Imagine this: All the spam emails you've ever received have come to life, and one by one, they are ringing your doorbell. There, on your stoop, is a parade of products you never asked for. Dozens of providers of services you do not need are tapping on your windows. And look, coming up the driveway—is that a Nigerian prince?

Several centuries before the internet, the dramatist Theodore Hook essentially invented the spam campaign. On November 27, 1810, Hook dispatched hundreds of tradespeople, several tons of goods, and at least one royal personage all to the same sleepy apartment: No. 54 Berners Street in London.

It's unclear exactly what motivated Hook. Some say a friend dared him to make 54 Berners Street the most famous address in the city. Others say the apartment's resident, a Mrs. Tottenham, had upset him somehow. It's also possible he just did it for laughs. As a friend of his once observed, "The exuberance of his fun was irrepressible... he did all sorts of strange things, merely that he might be doing [them]." A frequent hobby of his involved going to parties he hadn't been invited to—although the hosts always figured him out eventually, he generally entertained everyone so much that they didn't even mind.

For this trick, though, he decided to ramp things up a notch. According to The Life and Remains of Theodore Hook—a book cobbled together from Hook's own writings by the biographer Richard Bentley—he and two friends spent six weeks writing invitations, asking "recipients to call on a certain day... at No. 54, Berners-street." By the time the day arrived, the biography attests, they had sent "about four thousand letters," all with airtight references, specific instructions, and—when necessary—a dash of intrigue. (It's hard to resist an invitation from someone who writes that they are "desirous of speaking... on business of importance.")

When the big day arrived, Hook and his friends posted up at a hotel on Berners Street, just across from No. 54. Newspapers give us an idea of what they saw. First, reports say, came a single chimney sweep, who showed up promptly at 5 a.m. About a dozen more soon followed. Throughout the morning and afternoon, the address was swarmed by all manner of callers, visits from whom, under normal circumstances, would have been mutually exclusive: undertakers and accoucheurs; opticians and dentists; coal wagons and wedding cakes; and carts bearing "linens, jewellry, and every other description of furniture, sufficient to have stocked the whole street."

Six burly men delivered an organ. Forty butchers came wielding 40 legs of mutton. Then the Mayor of London himself careened around the corner in his carriage. He had received a personal letter from Mrs. Tottenham, he explained, telling him that she was too ill to make their scheduled meeting, and asking if he could stop by her place instead.

Hook's biography attests to still more visitors—attorneys, clergymen, even the Duke of Gloucester. In any case, between the confused tradespeople and the curious spectators, the streets were soon clogged to impassability. Even the policemen could do nothing. It was, Jackson's Oxford Journal concluded, "the greatest hoax that ever has been heard of in this Metropolis," and if its perpetrator was ever found, they should be punished "for such despicable waggery."

Although Hook was never officially caught, much of London suspected him. Even before his posthumous autobiography, Hook sort of owned up to the joke: In his play, Gilbert Gurney, he gives the main character the fun of confessing. "What else made the effect in Berners Street? I am the man," he says. "[I sent] piano-fortes by dozens, and coal waggons by scores… two thousand five hundred raspberry tarts from half a hundred pastry cooks… even Royalty itself." Mrs. Tottenham surely never crossed him again.

On a shelf just behind the reference desk at the Harmon branch of the Phoenix Public Library, are small pouches of seeds. Like the books and DVDs, they’re available to check out. The library allows visitors to take a few packets of the vegetable and flower seeds home for free just by showing their library card.

“It’s innovative, it’s different, it’s another way for people to interact with the library,” says Lee Franklin, the library’s spokesperson. “It’s been really well received.”

The Phoenix Public Library first put seeds on the shelves at one of its branches in 2014. Franklin says they were immediately in high demand. Now the library distributes an average of 1,000 seed packets per month across nine of its 17 branches. Franklin says the program has proven to be sustainable with minimal costs—around $300-$500 to bring a seed-sharing program to a new branch of the library. And, Franklin says, the organizational tasks of offering seeds fit seamlessly with the library’s existing cataloguing system.

The Phoenix Public Library is not alone. Hundreds of public libraries around the U.S. have adopted similar initiatives to offer free seeds to library-goers. Seed-sharing programs aim to expand access to crops and educate the public, while also protecting scarce agricultural resources.

“It’s great if we have all this sustainability, but unless we have access to seeds, all the other aspects of sustainable agriculture really don’t mean anything,” says Rebecca Newburn, co-founder of the Richmond Grows Seed Lending Library in Richmond, California.

Newburn says the common goal of seed libraries is to educate people on the unique plants and specific needs of the region, be it high-altitude, humid, urban, or rural. But each seed library is a little different.

“It’s so sweet to see different communities come up with what works for them,” Newburn says.

Some seed libraries just give seeds away, while others rely on participants to grow a plant to maturity, capture new seeds, and contribute back to the collection. Many seed libraries are run by nonprofits, clubs, or school groups, but Newburn says public libraries, with built-in resources for community outreach and educational programming, have become the most common place to find these programs.

Just a handful of public library seed programs existed around the U.S. in 2010, when Newburn, a middle school science teacher, helped introduce the concept to her local library. Then, in 2011, Newburn and her collaborators posted the framework for their seed program online for others to replicate. She also joined with other seed enthusiasts to create a website called the Seed Library Social Network to connect similar programs and share tips with other seed savers.

“Then it just started growing like wildflowers all over the place,” Newburn says—pun intended.

In less than a decade, Newburn’s list of seed libraries has grown to include around 500 programs from Oakland to Dallas to Martha’s Vineyard. Many more are in early development stages, Newburn says.

Newburn, and other organizers like her, hope that as numbers of seed libraries increase nationwide, so too will understanding of ecological issues.

“This is really the first time in human history where every individual doesn’t have to grow their own food,” says Joy Hought, executive director of Tucson-based seed preservation nonprofit, Native Seeds/SEARCH. That makes an impact on biodiversity, she says.

As plant species reproduce, new generations develop unique adaptations to different environmental conditions, resulting in diverse heirloom varieties. But when large companies control most food production and seed distribution, and work to hybridize and streamline agriculture, those regional differences can disappear.

“I don’t see us as competing against large industrial seed producers, we just want to make sure that biodiversity is still available to people,” Hought says. She also notes that, as climate change alters the environment, she hopes access to more varieties of seeds will prepare food growers to cope with extreme conditions.

Hought’s organization has provided seeds for several seed libraries, and she says launching these programs is not without challenges.

“In practical reality, questions start to come into play like, how do we make sure, if someone is bringing in carrot seeds, that it is what it says it is on the package?” Hought says.

Hought says not everyone has the organizational skills to manage a seed-sharing program, but if there’s any profession well suited to the task, it’s librarians.

“I can’t think of a better structure that’s already in place to handle it,” she says.

Phoenix Public Library spokesperson Lee Franklin says seed sharing makes sense from a library’s perspective too. The opportunities to expand access to home-grown food and educate people about the region’s history and ecology through educational programming and seed distribution fit squarely into the library’s missions of community building and promoting lifelong learning, Franklin says.

“We can fold all that in and help people have knowledge that they can use to make their lives better,” Franklin says, “Maybe it’s a little idealistic, but we can see that ripple effect.”

To Newburn, pairing community seed sharing with public libraries makes perfect sense. After all, she says, seeds are a lot like books.

“[Seeds are] cultural documents of what we have saved and found valuable in terms of taste and community,” Newburn says. “When we take the seeds home and plant them and return them we’re actually adding another chapter.”

In May 1913, New Jersey drivers had to take a road test for the first time. For the previous six years, under the state’s first Commissioner of Motor Vehicles, the licensing exam had been designed to be “as easy as possible for automobilists.” Drivers simply had to attest they had read the state’s automobile law and could competently operate a car. Now, they would need to get in their car and “perform the ordinary acts” of driving in order to get a license.

It did not go well. One test-taker hit another car. Another mowed into a barber’s pole, and one backed into a fence. During the first week, 30 percent of the people who took the test failed.

Today, more than six million people are licensed to drive by New Jersey, and passing a driving test is a hallowed rite of passage in America. But navigating the ritual space where this test is offered—the Department of Motor Vehicles—is considered an ordeal to be survived. Drab, confusing, glacial, detested, DMV offices are places we try not to think about unless we’re forced to.

But, hated though they are, writes Ellen Hostetter, an assistant professor of geography at the University of Central Arkansas, DMV offices are critical. They represent a decades-long struggle to answer one of the major questions of American life, starting in the early 20th century: How can people live safely with cars?

“The vast automobile infrastructure we take for granted, that comprises so much of our built environment, had to be invented,” she says.

When cars started appearing on American roads, the hazards they posed were not something people merely accepted. The earliest drivers tended to be wealthy enough to afford these new machines. As Hostetter notes in a new paper in the Journal of Urban History, as early as 1902, newspaper columnists were warning of “automobile scorchers”—”reckless and short-sighted motor vehicle owners who drive their machines at racing speed along suburban and country highways.” Activists and politicians fought for a system to monitor and control these menaces, and soon state laws started to regulate car owners and their behavior. In 1903, Missouri and Massachusetts became the first states to pass laws requiring drivers to have licenses. New Jersey, in 1906, was another early adopter.

In the early days of the New Jersey DMV, offices were located wherever the agents were—in a machine shop, automobile showroom, or office building. In 1913, when Commissioner Job H. Lippincott took over the department, he negotiated with city halls across the state to take up quarters in those buildings a few days each month to administer written exams. Road tests were conducted on the public streets nearby, with all the hazards that entailed. “One lingering physical mark of the DMV licensing exam landscape was damage done by road tests gone awry—the bent barber’s pole, the scraped arm, and broken bicycle,” writes Hostetter.

This arrangement worked, for a time. In 1914, the state’s DMV issued 70,313 driver licenses—2 to 3 percent of the state’s population was allowed to drive a car. By the 1940s, though, about a third of New Jerseyans, more than 1.3 million people, applied for licenses, which expired en masse at the end of the year. Drivers had to flock to DMV offices for renewals in such crowds that applicants were turned away, even as the state kept increasing the length of the renewal period. The cities and towns that hosted DMVs grew impatient with the traffic and road tests, and as early as the 1920s the department was having trouble keeping its testing sites.

The solution to this jam? The stand-alone, dedicated DMV office and test course, the bane of would-be drivers and renewal seekers across America.

But in the 1950s, when New Jersey opened its first “motor center” at Baker’s Basin, not far from Trenton, the building was heralded as a “Boon to Drivers”—modern, streamlined, and designed to serve drivers. “When it opened in 1957, Baker's Basin—its size, location, and scope—was certainly a direct reflection of frustration with a system of regulation developed in the early 1900s,” Hostetter says. It was an adaptation to a new reality, where driving was not the domain of a few wealthy “scorchers” but a necessity for growing suburban neighborhoods.

Today, perhaps no space seems more unremarkable than a DMV. I took my driving test at Baker’s Basin and would never have guessed it had once been a pioneering, celebrated space. We accept DMV offices in the same way we accept traffic deaths—as the inevitable cost of convenience and mobility. These mundane spaces, in some ways, help mask the danger of the deal we’ve made as a society.

But part of this culture is changing quickly. States have tried to streamline and automate the functions of the DMV to make it a less dreaded experience. And if the makers of autonomous vehicles are as successful as they dream, drivers' licenses could become rare or obsolete, along with the public establishments needed to administer them. If DMVs were invented to help curtail the new dangers posed by automobiles, their demise might signal another shift in the transportation landscape of the country—something that will seem remarkable at first, and then eventually fade into the background.

On March 11, 1947, readers of the Manchester Evening Chronicle were warned of a strange invasion. "Teams of men have descended on a dozen cities," the article explained. Some of these men wielded scopes and tape measures. Others had cameras, wooden boards, and cartoonish two-foot-long arrows, like the one pictured above.

Citizens were to cooperate: if the men asked to enter your home or workplace, or point one of those arrows at your stone wall, "you shouldn't say no," the Chronicle continued. After all, silly props notwithstanding, these men were pulling off a serious feat. They were mapping all of Britain, one revision point photo at a time.

As Ordnance Survey employee Elaine Owen explains, urban surveyors based their maps off of small, unmoving features of the built landscape, called "revision points." The photos kept track of where these anchors were located. They were vital resource in the midcentury effort to make detailed maps of Britain's major cities, but as technology changed, they eventually fell out of use. Manchester's languished in boxes for decades, until an archivist at the city's Central Library showed them to Owen.

Earlier this month she scanned and uploaded about 23,000 of them to inaugurate her new website, Timepix, which uses maps to place historic photos in their geographic context. "Manchester was one of the first cities to be mapped," says Owen. Seventy years later, you can use these photos to travel back in time and walk its streets, with the survey workers pointing the way.

Nowadays, if people need precise geographical information, they generally turn to satellites. But before such technology was available, mapmaking required a tiring combination of trigonometry and hoofing it. When new maps were necessary, teams of surveyors would roam the country, choosing or building landmarks and measuring the angles and distances between them. Cartographers and draughtsmen would take the data they collected and transform it into precise charts.

Great Britain's first major surveying project, the "Principal Triangulation," began in 1791 and took over half a century to complete. During that time, surveyors from the Board of Ordnance established a series of "triangulation stations," each of these stations denoted by a large stone with a deep hole drilled into it. The surveyors who installed and measured from the stations wrote down variously detailed accounts of where they were, and did their best to use non-local stones for the markers, to enhance their visibility.

Though undoubtedly clever, this method had some shortcomings, which became apparent when it was time to update the maps. "The descriptions were very poor and varied in quality ... from a dimensioned plan to a statement such as 'Mr. Brown who lives in the cottage at the foot of the hill knows the position of the station,'" a later report explained. "After a lapse of 100 years or more and the consequent demise of Mr. Brown this naturally complicated the task of finding such stations."

In other cases, civilians accidentally destroyed the markers: the report mentions a cinema owner removing one to install a "Wonder Organ," an archeologist excavating another, and a policeman throwing one away because he thought it was part of a zeppelin bomb.

And so in 1935, when the country underwent an update (called the "Retriangulation"), the Ordnance Survey decided to do things a bit differently. First, they installed durable concrete obelisks, known as "trig pillars" or "trig points," on various hilltops and mountains across the country. The trig pillars doubled as stands for surveying instruments known as theodolites, and the surveyors used them to establish the initial, or primary, triangles. They then broke those down into smaller and smaller zones, their axes denoted by other markers: generally brass rods, bolts, or buried concrete blocks.

At the most fine-grained scale, though, even those were too clunky. "The cities were mapped in more detail than the countryside," says Owen. So in urban centers like Manchester and London, surveyors decided to find existing fixed spots instead of making them, establishing what they called "revision points." For these, they sought both specificity and longevity. A quintessential revision point might be a scratch on a wall, or the corner of a doorway, or an old nail sticking out of a post—something so ordinary, unchanging and small, most people wouldn't even notice it.

This is where the props come in. These surveying teams wanted to ensure that when their own successors set out to revise the map, they wouldn't have to spend hours searching for the right scratch, corner, or nail. So every time they deemed something a revision point, they recorded the date and a location code onto a wooden board. They then had someone point a big arrow at the point in question, and snapped a photo.

"They're concentrating very hard at where they're pointing, because those points are at centimeter[-level] accuracy," says Owen. "They need to get the arrow right on the point."

Clicking around the Timepix map, you can get a sense of how a typical surveying team's day might have gone. The black board—called a hymn board, after the church prop it resembled—was heavy, and difficult to haul around. The cameras must have been cumbersome as well. Despite this, the workers often dressed in collared shirts and jackets. Sometimes they even wore ties.

"The nature of the survey is that it is ordinary places that are captured," says Owen. "Major public buildings and places tourists might normally go are of far less interest than the humble street corners." Some afternoons took the teams down empty streets, where they aimed their arrows at building after building. Others they spent on lonely back roads, stoically pointing up at a railway bridge, and then down at the corner of a drain.

As other Mancunians went about their own days, intersecting with these roving men must have been confusing. Part of the point of that 1946 Chronicle article was to explain the project to the general public. (It even includes an appeal from the surveyors: "Please don't move our tripods.")

But even so, Owen says, "a lot of people had no idea what was going on." In a fair number of the images, the arrow-pointers are dogged by curious onlookers—or, occasionally, actual dogs. Pedestrians gawk, children photobomb, and shopkeepers come out to see what's what.

Once the survey was finished, the photos were collected into thick books and stored in Ordnance Survey offices. Up until the 1980s, Owen says, people would still refer to them. But after satellite technology made them obsolete, they were all donated or destroyed. "They were a really valuable part of our history and we basically threw them away," she says. (The arrows and hymn boards, unfortunately, are also nowhere to be found.)

She feels lucky to have found the Manchester revision point photos, and is excited to dig into another store, of about 300,000, that was recently unearthed in an Ordnance Survey building. There are probably other troves in local archives and record offices, too, just hanging around and waiting to be mapped.

In the meantime, this set is a good start. Now that the images are online, Owen hopes that some of these photobombing children will recognize themselves in one of them and come out of the woodwork. So far, she says, she's in touch with one man, who has been combing through the collection: "His dad was a surveyor, and he'd go out with him on school holidays and help out, and if he was good they'd let him point the arrow."

The owners of a pub, the Greyhound, also got in touch after spotting their building. Unlike the children, it looks almost identical to its 1940s portrait, save for the new parking lot and picnic tables out front.

Owen also hopes people enjoy the quotidian details the photos provide: the fashions, the advertisements, and other aspects of the everyday. While trying to gather ageless data for an abstract map, the surveyors happened to thoroughly capture a very particular time and place.

A few more of Manchester's revision point photos are below. You can find tens of thousands of them at Timepix.

On October 26, 1864, 250 people gathered before sunrise at a grassy spot overlooking the Fraser River, in what is now Quesnel, British Columbia. Most of the crowd were Indigenous Canadians, many of whom had traveled for days. These onlookers were there to honor five men about to die on a scaffold provocatively set up on the site of an Indigenous graveyard: their Tsilhqot'in chiefs, Telloot, Klatsassine, Tah-pitt, Piele, and Chessus.

At 7 a.m., these chiefs were hanged as murderers. In early 1865, another chief named Ahan was also hanged. This week, more than 150 years later, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered an official government apology for their deaths, and full exoneration. "As much as it is in our power to do so, we must right the wrongs of the past," he said. "We are truly sorry."

In the years leading up to that morning, the tribe had suffered terrible losses of people and land. Smallpox, spread by settlers, had destroyed local populations and killed thousands of Indigenous people across the province. The colonial government took few measures to control the spread of the disease—a refusal to attempt quarantine, no real vaccination efforts—and an outbreak became an epidemic, with the elderly and strong alike becoming feverish and nauseated, and then covered in painful lesions, filled with pus. With no real immunity, approximately half of British Columbia's Indigenous population was killed.

Infected Indigenous people who had caught the disease from settlers in cities were forced back to their home territories in canoes at gunpoint, spreading it up the coasts. Today, many Indigenous people view this negligence as a deliberate act of genocide. “The colonial authorities … knew that would spread smallpox throughout British Columbia,” the Indigenous artist Marianne Nicholson toldMaclean’s magazine. “At that point in time the [government] wanted to be able to claim those lands without having to compensate or recognize Indigenous title.”

Smallpox left huge swathes of fertile land, previously inhabited by Indigenous communities, abandoned, which was quickly taken over by settlers and loggers. In the early 1860s, work began on a pack-train trail, with a wagon road that went through Tsilhqot'in territory. Having already seen the damage settlers and the diseases they brought with them could do, the tribe resisted. The arrival of workers in Tsilhqot'in territory, without Tsilhqot'in permission, was seen as a declaration of war.

In April and May 1864, Tsilhqot'in people killed a total of 21 white settlers, including sleeping road workers, a farmers, and a ferry attendant. So far as the Tsilhqot’in were concerned, this was the ordinary course of warfare, and the necessary cost of protecting their land and their people from further biological devastation. In a recent video posted to Facebook, present-day Chief Joe Alphonse said, “Our warriors defended our women, our children, our lands." They were doing only what they had to to fend off attack. But in colonial capitals, their actions had set off a wave of fury and public outcry for retribution. The chiefs were seen to be murderers, who would have to pay the price.

Members of the colonial government began looking for the chiefs, but were unable to find them across the hugeness of Tsilhqot'in territory. Then, in August, eight Tsilhqot’in warriors, including five of the chiefs, accepted an invitation to come into the colonial camp, unarmed, to discuss the possibility of peace. They had been promised friendship, and smoked tobacco with the settlers as a gesture of reconciliation. But as they slept, they were shackled and taken prisoner. The following month, they were tried as murderers; in October, they were hanged.

Even at the time of the trial, some settlers had misgivings about how the chiefs had been arrested. "We have all heard of the sacredness of the pipe of peace … among the Indians," Judge Matthew Begbie, who tried them, wrote to the governor in the days after the trial. "It seems horrible to hang five men at once, especially under the circumstances of the capitulation." Still, he acknowledged, “the blood of 21 whites calls out for retribution.”

More than 150 years later, the events, known as the Chilcotin War, loom large in the present-day Tsilhqot’in imagination. In the 1990s, provincial court judge Anthony Sarich recommended an official apology. “In every village," he wrote in an official report, "the people maintained that the chiefs who were hanged at Quesnel Mouth in 1864 as murderers were, in fact, leaders of a war party defending their land and people." Trudeau's official apology is the third of its kind. In 1993, the Attorney-General of British Columbia issued an apology for their hangings, and funded first the excavation of the chiefs’ makeshift grave sites, and then their proper burial. In 2014, the premier of British Columbia, Christy Clark, went further still, apologizing for their wrongful deaths. "The Tsilhqot'in people rightly regard these chiefs as heroes of their people,” she said. “So today we offer this apology, a historic day 150 years later."

Trudeau’s words are just one more step towards the reparations the Tsilhqot'in still feel they are owed. In an official statement, Tsilhqot'in members spoke of the suffering they had endured as a result of the trials. "Our families, especially the women, carried this hurt all these years," they posted on Facebook. "We can only imagine how the women felt when their Chiefs, their warriors, their husbands, their sons, their brothers were hanged." Speaking to the Guardian, Alphonse said still more needed to be done to return their lands to how they had been before European contact. "It’s time for Canada to step up to the plate. It’s time to get this done. It’s time to make this a better Canada.”

Many scientists place a high premium on surfaces that go way beyond squeaky clean. If you’re scrutinizing ancient DNA or the composition of a meteorite, for instance, you want to be absolutely sure that a jumble of recent genetic material or landlubbing organisms haven’t found a way in and scuttled the data.

That’s why NASA routinely evaluates its clean rooms, which are designed to store samples while limiting contamination. Thoroughly sealing any facility against anything and everything is a tall order. But at the very least, it’s helpful for researchers to know what they’re up against so they can look out for anything that could potentially skew data and, if left unchecked, lead them to misleading conclusions.

A recent sweep of one of the clean room facilities at NASA’s Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston, Texas, turned up a smattering of fungi. Somewhere between 83 percent and 97 percent of the microbes at the meteorite lab were fungus, particularly from the genus Penicillium ascomycetous.

The geomicrobiologist Aaron Regberg of JSC swabbed the floor, table, and other crannies of the lab, where NASA scientists study meteorites that dropped from the sky over Antarctica. Compared with other clean rooms, the meteorite lab is already on the less-sparkling end of the spectrum, “so this study may provide us with a ‘worst case’ for biological cleanliness in our labs,” wrote Regberg and collaborators in a report presented at the 2018 Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

The fungus is worth flagging for a few reasons, notes Science’s Adam Mann: For one thing, fungi has no trouble penetrating samples—and once it has breached them and branched out, it can potentially alter their chemical composition. Regberg explained to Mann that some fungi also produce amino acids that are rare on Earth but common on carbon-rich extraterrestrial material—which could introduce some uncertainty about what originated where.

The little microbial census comes before the lab receives samples from an asteroid, Mars, and elsewhere, Newsweek reports. All the better to button it up as much as possible beforehand.

During World War II, the British royal family stashed away scores of gemstones from the Crown Jewels, fearing the Nazis would steal them. Where exactly they put them, though, remained a mystery for decades. Rumors swirled for years that King George IV hid the jewels, which are usually housed at the Tower of London, in a Welsh cave. Others whispered that the gems were tucked away at a prison in Devon, beneath a secret tunnel.

In January, a BBC documentary revealed that the King had buried the Crown Jewels in a hole, underneath an secret exit known as a sally port, at Windsor Castle. He didn’t just put them in the ground, though: He stored them in a Bath Oliver cookie tin. Even the Queen of England did not know that her father had buried them there until Alastair Bruce, a presenter for the BBC, told her about the discovery. (The detail had been revealed in letters written by royal librarian Sir Owen Morshead to George IV’s mother, Queen Mary.) For all Queen Elizabeth knew, her father’s cookie tin held, well, cookies.

Finding much more than cookies in cookie tins—particularly the bright blue ones made by Royal Dansk—seems to be a common, cross-cultural phenomenon. From India to Canada, people have stories about finding something else in there entirely: Sewing supplies, ribbons, homemade cookies, or even their own family jewels (such as poker winnings).

My mother kept various Royal Dansk containers. One held wine corks that she’d saved up for an art project (which has yet to be completed). I'm Latin American and grew up Catholic, so I perhaps shouldn’t have been too shocked to find that another tin held small mementos and photos from my First Communion. As a child, I regularly opened tins, which I hoped would hold the crystalline, buttery cookies the label promised. They never did.

Something about Royal Dansk cookie tins has made them ubiquitous in our homes. At Gastro Obscura, we're curious about this phenomenon, so we're asking for your help. Were you one of those kids who hoped to find butter cookies in your family's tins, and instead found something unusual inside? Do you now store things in Royal Dansk containers? If so, what?

Tell us about it using this form, and we’ll share our favorite responses in an article this April. Together, we can figure out why these cookie tins so often house baubles instead of biscuits.

The epicenter of America’s tech industry was once orchards as far as the eye can see. California’s Silicon Valley, as it happens, used to be known as the Valley of Heart’s Delight, a slogan that often accompanied illustrations of sunshine and fruit trees.

The campuses of Google, Facebook, and other businesses have pushed out most fruit growers. But some are left: C. Todd Kennedy is one of California’s premiere fruit experts, collectors, and growers. As a co-founder of the Arboreum Company, he distributes rare and vintage fruit trees that produce prickly pears and little-known peaches. But his four-decade dedication to fruit has been remarkably important in another respect: preserving and adding to America’s agricultural legacy. In 2010, horticulturist Clay Weeks estimated that half of the national collection of old stone fruit cultivars come from Kennedy. When asked, Kennedy makes only a slight correction. “Half of the named varieties in the national collection come from me," he says.

Kennedy’s contribution is the result of a long partnership. The U.S. National Plant Germplasm System has repositories across America, each focused on preserving and researching different types of food plants. The genetic diversity they house may hold the key to overcoming devastating plant diseases (such as the citrus greening currently devastating Florida’s orange crop) or developing fruit cultivars that can withstand climate change.

But these important endeavors can be overlooked and underfunded. In the late eighties and early nineties, Kennedy says, many federal repositories lacked the money or space to receive new genetic material. According to Thomas Gradziel, a University of California, Davis professor and plant breeder, knowledgeable fruit growers (Kennedy chief among them) saved many fruit varieties from disappearing forever.

In a way, fruit is Kennedy’s heritage. "My parents had a large property in Atherton,” Kennedy says. “My father had been raised on a prune and apricot ranch in Los Gatos in the 20's and 30's.” (Both towns are in Silicon Valley.) In the 1980s, Kennedy’s father wanted to plant old fruit trees that he remembered from his youth during the Valley of Heart’s Delight days, and he asked Kennedy to help.

But Kennedy wasn’t a horticulturist. He’s an agricultural lawyer who works with farmers on employment and land-use issues. So he turned to state research stations to find his father’s fruits. Many were at what he calls “land-grant” universities established on government land, such as the many campuses of the University of California.

Research stations had maintained collections of fruit trees since the 1880s, but time was short. “I discovered that these land-grant universities were shutting down their orchards,” Kennedy says. He had to work fast to collect the varieties he wanted; others simply vanished. “I got a lot more varieties than was really intended," he notes. “So I saved them.” Kennedy started collecting cultivars he found to be interesting or “famous old fruits.” That choice turned out to be monumental.

When funding was once again allocated to federal repositories, representatives came to collect twigs and bud sticks from Kennedy. This genetic material is referred to by growers as “germplasm,” and it allows new trees to be propagated and preserved. Kennedy’s contributions helped these institutions fill out their collections.

“I've been slowly feeding these varieties to their appropriate repositories,” Kennedy says. Currently, the tally of his donations is 689. He’s donated even more on behalf of members of the California Rare Fruit Growers group, a vast organization of hobbyists. Kennedy says he used to correspond via typewriter with fruit enthusiasts around the country to accumulate interesting cultivars. ‘"Most people are pretty generous,” he says. According to Gradziel, Kennedy is the crucial link between national fruit collections and hobbyist growers.

Occasionally, Kennedy even finds rare fruit on the street.

The Santa Clara Valley, despite its current tech focus, is still one of the best fruit-tree growing climates in the world. As a result, a lot of yard fruit goes uneaten and piles up on lawns and sidewalks. Kennedy had long been looking for a tejocote, a type of tree native to Mexico. (Importing its fruit was illegal until recently.) While driving one day, he caught sight of tejocote fruit in a gutter.

“I just followed the line of [tejocote fruit], kind of like Hansel and Gretel,” Kennedy says. With material from that tree, he grew his own tejocote.

Kennedy is no longer a hobbyist. He lives in San Francisco, and the Arboreum Company orchard is two hours south, in Morgan Hill. Now that it’s spring, he’s busy sending saplings to gardeners who want what he calls “older and better fruits.” While Kennedy says his trees come from all over, the greatest number come from the American west. Kennedy’s knowledge of fruit trees and how they grow in California, Gradziel tells me, is just as momentous as the germplasm he’s collected. Kennedy is often referred to for his expertise.

There are challenges to growing rare fruit. “Unfortunately, fruit quality is also connected to other, not-so-good qualities,” Kennedy says. Some fruits with beautiful flavors or interesting stories are more susceptible to disease or less productive than varieties found in grocery stores. And locally adapted fruits don’t grow as well or taste as good elsewhere. The Arboreum Company describes its “Santa Barbara” peach as “designed for those southern Californian areas experiencing a minimum of winter: at the beach and upon the coastal plain.”

The health of Kennedy’s and other private groves is increasingly important, because the federal repositories are once again in trouble. Kennedy believes the current political climate means deep funding cuts are inevitable, while Gradziel describes the Davis branch, which is dedicated to tree fruit, nuts, and grapes, as “in a dire situation right now.” They both believe more money and land is desperately needed to care for and store incoming plants (either as planted trees, cryogenically frozen buds, or preserved seeds).

The trees maintained by Kennedy and other fruit growers serve as “backup collections,” Gradziel says. It’s a matter with international implications. “One of the projects with the Davis repository now is repatriating germplasm that originally came from Afghanistan.” Preserving genetic variety can make all the difference when crops are wiped out by war or disease.

Even at the Arboreum Company orchard, it’s infeasible to propagate all the trees every year. Instead, Kennedy chooses only a handful. Available fruit trees on the website have poetic descriptions beyond what you’d see in a typical nursery catalog, providing historical and even artistic context. For the Roundel cherry, the description goes:

A variety perhaps as old as the cherry itself. Roundel received its name as the only truly round-fruited sweet cherry, and it remains the prototype cherry of slot machine and cough drop packet ... it is figured as “Tondella” in the 1699 oil painting by Bartolomeo Bimbi of cherries grown at the Medici court at Villa di Castello, Tuscany.

The detail is deliberate. Kennedy grows fruit for qualities such as juiciness and taste, but also for their history. “They have a story to be told," he says. While Kennedy reckons that the Arboreum Company orchard is heavy on customer-favorite peaches at the moment, he doesn’t play favorites. “They're all equally valuable to me,” he says.

But when pressed, Kennedy name-drops the Imperiale Epineuse prune and Rio Oso Gem peach as particularly special. On the Arboreum Company’s site, the latter is described as “the finest fruit of California.”

It's 1884. An undertaker sits at his desk at a funeral home in Providence, Rhode Island. Suddenly, his telephone rings, splitting the silence. "Mr. Smith is dead," gasps the voice on the end of the line. "Please come quickly." The voice gives an address, and the undertaker rushes out, loads up his tools, and speeds over.

When he arrives at the prescribed location, though, who should answer the door... but Mr. Smith himself! The undertaker has been fooled. He hangs his head and goes back to his office. And the next time the telephone rings, he thinks twice before he trusts it.

Nowadays, a call from an unknown number elicits immediate suspicion. But in 1884, the telephone was only eight years old. The scenario above, which was described in the February 2, 1884 issue of the journal Electrical World, appears to be the first prank phone call ever recorded.

"Some malicious wag… has been playing a grave practical joke on undertakers, by summoning them over the telephone to bring freezers, candlesticks and coffins for persons alleged to be dead," the article reads. "In each case the denouement is highly farcical, and the reputed corpses are now hunting in a lively manner for that telephonist."

As historian Paul Collins details in an article in Defunct, whoever invented the prank call was braver than today's bored teens. "All calls were routed through operators, and the most anonymity one could get was in the payphones prominently displayed in drugstores and hotel lobbies," he writes.

This, he continues, did not stop jokesters from embracing and improving on the genre: By the early 1900s, pranksters were using "While You Were Out" slips to trick people into becoming prank callers themselves. They'd leave a message saying that a particular person had telephoned, and how that person supposedly could be reached. When the victim returned the call, they'd find themselves asking for, say, a Mr. Train at Union Station, a Mr. Fish at the New York Aquarium, or—in Providence again—a Mr. Graves at the North Burial Ground.

All such variants proved extremely popular. The Museum of Hoaxes has a whole page dedicated to April Fool's Day prank-calling sprees. A certain macabre streak runs through them: In 1920, the Milwaukee city morgue was apparently tied up so long fielding calls for Mr. Graves and Mr. Stiff, they "failed for an hour and 45 minutes to inform the coroner of the death of a patient."

Five years later, so many undertakers in Reno, Nevada, got prank calls asking "Someone there want me?" that they apparently started responding "If you're a dead one, yes." By April 1, 1959, the person who answered the phones at Chicago's Cook County Morgue estimated he was getting four or five prank calls per minute.

The identity of that first inspired caller has been lost to history. But the morbid trend he started will probably never die.

In 1860, statesman and University of Sydney chancellor Sir Charles Nicholas donated 408 ancient Egyptian artifacts, collected from a three-year archaeological expedition across the country, to the university. These artifacts would later become the first collection for the on-campus Nicholson Museum, which was founded that year. Out of all the delicately wrapped mummies, one unassuming coffin carved from cedar wood or cypress pine contained nothing of note—or so it seemed.

In his 1948 Handbook to the Nicholson Museum, archaeology professor Dale Trendall cataloged the coffin, carved in the likeness of a noblewoman called Mer-Neith-it-es (664 to 525 B.C.), as empty. The museum database, however, listed the contents as "mixed debris." Regardless, Trendall’s declaration stood mighty and unchallenged.

In June 2017, the museum's senior curator Dr. Jamie Fraser and his team removed the faded wooden lid, stared into the coffin’s depths, and with fresh eyes discovered something they hadn't seen before. Inside were scattered bone fragments, delicate tiny beads, resin residue, and bandages. A wandering leg bone rested near the coffin’s shoulder, and a jawbone was nestled toward the base.

However, there were some bones missing. "A tomb robber has probably come in and rooted all the way through trying to find jewels and amulets," Dr. Fraser told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). Signs all pointed to a partially complete mummy, but was it really Mer-Neith-it-es? Often coffins hold remains of other people and the contents were clearly disturbed. The team had to take a closer look.

In December 2017, the Nicholson Museum team carefully transported the remains to Sydney's Macquarie Medical Imaging (MMI) to put them in a CT scanner. They also brought along a collection of better-known mummies: Horus, Meruah, and Padiashiakhet.

Previously, the curators knew from hieroglyphics inscribed on her coffin that Mer-Neith-it-es served as a priestess of Sekhmet Temple. Now they have her remains to study. The scan revealed two ankles, feet, and toes. The bones, which showed some aging and degeneration, dated her to around 30 years old at the time of her death.

Mer-Neith-it-es' coffin will be on display at the museum, but there’s more to learn about her. What did she eat? How did she live, and how did she die? With this new information, these looming questions might be answered in time.

It's impossible to discuss Los Angeles cuisine without delving into the city's history of multiculturalism. Waves of immigration from just about every corner of the globe have both defined L.A.'s dining culture and made it nearly impossible to categorize. Understanding food in Los Angeles requires some (delicious) homework.

The city's culinary trajectory is a vibrant narrative that continues to evolve. More than ever, dishes that combine disparate influences are entering the canon (think: Korean tacos). In other parts of the United States, the term "fusion cuisine" may elicit groans, but in Los Angeles it's simply a matter of fact. The adult children and grandchildren of immigrants are experimenting with flavors that have been passed onto them, combining them with the tastes they've encountered while growing up in one of America's most diverse cities.

It wasn't until the writer Katherine Spiers moved to Los Angeles over a decade ago that she became deeply interested in food. She found in the city a place to explore different cultures' cuisines from angles she'd never even considered before. For example, she says, understanding the differences in a banh mi sandwich from Ho Chi Minh City and one from Hanoi can help form a better understanding of the country's history and cultural nuances.

A former food editor for LA Weekly, Spiers has spent the past 10 years immersing herself in Los Angeles' rich multicultural culinary scene. She currently hosts a podcast, Smart Mouth, in which she interviews local notables, always in pursuit of a fuller understanding of gastronomic history.

With the help of Spiers, we've assembled a three-day itinerary that highlights some of Los Angeles' most unusual and exciting food ventures, along with key cultural monuments that contextualize the city's embrace of immigrants and the foods they bring with them.

Day 1 Agenda:

• Ride the Angel's Flight Funicular

• Take a stroll through Los Angeles history in Grand Central Market

• Visit El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument

• Drink and dine at Here's Looking at You

Angel's Flight

Start the day (and the journey!) as many Angelenos did at the turn of the century. Just across the street from Grand Central Market is Angel's Flight, a narrow-gauge funicular built in 1901. In its early years, Angel's Flight carried wealthy residents of Bunker Hill downtown to their jobs for just a penny a ride.

A plaque at the top of the funicular declares it to be the world's shortest incorporated railway, traveling a 33-percent grade for 315 feet. The same signage estimates that Angel's Flight has carried more passengers per mile than any other railway in the world: 100 million in its first 50 years.

But by the 1960s, Bunker Hill's demographics had changed, as its well-to-do denizens moved to the suburbs. Angel's Flight ceased operation in 1969, and the neighborhood was eventually razed as part of a controversial redevelopment project. A sleek, elevated complex of skyscrapers took its place.

The conveyance reopened two blocks away in 1996, and as of August 2017, Angel's Flight is open for business. At $1 per ride, it's worth a roundtrip to experience the unique commute of many turn-of-the-century Angelenos.

Grand Central Market

Grand Central Market was made to last. When it opened in 1917, it occupied Los Angeles' first ever steel-enforced, fireproof structure. Located just steps away from Angel's Flight, its vendors originally catered to Bunker Hill's wealthy residents (Los Angeles magazine once described it as a "Jazz Age version of Whole Foods.")

As Los Angeles grew more diverse post-World War I, so did the purveyors and shoppers at Grand Central Market. Immigrants from all over the world were introducing Angelenos to brand new types of Mexican, Jewish, and Japanese cuisines, to name only a portion.

In the middle of the century, like many downtown locations, the market experienced economic decline. The profile of the average shopper changed, but the market never ceased to attract customers. During this period in particular, Grand Central Market was lauded for the diversity of its vendors.

The market began its transformation into its current incarnation in 1985, when the attorney Ira Yellin and his wife Adele bought the property with the plan to reinvent it as a dining destination that would beckon people back downtown. But the venture was ill-timed.

It wasn't until 2011, when residents began flocking back downtown in droves, that Adele, who carried on the project following the death of her husband in 2002, was able to restore the market fully to its former prestige.

As Spiers explains, the evolution of Grand Central Market has always mirrored the development of Los Angeles itself. For years, rents remained low and hospitable to immigrants in downtown Los Angeles. But in recent years, upwardly mobile young people have moved downtown, as they have in many cities across the United States. Once again, Grand Central Market serves a well-to-do set. Yet some of its oldest tenants have found a way to remain (one of the most popular being China Cafe, which has been open continuously for nearly 60 years).

Grand Central Market warrants a visit as a place for examination and reflection on Los Angeles' ever-evolving landscape. And with world-class vendors including Wexler's Deli and Sarita's Pupuseria (another longstanding tenant), you won't walk away hungry.

El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument

Take a moment to digest by walking over to El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historical Monument, a gathering of landmarks that honor the city's very first settlers and celebrate waves of immigration since 1781.

Highlights of the monument include the buzzing Mexican marketplace located on Olvera Street, the Chinese American Museum, and the América Tropical Interpretive Center—a viewing platform and visitor's center displaying the artist David Alfaro Siqueiros's controversial 1932 mural, América Tropical. When the mural was first unveiled in the 1930s, it met with outcry for its critical depiction of the city's treatment of Mexican laborers. Within a year of its debut, it was literally whitewashed.

Ironically, the white paint that was intended to erase Siqueiros' mural ended up protecting it from natural elements that could have destroyed it over time. With the help of Los Angeles' first Mexican-American mayor in more than a century (Antonio Villaraigosa) and the Getty Conservation Institute, Chicano artists and activists were able to partially restore the mural in 2012.

At the very center of the historical monument, a stately gazebo known as Los Angeles Plaza Park may be the most visible structure inside El Pueblo de Los Angeles, but its most poignant feature is easy to miss. A large plaque laid in brick lists, by name, the 44 original settlers of Los Angeles alongside their age, gender, and ethnicity. Archaic terminology notwithstanding ("negro" and "mulatto" are among the ethnic designations) the plaque is a proud testament to the too-often overlooked role that early Angelenos of African descent played in the city's founding.

Here's Looking at You

End the day by beginning a tour of Koreatown about seven miles away, in a restaurant that doesn't serve Korean food. Despite boasting an impressively diverse array of international influences, the menu at Here's Looking at You shows no loyalty to any particular cuisine, except for Los Angeles'.

The restaurant slyly upends tradition by asking diners to reconsider preconceptions of regional cuisine. Frog legs, for example, are often seen as a staple of French cuisine, but at Here's Looking at You, they're tossed in a salsa negra seasoned with five different chilis and spritzed with lime juice. It's a dish that speaks to this city's culinary advantages: its ethnic diversity and the availability of fresh produce.

Just as notable as the food are the cocktails. Allan Katz and Danielle Crouch of Caña Rum Bar (which boasts Los Angeles' largest selection of rums) were consulted to perfect the tiki-inspired bar menu.

Los Angeles' special relationship with tiki culture can be traced back to a single person: Ernest Gantt, a.k.a. "Don the Beachcomber." A former bootlegger born in Texas, he moved to Hollywood in the 1930s and opened the city's first-ever tiki bar, called Don's Beachcomber. The kitschy, Polynesian environs and fruity rum cocktails proved to be popular with a celebrity clientele, but it wasn't until after World War II that tiki culture truly exploded. Veterans (including Don himself) returned home from war with stories, captivating the country with a newfound interest in Pacific culture.

Though the bar menu changes seasonally, it's clearly dedicated to preserving and advancing Los Angeles' relationship with tiki culture. You'll find some surprising ingredients on the bar's menu, but the cocktails at Here's Looking at You seem less interested in experimentation than the food. It appears that some things are sacred to Angelenos, tiki drinks being one of them.

Day 2 Agenda:

• Try the eponymous meat at Sahag's Basturma

• Visit Barnsdall Art Park

• Eat a cheeseburger in Chinatown

• Stay out until the early morning hours at Dan Sung Sa

Sahag's Basturma

Begin the day just north of Koreatown in Little Armenia. "Try basturma, the ancient predecessor to L.A.'s beloved pastrami, and tuck into a full breakfast," says Spiers. Pastrami may not be the most popular breakfast choice, but it's not unheard of. With this in mind, it doesn't seem so unusual that Sahag's Basturma opens at 8 a.m.

The process of salting, seasoning, and air-drying beef dates back to the Byzantine era. Armenians originated the technique and came to be known as the masters of its creation. Families that processed basturma were known by the proper name of "Basturmajian."The Armenian tradition lives on at Sahag's Basturma, an unassuming deli and grocer nestled in a strip mall.

Since 1987, the establishment has served its signature basturma in addition to a variety of deli items, including soujouk (Armenian sausage) and maaneg (Lebanese veal sausage), as well as spices, preservatives, and sweets from the Middle East. Unsurprisingly, its most popular menu item is the basturma, which you can buy by the pound or in a compact sandwich served alongside shriveled black olives, peperoncinis, and pickled radishes.

The sandwich may look puny, but one bite in and you'll realize why Sahag's exercises caution in its portions. Even tempered by slightly sweet, pressed french bread and cold tomatoes, its savory flavor is nearly overwhelming. Eat at one of the deli's two tables, or take your sandwich on the go to picnic at the next stop.

Barnsdall Art Park

Less than a mile from Sahag's Basturma, the Hollyhock House is perennially perched on a hilltop above Los Feliz, now part of a larger complex known as the Barnsdall Art Park. Maintained by a nonprofit, the organization is dedicated to community engagement in the arts, managing a low-cost theater space, free art classes, and a museum devoted to exhibiting Southern California artists of diverse backgrounds.

The park dates back to 1919, when the oil heiress Aline Barnsdall bought 36 acres of land with the intention of creating a commune for artists and free thinkers. A radical feminist and champion of progressive causes, she enlisted her friend, Frank Lloyd Wright, to build the house. Wright designed the home in a style that combined Mayan and Japanese influences, predating his equally famous (and visually similar) Ennis House.

Barnsdall was difficult to please, and her correspondence with Wright during the time of the house's construction reveals the erosion of their friendship. She complained of a leaky roof, heavy doors, and small rooms. After firing Wright in 1921, she gave up her vision for an artists' utopia overlooking Los Feliz and eventually donated the land to the city of Los Angeles.

Her loss was ultimately the city's gain. Looked upon generously, one could even say that her dream has finally been realized.

Burgerlords

Head back down south for a California cheeseburger specialty in an unlikely place: Chinatown's Central Plaza.

Brothers Frederick and Maximilian Guerrero (along with business partner Kevin Hockin) opened Burgerlords in 2015, having spent the previous decade helping launch their father Andre Guerrero's popular restaurant, The Oinkster. Famous for its pastrami, pulled pork, and burgers, one menu item stands out: the ube milkshake. A Filipino dessert made from purple yams sweetened with sugar and coconut milk, it's the only item on the menu that suggests the family's Filipino heritage.

Growing up in northeast Los Angeles, Chinatown was a dining destination for the Guerrero family. Frederick and Maximillian chose Chinatown's Central Plaza because of their shared, nostalgic affection for the place in addition to what they saw as a dearth of fast food restaurants in the area.

Compared to The Oinkster's decadent menu, Burgerlords' options are modest, as is the size of their cheeseburgers. They're a well-done rendition of Los Angeles' signature, thousand-island dressed, one-handed sandwich. Aside from their exceptional quality, the only thing unusual about the cheeseburgers is that their creators have never tried them. The Guerreros are both vegetarians.

Hence, the vegan option is a patty made of roasted eggplant, garbanzo beans, barley, leeks, celery, and a special spice mix. Vegetarians will tell you that this is one of the best renditions of a notoriously hard-to-pull-off culinary challenge.

Take a moment to explore Central Plaza's colorful, albeit Disney-fied rendition of Chinatown. A seven-foot statue of Bruce Lee strikes a pose just steps away from Burgerlords. Also next door: the respected art shop, zine publisher, clothing store and event space Ooga Booga, located on the second floor of a multi-use building.

Dan Sung Sa

You may want to take a rest before heading back to Koreatown's Dan Sung Sa, where it's easy to lose track of time and make a late night of it. "Dan Sung Sa is one of the greats, even though it’s not the KBBQ the whole city is so obsessed with," Spiers once wrote in a review.

The first thing one notices upon arriving at Dan Sung Sa is a mural that towers over its entrance featuring four figures, only one of whom is instantly recognizable: Kim Jong-Il. Owner Carol Cho is quick to dispel any rumors that the restaurant has friendly ties with North Korea. The mural, she explains, depicts a a civil interaction between Kim Jong-Il and beloved former South Korean President Kim Dae-Jung. The only Korean Nobel Prize winner in history, Dae-Jung was praised for his efforts at ameliorating tensions with North Korea.

The second thing one notices upon entering is how dark Dang Sung Sa is. "Do you like drinking under the light?" Cho asks rhetorically. "We don't." Virtually windowless, the interior is encased in brick and dark wood. The kitchen is open until 2 a.m., making the spot a popular destination for homesick expats, rowdy drinkers, and everyone with a curious palette in between.

The large menu features meat and vegetable skewers, traditional Korean dishes, and a curious selection of items born from the melding of Korean and American culture.

In the 1950s, Los Angeles experienced its second major wave of Korean immigration following the Korean War. Adapting to their environs, Koreans incorporated American staples into their diet. Packaged goods arriving from the West after the war, in turn, influenced Korean cuisine back home. Dan Sung Sa serves corn cheese (creamed corn topped with cheese), french fries, and a grilled sliced spam and egg fry.

Dan Sung Sa aims to be a place that feels like home for Korean expats. It's open 365 days a year, adhering to an altruistic policy that values camaraderie above all else. For immigrants, a creeping feeling of displacement arises during the holidays. The spot aims to be a home away from home during these times of the year, because, as Cho puts it, "those are the days when you need it the most."

Day 3 Agenda:

• Detox at Natura Spa

• Cool down with a cold dessert at Saffron & Rose Ice Cream

• Treat yourself at Shunji Japanese Cuisine

• Make a pilgrimage to Randy's Donuts

Natura Spa

If you went overboard on the soju at Dan Sung Sa, begin your last day in Los Angeles detoxing at one of Koreatown's famous spas. But with so many options to choose from, which should you visit?

Natura Spa may not be the most well-known spa in Koreatown, but it's definitely the most unusual. In addition to offering all the facilities (saunas, swimming pools) and services (massages, body scrubs) you would expect, it also gives customers the unique opportunity to soak in watery bliss beneath the remains of an abandoned luxury department store.

Built in 1939 by the architect Myron Hunt (who also designed the monumental Ambassador Hotel), the Wilshire Boulevard branch of the luxury department store I. Magnin was described at its opening as a "symphony of beauty."

Closed in 1990 and re-opened in 1992 as the "Korean-oriented" Wilshire Galleria, it's evident that aside from Natura Spa, the massive structure hasn't seen much development since the closing of I. Magnin. Entirely closed to the public save for Natura Spa, one can sneak a peek at the department store's interior by peering through the galleria's locked entrance on Wilshire Boulevard.

Natura Spa's entrance is located around the corner, where a former parking circle once chauffeured clients straight through the department store's doors. Entering now, one encounters two entrances: male and female. The male entrance is, ostensibly, at the end of what appears to be a maze of plywood. To the left is a more a direct, polished entrance for women. An elevator ushers visitors to an underground oasis.

Saffron & Rose

You'll have to head back west to the airport eventually, and if you're still feeling steamy from the spa, make a pit stop at Saffron & Rose.

"We have really good ice cream [in Los Angeles]," Spiers says, "because we have cows and fruit in the state." Indeed, Angelenos are spoiled with options when it comes to ice cream. For those who haven't tried it, Spiers recommends the Persian variety served at Saffron & Rose, located on a stretch of Westwood Boulevard colloquially known as "Little Tehran." "They do use a lot of Persian and Middle Eastern flavors that we are less likely to see in ice cream here," she says.

Persian ice cream utilizes powdered salep (ground orchid root) and whole milk, giving it a thicker, more viscous consistency than traditional ice cream or gelato. The shop's best seller combines pistachio with saffron's subtle floral notes and feels both familiar and transportive. For the less adventurous, it's a delicious introduction to Persian ice cream.

The menu focuses heavily on fruits (dates, pomegranates, and guava, to name a few) and rosewater, but there are also purely American creations including cookies and cream. The shop also serves faloodeh, a popular Iranian frozen dessert made of vermicelli noodles and rose water.

Pints of ice cream line the back wall of the shop, featuring an illustration of Saffron & Rose's original owner, Haji Ali Kashani-Rafye, who began selling ice cream when he immigrated to Los Angeles from Iran in the 1970s. After his death, his two children and grandson took over. His legacy is palpable in the ice cream shop, and within the many nearby establishments that sell pints of ice cream labeled with his countenance.

Shunji Japanese Cuisine

"L.A. was the first place in America that had sushi restaurants," Spiers notes. In 1966, the Japanese businessman Noritoshi Kanai opened a nigiri sushi bar inside a Japanese restaurant called Kawafuku. For your last meal in Los Angeles, treat yourself to a luxurious sushi dinner in a not-so-luxurious location.

Los Angeles Times food critic Jonathan Gold once wrote of Shunji Japanese Cuisine: "Some of the best Japanese restaurants in Los Angeles have always occupied some of its grungiest real estate." Noting that the bathrooms are located outside of a restaurant owned by a renowned chef, where an omakase dinner can cost upwards of $120, Spiers echoes the sentiment: "We keep it humble."

What Shunji Japanese Cuisine's exterior lacks in glamour, it makes up for in charm. It's impossible not to stifle a giggle pulling in to the oddly shaped structure. Once the home of a now-extinct barbecue franchise, the building was erected to resemble a chili bowl at the height of southern California's obsession with programmatic architecture in the 1930s.

Despite being known for its sushi, the restaurant's most noteworthy dish doesn't involve fish at all. Chef Shunji Nakao is the inventor of agedashi tomato tofu. It's a dish made from dissecting a tomato and condensing it into a square with a tofu-like consistency, topped with a splash of dashi (the same broth used at the base of miso soup).

Nakao's establishment is just as notable for its vegetable dishes as it is its fish, and the tomato tofu is representative of Nakao's approach to Japanese cuisine. He treats common vegetables with the same care and delicacy as a fine cut of fish.

Randy's Donuts

You can't leave Los Angeles without stopping by Randy's Donuts. Fortunately, it's located close to LAX, and no matter what time your flight takes off, Randy's will be open.

By the 1950s, programmatic architecture in Los Angeles had shifted from the buildings themselves to their signage. Car culture was beginning to truly reshape the city, and roadside drive-ins scrambled to capture drivers' attentions. Oftentimes, signs could be easier to read and discern than buildings themselves.

Though the gargantuan doughnut that tops Randy's Donuts is technically a sign, it dwarfs the eatery below it, effectively straddling both iterations of programmatic architecture. It's safe to say that in competing for motorists' interest, Randy's Donuts steamrolled the competition.

But Randy's Donuts hasn't just abided for all of these years because of its quirky appearance. You can still buy a doughnut there for a handful of change, and they're simply, plainly delicious. Add to that that they're open 24 hours, and you've got yourself the perfect way to end a culinary adventure in L.A.

They call them Highlands tigers. With thick grey stripes and an occasionally vicious nature, just a few hundred Scottish wildcats are thought to remain in the remote pine forests of northern Scotland. The cats are a separate species to Britain's domestic cats and a comparable size, though around twice as heavy. Once native to the entire United Kingdom, they are believed to have come from the European mainland via the land bridge Doggerland around 12,000 years ago. While in England, Wales, and southern Scotland, these stripy cats were driven to extinction by trappers and hunters, in the Highlands, the BBC reports, they were venerated.

This week, one of the largest wildcats ever recorded was captured on camera by field workers in Aberdeenshire's Clashindarroch Forest, as part of the Wildcat Haven conservation project. Traps across the region have been baited with food or scent, with hidden cameras set to capture anything that crosses their path.

"I've been fortunate to get footage of quite a few of these ghost cats; there's about 10 to 15 of them here in the Clashindarroch," the field worker Kev Bell told the BBC. But this particular animal, nicknamed "The Beast," was like no other he had seen. "I couldn't believe my eyes when I first saw this cat, he is enormous, a magnificent animal."

This monstrous wildcat is estimated to be around four feet long. Black and white video footage, taken in the middle of the night, shows it perched on a sloping log, snacking on some mystery substance. Videos like these, Wildcat Haven says, help disprove allegations that the cats are no longer living in the Highlands.

To protect the animals, the charity is attempting to neuter feral domestic cats across more than 1,000 square miles of Scotland, as they feed on the rabbits and rats that make up much of their diet. "These cats are a vital part of Scotland's wild nature and ecology, and they must be protected wherever they live," said fellow fieldworker Steve Sleigh. "They are one of the rarest animals in the world."

Since 1790, every ten years, the federal government goes around trying to gather information about every person in the United States. The decennial census is mandated by the Constitution, and it's happened 23 times in American history.

Over these decades, the information the government has asked for has changed dramatically. The original census, in 1790, asked just four questions.

• The number of free white males aged: under 16 years and of 16 years and upward
• Number of free white females
• Number of other free persons
• Number of slaves

The current administration is proposing a controversial change to the 2020 census: asking about citizenship status. Though the census has long been concerned with the national origin and naturalization status of people living in America, the current proposal would make the 2020 census the first time in American history that the government would ask the question "Is this person a citizen?" about every individual in America.

Although the main purpose of the census is to count the population of the United States, its interest in naturalization has always been related to contemporary federal immigration policy, American attitudes about race, and the rise and fall of nativist sentiment in the country. The year of the first census, 1790, was also the first year that the U.S. restricted who could become a citizen, limiting naturalization to free white people who had lived in the country two years and could prove their “good moral character" to a court. Free black people, Native Americans, and indentured servants were all excluded.

Thirty years later, in the 1820 census, the form asked about citizenship status for the first time: Heads of households were asked to list the "number of foreigners not naturalized." The 1830 survey tweaked the question to specify that it meant to cover only "White persons who were foreigners."

By this point, the federal government had already passed the first law authorizing deportation of any non-citizen who posed a danger to the country, but there was no restriction on immigration: Anyone could come. Non-citizens were included in calculations of political representation, too.

It wasn't until the 1850s that Americans started to be concerned about where, exactly, immigrants were coming from. In 1850, the census asked for the first time about a person's place of birth; by 1870, the census also wanted to know where people's parents were born. America's borders were still open, but a growing wave of nationalism was pushing to change that. After states started passing immigration laws, the Supreme Court found in 1875 that regulating immigration was a federal responsibility. In the 1880s, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, along with laws restricting immigration for contract labor.

By 1890, the share of the U.S. population that was born in another country was at an all-time high—14.8 percent of the population, according to the Pew Research Center—and the census started asking again about naturalization status. By then, a person had to have lived in the United States five years to become a citizen. The 1790 naturalization law had been expanded, after the Civil War, to allow black people to become citizens, but the Chinese Exclusion Act had explicitly prohibited Chinese immigrants from naturalizing. In 1884, the Supreme Court had also established that a person born to a Native American tribe was not an American citizen.

By 1920, the census wanted to know not just where a person was born, but where their parents were born and what language they spoke. Between 1890 and 1920, about a quarter of foreign-born census takers reported that they were not naturalized citizens. That year the U.S. also enacted immigration quotas based on nationality that were in place, in some form, until the 1960s.

In the second half of the 20th century, the government dropped the nationality quota system and changed laws that prohibited people from applying for citizenship based on their race. In these decades, the census de-emphasized questions about citizenship.

Starting in 1970, the U.S. Census Bureau started drafting two forms of the census, the "short form" and the "long form." The short form, received by most Americans, did not ask about citizenship. A much smaller sample of households would receive the more detailed "long form." That form did include a question about where a person was born and if they had become a naturalized citizen. But only a fraction of the population had to answer it.

Only in 1990 did the census start phrasing the question on the longer form as "Is this person a citizen of the United States?" In 2010, that question was removed from the census altogether, although it remained part of the American Community Survey, a more detailed but limited nationwide questionnaire. It's this version of the question that could be added to the census in 2020.

While the federal officials requesting the change argue that it will not affect the accuracy of the census, opponents fear that asking every person in America this question will dissuade people (undocumented people in particular) from responding at all. The census already suffers from underreporting among low-income and immigrant populations. If the main goal of this exercise is to count people in America, it's possible that asking every person about their citizenship will skew the results.

The last ice age was 11,700 years ago. Scientists have long hypothesized that during that frigid time early humans walked from Asia to North America using a land bridge, called the Cordilleran Ice Sheet. Some eventually arrived on the coast of present-day British Columbia, Canada. Despite the many footprints they left behind, there isn’t much archaeological evidence to substantially show the Cordilleran Ice Sheet was a major migration route. When exposed to coastal erosion and years of soil accumulation, footprints don't always stay preserved. Yet, a new study from the Hakai Institute and University of Victoria, Canada, provides the needed evidence to support this land bridge hypothesis.

Off the Calvert Island shoreline in British Columbia, researchers discovered 29 human footprints impressed into sediment found below the beach's surface. These footprints were not just rounded oblong shapes; some samples showed defined toes, rims, and heels, which is a rare find.

The researchers then excavated the tracks, and through photo analysis and radiocarbon dating, found many of footprints dated back to 13,000 years ago. Their lengths ranged from 15 cm (5.9 inches) to 28.5 cm (11.2 inches) and their widths were between 6 cm (2.4 inches) to 13 cm (5.1 inches) When plotted in a scattergram, these measurements, according to the study, “fall into three distinct size clusters suggesting that the tracks were left by a minimum of three individuals.” The most likely combination is two barefooted adults and one child. And it seems these humans were on the move.

The research team plans to conduct further analysis on the footprints, and possibly find more, but for now, the discovery is a great start. “This finding provides evidence of the seafaring people who inhabited this area during the tail end of the last major ice age,” said study co-author Duncan McLaren.

Every morning, every day, 85 percent of Americans alter their state of consciousness with a potent psychoactive drug: caffeine.

Their most common source is the roasted seeds of several species of African shrubs in the genus Coffea (coffee), while other Americans use the dried leaves of a species of Camellia plant from China (tea).

Americans love caffeine, but few realize just how ancient the North American craving for caffeine truly is. North Americans have been enthusiastically quaffing caffeinated beverages since before the Boston Tea Party, before the English founded Jamestown, and before Columbus landed in the Americas. That is to say: North Americans discovered caffeine long before Europeans “discovered” North America.

Cassina, or black drink, the caffeinated beverage of choice for indigenous North Americans, was brewed from a species of holly native to coastal areas from the Tidewater region of Virginia to the Gulf Coast of Texas. It was a valuable pre-Columbian commodity and widely traded. Recent analyses of residue left in shell cups from Cahokia, the monumental pre-Columbian city just outside modern-day St. Louis and far outside of cassina’s native range, indicate that it was being drunk there. The Spanish, French, and English all documented American Indians drinking cassina throughout the American South, and some early colonists drank it on a daily basis. They even exported it to Europe.

As tea made from a species of caffeinated holly, cassina may sound unusual. But it has a familiar botanical cousin in yerba maté, a caffeine-bearing holly species from South America whose traditional use, preparation, and flavor is similar. The primary difference between cassina and maté is that while maté weathered the storm of European conquest, cassina has fallen into obscurity.

Today it’s better known as yaupon, and it’s mostly planted as an ornamental throughout the southeastern United States. Recent years have seen a handful of small-scale growers selling and promoting cassina for consumption, typically under the name yaupon tea. Cafes in a few scattered Southern locales are selling it and pushing for a revival.

This is not the first call for a reappraisal. For over a century, botanists, historians, and even the U.S. Department of Agriculture have periodically drawn attention to the absurdity of cassina’s disuse in its native land.

So why was a plant of such well documented potential, which seemingly should have developed into a domestic alternative to expensive tea and coffee imports, ignored for so long? What happened to cassina?

Over the years, cassina has gone by many names. But just one gave the tea a permanent black eye that diminished its commercial prospects for centuries.

The first Spanish colonists in Florida who, according to one contemporary account, drank cassina “every day in the morning or evening,” knew it as té del indio or “cacina". The English in North Carolina called it yaupon, a term borrowed from the Catawba language that is still the most common name for the plant itself. In South Carolina, “cassina" was the usual appellation, possibly derived from the long extinct Timucuan language. And colonists throughout the English-speaking colonies often settled simply for “black drink.”

Upon export to Europe, cassina was marketed in England under the names “Carolina tea” and “South Sea tea,” and in France as “appalachina," likely a reference to the Appalachee people.This confusing array of names emphasizes the practicality of the Linnaean classification system, which was still in its infancy when Europeans learned of cassina. William Aiton, an eminent British botanist and horticulturist, director of Kew Gardens, and “Gardener to His Majesty,” is credited with giving cassina the scientific name it bears to this day: Ilex vomitoria. Ilex is the genus commonly known as holly. Vomitoria roughly translates to “makes you vomit.”

Cassina does not make you vomit. Both modern scientific analysis and centuries of regular use by Southerners confirms this. But several early European accounts of cassina mention vomiting. Cassina seems to have been used in elaborate purification rituals where men sat in a circle, sung or chanted, and took turns chugging and then throwing up hot cassina.

Yet other detailed, first-hand accounts of indigenous people drinking cassina don’t mention vomiting at all. Anthropologist Charles M. Hudson and others have suggested that a plant with emetic properties may have been added to the cassina brew (unbeknownst to European observers) or that the black drink ceremony may not have involved cassina at all. Alternatively, if the ritual vomiting did, in fact, involve only cassina, the sheer volume of liquid consumed could explain the vomiting. So could the fact that vomiting was a common ritual practice for Southeastern indigenous people—participants may have trained themselves to throw up at will.

Nevertheless, the association of cassina with vomiting persists: Sources such as the Oxford English Dictionary erroneously describe yaupon leaves as having emetic or purgative properties, keeping alive the myth that cassina makes you throw up.

William Aiton may have simply made a long-perpetuated mistake when he named cassina “Ilex vomitoria.” But there’s reason to believe he and other Europeans conspired against the plant.

As the royal gardener, Aiton knew some of the richest and most powerful people in the British Empire. One of the most profitable and influential forces in that empire was the East India Company, which held a virtual monopoly on the tea trade. Its officers may well have worried that cassina represented a potential replacement for a lucrative British commodity, especially as it grew abundantly within regions then under the control of Spain and France.

In his entry on Ilex vomitoria, Aiton listed “South-Sea Tea” as a common name for cassina, suggesting he was aware of its use as a beverage amongst the English. Further, Aiton chose the name vomitoria even though Carl Linnaeus, the founder of the modern taxonomic system, referenced cassina under the name Ilex Cassine vera Floridanorum in 1753. (Ilex cassine is now the name for a close relative of cassina, the dahoon holly, which has significantly less caffeine.)

If Aiton’s sensational name choice was simply a mistake, it could have been corrected in the subsequent edition of his book Hortus kewensis, which was published by his son in 1810. It’s hard to imagine both Aitons missing Bartram’s Travels (the first English edition was published in the early 1790s) wherein Philadelphia botanist William Bartram describes southeastern American Indians and European traders drinking cassina and makes no mention of them throwing up. There’s no smoking gun, but given that the British Empire passed laws and went to war to maintain monopolies on goods such as sugar, tobacco, and opium, it’s possible Aiton engaged in scientific slander.

Either way, cassina never developed into a major English export or drink of choice. Recent research at the University of Florida suggests that the scientific name continues to make people “leery of buying” cassina despite preferring it over maté in a blind taste test. In the words of Charles M. Hudson, our insistence on associating cassina with vomiting may be because“we are all too ready to emphasize the bizarre and exotic in the cultural practices of the Indians.”

That’s not to say that cassina was never drunk widely after the colonization of the Americas. In the earliest days of the Southern colonies—when plantations were being carved out of woodland and luxury imports were rare—cassina drinking was widespread from slaves to plantation owners. But as plantations became larger and more profitable, the nouveau riche demonstrated their wealth by drinking expensive imported tea.

“Cassina was so abundant on the coast,” writes Hudson in Black Drink: A Native American Tea, “that it could be drunk by the poor; hence it became déclassé.” An 1883 encyclopedia entry on cassina summed up this new state of affairs when it stated that cassina is “still used as a beverage by the poorer classes in North Carolina.”

The Civil War reinforced this association of cassina with a hardscrabble lifestyle. When the South seceded, luxury imports became scarce, and both rich and poor turned to cassina. After the war, when coffee and tea became available again, cassina had acquired more negative associations: war, hunger, and defeat.

In the modern South, cassina, usually known by the name yaupon, is just a plant: a border shrub or small tree in residential developments. (Americans regularly walk by the caffeine-producing plant on their way into coffee shops that source beans from the other side of the globe.) Whether or not the ongoing cassina revival can reverse it ignominy and poor reputation remains to be seen.

The extent to which coffee and tea are now being marketed as ethical, fair, and environmentally friendly, as well as the surging popularity of cassina’s cousin, yerba maté, would seem to indicate that cassina’s time has come. And yet, as the many calls for cassina’s rediscovery over the past century show, cassina has long been predicted as the next big thing. For it to succeed commercially, a change to its botanical name may be necessary: Like an acquitted suspect, no matter how many times cassina is proven innocent, an air of suspicion and nausea lingers from the original accusation.

Novelty, which has replaced necessity as the driving force behind cassina consumption, can only take cassina so far. So what’s hopeful about the recent cassina revival is that it’s centered around cities such as Austin, Texas, and Asheville, North Carolina, which boast strong local food movements. The cities’ growers and cafe owners are touting the unique, richly herbaceous, complex flavor of cassina. It’s also recently become available for purchase by the bag and appeared in bottles in specialty food stores.

Because while explaining cassina calls for a trip into contentious history and unsettling nomenclature, taking a first sip of yaupon is revelatory: America’s rightful caffeinated drink simply tastes wonderful.

Some ancient texts are lost to the ages. Others are hiding in plain sight, and technology can bring them back to life on the page.

Take the so-called Galen Palimpsest. The parchment leaves of the leather-bound manuscript carry hymns dating to the 11th century. Beneath these inscriptions, though, is an earlier medical treatise—a 6th-century Syriac translation of a text by Galen of Pergamon, a physician and anatomist who attended to Roman emperors. “Little of Galen’s advice would stand up to modern scrutiny,” the New York Times noted in 2015. (The article also quoted a scholar who summed up Galen’s philosophy, which included theories about balancing the body’s humors, as “completely bonkers.”) No matter: Researchers still want to glean as much as possible from his writings, which were foundational strata in the bedrock of Western medicine.

Historically, parchment was a pricey commodity, and it was common practice for a scribe to scuff away earlier text and then lay down fresh lettering. But that doesn’t mean the bottom-most layer is gone forever.

Earlier this month, an instrument at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory blasted the manuscript with X-rays to get a closer look at the traces of the text that have been buried for millennia.

This technology lets researchers get a closer look at the layered text without threatening the integrity of the pages. By penetrating the document with X-rays—instead of trying to lift the newer writing from the surface—“you don’t have to jeopardize one part of the document to learn about the other,” said Kristen St. John, head of conservation services at Stanford University Libraries, in a news release.

When it comes to distinguishing the old from the even-older inscription beneath it, the researchers caught a serendipitous break: The buried Syriac text is organized horizontally, while the 11th-century characters run vertically.

It takes roughly 10 hours to scan a page, and the team is working on 26 in all. Each scan contains more data than a human could wrangle. To help sift through it all, the team is working with machine-learning tools. The images will eventually be added to a digital trove manned by the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

Already, the scans have delivered new insights. A page that had long been undecipherable, unyielding to prior attempts to crack it with other forms of imaging, proved to be a portion of a preface. "The first initial results are incredibly mind-blowing," the University of Manchester classicist Peter Pormann told Newsweek. As work marches along, researchers hope the text will yield much more information to diagnose.

Even in 1878, readers of The New York Graphic should have known better than to trust a fantastical-sounding article published on April Fool's Day. The paper had a scoop: Noted inventor Thomas Edison had accomplished a task straight out of a fairy tale. He had invented a machine that could turn dirt from his basement into meat, fruit, and even wine.

The device "Would Feed The Human Race," the breathless headline declared. The raw materials were simply air, water, and dirt. Reporter William Croffut described a lunch at Edison's Menlo Park headquarters. What unfolded could have been a scene from a Jules Verne novel. Croffut had never tasted anything like the mysterious dishes: headcheese (a type of cold cut) that tasted like woodcock (a type of game bird), a coffee-like beverage "different from anything I had ever seen," and sweet gelatin covered in cream and jelly (yum!).

When Edison came to the table, he revealed that the Graphic was his favorite paper, and that he had invented a machine that could feed the world, freeing animals from slaughter and farmers from drudgery. When the stunned reporter asked why such a device hadn't been discovered before, Edison responded with paragraphs worth of 19th-century technobabble. The food of the future, Edison said, would be "oranges and cabbages that have never felt the wind and rain, and pork and partridges that have never been alive."

The problem was, no such device existed. In the last sentence of the article, the writer awoke from a nap, which revealed that the entire story was a dream sequence. But many people didn't get the joke, including newspapers around the world that reprinted it as news. The Graphic later published an incredulous addendum. With head-shaking solemnity, the editors condemned "the careless American habit of hasty reading" that apparently kept readers from reaching the end. (Although the gleeful two-word headline, "They Bite," suggests the editors enjoyed the con.)

But the mistake was perhaps understandable. Edison had recently displayed a new invention, the phonograph, to great acclaim, and the ability to record sound was unprecedented. In the ensuing media storm, Edison was painted as a genius, a hero, and something of a sorcerer. Edison himself encouraged this myth-building. Even his on-and-off sleeping habit was lauded as a sign of productive virtue. The American public was primed to believe in a food-machine invention by a miracle-worker such as Edison.

Soon, Edison felt the effects of the Graphic's little joke, as he received letters asking the price of his new machine. However, he reportedly wasn't thrown. He got in on the hoax, play-boasting that it could "change fire-clay into rice pudding and cornmeal into gold dust." It helped that he was friendly with Croffut. Later that month, Croffut coined Edison's most famous nickname: "The Wizard of Menlo Park."

In Mafraq, Jordan, a group of Syrian refugees is studying the art of stonemasonry. They gather each day at 5 a.m. to learn how to hammer pieces of rock into the kinds of beautiful ornaments that once adorned the buildings of Aleppo, before the war reduced them to rubble.

The center where they train is just 12 miles south of the Syrian border. It is close enough that you can sometimes hear the low rumbling of bombs across the border. In time, these refugees hope to cross back over this border and start to restore their country’s cultural heritage.

The 42-week course began in September 2017. It is run by the World Monuments Fund, in partnership with the Petra National Trust, and is managed by a small team of architects with a background of conservation in the Middle East.

“In the future, it may be possible to return to Syria,” says Mahmoud Rafeeq Al Qasem, 40, a former timber trader from Homs. “There were many things that were destroyed; many monuments have been damaged. I could take part in rebuilding my country.”

Al Qasem is one of the 28 refugees taking part in the program – a group that includes both men and women. There are also seven Jordanians, included to combat the perception that local people are being shunned in favor of the country’s massive influx of Syrians.

This somewhat disparate collection of people—among them a former Syrian Army soldier, a taxi driver, a housewife, and a pipeline construction worker—spend their days either absorbing theory in a classroom or chipping away at blocks of limestone in an open courtyard. They study geometry and visit the ancient sites of Jordan, such as the ruins of the Roman city of Jerash, take lectures from local professors on geology and the history of Islamic architecture, and learn how to craft ornamentation out of rock and clay.

Since the war began in 2011, more than 5.6 million people have fled Syria. In Mafraq alone, there are almost 80,000 registered Syrian refugees, with another 80,000 at the Zaatari refugee camp on its outskirts. Those fleeing the country include doctors, teachers and engineers, but also stonemasons. They were already in short supply before the war, and their flight will complicate the challenge of rebuilding Syria’s historical architecture even after it becomes possible to re-enter the country.

“Before the war, we found it was straightforward enough to find professionals—architects, engineers, even conservation professionals—mostly outside of Syria, but also in Syria,” says Stephen Battle, who manages the training program. “But the thing we found the hardest was to find craftspeople—people with the skills in their hands for the conservation work and restoration work we were trying to do,” Before the war began, Battle had been working on the Citadel of Aleppo, a 13th-century fortress that once guarded the city.

“It raises the question of, if it was that difficult before the war to find skilled craftspeople, then what’s it going to be like when bullets finally stop flying? Given all the population displacement and loss of life, combined with the huge amount of extra work that has to be done, how does that equation square itself out?”

It would not be the first time that conservators have struggled to restore a country’s historical character following a conflict or disaster. In Iraq, for instance, many people in the cultural sector were Christian, and left in the aftermath of the war to avoid persecution.

“Our experience in Iraq was that there was an enormous number of well-trained archaeologists, many of whom are still in the country, but there is just not an archaeological conservator virtually to be found. That sector picked up and left,” says Lisa Ackerman, executive vice president of the World Monuments Fund.

Conservators are concerned that the character of Syria’s cities, with its ornamented limestone buildings and geometric patterns, should be maintained during any rebuilding efforts. The redesign of Beirut, following its destruction during the civil war in Lebanon, was criticized for transforming a bustling and charismatic city into a ghost town of slick glass buildings, designer stores and empty apartments. By contrast, following the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the World Monuments Fund rushed in to protect the country’s post-colonial “gingerbread houses.”

Much of the training that the refugees are undertaking is based on photographs of buildings in Aleppo, taken before they were destroyed. But there will be no shortage of sites where a Syrian stonemason could apply their skills one day, including places like Damascus Old City, Bosra, and the Lady of Saidnaya Monastery.

Even if the opportunity to return to Syria doesn’t emerge any time soon, such skills are transferable, leaving them equipped to work on modern buildings where stone is used as cladding, for instance, as well as historic monuments. The program will wrap up this September, when the World Monuments Fund hopes to recommence with a new group.

Amid the disruption and dislocation faced by these refugees, stonemasonry has offered an opportunity to rebuild not only their history but also part of their identity.

“My life has benefited a lot from joining the course, and praise God I see myself developing from where I was to where I am now,” says Awaish Jumaa Al Jibra, 28, from Aleppo. “We’ll carry on using the skills when we go back to our country, to our neighborhood in Aleppo after the war, after all this.”

There are plenty of publications well-known for their pranks: Mad, Nickelodeon, Cracked. But by one metric, a German gardening magazine has outdone them all. In 1900, they pulled off a very boring prank that, against the odds, has endured for over a century.

Möllers Deutsche Garten-Zeitung ("Möller's German Garden Newspaper") was a popular horticulture magazine founded in the 1880s. Each month, they published articles about gardening strategies and descriptions of new plants. When the turn of the century came along, though, someone—perhaps Möller himself—decided to have a little fun.

And so in the April 1900 issue, a few imposter plants and tools showed up in the magazine's pages. There was a "tree strawberry," which towered over would-be snackers. There was a trumpet that could kill all insects in its vicinity with a single blast. And then there was Echinocereus dahliaeflorus, a cactus covered in sharp flowers. According to the text, the cactus was found in Madagascar, and its strange blooms perfectly solved a longstanding argument between members of the German Cactus Society and the German Dahlia Society.

Everyone in the office must have had a good laugh over the tall strawberry and the bug trumpet. But as the months went by, E. dahliaeflorus proved unmemorable even to its perpetrators. As a later cactus compendium explained, "The April Fool joke is so cleverly concealed that the editor deceived himself"—when compiling new discoveries at the end of the year, he "carefully indexed" that particular fake plant among the real ones.

In later years, Möller would sneak more fakes into the pages of his magazine. The April 1901 issue, for instance, appears to be largely dedicated to impossible plants. The Chicago Tribune took the time to translate some highlights, which included tales of fruit trees in the shape of world leaders, gourds that fill themselves with wine, and clematis and sunflowers that glow brightly enough to read in the dark.

But the simplest prank proved the most effective. Few today are fooled by light-up sunflowers, and only the most dedicated know how to purposefully shape trees. Because it was so carefully indexed, though, Echinocereus dahliaeflorus remains in the pages of various online plant databases to this day. On Tropicos, for example, it sits among its realer counterparts, differentiated from them only by a little, spiky addendum: "(April Fool.)"

In the nave of Chartres Cathedral, the stones of the floor were arranged, hundreds of years ago, to form a flat labyrinth, 42 feet in diameter, with paths large enough for a person to walk its full winding course.

Starting back in the 12th century, labyrinths like this became part of the design of cathedrals in northern France and in Italy. Their purpose is somewhat mysterious, though it’s usually assumed to be allegorical in some way. Following the path of the labyrinth might have symbolically recreated a pilgrimage, or perhaps the symbol represented Christ’s trip through Hell between his crucifixion and resurrection. Sometimes the labyrinths were decorated with images of the Minotaur, from the ancient Greek myth involving the hero Theseus, repurposed to symbolize Christ’s journey.

Thanks to a 14th-century document, though, we know that at least one cathedral labyrinth had another purpose, just once a year—it was used as a ball court on Easter Monday.

In Auxerre Cathedral in northern France, and most likely in cathedrals in Sens and Amiens (and perhaps Chartres, as well), clergy gathered around the labyrinth, danced in a circle, and tossed a ball from person to person. These games, according to medieval religious observers, had ties to pagan practices. In certain places, they were incorporated into church rituals for hundreds of years.

Though it was meant to be joyful, the Easter ball game was far from a free-for-all. One early description, according to Max Harris, author of Sacred Folly: A New History of the Feast of Fools, describes how, before vespers on Easter Monday, the cathedral chapter would gather at the archbishop’s house to eat meat and drink spiced wine. “Afterward the archbishop should throw the ball,” the text specified. A later note added that if the archbishop was absent, his deputy could step in.

During the ritual, the priest who had most recently joined the community would carry the ball, which was supposed to be “too large to be grasped in one man’s hand, requiring two hands to stop it," to the circle. (The sources don't say what it was made of.) He would toss the ball to the church’s leader, who would dance with it into the labyrinth. The assembled group would sing the antiphonal hymn "Victimae paschali laudes," and the organ would keep time.

The priests would start a circle dance, described as “garland-like,” around the labyrinth, while the archbishop or deputy started dancing along the path of the labyrinth. As he proceeded through the winding maze, which took him back and forth around the circumference, and toward the center and out again, he would toss the ball to each of the priests. The game lasted as long as it took the leader to reach the center of the maze.

What was the meaning of this ritual? No one knows for sure, but it referenced some of the big questions in life. What is our place in the world? How do we face down challenges?

The labyrinth’s ring-like paths may have gestured to the organization of the universe, imagined in medieval minds as 12 concentric layers. The dance, writes David Brown, a religious scholar at the University of Durham, “was thus a way of relaying belief in a divine order, no matter how confused our path through life at present appears to be.”

Or, if the dance was meant to recreate the journey of Theseus, the ball could be “one or both of the balls used to defeat the Minotaur,” Harris writes. A ball of pitch, used to stop the monster’s mouth, represents Christ’s humanity, while the ball of thread that Theseus unwound to navigate the maze represents Christ’s divinity. Another tradition gave the ball a simpler meaning: the rising sun on Easter morning.

Whatever its purpose, the ball game tradition was limited to northern France, and eventually those pagan overtones caught up with it. Late in the 15th century, the newest priest at Auxerre was not a fan, and did not bring the ball with him when he was supposed to. He was eventually convinced to play, but that began the end of the tradition. Even the stone labyrinths began to disappear. The one in the Auxerre Cathedral was removed before 1690, along with what scholar Tessa Morrison of the University of Newcastle in Australia calls one "path of pilgrimage of the soul to receive the illumination of God."