'I'm sorry you all have weird-sounding birds now.'" Someone once told her they were going to play Alex's videos out the window to see if a nearby flock of wild cockatiels would pick it up, but she never heard back about that experiment.

They try not to let fame interrupt the home dynamics. Dominic—Alex's son with his late mate, Tina—makes regular cameos in Alex's videos, but he generally prefers to indulge in lengthy bouts of scream-singing. "He did honk once, on Christmas morning," says Howells, almost as if to prove that he could if he wanted to. "We called it the Honkmas Miracle. [But] he prefers to do his own thing."

As for Alex, he's remains much more of a tastemaker than a crowd-follower. Howells has tried to get him to imitate some of her favorite videos, like the one where a cockatiel sings the Totoro theme song, but he has proven tone-deaf. When she shows him his own videos, he doesn't do much, either. His own first viewing of Wii Honk Channel elicited a kind of rapt befuddlement. "The first time in his life he had nothing to say," says Howells.

"He can only really do one thing," Howells continues. "But he does that one thing well." On the Internet, that's all it takes.

Throughout human history, technological advances have changed how we relate to one another. This is especially true of photography. In the 19th century, the sudden ability to print images on paper—a material that's both shareable and disposable—eventually gained widespread and long-lasting use. And as a new exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles demonstrates, this photographic process ultimately also became an influential social force.

“We sometimes tend to think about photographs as documents or illustrations of history,” says Mazie Harris, assistant curator of photographs at the Getty Museum, which opened Paper Promises: Early American Photography this week. “It was important for me to think about the ways in which photographs are agents in history, in really bringing about change or really giving people a sense of the world.”

In mid-19th century Europe, photographers quickly realized the benefits of using paper to create prints from negatives. But in the United States, there was some reluctance. Part of the problem was the fear that it would contribute to the widespread use of counterfeit money (‘paper promises’ was a 19th-century term for fake currency). Photographs were usually displayed on metal or plate glass surfaces, which don’t exactly lend themselves to portability. But some American photographers saw the potential of this new technique. Printing on paper meant that photographs could be created and shared for all the same reasons we might use post an image on Instagram or Facebook today: self-promotion, as a memento, to document travel, to advertise something, or to promote political causes.

“With a lot of photographs in this exhibition, you can see that they were folded and sent through the mail, or they were quite small and could be easily shared,” says Harris. “You really get that sense of it becoming more and more available as a social tool because it can be made in multiples.”

This is particularly true, notes Harris, of the photographs in the exhibition that deal with the expansion into the American West. One photograph shows a group sitting on the front of a steam locomotive, forging ahead to, presumably, their future. Harris learned that this photograph was originally a promotional image made by the railroad company. “It really does give that sense of positive progress, moving forward, the dynamism of the railroad. Photography in that same way was really about creating new networks of sharing information,” she says.

It's also important to look at the people in such images. "If you take the time to look really closely at the people’s faces, you see a sense of determination," says Harris, a quality she thinks the photographer themselves shared. But, as she notes, “there’s a real lack of diversity in that image. Just as it offers a sense of progress it also excludes certain people from that wall of progress."

Easily reproducible photographs had an impact on territorial issues of the day. According to Harris, there was a real public interest in images of the Native American delegates who visited Washington, D.C., in 1857-1858. The photographer Julian Vannerson took a series of studio portraits which include, Harris notes, "these inscriptions of the names of the sitters that are this really botchy transliteration of the pronunciations of their names." Another photographer kept outfits at his studio for the delegates to wear, which more closely matched white Americans' perceptions of Native Americans.

The increased ability to share photographs also coincided with the Civil War. The accompanying exhibition text includes a quote from the 1862 American Journal of Photography on the popularity of portraiture among soldiers:

“America swarms with members of the mighty tribes of cameristas... The young Volunteer rushes off at once to the studio when he puts on his uniform, and the soldier of a year’s campaign sends home his likeness that the absent ones may see what changes have been produced in him by war’s alarms.”

“There is an explosion of interest [in photographic printing], both for the soldiers to document for loved ones, but also for the cause,” says Harris. After the war, photographers also shared images of the devastation and, in some instances, casualties, as a way to promote pacifism.“This was incredibly shocking for people to see these first-hand images of death in that way, and I think it had a profound impact,” says Harris.

Today, of course, we can take and share a photograph in a matter of seconds, distributing it across the digital world for anyone to see. “One thing that is important to me about this show is that photography is about objects,” says Harris. “We tend to think of them as something we experience with our eyes, but this 19th-century material was hand-held material—the same way that we cradle our cell-phones, and flip through them with our hands.”

Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from the exhibition, which runs through to May 27, 2018.

Sin City: The land of casinos, lax open container laws, and, apparently, lurid crustacean theft.

Earlier this week, a cook at the Bellagio resort and casino was nabbed with nearly $2,000 worth of lobster tails. Security at the resort had seen Alex Hernandez, 49, stuffing the 25 lobster tails into his backpack and then exiting through the back door. The tails were valued at a whopping $75 each.

Hernandez was eventually arrested by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police then booked into the Clark County Detention Center. He faces one count of embezzlement for stealing the tails.

The lucrative theft attempt comes at a time when the United States' premiere lobster hub, Maine, faces its lowest lobster catch rates since 2011. But, on the bright side, it looks like the anatomically-appropriate lobster emoji is happening after all.

Pygoscelis adeliae is commonly known as the Adélie penguin, after the wife of French explorer Jules Dumont d'Urville, the man who first documented them in 1840. Though they are not especially uncommon, scientists have been concerned that their Antarctic population has been on a steady decline for the last 40 years. Now, a new study conducted by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) has revealed a previously unknown “supercolony” of more than 1.5 million Adélies living in the Danger Islands, a remote archipelago on the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.

"Until recently, the Danger Islands weren't known to be an important penguin habitat," says Heather Lynch, an ecologist at Stony Brook University who co-led the study, in a release. The remoteness of the archipelago—named by English captain James Clark Ross after he almost crashed into its ice-covered rocks in 1842—makes it hard to access.

Remote images gave researchers a fresh look. In 2014, Lynch and colleague Matthew Schwaller, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, spotted some telltale guano stains in satellite photos of the islands. To ground-truth their suspicions, Lynch and an international team of ecologists got on a boat.

Upon their arrival in December 2015, the group was confronted with hundreds of thousands of penguins nestling amid the icy rocks. Using neural network analysis of drone images they took of the colony, the scientists were able to determine the size of the population, as well as how changing temperatures and sea ice are impacting the island ecosystem. Their results, published this month in the journal Scientific Reports, show that there are currently more than 750,000 breeding pairs of Adélie penguins in the Danger Islands—more than the rest of Antarctica combined.

Further study the supercolony will help the team better understand Adélies across the region."The population of Adélies on the east side of the Antarctic Peninsula is different from what we see on the west side, for example. We want to understand why,” said Stephanie Jenouvrier, a seabird ecologist at WHOI and coauthor of the study, in the release. "Is it linked to the extended sea ice condition over there? Food availability? That's something we don't know."

It might have been the first academic textbook that greeted the masses via the medium of Garry Trudeau’s comic Doonesbury. In a series of strips in June 1994, recently outed gay character Mark Slackmeyer attempts to pick up a fundamentalist Christian married man, and tells him that the church had, for a millennium, performed gay-marriage ceremonies. “Where did you hear such garbage?” the man replies, irate.

"It's in a new book by this Yale professor,” answers Slackmeyer. “His research turned up liturgies for same-sex ceremonies that included communion, holy invocations and kissing to signify union. They were just like heterosexual ceremonies, except that straight weddings, being about property, were usually held outdoors. Gay rites, being about love, were held INSIDE the church!"

That week, at least two Illinois newspapers refused to print the strips, while a few dozen readers rang the distributor to ask “why Garry Trudeau exists to make their lives unhappy.” If the strip provoked controversy, the book, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, incited outrage both within and outside of the academic community. Its author, scholar John Eastburn Boswell, known as Jeb, died six months after the comic strips ran at the age of 47, of AIDS-related complications.

In barely 20 years at Yale, Boswell’s work as a historian managed to set the cat among the pigeons to stupendous effect, through years of meticulous scholarship that, if correct, undermined the very foundation of much modern homophobia. In the introduction to his 1980 American Book Award-winning Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century, he observed that gay people were “still the objects of severe proscriptive legislation, widespread public hostility, and various civil restraints, all with ostensibly religious justification.” Boswell’s work suggested, however, that this “religious justification” might, in fact, be bogus—a latter-day alteration, introduced hundreds of years after Christianity was founded.

The book argued that the Roman Catholic Church had not always been as hostile to gay people, and indeed, until the 12th century, had thought homosexuality no more troubling than, say, hypocrisy—or even celebrated love between men. The response to the book was explosive, if polarized. "I would not hesitate to call his book revolutionary," Paul Robinson, a Stanford University historian, wrote in the New York Times Book Review in 1981. But other critics felt that, despite its attention to detail, its central thesis—that Christianity and homosexuality had not always been such uneasy bedfellows—was not only false, but a failed attempt by Boswell, gay and Catholic, to square two aspects of his identity they felt could not be reconciled.

Boswell was young and brilliant, blond and boyishly handsome, with an incredible facility for languages. His work might at any time draw on any of 17 dead and living examples—among them, Catalan, Latin, Old Iceland, Syriac and Persian. As a teenager growing up in Virginia, writes the researcher Bruce O’Brien, he had converted to Catholicism from Episcopalianism. This conversion was precipitated by a show of tolerance and strength: “because, in large part, the archdiocese of Baltimore had voluntarily desegregated its schools, without a court order, solely because it was the right thing to do.” Here, he saw a Catholic church that was intrinsically moral and would be a beacon of light against intolerance—one that might lead the charge on other struggles for equality in a country whose sensibilities were shifting at great pace.

Many saw the book, therefore, as a chance for a reckoning—Boswell giving the church the opportunity to welcome the gay community. As his sister Patricia, who spoke at his funeral, puts it: “Jeb’s love of God was the dri­ving force in his life and the dri­ving pas­sion behind his work. He did not set out to shake up the straight world but rather to include the gay world in the love of Christ… to acquaint all with the fear­some power of that love, the wild­ness, the ‘not tame­ness’ of it.”

Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality is a 442-page journey through around 1,000 years of gay history. Assiduously researched, it jumps from country to country, instance to instance, drawing on examples of love between specific men, and generalized cases of societies in which sex between men was quite normalized.

Boswell spends some time delving into the relationship between the 4th-century Ausonius, a Roman poet living in Bordeaux, France, and his pupil Saint Paulinus, later the Bishop of Nola. Whether or not the relationship was a physical one is impossible to say—but the passionate affection the two had for one another seemed to transcend ordinary platonic friendship.

In whatever world I am found,
I shall hold you fast,
Grafted onto my being,
Not divided by distant shores or suns.
Everywhere you shall be with me,
I will see with my heart
And embrace you with my loving spirit.

“It would be inaccurate to suggest any exact parallel between such relationships and modern phenomena—as it is to compare medieval marriage with its modern counterpart,” Boswell wrote. But the idea that the concept of friendship has simply changed rang hollow to him—especially given that in many ancient societies, homosexuality was conventional and so might well have been part of a normal friendship. “Friends of the same sex borrowed from the standard vocabulary of homosexual love to express their feelings in erotic terms,” he wrote.

Saint Augustine, writing at the same time, described a friendship thus: “I felt that my soul and his were one soul in two bodies, and therefore life was a horror to me, since I did not want to live as a half; and yet I was also afraid to die lest he, whom I had loved so much, would completely die.” Elsewhere, however, he claims to have “contaminated the spring of friendship with the dirt of lust and darkened its brightness with the blackness of desire”—yet this is a denigration not specifically of homosexual lust and desire, but of sexuality more generally.

In the same period in Antioch, an ancient Greco-Roman city sometimes called “the cradle of Christianity,” Boswell described how Saint John Chrysostom visited the town, in what is today Turkey. Chrysostom was surprised to see the men of the city “consorting” not with prostitutes, but “fearlessly” with one another. Boswell quoted him: “The fathers of the young men take this in silence: they do not try to sequester their sons, nor do they seek any remedy for this evil. None is ashamed, no one blushes, but, rather, they take pride in their little game; the chaste seem to be the odd ones, and the disapproving the ones in error.” In this early Christian city, Chrysostom found homosexuality to be so very common and accepted that “there is some danger that womankind will become unnecessary with the future, with young men instead fulfilling all the needs women used to.”

Boswell shored up example after example of homosexual love and sex in the early Christian world over the course of almost 1,000 years. There were occasional laws against them, he pointed out, but they were not usually religious ones, but civil, where homosexual acts were fined as a way to increase tax coffers. Indeed, often the people being taxed in this way were not ordinary members of society, but bishops and clerics. “Purely ecclesiastical records usually stipulate either no penalty at all or a very mild one,” he wrote. Under Pope Saint Gregory II, for instance, lesbian activities carried a 160-day fasting penalty, likely under the same terms as Lent. A priest caught going hunting, on the other hand, would be in comparable trouble for three years.

In the 1980s, at a time when laws against sodomy remained in place in many American states, the book was a bombshell—especially for Catholics. The United States, at that time, was still a place of extreme homophobia and prejudice. In 1978, the openly gay politician Harvey Milk had been assassinated in San Francisco; a year earlier came Anita Bryant’s organized opposition to gay rights, with its rhetoric about saving children from gay “recruitment.” Queer studies remained a very niche part of academic study—Yale’s Lesbian and Gay Studies Center, which Boswell helped to found, emerged only in the late 1980s.

Criticism of Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, therefore, came on a variety of fronts. In some parts of the academic community, it came from historians like the R. W. Southern of the University of Oxford, who believed that “gay history” was not an interesting or important part of historical research. (Southern, O’Brien notes, was largely influenced by having grown up in “a repressed age where homosexuals were criminals [a word he used when talking about homosexuality.]”) In others, it came from theological scholars who picked apart Boswell’s thesis and found it undermined by the scholar’s deep, deep desire to be right. In the Catholic magazine Commonweal, after the book’s release, Louis Crompton wrote: “It is a pity that [the book] is … vitiated by a determination to construe all its voluminous evidence in the light of an untenable leading idea.” Some of its harshest criticism came from members of the gay community, who accused Boswell of being an apologist for the church’s atrocities against gay people. In the Gay Books Bulletin, Wayne Dyne wrote, decisively: “Christianity is definitely guilty of the stigmatization and persecution of same-sex relations in our civilization. It has served as a redoubt for bigotry of all sorts, and until those who call themselves Christians are ready humbly to acknowledge this, they are coming to us with dirty hands.”

Boswell, for his part, seemed to take the response in his stride. To the many critics who argued that such categories as “gay” and “straight” were modern conceptions, Boswell responded: “If the categories ‘homosexual/heterosexual’ and ‘gay/straight’ are the inventions of particular societies rather than real aspects of the human psyche, there is no gay history.” The book had caused controversy, but it had also won multiple awards and cleared important ground in developing this largely uncharted territory of gay studies.

Today, Boswell is remembered for two things—by those who didn’t know him, for his contributions to his field; and by those who did, for his unwavering kindness and generosity. A 1986 video of Boswell giving a talk shows a man who was at once dazzlingly bright and brilliantly charismatic. He’s likeable, urbane, often very funny. On and off campus, he was adored—by undergraduates, who clamored to be in his classes, and undergraduates; gay and straight members of faculty alike; and by many members of the Catholic community. At Harvard, where he had completed his PhD, he counted among his devoted friends John Spencer, rector of the Jesuit community of Boston, and Peter J. Gomes, the Plummer professor of Christian morals, after he came out publicly in 1991. "At a time of great public trauma for me, he wrote me out of the blue a lovely letter of support," Gomes told the Harvard Crimson, shortly after Boswell’s death. "He gave me courage.”

When he passed away in December 1994, Boswell had been in the Yale infirmary for some months. The music historian Geoffrey Block recalled visiting him in his hospital room, where, despite having only recently emerged from a coma, he was “brilliantly and miraculously holding court,” quoting lines from films and singing “Cause I’m a Blonde” from the musical Earth Girls Are Easy. Admirers and friends drifted in and out of the infirmary—friends he had helped through crises; a devoted graduate student; his father; the newly installed President of Yale, Richard Levin, who cried freely and readily. “A young bar­ber who came to the infir­mary room to give Jeb a hair­cut moved us to tears when he refused pay­ment.”

Boswell died on Christmas Eve, surrounded by family, friends, and his partner of many years, Jerry Hart. In the months leading up to his death, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, which had been previewed in Doonesbury, incited similar levels of controversy to Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality. Comprised of the study of more than 60 manuscripts from the 8th to the 16th century, it was a full investigation into the history of same-sex unions. These he described as relationships that were "unmistakably a voluntary, emotional union of two persons," and "closely related" to heterosexual marriage, "no matter how much some readers may be discomforted by this." Again, critics argued that he was looking for something that he dearly wanted to be there. Block, in his 2013 memorial, wrote how delighted and thrilled Boswell would have been to have been able to legally marry Hart. “I came across a sign on a lawn that would have made Jeb, a devout Catholic—per­haps para­dox­i­cally con­sid­er­ing this insti­tu­tion’s take on his sex­ual iden­tity—extremely happy. It sim­ply said, ‘Approve R-74. My Church Sup­ports Mar­riage Equal­ity’.”

Like all the other passengers on a commercial flight from London to New York next Monday, Jeremy Bentham will be strapped in. But the moral philosopher will have markedly less legroom than his fellow travelers. He’ll while away the 3,459 miles in the cargo hold, tipped on his back, padded with foam, legs bent in a sitting position. He’s bringing a bit of luggage, too. His wax head, chair, walking stick, and hat will be packed separately nearby.

A few days before the journey, Emilia Kingham—Bentham’s transatlantic chaperone—is quick to point out that the word “he” isn’t quite right. That’s because Bentham is more of an assemblage than a person.

Before he died in 1832 at the age of 84, Bentham pledged his body to science and tasked his physician and friend, Thomas Southwood Smith, with preserving his corpse in a curious manner. On a paper affixed to his will, Bentham described his desire to be dissected in the name of anatomical knowledge, and then, “when all the soft parts have been disposed of, the bones are to be formed into a skeleton." He then wanted to be outfitted in his clothes and “seated in a Chair usually occupied by me when living in the attitude in which I am sitting when engaged in thought.” In this way, he would be a perpetually curious intellectual.

Bentham’s “auto-icon,” as it is known, looks a bit like a figure in a wax museum, but there’s still a bit of Bentham inside. Beneath the clothes and a bodystocking are layers of linen tow stuffing—and then his bones, wired together. A wax head sits on top (more on his real, mummified head, in a moment).

The auto-icon is a hybrid sculpture and relic. University College London (UCL) acquired it in 1850, and today it usually sits in a secular shrine in the South Cloisters building, ready to receive visitors. It’s an oddity, to be sure, but the curators don’t consider it particularly lurid. It’s more of a provocation for discussions of life and death. For a while, the university produced a cheekily maudlin project nodding to the philosopher’s notion of the panopticon, a prison built around the idea of surveillance, by mounting a camera behind the auto-icon’s unblinking head to capture photographs of viewers.

The auto-icon’s trek to New York is by the invitation of the Met Breuer, where it will be included in the exhibition Like Life: Sculpture, Color and the Body. From March through July, Bentham’s remains will share a room with works by El Greco, Auguste Rodin, Louise Bourgeois, and more.

But before Bentham could board the plane for his first visit to America, the auto-icon needed some freshening up. “It can't go on display all grubby and dirty and shoddy-looking, you know?" Kingham says.

The three-week process of preparing for the trip gave Kingham a chance to inventory its condition. Under regular circumstances, the UCL team tries to keep handling of the auto-icon to a minimum, because movement can be stressful for any old, fragile object. The conservators had “little tidbits of information” from previous research, Kingham says, such as X-rays from about 15 years ago and notes scribbled by Violette Lafleur, a conservator who treated the object in the 1930s. (Lafleur noted that she had encountered traces of a raging moth infestation, and swapped Bentham’s waistcoat for a garment donated by one of her friends.) "We saw this as a really good opportunity to investigate what [the auto-icon] is made out of, and what all the different components and elements are," Kingham says.

There were reports that the feet were bundled in two sets of stockings, for instance, but little information and no pictures. (Now Kingham and company have proof.) If the conservators hadn't had occasion to lift Bentham from his perch on the chair, they wouldn't have noticed that moths had, at some point, nibbled the seat of his trousers to shreds.

The conservation process involved “spinning lots of plates at once,” Kingham says. How, for example, were they to ease the jacket off to check for pests, when they know that the wiring of the shoulder joint is broken? “We knew [the object] was already damaged,” Kingham adds, “and we were trying to minimize other damage from occurring.”

The auto-icon has also gone a bit lumpy in its advanced age. “When you have an old sofa, everything settles into the bottom and you have to plump up the cushions,” said Subhadra Das, a UCL curator, in a statement. “Well the same thing happened with Bentham.” The team smoothed out the stuffing, and now everything is more evenly proportioned.

Other aspects have deteriorated far beyond any possibility of salvage. Bentham’s original scheme called for his real head to sit preserved atop his bones, but an experiment with sulfuric acid left the face shriveled and discolored. Anatomist Jacques Talrich was then enlisted to fashion a wax version of the head, while the mummified version sat between the object’s feet. (Over the years, both the original head and replacement noggin were pilfered—and eventually returned—by students from rival King’s College London.) These days, Kingham says, the reddish-orange, taut, and deeply grooved original is kept in a temperature- and humidity-controlled storage facility nearby, and won't be making the trip across the pond. It’s in stable condition, she adds, “but it’s not particularly pleasant-looking.”

When the crates containing the auto-icon touch down in New York, Kingham will be anxious to get a look inside. She spent days making a padded mount for the fragile wax head. Even so, "it's extremely nerve-wracking when you get to the museum site where you're unpacking and you take the side of the crate off for the first time, and you see, 'Oh my god, did everything make it in one piece?'" she says. The conservator is a little worried about that bum shoulder. If turbulence jostles the crate, she adds, "I know there's a looseness there that could cause some slippage."

"We were joking, at first,” Kingham adds, “wouldn't it just be easier to wheel him onto the plane and book a seat for him?" For the long-deceased philosopher, it would have been an upgrade.

Perhaps it was the recent snow, leaving Brits stir crazy and stranded at home. Or perhaps there are simply more coin collectors than anyone had anticipated. Either way, when the British Royal Mint announced the striking of 26 new 10-pence pieces, one for each letter of the alphabet and all "quintessentially British," there was so much traffic to the site that it crashed, resulting in hours-long online waits. (Either that, or it was an immersive experience: Q is, after all, for queueing.)

Most of the treasures depicted on these 26 new coins will be familiar to anyone who's ever visited London, or simply watched Paddington Bear. Think English breakfasts, the Houses of Parliament, the double-decker bus. But the coin of the greatest interest to cryptozoologists, conspiracy theorists, and anyone with a fondness for monsters comes in the middle of the alphabet: L, for Loch Ness Monster. "Nothing gets the mind wondering as much as traditional British folklore," the site says. "And the top of all the mythical beasts is the Loch Ness Monster."

Nessie, as she's sometimes affectionately known, is by no means the first cryptid to have her own coin. The Royal Canadian Mint released a series of monster-themed collectable coins, including Sasquatch, in 2011. This colored quarter was followed by two others, also by illustrator Emily Samstra. First, there was Memphré, a serpentine cryptid, who lives in Lake Memphremagog, about 93 miles southeast of Montreal. Next was a feline "being" called Mishepishu. Per the the Canadian Mint: "For centuries, Ojibwe legends have described a mysterious creature lurking in the depths of Lake Superior. They call it Mishepishu, which means 'Great Lynx,' to describe its wildcat shape."

If you want to have your wallet full of monsters, however, you'll have to look beyond North America and Europe—and perhaps beyond ordinary legal tender, too. The New Zealand Mint produces a line of two-dollar coins, valid only on the island of Niue, that boast among them the Minotaur, the Gorgon, and a ready-slain Cyclops. Elsewhere in the Pacific, you can find one-dollar "Mythical Creatures" coins valid on the island of Tuvalu, minted by the Australian Gold and Silver Exchange: Think griffins, unicorns and phoenixes. Given that these are made of silver, and worth far more than their dollar "value," these are likely safely tucked away in the coffers of collectors. The Royal Mint has, so far, minted about a million Nessies, however—allowing this cryptid to roam the breadth and width of the British Isles, from the comfort of the back of a coin.

Every once in a while, Josh Calder goes out to Rock Creek in his home city of Washington, D.C., and peers across the water at a little gravel bar. The small spit used to barely be visible at all, but it's growing more robust, and vegetation has started cropping up there. When Calder swings by, he's checking to see if a specific alchemy has occurred. He's waiting for it to become an island.

If you close your eyes and picture an island, what do you see? In the popular imagination, the word conjures up somewhere stable, contained, and understandable: maybe a little rocky outcropping covered with gulls, or a round disc of sand with a single palm tree. In reality, experts say, things are a bit more like that gravel bar: shifty, complicated, and full of gray areas. If you want to get to know islands, it helps to start by asking yourself what the heck they are.

The geographer Stephen Royle, who has published various books about islands, has a simple definition at hand. "An island is a body of land surrounded by water, above water at high tide, and smaller than a continent," he says. David Clague and Rosemary Gillespie, co-editors of the Encyclopedia of Islands, take a slightly wider view. "I think [of islands] in terms of isolation from the surrounding area," says Clague. "They're bits of real estate with some boundary that prevents or severely inhibits exchange of [animal and plant life]." Under this definition, underwater volcanoes can be islands. So can mountaintops, which often house plants and animals that wouldn't be able to survive at lower elevations.

But thinking about islands is tricky. As soon as you reach the solid ground of one answer, more questions spread out ahead of you in an endless archipelago. Say you take Clague and Gillespie's broad ecological definition. In that case, what counts as isolation? Start considering this query at different physical scales, and the possibilities proliferate: "Water-filled tree holes can serve as islands for many invertebrates," Gillespie points out, "and an animal’s body is an island to the parasites it contains." (Maybe it's time to revise our adages: No man is an island, except to his own gut flora.)

This may tempt you to hop back to that first, more traditional answer, in which an island is a body of land surrounded by water. That definition comes with an upper limit—"smaller than a continent." But now we have to define the lower one: how big does an island have to be in order to differentiate it from, in Royle's words, "a mere rock"? For some, the answer is qualitative: according to Royle, Vikings didn't think something was an island until it was far enough from the mainland that a ruddered ship was required, while 19th century Scotlanders defined it as a patch of land with enough pasture to support at least one sheep.

Contemporary politicians often find reasons to promote or demote places to island status. In one recent case, a Scottish politician caught heat when he suggested Skye might not be a "real island," because it is connected to the mainland by a bridge. Calder jumps at any chance to "collect" a new island—he's been to over 500—but even he has some heartfelt criteria regarding what that entails. "It's a place, not an object," he says. "So it should have soil and vegetation on some level. It can't be just a rock or a bridge pier." That gravel spit in the D.C. river, for instance, needs a tree or two before it makes the cut. (Calder also runs a Flickr group, Island or Not Island, dedicated to what he calls "definitionally problematic would-be islands," such as ocean-bound fortresses and beautiful bonsais growing on floating logs.)

Others have attempted more quantitative assessments. In 2008, Royle writes, a nissologist—one who studies islands—named Christian Depraetere "selected a threshold of 0.1 sq km… and calculated that there are 86,732 islands at or above this size on earth." When he reduced this threshold to .01 square kilometers, the number jumped up to around 450,000. When he brought it down still more, it rocketed to nearly 7 billion, "although there is some doubt as to the validity of his formula at this scale," writes Royle. Sweden counted their own islands in 2001 and came out with 221,800. Then they tried again in 2013, with different criteria, and got 576. Meanwhile, if you go by the definition the European Union used to determine the sample set for a study of island communities, the whole country has only 24, says Calder.

The act of counting itself is difficult. Try to make a computer do it, and you're at the whim of satellite imagery and pixel resolution, and boxed into whatever rules you set for the program. Whip out a paper map, and you're counting on some cartographer's thoroughness and honesty, as well as your own eyes. "No matter how tightly you set the definition and how many resources you pour into counting them, no two people will come up with the same number," says Calder. He would know: "When I was bored at college I took all the maps of Connecticut done by the Geological Survey up to my desk, and sat there and counted every island on them," he says. "I counted 1,900 in Connecticut alone."

So let's give ourselves a break and pretend that, by some miracle, everyone has agreed on how many islands there are. Almost immediately, we would all be would be wrong again. "They're winking in and out of existence every minute," says Calder. "Some island in the Congo River just collapsed finally and disappeared. Another one just arose out of the Baltic." Mountaintops are getting cut off, and trees are filling with water. Our current climate weirdnesses promise to accelerate both sides of this arms race. As sea levels rise and flood some islands out of existence, others will be created out of swaths of land we now consider solid: Miami, say, or Maryland.

While all of this messiness may undercut some of our core ideas about islands, it certainly makes them more relatable. "I think people are attracted to islands because they think that they're defined and precise and memorable," says Calder. "But of course, just as in all areas of life, they're actually full of gray areas and perplexity." So if you're wondering whether something is an island, try waiting around little bit. You never know what might happen.

Those who traveled to from mainland Scotland to the island of Barra Head in the 19th century described a journey involving "innumerable jumblings by land and sea." The island is the southernmost in the Outer Hebrides, and is unprotected from the ravages of ocean weather. As the National Trust for Scotland puts it, "the western cliffs plunge with giddying suddenness" down into the sea, and storms slam right into them.

In the fall of 1833, the Barra Head Lighthouse flicked on for the first time, meant to help sailors near those cliffs deal with the extraordinary waves. As settlements rose and fell around it, the lighthouse housed keepers steadily for over a century. Many hosted guests who had come to study the island's flora and fauna, or just to see what life was like. At least one keeper buried family members there, in a small stone-walled cemetery near the tower.

In 1869, the ornithologist H.J. Elwes described looking down from the lighthouse on a blustery day as flocks of birds wheeled in the wind below. "The the air was so thickly crowded with birds as to produce the appearance of a heavy snowstorm," he wrote. "The howling of the tremendous gusts of wind coming up from below as if forced through a blast-pipe made it almost impossible to hear a person speak... It was the grandest sight I ever experienced."

But the lighthouse couldn't save everybody: After World War II, scraps from a Blenheim bomber were found on the face of the cliff. "Apparently, it had crashed in a storm and no one had heard it," the Northern Lighthouse Board reports.

In October of 1980, a crew came out to the lighthouse, converted it to automatic operation, and brought the last keeper back with them. No one lives at Barra Head anymore, although people still brave its waters to visit, or to rescue those who have drifted off-course.

Fans of historic buildings are trying to upgrade and preserve the lighthouse, fearing the storms will bring it down too. But these efforts have been made difficult by how hard it is to land on the island. For now, the light—the highest in all of Scotland—still spins once every thirty seconds, sweeping over the quiet graveyard, the seabird snowstorms, the crumpled bomber, and everything else we left behind.

In Dorado, Puerto Rico, the problems with the water began in the 1980s, when industrial solvents and dry cleaning compounds started to show up in local wells. Over the next three decades, when officials from Puerto Rico’s water authority and health department came to test the water, they kept finding contaminants. By the 1990s the problem had become troubling enough that wells began to be shut down. By the 2000s, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was searching for the source of the pollution.

Whatever was leaking these compounds into the groundwater, the federal agency couldn’t find it. But the contamination was only getting worse, and in April 2016 the EPA proposed putting the Dorada water system on the national list of Superfund sites—the most contaminated places in the country.

This past October, in one of the many headline-making incidents that followed Hurricane Maria, workers from a local utility opened one of those contaminated wells near Dorado and started distributing its water to desperate people who had no other option.

For months after the hurricane, without electricity, surrounded by damaged infrastructure, Puerto Ricans struggled to find clean water after sewage, gasoline, and more was swept up in floodwaters. But the island’s underlying geography, along with a history of poor investment in the water system, have made contamination a long-standing problem in the island territory. Researchers are trying now to understand and measure just how much the storm exacerbated these issues.

Underneath the northern coast of Puerto Rico lies a karst aquifer, a geologic formation of limestone where, over time, rain dissolves the rock to form tiny fractures, streaming rivulets, and giant caves. When rain falls, that maze of spaces collects and stores generous supplies of water. “It’s a unique geologic environment,” says Ingrid Padilla, a professor of water resources engineering at the University of Puerto Rico. “It’s highly complex and very difficult to simulate.”

Many other types of aquifers collect water that seeps through layers of the ground, which serve as a natural water treatment plant and filter contaminants out. But karst aquifers don’t have that same advantage. “The same exact characteristic that allowed water to flow through allows the contaminants in,” Padilla says. As reliable sources of water, karst aquifers attract human settlement. But even in the absence of a dramatic spill or clear sources of pollution, contaminants sneak into the groundwater as neighborhoods and industry grow.

This danger is compounded by Puerto Rico's systems of pipes, pumping stations, and treatment plants, which has registered more drinking water violations than any other state or territory in the United States, as the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) reported in the spring of 2017. According to data analyzed by the environmental group, close to 70 percent of the island’s population gets its water from sources in violation of federal health standards for drinking water.

These violations are caused in part by the degradation of Puerto Rico’s water infrastructure, which is riddled with leaks that make the system vulnerable to further contamination. “There’s been a lot of disinvestment in water treatment plants and water pumping stations,” says Mekela Panditharatne, an NRDC lawyer who specializes in water.

The hurricane had a direct, dramatic impact on these existing problems. Across the island, taps stopped running and floodwaters rushed in, covering cars and houses. Padilla, the water engineering professor, remembers the water seeping in under her door being white and brown. “I was thinking, ‘That could be contaminated water,’ right in the middle of the hurricane,” she says.

Part of Padilla’s work on the ongoing groundwater contamination is to measure contaminants in the water people use, and to see if they have any connection to preterm births, a widespread problem in the territory. But when she and colleagues first thought to start sampling the water after the hurricane, they found roads blocked and cars commandeered by federal authorities. Even when they were able to make it to test sites, it was often impossible pump water from the usual sources. “There were limitations on what we were able to do,” she says. “We finally were able to start sampling after a month.”

Clearly the hurricane had an impact on the island’s water quality in the short term, but Padilla is interested in its far-reaching impacts as well. “The impact by chemicals is generally longer term,” she says. “You’re not going to see that the next day.” The influx of floodwater could also have diluted the contaminants that had been a problem in the past. Those levels could be quick to return.

Now that conditions on the islands are finally starting to improve—Padilla got electricity back only in the past couples of weeks, she says—researchers are starting to think about their next steps. Another group is planning to work with local nonprofits and schools to sample water supplies around four other Superfund sites, including a battery-recycling facility and a naval training center, contaminated by munitions tests, in order to identify new risks of exposure.

In the first months after the storm, even the EPA had trouble accessing all the Superfund sites on the island—24 in total—but as of February the agency says it has assessed every one and found no major spills associated with the storm. Returning to the status quo, though, is far from ideal. Even before the storm Puerto Rico needed more than $2 billion to fix up its water infrastructure, and now the island needs billions more just to rebuild.

Around 3,000 years ago, humans came to shore on the archipelago of Vanuatu for the first time. An ancient seafaring people spilled out of their boats and onto the land, planted their feet in the white sand, and decided that these 83 islands, scattered across 800 miles of the Pacific Ocean, would be home. But who they were, and where they came from, has puzzled researchers. The islanders' genetic ancestry suggests an origin point of what is now Papua New Guinea—but their Austronesian languages tell a different story, instead finding their roots in southeast Asia.

Now, however, two studies recently published in Current Biologyand Nature Ecology & Evolution suggest possible backstories for these early settlers, using DNA sequences from the remains of around a dozen ancient inhabitants of Vanuatu and nearby islands.

What seems near-certain, the studies agree, is that Vanuatu's earliest settlers came from what is now Taiwan, a journey of over 4,000 miles. They were members of the Lapita culture who first left Taiwan around 5,000 years ago on specialized outrigger canoes that carried farming technology and Austronesian languages everywhere from Madagascar to Easter Island. Around 500 years after their arrival to Vanuatu, a group of mostly male voyagers joined them, coming from Papua New Guinea.

Where the studies differ is in assessing what happened next. Research published in Current Biologyasserts that the Papuans eventually almost entirely replaced the original Vanuatuans, or pushed them out to far-off pockets of the archipelago. The team, led by Harvard Medical School geneticist David Reich, also found hints that there might have been multiple waves of migration from the larger islands around Indonesia and New Guinea—Papuan ancestry found in islands west of Vanuatu seem to have come from another source. “This is only the tip of the iceberg," Reich told Nature.

Researchers behind the Nature Ecology & Evolution study, however, think it's far more likely that the people gradually mixed with one another. “There wasn’t this huge boom, and the Papuans came in and killed off everyone," anthropologist Heidi Colleran, from the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, told Nature. Many of Vanuatu's 130 languages appear to be Austronesian in origin—though some researchers say that particular aspects, including what’s known as a bilabial trill (a kind of "bwwww" noise in the middle of some words), are distinctively Papuan—speaking to a kind of linguistic intermingling. But other linguists have pooh-poohed the suggestion and say it's by no means a certainty that those features do originate in Papua New Guinea.

What scientists can agree on, however, is that right now, their studies are suffering from a paucity of data. Mark Stoneking, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, told Nature that once more genomes for the region had been sequenced, it would be easier to fill in some of the blanks. As he said, "People tend to over-interpret things a little bit because it’s so exciting to have ancient DNA from this part of world."

When the burger-flipping robot Flippy debuted last year, the Miso Robotics contraption seemed to be mostly a futuristic curiosity. But today, Flippy fulfilled the purpose it had been built for. After a year-long testing period, a model of the robot is now hard at work flipping burgers at a Caliburger restaurant in Pasadena, California.

Looking like a large arm swathed in a chef jacket and mounted on a cart, it comes with a spatula at one end. Using thermal imaging and cameras, Flippy can tell when a burger needs to be flipped and taken off the heat. Flippy can also switch out dirty spatulas for clean ones, and can even scrape the grill. According to local news outlet KTLA, artificial intelligence is a part of its programming, meaning that Flippy has the potential to get better at its job over time.

Caliburger, which helped fund Flippy and Miso Robotics, plans on rolling its technology out to restaurants across the world. At the same time, the rise of robots has sparked anxiety about their potential to replace humans at jobs, particularly entry-level positions. On the flip side, the founders of Miso Robotics argue that grill cooks are exposed to the danger of sizzling grease and stovetop burns, and that the vocation itself has what restaurants consider an expensively high turnover rate.

But there might not be cause to worry just yet. Flippy has a steep $60,000 initial price tag and a yearly fee for the bot's "learning and maintenance." Plus, Flippy still needs a human hand to help it lay a slice of cheese on each burger.

One day around 127 million years ago, a hatchling emerged from its shell. This petite member of the enantiornithine family—measuring about the length of your pinky finger, and weighing less than three ounces—didn’t have much time to get to know its dinosaur neighbors or the terrain of its prehistoric world. It died soon after cracking through.

The bird’s loss is researchers’ gain, because its bones tell a story. The hatchling’s skeleton—which is well preserved and nearly complete—offers researchers a window into the stages of avian development in the Mesozoic era.

When the wee enantiornithine was unearthed at the Las Hoyas site in Spain, the skeleton wasn’t immediately scrutinized—but not for lack of curiosity. The techniques needed to study the tiny bones “had not yet been developed when the specimen was discovered," Fabien Knoll, a researcher at the University of Manchester and project lead, explained to BBC. Now, though, tools such as synchrotron microtomography and elemental mapping have allowed researchers to take a closer look, which Knoll and company describe in a new paper in Nature Communications.

By studying bones, researchers can glean a lot of information about how a creature spent its life. Analyzing a skeleton reveals “a whole host of evolutionary traits," Knoll said in a statement.

Take flight, for instance. A bird’s bones must be fairly ossified in order to support the weight of flapping and hurtling through the air. The relative dearth of fossilized avian embryos and hatchlings means that researchers have a paucity of information about when in their development prehistoric birds might have lifted up into the sky. In this case, the sternum was still more cartilage than bone, leading the researchers to conclude that the hatchling probably couldn’t fly.

There’s still plenty more to learn about this long-deceased specimen, as well as its relationship to the living creatures speckling the sky, said Luis Chiappe, a co-author and director of the Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, in a statement. "It is amazing to realize how many of the features we see among living birds had already been developed more than 100 million years ago."

Angostura, the bitters packaged in the ubiquitous, yellow-topped bottles, can be found on nearly every bar in the world. Typically, a dash or two of the potent liquid is enough to add an earthy, sharp tang to any drink.

But on Washington Island—a remote locale off the tip of a tiny peninsula, surrounded by Lake Michigan in the northernmost part of Wisconsin—people do things a bit differently. To truly drink like a local, you must take a full one-ounce shot of Angostura at Nelsen’s Hall Bitters Pub (as one of only a handful of bars on the island, that means pretty much every resident is a regular). According to the card you receive as an initiated member of the “Bitters Club,” that shot means you are “now considered a full-fledged islander and are entitled to mingle, dance, etc. with all the other islanders.”

It’s curious why anyone would want to willingly do shots of Angostura in the first place. But somehow this minuscule island, with a population of around 718 people, not only instituted a strange tradition, but also became the world’s single-largest consumer of the bitters brand. Washington Island’s fascination with Angostura Bitters can be traced, like a handful of American drinking practices, back to Prohibition.

Tom Nelsen first arrived on Washington Island in the late 1800s as part of a wave of Danish immigration. He not only traversed the northernmost reaches of Wisconsin, but also then crossed the choppy, treacherous stretch of water known as the Death’s Door Strait, so named because of the many shipwrecks that occurred there. He survived the journey, and opened his dance hall on the island in 1899, adding a bar three years later.

At the time, it served up drinks just like anywhere else. But after the Eighteenth Amendment kicked off in 1920, effectively prohibiting the production and sale of alcohol, Tom was at a loss. Then, he found the perfect loophole that would allow him to keep doling out drinks. He would sell bitters, marketed as a “stomach tonic for medicinal purposes."

“During Prohibition, Tom got a pharmaceutical license so he could legally sell bitters,” says Sarah Jaworski, whose parents have owned Nelsen’s since 1999. This loophole wasn’t quite the same as that used by doctors who prescribed alcohol during Prohibition. Rather, the bitters were classified as a “stomach tonic for medicinal purposes” instead of alcohol, meaning that a doctor’s prescription wasn’t required. “Medicinal tinctures are usually taken in smaller doses, but since Angostura bitters are 90 proof, he was able to legally sell it as a tincture,” she says. “He just sold it as shots.”

Tom’s tonic proved to be extremely popular among locals, many of whom apparently suffered from previously-undiagnosed stomach ailments until then. In fact, customers who kept Nelsen’s open for the entirety of Prohibition are directly responsible for the pub being the oldest continuously-operating tavern in Wisconsin. That’s despite more than one visit from the feds, who harbored their doubts about the island’s sudden onset of tummy troubles, but were never able to successfully shut down the pharmacy-cum-bar.

Prohibition was repealed in 1933. Though the pub eventually resumed normal operations, and even after a full bar was reinstated, the bitter shots had embedded themselves in the island’s drinking traditions. Shots of Angostura continued to be one of the most popular items on the menu. Tom himself is said to have consumed up to a pint (about eleven shots!) of bitters every day. “The bitters were a huge part of his life,” Jaworski says. “He lived to the ripe old age of 90, and drank his bitters until the very end.”

In the mid-twentieth century, Tom’s nephew, Gunnar, and his wife, Bessie, took over the pub and carried on his legacy by founding the Bitters Club, which has continued under several different owners. The club has proved so popular that Nelsen’s is officially the largest purveyor of Angostura bitters in the world. According to a representative from Angostura, the bar singlehandedly sells upwards of 10,000 shots every year. Many members of the club have told Jaworski that the experience inspired them to buy bitters for their home bar, though more often to use in Old Fashioneds than as shots.

“We go through case after case,” says Jaworski. “Busy weekends we’ll go through three cases of bitters. When we get a first-timer who wants to join the club, we try to be encouraging. We tell them that it smells like clove, and that it’s not going to be as bad as they expect.”

Maryn McKenna was one of those first-timers when she arrived in Washington Island with a boyfriend in 1992. The two visited the island on a whim and wandered into Nelsen’s knowing nothing about its specialty.

“We stepped into this big white building where there seemed to be lots of people at the bar, and someone was slamming back a shot glass and gagging,” McKenna recalls. Naturally, she was intrigued. “I had never heard of the Bitters Club. I’d never even heard of Nelsen’s. Anyway, they poured the Angostura, I tossed it down, I didn’t choke, and the bartender stuck her thumb in the dregs. She stamped my card with a thumbprint and initialed it, gave me my card, and wrote my name in a ledger.”

Nelsen’s has evolved Tom’s tradition by integrating Angostura into some of its other offerings, such as the “Bitters Burger” special, where Angostura is used to season the burger patties before they’re cooked. And the several times a year the bar makes a ham, they use bitters instead of traditional spices, too. But Nelsen’s is cautious about over-using the potent flavor. “We don’t incorporate it in too many other places because it stands out and speaks for itself,” Jaworski says. “The island is a unique place, and our relationship with the bitters is part of what makes it that way.”

People say that when the feds brought Tom to court during the dry years to challenge his pharmacy’s legitimacy, he poured the judge a shot of bitters. The judge knocked it back, and then declared that anyone crazy enough to drink Angostura should be allowed to continue. Nelsen would probably be thrilled to know that they have.

Who hasn't occasionally daydreamed of leaving it all behind and running away to your own very special island?

Today Atlas Obscura is kicking off Islands Week, our five-day dive into the best and most unusual stories from beyond the mainland. To celebrate, we're issuing a challenge to our readers: we're asking you to draw us a map of your personal fantasy island.

If you could make an island to your exact specifications, what would it look like? What would make it unique—the true island of your individual dreams?

Maybe your island is made entirely of recycled bottles, or only accepts currency featuring Darth Vader. Perhaps your island is set up as a villains’ lair, or populated with magical creatures that don’t exist anywhere else in the world. Is your island an expansive paradise that will take years to explore, or a simple spot of sand surrounded by boundless ocean? Does it have a treehouse? A mansion? Is there a skull-shaped cave? A water park? A hidden base in a volcano? Mischievous monkeys? Pirate ghosts? A lost society of evolved super-beings?

Send us a map or illustration of your perfect dream island, no matter how crude, and include a short description of what makes your island special. Email your image and description to eric@atlasobscura.com with the subject line "My Fantasy Island" by Thursday at 2 p.m. EST, and we’ll publish our favorites on Friday. Please include your full name and location, and if you include your Instagram handle, we'll be able to tag you on our account as well.

From as far back as anyone can remember, up until about half a century ago, Nishinoshima—a volcanic island southeast of Tokyo—was quiet. Sure, once upon a time, it had roared itself into existence, erupting and erupting until its lava piled up into a blob a couple of kilometers wide. But for thousands of years, it had kept things low-key, content to grow groundcover, host the occasional seabird, and hang out.

Then, in April 1973, a burbling began beneath the water just east of the island. Passing sailors noticed smoke rising into the air, and a pair of chemists later wrote that "the sea water became turbid with fine, suspended particles… yellow to brown in color." Over the next few days, new islands formed, then joined together, engulfing the original. Afterwards, Nishinoshima was no longer a blob, but a bumpy crescent, stretched out in both directions like it was grabbing at something.

A respectable size and shape, to be sure—the island could have stopped there. But then, in late 2013, it happened again. Yet another underwater volcano near Nishinoshima began erupting, gushing lava that hardened into spools and swirls. A new island formed, then spread, inching closer to the old one. Authorities considered giving it a name—but soon enough, it too had merged with Nishinoshima, and so it was just Nishinoshima again.

This time, it kept spewing. It swallowed the old land mass up. People marveled at its productivity: In 2014, the Japan Timesreported that it had released enough lava "to fill [the] Tokyo Dome six times." By 2015, the brand new Nishinoshima was 12 times as big as version two had been.

Later that year, eruptions stopped for a time. Scientists got excited about a new kind of growth: As the island cooled and hardened, would plants and animals move in? But as of last spring, things had started up again. "Observers aboard a plane passing the volcano on 21 April noted intense activity in the crater," noted a Smithsonian Institution vulcanology report. "Bombs were ejected as high as 100 m above the crater and incandescent rocks rolled down the flanks, reaching the sea." Nishinoshima may stop someday, but only when it's ready.

Floating islands have fascinated human beings for thousands of years. They appear in Greek, Native American, and Polynesian mythology, not to mention fantasy novels and dessert menus. But the residents of Crow Wing County, Minnesota have had about enough of their floating island.

“The wild beast of North Long Lake,” as one person described it to a local TV news crew, broke loose from the shoreline last fall. Heedless of property lines and proper decorum, it caromed around the lake for about three weeks before coming to rest, leaving behind crumpled docks and mangled boat lifts.

For now it is harmless, frozen in place. As the spring thaw approaches, the residents who live around North Long Lake are gearing up once more to deal with their beast. It won’t be easy. Disputes over who is responsible for it have challenged the bonds of community in this serene area just north of Brainerd, known for recreational fishing and boating.

Floating islands are common in Minnesota; it’s the size of this one that’s causing all the fuss. Sue Galatowitsch, a wetland ecologist at the University of Minnesota, says the island likely weighs at least 1,000 tons and could extend 30 feet below the water. Technically, it’s a floating bog. A natural assemblage of peat moss festooned with cattails and tamarack trees, the bog is more than four acres across—that’s about 64 tennis courts. “A bog that size,” Galatowitsch says, “can kind of do whatever it wants.”

Most floating islands are bogs, and they are more common than one would think. “They seem like something that can’t exist, but they’re really all over,” says Chet Van Duzer, who wrote a 400-page bibliography on floating islands. They are found on six of the seven continents. People have grazed cattle on them, fished through them, farmed on them, even created religious ceremonies around them.

But in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, people mostly want them to go away. Minnesota residents regularly ask the state Department of Natural Resources for permission to move floating bogs away from their homes and stake them down elsewhere. “I deal with floating bog permits every year,” says Kevin Martini, an aquatic plant management specialist for the agency. In most cases, problem bogs are small enough to nudge to a new location with a boat or two. “They’re never this big,” he says.

Floating bogs float because the peaty soil that supports them releases gases as it decomposes. “Where they’re best developed, you’ve got 5,000 years of sphagnum peat accumulation,” Galatowitsch says. “Most of it’s dead. The only stuff that’s alive is the three or four inches at the top.” They expand outward from peat shelves that form along the shoreline. And when water levels are unusually high, as they were on North Long Lake last fall, floating bogs sometimes break free from their root tethers and go wandering.

The North Long Lake bog began its journey at a summer camp called Legionville. The camp, owned by the American Legion, trains children as volunteer crossing guards and helps them master other road safety skills, like exiting overturned school buses. For years, the bog bobbed inoffensively next to an unused stretch of lakeshore there. Then, one blustery October morning, it broke loose.

Bill Schmidt, president of the North Long Lake Association, remembers the phone call from a resident at the north end of the lake. “They said there was this huge chunk of land floating towards them,” he says. “And they were sitting there having coffee and it just kept coming. It destroyed their dock and boat lifts and they wanted to know what to do about it.”

At the whim of wind and wave, the bog meandered for weeks within a kidney-shaped bay at the north end of the lake, an area just over one square mile. In late October, it came to rest in the waters off Legionville’s swimming beach, about 400 yards from where it had started. Randy Tesdahl heads the American Legion in Minnesota. He was out of town when he got the call. “I said ‘Okay, we’ll deal with it in the spring,’” he recalls. “‘It’s a bog. How bad can it be?’”

A bog, he’s since learned, can be pretty bad. After it landed at Legionville, the DNR gave the North Long Lake Association a permit to stake it there. The idea was to try and corral the bog near its place of origin while a plan took shape to move and anchor it permanently. The Lake Association planted wooden stakes, made of 10-foot-long two-by-fours, on three sides of the bog to keep it from heading back out into the lake. But they did so without the American Legion’s permission. Lake Association president Bill Schmidt says that’s because, at the time, the bog was several hundred feet offshore. (The wind has since blown it back, right in front of the swimming beach.) “It was not attached to shore so there would not be any reason to seek permission,” he says. Some Legionnaires felt otherwise.

“There was some anger, quite honestly, and some discontent,” says the American Legion’s Tesdahl. Summer camp manager Roy Kruger complained to a local newspaper that he was going to lose business because of the bog. “So the person who staked it there is the responsible party,” he said. “So they're going to have to move it, [or] they're gonna get sued."

Meanwhile, other residents directed their ire towards the Department of Natural Resources. “I mean, this got political,” says Martini. Residents complained to their legislators that issuing permits wasn’t enough—that the DNR should get out there and move the bogs. “They were complaining that the DNR should take care of this,” Martini says. “We just say hey, it’s a public water. The bog is habitat. We’re fine with it being wherever it ends up.”

Winter deepened and tempers cooled. Tesdahl, Schmidt, and Martini talked things over. “I said, ‘We gotta turn this into lemonade,’” says Tesdahl. “‘Everybody do a little bit and we’ll get the thing moved and it will be a feel-good story.’” All three entities now claim a positive working relationship. The North Long Lake Association and the American Legion agreed to share the cost of dealing with the bog.

But early estimates were beyond either organization’s means. Destroying the bog, they learned, would cost as much as half a million dollars. Bids to move it came in around $100,000. So the interested parties, led by Tesdahl, decided they would take on the bog themselves. “My first question was ‘Can we blow it up?’” says Tesdahl. The DNR demurred. So the group has devised an elaborate plan to move it, as soon as the lake thaws.

A floating bog, they’ve learned, is a slippery adversary. It jiggles like a waterbed when you walk on it, and falling through is a danger. To move a bog, one needs to get a grip on it. Try and do so, and chunks break off like Jello. So Tesdahl and others are building a “necklace” out of logs and chains. According to Tesdahl, the log necklace will wrap around the bog, allowing tractors equipped with poles to push from the shore and boats in the lake to pull. The boats will rotate the bog 180 degrees, away from the swimming beach. Then the team will fix the bog in place. Chains will encircle the rootballs of fallen trees, snake across the bog on top of plywood planks, and hang off the end into the water, anchored by massive steel beams. Eventually, the team hopes, the bog will root itself once more and reattach to the shoreline.

Tesdahl estimates the operation will cost between $5,000 and $10,000. Taking advantage of an unusual product placement opportunity, the outboard motor company Evinrude has agreed to donate 20 boats, including a 24-foot barge, to the effort. Tesdahl is seeking donations for materials. Manpower, however, won’t be a problem. The American Legion in Minnesota has 73,000 members.

“You put a bunch of old veterans together, they can move a mountain,” Tesdahl says. Whether they can move a bog remains to be seen.

David Benscoter is an apple detective. Once an investigator for the F.B.I. and the United States Treasury, he has moved from digging into the affairs of corrupt politicians and tax evaders to hunting down the United States's lost apple trees, one variety at a time. Now, in the green expanses of the vast Palouse agricultural area, across parts of Idaho and Washington, Benscoter has found five apples previously believed to be lost, the AP reports.

It all started with a helping hand on a neighbor's orchard. A friend living with a disability asked Benscoter to help her pick apples from an old orchard behind her house—but no one could identify what kind they were. The answer, eventually, was in old county fair records from Whitman County, Washington, which listed multiple types of apple believed to be extinct. In the time since, Benscoter has used maps, family histories, and newspapers to successfully track down more than 20 varieties of wayward apples.

“It’s like a crime scene,” Benscoter told the New York Times last year. “You have to establish that the trees existed, and hope that there’s a paper trail to follow.” In this latest windfall is Shackleford, Saxon Priest, Kittageskee, Ewalt, and McAffee varietals, found peacefully growing in plain sight on trees scattered across the Palouse region.

You might think that one apple resembles another. But apple experts will tell you that there are as many as 50 different identifiers that distinguish one variety from the next, from the length of the stem through to the hue of the skin. To identify the fruit, Benscoter pairs with apple experts from Temperate Orchard Conservancy in Oregon and Fedco Seeds in Maine, comparing their conclusions to old watercolor paintings or descriptions in books.

Today, there are around 4,000 named apple varieties in North America; once upon a time, there were more like 17,000, many of which have been painstakingly recorded. “I just love the history of these old apples and what they meant to the first homesteaders that arrived here in eastern Washington and northern Idaho,” Benscoter told the newswire. “The apple was the most important fruit you could have, and it could be used in so many ways."