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Why This Severed Hand Is So Glorious

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According to legend, thieves could use it to render a whole household unconscious.

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You would be forgiven for not knowing anything about the Hand of Glory—after all, there is supposedly only one in the world, and it resides in the Whitby Museum, an eclectic Victorian place on the Yorkshire coast of England. Grayish-brown and displayed palm down, with the fingernails clearly visible and the wrist bones protruding, the hand has dulled with age and the preservation process. According to myth, it was used to induce household inhabitants into an enduring sleep so their home could be robbed.

The use of body parts as charms to cure illness and ward off evil can be traced back to antiquity, with Pliny the Elder writing circa 77 that:

Scrofula, imposthumes of the parotid glands, and throat diseases, they say, may be cured by the contact of the hand of a person who has been carried off by an early death: indeed there are some who assert that any dead body will produce the same effect, provided it is of the same sex as the patient, and that the part affected is touched with the back of the left hand.

Myths around body parts used for evil started to appear more frequently in the 1600s, as witch trials began in earnest in Britain. The first English reference to a hand that had the power to induce sleep appeared in 1686 in the reminiscences of John Aubrey, who recounted a story told to him as a child in which thieves were able to use a dead man’s hand with a candle in it to keep a household asleep. This popular myth claims that the hand of a convicted felon, cut from the body while still on the gallows or gibbet, then preserved following a special recipe and adorned with a special candle could, when lit, put the members of a household into a coma. This made it much easier for the home to be looted.

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In the 16th and 17th century, hangings were a common practice in Britain. The death penalty could be imposed as a sentence for any theft of property worth more than five shillings—the price of a pocket handkerchief. Although most hangings were not public and tended to take place in town halls, many hanged bodies were displayed in gibbets at cross roads or, in the case of Whitby, on the moor top, clearly visible as a warning to would-be thieves. Brushing against the dead body to cure skin diseases and other ailments was common practice and an executioner could make a good side-line by charging for the pleasure. So rife was the practice of not only removing body parts, but the hanged man’s hair, and thread from the noose for use in charms, that many gibbeted bodies were covered in tar and preserved.

There are various accounts from the 17th century of how to prepare a Hand of Glory, including the suggestion, documented in the Dictionary of English Folklore, that it be

pickled in salt, and the urine of man, woman, dog, horse and mare; smoked with herbs and hay for a month; hung on an oak tree for three nights running, then laid at a crossroads, then hung on a church door for one night while the maker keeps watch in the porch—"and if it be that no fear hath driven you forth from the porch ... then the hand be true won, and it be yours."

Once severed, the hand would be wrapped tightly and squeezed thoroughly until the blood was drained from it. There followed a curing method with salt, saltpeter and long peppers and a drying time in strong sunlight, after which incantations and spells were cast to give the hand its power. The candles were made from virgin wax and the wicks from the hair of the same hanged man.

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After this process was completed, the gruesome thing could be lit. After the incantation below, first published in 1866 in William Henderson’s Notes on the Folklore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders, was spoken, the hand was then said to have the power to charm a household.

Let those who rest more deeply sleep;
Let those who wake their vigils keep.
Oh, Hand of Glory, shed thy light
Direct us to our spoil to-night.
Flash out thy light, O skeleton hand
And guide the feet of our trusty band.

The Whitby Hand has been at the museum since 1935, shortly after it was discovered. It doesn’t appear to be a standard Hand of Glory, which were generally bent into a fist shape during the curing process in order to place the candle in the middle of the fist. The Whitby Museum hand is, instead, laid flat. In photographs taken some years ago when the hand was taken from its display case, the tendons on the palm side can be clearly seen. There are other examples in 17th-century illustrations of witch hovels that show the Hand of Glory as the Whitby hand is, with the fingers themselves anointed and lit, and the hand placed into a candle holder at the wrist bone.

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Based on its size, the Whitby Hand is likely to be male, though no forensic or DNA tests have ever been carried out on it. It was found by a local stonemason, Joseph Ford, hidden in the roof of a thatched cottage in the nearby village of Castleton. The previous owner of the house was well known as a person of bad character, someone perhaps not averse to a little petty criminality, so when the hand was discovered nobody was surprised. It was Ford himself who identified the hand as a Hand of Glory, based on his own knowledge of local folklore.

In the time it has been in the museum, the hand has been taken from its case only once, to remove the cotton wadding it was originally wrapped in. Roger Pickles, who has been a curator at Whitby Museum since 1996, has never seen the hand out of its case and has never had the pleasure of touching it. One oddity that Pickles points out is the lack of any fire damage to the fingers. Could this be because the preservation process wasn’t finished? Pickles has a slightly different theory.

“It’s possible that this hand was actually used as a bad luck charm,” he says. “We know that body parts were used in this manner, and because the single-story cottages had thatch that was quite low to the ground, it would have been easy for someone to lift the thatch and slip it into the roof space, casting bad luck on the occupant.”

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Whatever the true nature of the Whitby Hand, it is a fascinating and gruesome museum artifact. In an age where horror stories are so readily available and magic can be summoned with a sprinkle of special effects, as Pickles says, “people still like to have their toes curled.” Sometimes, all it takes is five shriveled fingers and a centuries-old legend.


Get Lost in This Mind-Blowing Atlas of 1.7 Billion Stars

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A new image offers an “all-sky view” of the Milky Way and nearby galaxies.

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Where is home? It’s partly a question of scale. The smallest version of the answer might be a bedroom, then an apartment or a building. Slightly larger: a city, state, or country, and larger still, a galaxy. All of us Earthlings live inside the Milky Way, and a new trove of data could tell us much more about our shared home turf and our galactic neighbors.

Since 2013, the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite has been probing our galaxy from an orbit around the sun, roughly a million miles from Earth. To produce a new set of images, released this week, 450 scientists and data whizzes analyzed observations that Gaia collected between July 2014 and May 2016. The images include the map above, which the ESA describes as an “all-sky view” of the Milky Way and nearby galaxies.

Of course, “nearby” is relative: Some of these stars are as many as 8,000 light years from Earth. In all, Gaia captured the position and brightness of 1.7 billion twinklers, still just a sliver—roughly one percent—of the billions bedazzling our galaxy. It also collected data about the surface temperature and dust around millions of others.

The release is "a very big deal," David Hogg, an astrophysicist at New York University and the Flatiron Institute, told NPR. "I've been working on trying to understand the Milky Way and the formation of the Milky Way for a large fraction of my scientific career, and the amount of information this is revealing in some sense is thousands or even hundreds of thousands of times larger than any amount of information we've had previously," he said. "We're really talking about an immense change to our knowledge about the Milky Way."

Even if these observations only consider a cranny of the universe, it’s an immense amount of raw data; sifting through it will be an ongoing project. Meanwhile, it’s freely available online—anyone can probe it for problems, questions, and answers that reveal even more about the place we all call home.

A Photographer’s Journey Through the Former Spas of Soviet Georgia

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Remnants of communist leisure in the shadow of war.

The town of Tskaltubo, in Georgia, had everything a Soviet citizen could want from his or her annual, state-sponsored, two-week vacation. Located near the Caucasus Mountains, it offered a subtropical climate and thermal water treatments at an array of sanatoriums. But since the collapse of the USSR, the town has changed. There are fewer visitors to the few sanatoriums that remain in operation. Those that closed were either left to decay, or are now housing refugees from the Abkhaz-Georgian conflict.

"Georgia, as a Republic of the Soviet Union, proved to be the perfect host for building many sanatoriums,” says photographer Reginald van de Velde, who visited a dozen of these sites across Georgia and Abkhazia last summer. In addition to the thermal and mineral qualities of their water, “some even had sources with radiotive isotopes in them,” he says, noting that “radioactivity was once considered a healthy thing, curing everything from infertility to paralysis.”

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Vacation was a serious business in the USSR. It was enshrined in the 1936 Soviet constitution, as a “right to rest.” Using a voucher system, workers could stay at a sanatorium and receive health-promoting treatments. They were often built to capitalize on natural resources, such as the one in Naftalan, Azerbaijan, where visitors could soak in crude oil (a treatment that is still available today). Georgia’s appeal was not just its spring waters, but also the region on the Black Sea coast known as Abkhazia.

“This pristine coastline soon gained an enormous popularity amongst the Soviet elite, and was dubbed the 'Russian Riviera,'” says van de Velde. Abkhazia drew so many visitors that at its peak, apartments in Sukhumi, the main city, were more expensive than ones in Moscow. Stalin, in addition to visiting sanatoriums in Tskaltubo, owned a dacha overlooking the Black Sea.

But in 1992, shortly after the collapse of the USSR, Abkhazia sought independence from Georgia. “With the Georgians being the single largest ethnic group in prewar Abkhazia, they pretty much all fled the war-torn country due to the heavy and deadly clashes between the Georgian army and the Russian-backed Abkhaz separatists,” says van de Velde. More than 220,000 people left as refugees, and some of them still live in makeshift homes in Georgia's former sanatoriums.

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The Abkhaz-Georgian conflict remains unresolved. Most of the world considers Abkhazia part of Georgia—the disputed territory has been recognized by only four countries: Russia, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Nauru. The U.S. State Department advises against any travel to Abkhazia, as does the British Foreign Office. So van de Velde prepared a great deal before attempting to enter.

“There’s only one way to travel into Abkhazia via Georgia, and that’s via the famous Enguri Bridge. No vehicles are allowed to cross, so you need to walk the bridge by foot or make use of one of the horse carriages,” van de Velde recalls. “The Georgian police held us at the border for three hours for no apparent reason. Once you cross the other side, you bump into a Russian border operated by the military, doing a proper check-up as well.”

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Van de Velde didn’t know what to expect once he finally got into Abkhazia. “You enter a country no one ever visits, no one ever sees. You enter this fascinating entity secluded from the outside world. It’s unspoiled, its unknown, it’s subtropical, it’s war-torn, but it’s also incredibly beautiful and pristine,” he recalls. Evidence of violent conflict is still impossible to escape. “All the roads remain severely damaged and potholed, many homes are abandoned, and when you inspect them up close you see the impacts of bullets and shelling.”

Late one afternoon last summer, van de Velde found himself on the terrace of an ornate sanatorium in Abkhazia. Between the vast columns were sweeping views across the Black Sea. “Abkhazia suffered severely from the war,” he says. “But there’s still so much grandeur and beauty to be found.”

Atlas Obscura has a selection of van de Velde’s photographs.

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The Jiggling, Gelatinous Creations of a Pop-up Jell-O Exhibition

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Behold a beloved children's character, a famous painting, and fusion foods.

“It started as a joke,” says Emily Wallace, “and then we were like, ‘Actually, that’s not a bad idea.’”

The idea was a pop-up event celebrating the art of sculpted foods, particularly gelatin foods in all their elaborate, multi-colored glory. (Whether they be savory aspics or fruit-filled Jell-Os.) The name, chosen by Emily with her friends Kate Alia and Kate Medley, was “O Moldy Night,” a riff on the iconic Christmas carol “O Holy Night” referring to the many molds used to shape Jell-O and aspics. So one night in Durham, North Carolina, home cooks and professional chefs displayed their creative concoctions in a hotel lobby. Beyond Jell-O, most anything made with a mold was welcome.

The three main organizers, Medley, Wallace, and Elia, work as artists and professionals in the local culinary scene and have an interest in blurring the line between art and food.

“Molded foods are so visually stunning and weird,” says Medley, a photographer and filmmaker. “Why not elevate them on a pedestal?”

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Wallace and Medley both grew up surrounded by Southern home cooking and have fond memories of the molds of their youth: orange Jell-O salads, accompanied by cool-whip and mandarin oranges.

“It’s not Southern by nature, but it shows up pretty strong in the South,” says Wallace.

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But “O Moldy Night” contained molds far more elaborate than anything from Wallace or Medley’s youth. Many of the molds were savory, which is a departure from the average Southern Jell-O concoction. One home cook, Lauren Hart, suspended pieces of fried chicken in a sweet tea mold and finished off the display with mashed potato florets.

“That took it to a new level for me,” says Wallace of that particular mold. “I wish I had grown up with that.”

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Even though some may associate Jell-O with Southern cooking, it is not connected with a particular region. When powdered gelatin packets first became widely available in the early 1900s, it was embraced by home cooks all over the country.

“Anybody could do it,” says culinary historian Laura Shapiro, “It was not expensive, it was easy, and it was festive and flamboyant. And it was sweet. Everything that the American pallet and imagination wanted.”

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Jell-O’s lack of regional provenance allows people of different food traditions to embrace the concept and infuse it with their own culture. Sandra Gutierrez’s “Mold for the Nuevo South” contained avocado, chili peppers, and pimientos, combining southern American molded food traditions with South American flavors.

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At the museum, every mold was superlative in one way or another. But the organizers doled out “Shimmy awards” as extra praise, and each award was associated with its own special pun. The “Out With the Mold, in With the New” award for most contemporary mold went to a Totoro-shaped creation, which depicts a beloved character from a Hayao Miyazaki children’s film. And the “My Jell-O Americans” people’s choice award went to a haunting mold that depicts the painting “Ophelia.” (In this case, Ophelia was drowning in aspic.)

Over 400 people showed up for the event to celebrate art, food, and some truly unique Jell-O. At the end of the night, the molds were cut up and devoured.

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Jell-O is nostalgic. It’s weird. It jiggles. It’s a food commonly associated with childhood or grandma’s dinner table. It’s also a medium of artistic potential, which can contort into infinite combinations of form, substance and flavor.

Also, it’s pretty hilarious.

“Every time things got to serious,” says Medley, “it was like, ‘Oh yeah, it’s just Jell-O.’”

America's Greatest Horticulturist Left Behind a Plum Mystery

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Frida Kahlo painted him. Thomas Edison admired him. Now Rachel Spaeth is trying to decode him.

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Luther Burbank was America’s most legendary horticulturist. At the turn of the 20th century, he developed hundreds of new fruit, vegetable, and flower varieties, creating marvels such as the Shasta daisy and the Santa Rosa plum. If America had a national plant, it might be the his blight-resistant russet Burbank potato, which alleviated the lingering effects of the Irish famine and makes up McDonald’s French fries today.

The media portrayed Burbank as a saintly, botanical wizard. For decades, thousands of people traveled to his Santa Rosa home, trying to catch a glimpse of him at work. Thomas Edison and Henry Ford sought his friendship, and after his death, both Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera painted him. Around his grave at the Luther Burbank Home and Gardens, the plants he pioneered are still growing, watched over by garden curator Rachel Spaeth.

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Despite all the press and acclaim, much of Burbank's work remains mysterious—a problem that Spaeth, who has worked at the Burbank Home for a decade, has set out to solve. Once Burbank died, much of his knowledge was lost. Burbank was a terrible notetaker and an untrained scientist; he rarely recorded his process of creation as he developed plants that were sold through nurseries and seed catalogues. He also had good reason not to advertise the genetic makeup of his plants: In the early 20th century, there was no way to patent them.

“A man can patent a mousetrap or copyright a nasty song," Burbank once groused. "But if he gives to the world a new fruit that will add millions to the value of earth’s annual harvests, he will be fortunate if he is rewarded by so much as having his name connected with the result."

This created a challenge that Spaeth is facing. By sorting through what Burbank left behind, Spaeth hopes to uncover the lost parentage of his plums, the fruit which Burbank worked with more than any other.

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For a botanist and biologist such as Spaeth, it’s more necessary than ever to decipher Burbank’s work. In the event of plant disease or a changing climate, knowing the parents of popular varietals could help future horticulturists develop heartier new varieties. “It's a big part of food security,” she says. She’s long admired Burbank, once strolling through his gardens every day on her way to work. But also, she tells me, there’s an undeniable impulse to continue Burbank’s work, with the same genetic material he used. She hopes to develop new plums, and even examine more of Burbank’s plants outside of the fruit. The Burbank gardens are still packed with his experiments, many of them genetic anomalies.

As garden curator, Spaeth is uniquely situated for research on Burbank. Their backgrounds even have some similarities. As children, they both grew up in the East: She in rural Pennsylvania, he in Massachusetts. Both were influenced by their families’ gardens. Part of living where she did, Spaeth tells me, meant a diet of mostly homegrown fruits and vegetables.

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Both relocated out of necessity. He sold the the russet potato to a seed company for $150 dollars while he still lived in Massachusetts. With the money, he left for California, settling down in Santa Rosa. Spaeth left too, moving to California in search of “better weather and cheaper education.” But while Burbank only received a high school education, Spaeth’s plum project is part of her PhD research at nearby University of California, Davis.

Spaeth’s first challenge is to gather Burbank’s 250 plum varieties. With a living database of Burbank’s plums growing at the Burbank Home, it will be much easier to pick out family connections, she says. But many have been scattered to the winds. Nurseries and private growers have various varieties, and she’s collected samples of those. Other times, she turns to the local Santa Rosa community, going on the radio to appeal to locals who might have 100-year-old plum trees. Nearly every time, she’s been successful in finding a named Burbank variety. That might not be as strange as expected. Fruit trees flourish in Santa Rosa. Burbank himself called the region “God’s gift to fruit growers.”

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Yet some of Burbank’s plum and plum hybrids have never been named. At the Burbank House, one of Burbank’s orphaned plumcots is still growing. “The apricot was the pollen parent, and the plum was the mother tree,” says Spaeth. Burbank was the first to cross apricots and plums. “He wasn’t bound by scientific principles,” Speath says. When told the two fruits were too distantly related to cross, Burbank’s response was, as Spaeth sums it up, “Watch me!”

The flesh of the plumcot is chartreuse green, and the exterior is a dark bluish purple. “It’s the only tree of its kind," Spaeth says. Once she has a clearer idea of the mystery plumcot’s genealogy, the Burbank Home will name it.

Typically, horticulturists use brushes to apply pollen from one parent tree to the blossoms of another. The bloom’s stamen (the male sexual part) is cut off to keep it from pollinating itself. The branch is bagged to prevent lothario bees from coming and administering unintended pollen. Then, a new fruit develops.

There’s a sticky problem there, too. It’s difficult to trace Burbank’s parent trees because he didn’t bag his blossoms, and marked trees with scraps of his own clothing instead of signage. In contrast, other horticulturists took detailed notes. But Burbank was more artist than scientist, and he only had a high school education. His unorthodox methods often frustrated his contemporaries. His work, then, is “very difficult to reproduce,” Spaeth says.

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That’s where genetics come in. The second step of Spaeth’s research is getting her hands on more of Burbank’s notes. Burbank did keep some records: He traced the shapes of his fruits and squashed them onto paper to make impressions. At the moment, the majority of those prints are at the Library of Congress. With the genetic material left over on the prints, Sparth can extract the genome and compare it to the living plums in her growing collection. She compares the process to how archeologists test the DNA of mummies, with a “forensic version of genomics.” She expects that time will have degraded what genome she can extract from the fruit prints, making the Burbank Home’s living collection even more vital, “to fill in some of those holes.”

Spaeth is still in the early stages, and she hasn’t identified any plum parents yet. But when she does, she plans on crossing his varieties to recreate Burbank’s methods—and his plums. She expects some trial and error: After all, “you’re dealing with random assortment, genetics, and just how biology works in general,” she says. The same parents don’t necessarily mean the same fruits, as anyone with siblings knows.

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At the moment, Spaeth is making her own fruit prints to see what kind of data can be extracted. When she has results, she plans on requesting Burbank’s prints from the Library of Congress. It’s not a request to make lightly: She'll have to peel the residues off the vintage prints to analyze them. But the Library often opens its archives to valuable research, so she thinks they’ll be amenable.

Burbank, while a genius, wasn’t an eccentric. His fears about having his work stolen were well-founded. Since plants couldn’t be patented, he depended on his creations for income. His death and the loss of his knowledge led Congress to allow the patenting of plants. Thomas Edison hoped that the decision would lead to many new Burbanks, who could provide the world with a wealth of new plants. But while Spaeth might be one of them, she also takes her cues from a different treasure-seeker. “Sometimes I feel like the Indiana Jones of the plant world,” she jokes.

New Guineans Made Intricately Carved Daggers From Human Bones

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These deadly relics were symbols of power and prestige.

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At the sight of these New Guinean daggers, you’d think they were made from wood or maybe ivory. Not quite. The bottom one comes from a cassowary. The first two were made from the femurs of warriors on the South Pacific island around 100 years ago.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, bone daggers were carved from the tibiotarsus (upper leg bone) of cassowaries, a flightless bird native to New Guinea. The daggers symbolized strength and social prestige within the community, which was often defined by the number of enemies and cassowaries killed. According to Dartmouth College anthropologist Nathaniel J. Dominy, it’s unclear what the intricately sculpted designs of geometric shapes, lines, faces, birds, and crocodiles on these daggers represent, but they are most often interpreted as power symbols. “The most powerful images were on the handle,” wrote Dominy, so the user could harness the power by gripping the handle.

Human bone daggers, however, are rare compared to cassowary bone daggers, which you can still find on eBay. Out of roughly 499 bone daggers housed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the Field Museum in Chicago, only 21 are human. These daggers were carved from the femurs of men who were victorious on the battlefield or vanquished rivals who had racked up a high number of kills. “It was the possession of a human bone that entitled you the rights, magic, and prestige of the man who was the source of the bone,” wrote Dominy.

For decades, groups in northern New Guinea used bone daggers during close combat to stab enemies in the throat, wound their hip or leg joints, or incapacitate prisoners to assure victory. It’s unknown when and for how long New Guineans in the Sepik region started using human bone daggers, but the carving custom tapered off near the end of the 19th century or early 20th century.

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Since then, anthropologists have wondered how these valuable possessions withstood the blunt force of brutal battles without breaking. Dominy, who has studied bone daggers for years, and a team of researchers from Dartmouth College, the University of Colorado, Denver, and the University of Maine, Orono, were determined to find the answer. For their study, the team acquired five human bone and six cassowary daggers from the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College and a private dealer. They scanned the daggers with a CT scanner, jabbed the weapons through urethane casting material to simulate stabbing a human joint, and tested the daggers’ resistance to bending with a uniaxial mechanical tester.

The CT scanner results showed that cassowary daggers were much flatter than the curved daggers carved from human bone. Mechanical testing demonstrated that human bones have a greater resistance to bending. The urethane test revealed that the material stiffness and strength of human and bird daggers were actually fairly similar. Using the cassowary data, the research team employed computer simulations to evaluate the bird daggers' mechanical force compared to human bone daggers. The simulations determined that the human bone weapons were far stronger than the cassowary daggers.

This superiority, the researchers surmise, is due to the curved structure of the human bone daggers. “When men are shaping the dagger from a human femur they retain a lot of the cross-sectional curvature,” Dominy told The Washington Post.

They are not sure if and why the dagger-makers intentionally carved the flat cassowary daggers to be frailer than their human bone counterparts. It's possible, the researchers speculate, that dagger-makers carved the cassowary daggers to be lightweight, easy to carry, and replaceable when broken. What seems plausible is human bone daggers as symbols of strength were sculpted to weather flesh, bone, and time.

The Man Searching the World for Artifacts Bearing His Name

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Why an artist named Glen Eden collects "Glen Eden" memorabilia.

On a 2002 trip to San Diego, the artist Glen Eden Einbinder took a detour to visit America’s largest member-owned nudist resort and club. He wasn’t there as a member, nor as an aspiring nudist. “I was a little nervous of what to tell them,” he remembers. “So I didn’t tell them what I was doing. I just said that I was interested in the place, and if they had any information.”

He turned down a nude tour (“I’m not a prude, but I felt a little uncomfortable doing that, as a single man,” he says, laughing) and instead left with a few pamphlets about this “Nudist Resort For All Seasons.” Outside, he snapped a few shots of the signage and surrounding streets, before heading on his way.

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In fact, Einbinder was there as a collector. For over 25 years, he’s amassed a treasure trove of objects that somehow incorporate his first and middle name. (The nudist resort in Corona, California, was the Glen Eden Sun Club.) Over the decades, he’s made his way to Grayson County, Texas, to visit the site of the Glen Eden plantation; to the Glen Eden Pilot Park, in Raleigh, North Carolina; and to the corporate headquarters of the Glen Eden Wool Company, in Georgia, to name just a few of his stops. Sometimes he explains why he’s there; on other occasions, he’ll gloss over the truth, fearing a negative reaction. “I’m shy with a lot of things like that,” he says, faltering.

From each place, he’s acquired objects: leaflets, photographs, a square of mottled carpet the color of moss. But not everything in his collection is the product of a journey. Some, like postcards from motels that no longer exist, are bought on eBay. Others are gifts from friends. A New Zealand suburb is represented by a map and a leaflet containing a bus route. Many of these places have been shored up from elaborate searches on Google Images. It’s at once art project and hobby, an odyssey across places real and forgotten.

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Einbinder’s parents didn’t name him for a place. Glen, he says, is somehow related to the initials of his ancestors, with the “G” perhaps coming from a Great-Aunt Gussie. And Eden comes from the Jack London book Martin Eden, which his father was reading when Einbinder was born. Though the two together conjure up some pleasant idyll—Glen as a woodland valley, Eden as a garden—he didn’t realize the connection until he started to come across the huge volume of places that share his name.

In person, Einbinder is soft-spoken and self-effacing, with thick, sooty eyelashes and an open smile. He’s small and dark, a little androgynous, and lives alone in a neat, one-bedroom apartment near Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. A piece of his own art, a woodwork of a bower bird’s nest and collection, hangs on the wall. After years of work at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, as their Chief Engineer of Exhibits, he now freelances in museums across New York City, helping to design and execute exhibits and environments.

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You can see that curatorial spirit in how he cares for his collection. For a recent show at the City Reliquary’s Collectors Night, Einbinder stuck a grid of plastic rectangles onto a piece of blue card, then slipped a vintage postcard into each sleeve. Seven metal milk bottle tops, from a Glen Eden dairy, are as shiny and pristine as if they’d been delivered to his doorstop yesterday. There are many more objects, each as fastidiously preserved, such as nine pieces of Glen Eden-branded hotel soap paraphernalia or a ceramic jug. One of his favorites is a framed gouache painting of a woman with ice-skates flung over one shoulder. Her sweater reads “Glen Eden,” likely for a girls’ boarding school in Poughkeepsie, New York.

That’s on top of teacups, clothing, books, drink coasters, leaflets, and dozens of other paper items, including photographs of street signs from places he’s visited, all featuring his name in some manner. He’s not in the photos, though in some, his shadow creeps into the frame.

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There are rules to this collecting, but even now, he’s still trying to figure out exactly what they are. The names have to be in the right order—a spoon marked “Eden Glen” doesn’t really count, though he keeps it nonetheless. Digital objects don’t either, unless he finds a way to make them exist in physical space. He gives the example of a vividly colored label from a can of peaches, which he saw on eBay. He lost the auction, but saved the digital image from the listing. As a collection of pixels, it’s only an addendum to the main collection, he says, though if he decided to print it out, or even glue it to a can, it would count.

He is still hashing out other guidelines, he says, like whether a series of Emily Brontë poems addressed to a mysterious R. Gleneden are valid additions. “It feels like it’s not specific,” he says, holding the book open. “A person is harder. Because I’m the person—so if there’s others, it doesn’t work for the collection.”

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It all started with a bottle of whisky. As a student in Valencia, California, Einbinder came across a bottle of now-defunct Glen Eden single malt. (Online reviews describe it as “vile” and “repulsive.”) When the bottle was empty, he threw it out, but held on to the red, gold, and black label. At the time, he says, he was going through a phase of collecting things he came across that somehow spoke to him, often from another time: “I was going to thrift stores, and picking up records for 50 cents, just because of the way it looked.” Next, he came across a classified advertisement for the Sun Club in the back pages of a newspaper. He cut it out and kept it. From there, the collection blossomed, and then ballooned.

But pinpointing exactly why Einbinder does it is even harder than choosing concrete rules to govern the cache of artifacts. “The ‘why’ is not really apparent. It’s just kind of fun, I think.” He gives the example of people buying souvenir mugs and keyrings that are emblazoned with their first name. There’s no actual connection, he says, yet somehow people are still drawn to things that arbitrarily have their names on them. “In terms of what that says about me, I think I like ‘arbitrary,’” he says. In terms of what it means as art, he’s even less sure. Friends have asked him if it’s self-portraiture—if the collection of objects together somehow represents him, or says something about him as a person. But beyond the fact that “all the things are together, and they’re interconnected through me,” there’s little to be gleaned about the collector himself.

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Rather than worrying about why he does it or what it represents, he says, the next step is making it accessible to those who might want to see it, and finding a digital home for these physical things. Hundreds of digital photographs are meticulously stored on his laptop: Online, they might finally be a valuable addition to the archive, whether displayed separately or enmeshed among photographs of the things he already has. “It would be a lot,” he says, “but I would like to do that.”

And in the meantime, he’ll continue to collect, buying old postcards from eBay and checking Google to see whether other Glen Edens he may not have known about have suddenly made their way onto the internet. He’d like to find the time and resources, too, to make it to the sites of places memorialized in his collection, such as the long defunct Glen Eden Hotel, in Chicago, or Camp Glen Eden, a former boys’ summer camp in Eagle River, Wisconsin. Each one opens up a new, forgotten world, with its characters and its history—a collection not just of things, but of stories, each linked by a common name.

The World's Tallest Active Geyser Keeps Erupting

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Steamboat, normally quiet for months at a stretch, has already blown its top three times this spring.

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Steamboat Geyser is impressive. When it really gets going, it can spew water 300 feet in the air. That's far higher than anything its neighbors in Yellowstone National Park's Norris Basin can accomplish. In fact, Steamboat is considered the tallest active geyser in the world.

It's also pretty sleepy. According to the geyser monitoring site GeyserTimes, while more active geysers may roar to life weekly or daily, Steamboat generally saves up its strength for very occasional blasts. In the past, it has slumbered for whole months, or even years, at a time. Once, it almost missed an entire decade: Between August 26, 1968 and March 28, 1978, it made not a peep.

So it was surprising when this past spring—after a three-and-a-half-year period of silence—Steamboat erupted three times in quick succession. In a recent blog post on the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory website, USGS scientists detailed the latest outbursts. The first happened on March 15, around 5:30 a.m. No humans caught the action, "but the activity was detected by a nearby seismometer, temperature gauges, and water discharge at a USGS stream gage," they write. Plus, "the ground around the geyser was strewn with small rocks and mud."

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A little over a month later, on April 19, Steamboat blew another gasket. Instruments showed that this eruption was a bit bigger (although, again, no one saw it). The next came just eight days later, on April 27. This time, one lucky visitor clapped eyes on the torrent of water and steam. It was, once again, larger than the last, although still only about half as big as Steamboat's biggest blasts.

When people read "unusual," "eruption," and "Yellowstone," they often think of the 44-mile supervolcano hanging out under the park. But officials say there's no need to worry: Steamboat is its own guy(ser). "There is nothing to indicate that any sort of volcanic eruption is imminent," Michael Poland of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory told the Washington Post.

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Indeed, scientists aren't quite sure what it all means. It's difficult to figure geysers out, as studying them requires dealing with scalding hot conditions deep underground. Poland told the Washington Post that the rapid eruptions might have to do with thermal disturbances in the ground around the Norris Basin.

"It is also possible that Steamboat is entering a period of more frequent, but relatively small, eruptions," the scientists write in the blog post. (This has happened before: If you scroll back through GeyserTimes, you'll see that the early 1980s were particularly dramatic, with Steamboat explosions every couple of weeks or so.)

Another explanation: "The current eruptions may simply reflect the randomness of geysers," they write. If you can throw that much water up in the air, no one can tell you what to do.


Scientists Have Confirmed the Longest Straight Line Over Water

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They do not recommend sailing it.

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Here's the premise: You're in a boat, traveling along a straight line. You want to travel for as far as possible, without crashing into stray islands or running aground. How far can you go, and what's your route?

Without even looking for it, Reddit user kepleronlyknows stumbled across the answer five years ago. (In civilian life, he's a lawyer who goes by the name Patrick Anderson.) While navigating the choppy backwaters of Wikipedia, he came across the coordinates of the line on a list of "Extreme points of Earth." He plotted the distance on a map and and then published a video, showing that the line really was straight. It's an epic journey of 19,940 miles, traveling overseas from southern Pakistan to northeastern Russia across the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, the South Atlantic Ocean, and the entire Pacific.

But whether or not it was actually the longest continuous maritime line remained up in the air—until this month, when a team of scientists from Ireland and India finally proved him right, Science reports. Kushal Mukherjee, an engineer from IBM Research India in New Delhi, worked with the physicist Rohan Chabukswar, from United Technologies Research Center Ireland, to solve the puzzle, using computers, complicated geometry, and a bit of lateral thinking. They published their results online last week.

Any line that goes all the way around a sphere, or the globe, is called a great circle. Like the equator, great circles cut the earth in half, producing the maximum possible length of any straight line around it. At first, Mukherjee and Chabukswar married great circles with computer-aided brute force in search of the solution. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s ETOPO1 Global Relief model of Earth’s surface differentiates between water, ice, and land. Using a standard laptop computer, the team attempted to examine every possible great circle on the planet with this model. But with some 233,280,000 possible contenders, yielding a further 5,038,848,000,000 "land or sea" points that would need to be checked, the computation was too unfathomably vast.

Instead, they took another tack, as Science reports, using an optimization algorithm known as "branch and bound." This program selected a few batches of all possible great circles, narrowing in again and again on the most likely options. After just ten minutes of processing, their "standard laptop" spat out the answer: The mysterious Wikipedia contributor was correct.

The line runs from the beach town of Sonmiani, Pakistan, "threading the needle" between Africa and Madagascar, and then between Antarctica and Tiera del Fuego in South America. It finishes in Russia's remote Karaginsky District. It fits the brief—the longest continuous line across the earth's waters—but you may want to think twice before firing up your rudderless boat. The authors note, a little pointedly: "The problem was approached as a purely mathematical exercise."

How to Tell If You Have Spring Fever

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Symptoms include: listlessness and energy, laziness and glee.

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Are you feeling tired, or energized? Depressed, or cheerful? Ready to go back to bed, or eager to engage with the world? All answers point to the same diagnosis: spring fever.

Over the last 160 years, spring fever has become an “auto-antonym,” or a word with multiple meanings, one of which is the opposite of another. Back when the phrase first appeared in the U.S. in the 1850s, spring fever meant “the listless feeling caused by the first sudden increase of temperature in spring,” according to one dictionary. The body’s “machinery is clogged,” a writer for the Christian Union wrote in 1878. It wasn’t just a physical ailment, though. The American Agriculturist called spring fever a “feeling of discontent when neither body or mind are at ease.”

By the late 1880s and 1890s, though, Americans’ moralist tendencies were starting to recast this ailment. In 1887, the Therapeutic Gazette sniffed that spring fever was “supposed by many to be moral rather than physical." A year later, a reader named Josephine wrote to the women’s department of Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine declaring that, “I have decided that I have spring fever. Consequently I don’t propose working very hard.” Common Sense Health Notes described it, in 1893, as “the fever that attacks the boy, causes him to skip school, or shirk work.”

By the early 20th century, spring fever was considered a made-up ailment. “Our grandfathers had much more reverence for spring fever than we have today. In fact they ‘invented’ spring fever,” wrote William Brady, M.D., in a 1916 issue of Illustrated World. The Nurse wrote the next year that, “We admit that one of our medical authorities has recently asserted there is no such thing as spring fever.”

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But, according to that very same editorial, “Spring fever is a good kind of fever to have.” Victims included the humming waitress who keeps getting an order wrong, the boy dangling his foot in the lake, a hospital patient who wants his window open, a officer worker who walks three miles every morning instead of taking the streetcar, a usually punctual nurse who comes 30 minutes late—in a car, with flowers. Spring fever had morphed into the opposite of the original ailment: It now meant a light-hearted, carefree feeling. The only symptom the two strains of spring fever had in common was the desire not to work.

“The sufferer sometimes—or in fact quite often—finds it well nigh impossible to resist the temptation to play what in the disciplinary technique of the school is known as 'hookey,'” wrote the students of St. Mary’s College in Indiana in 1921.

There were cures for spring fever. “On rising, sponge the body lightly and quickly with cold water, briskly toweling after,” instructs the Christian Union. “Rehabilitated, you are now ready for your morning bitters, namely, the clear juice of a fresh lemon in a wineglass of water, without sugar.” In 1893, Common Sense Health Notes advised people to “keep on wearing your flannels,” in order to avoid the disease. In 1916, Dr. Brady advised that, “To stick to your flannels far into the balmy spring is a mistaken way of doing penance.” Many publications advised better diets, spring vegetables in particular. One author had a simple solution: “The best cure of spring fever is to loaf in the sun or go fishing.”

In the 19th century, there were actual diseases that might have affected people in the spring. The season sometimes brought with it cases of malaria, though usually relatively mild. The listlessness may also have been related to the onset of scurvy: Symptoms include feeling “very tired and weak,” as well as “irritable and sad.” (And hence the recommendation to eat vegetables.)

Aside from those medical problems, doctors today associate a rise in energy in spring with hormonal changes. When the day lengthens and the sun comes up earlier, changing levels of melatonin could improve people’s moods and energy levels. Without malaria or scurvy to worry about, spring fever has transformed: Now, if we’re shirking work in spring, it’s not because we’re tired, but because we have too much energy to stay inside.

What Ecologists Can Learn From Memes

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Some scientists are studying YouTube comments and trying to go viral.

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A meme of two angry men recently stampeded across the internet. It’s a scene from the reality show American Chopper, broken out into stacked panels, like a comic strip. The still images are pulled from a scene in which one man is firing the other. Things escalate quickly: Fists are pounded, faces are flushed, fingers are jabbed, chairs are flung.

Like many memes, its particulars matter less than its elasticity. There are zillions of permutations, and one especially notable riff came courtesy of the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

In their version, the meme asks how a conservation agency ought to reach out and connect with people—particularly folks who don’t spend much time worrying about the ocean. “We have to reach people where they are for conservation to break through the noise!” the first panel reads. “This is a really popular meme right now—maybe it can generate a non-zero amount of ocean awareness!” screams another.

On the other side of the country, Mason Fidino, a quantitative ecologist at the Urban Wildlife Institute at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, was wondering something similar: How should ecologists and wildlife management teams be thinking about the internet, both as a source of information and as a tool to harness in order to get their message out?

Fidino’s training is in statistics, computer programming, and ecology, but he also runs his group’s Twitter account—a side project that no one quite taught him how to do. When the UWI played around the idea of a social media presence, he says, they decided, “Hey, let’s make this thing, and Mason will be in charge of it.” In a new paper, published this week in Human Dimensions of Wildlife, Fidino and his collaborators advance the idea that the nooks and crannies of the web hold useful data points, and maybe a bit of a roadmap.

“When we think about humans interacting with the environment, I think we're at a point now where we cannot ignore the internet,” Fidino says. “That's the way that so many people learn about the world around them.” If a raccoon is ambling around your fire escape and peering in your window, for instance, you'd probably consult Google before seeking out a friendly neighborhood zoologist. “As humans and the environment are incontrovertibly linked, so too then are the internet and the environment,” the authors write. That is to say, the web and the offline world coexist as one ever-growing ecosystem.

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To better understand what happens inside it, Fidino and his coauthors analyzed more than 50,000 comments left on the most-watched YouTube videos depicting three common species of North American mammals—coyotes (Canis latrans), opossums (Didelphis virginiana), and raccoons (Procyon lotor).

The videos illustrate a range of scenarios: Some show the mammals being coddled as pets, while others picture them sparring among themselves or being hunted by humans. Each averages more than a million views plus a slew of comments, which the researchers coded into various categories based on an existing typology of attitudes towards animals. These include “humanistic” (cooing over the creatures and wanting to snuggle them as pets), “dominionistic” (emphasizing turf and control), and “negativistic” (the idea that certain animals are simply gross). To control for spammers skewing the results, the researchers only counted a user’s first comment on each video.

Most of the top-viewed coyote videos showed humans hunting them, while the majority of the opossum videos depicted the animals as pets or in captivity. Half of the videos of raccoons cast them as bandits stealing food or otherwise stirring up shenanigans. Dominionistic comments were the most common type on coyote videos. (“Destroy all coyote who ruin deer hunts,” read one.) Humanistic comments were the common responses on the videos of raccoons and opossums—though a sizable share of the latter were negativistic, too. Some people were pretty grossed out by the beady-eyed marsupial.

Fidino acknowledges that YouTube commenters are a self-selected and notoriously vocal bunch, and their views aren’t necessarily representative of everyone else’s. But getting a handle on the prevailing, pervasive ideas that viewers have about different animal species, he says, could help wildlife organizations think about messaging and misconceptions.

“How do we encourage people to be like, ‘Okay, you can take a photo of this animal, but you don't want this raccoon to be a pet,’” Fidino asks. “Whereas, conversely, with coyotes, it seems like the biggest hurdle that you have to overcome with that is that people are afraid of them.”

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The paper doesn’t make any specific recommendations about how wildlife officials should go about becoming more internet-savvy, but Fidino thinks they should give it a shot. “If I went into these [comments] and said, ‘Oh, hi, I’m Dr. Mason, the ecologist, and you probably shouldn’t say that you want raccoons as a pet, and here are some reasons why,’ that probably wouldn’t have much of an impact,” Fidino says. His vision involves messaging on a larger scale—and maybe a more playful one. “Should there be a science center that crafts memes or something?” he says. “I don’t know, but it would be pretty cool, I think.”

The meme approach worked out pretty well for the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Their take—which Fidino describes as “a really awesome example”—was retweeted 44,000 times. Afterwards, the account managers hopped back in to try to redirect some of those eyeballs to the institute’s more-rigorous, less-punny efforts. “Wow, this really blew up,” they tweeted. “Here's a link to our newest sea otter research paper and a bonus otter gif! Thanks for the love and for doing your part for the ocean!”

An Algorithmic Investigation of the Highfalutin 'Poet Voice'

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New research suggests that the affected reading style consists of a particular set of attributes.

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You walk into the bookstore. You sit in your folding chair, or on the floor, with your paper cup of wine. The poet approaches the microphone, affably introduces himself, and maybe cracks a joke. He shuffles his papers, launches into his first verse—and all of a sudden, his voice changes completely! Natural conversational rhythms are replaced by a slow, lilting delivery, like a very boring ocean. Long pauses—so long—hang in the air. Try and get comfortable. There's no helping it. You're in for a night of Poet Voice.

Many performance-related professions and avocations have developed an associated "voice": a set of specific vocal tics or decisions. Taken together, these mannerisms make up a kind of sonic uniform, immediately clueing a listener into who or what they're listening to. There's "Newscaster's Voice," for example, characterized by a slow cadence and a refusal to drop letters. There is "NPR" or "Podcast Voice", which the writer Teddy Wayne has diagnosed as a "plague of pregnant pauses and off-kilter pronunciations," and which radio host Ira Glass once said arose in direct response to those butter-smooth anchors.

And then there's Poet Voice, scourge of the open mic and the Pulitzer podium alike. Unsurprisingly, poets are the best at describing Poet Voice: Rich Smith, in CityArts, calls it "a precious, lilting cadence," in which "every other line [ends] on a down note," and there are "pauses, within sentences, where pauses, need not go." According to Smith, today's egregious Poet Voicers include Louise Glück and Natasha Trethewey, whose fantastic poems are obscured, in performance, by this tendency of their authors. "Poet Voice [ruins] everybody's evening," he writes. "[It is] a thick cloud of oratorial perfume."

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Marit J. MacArthur has had many evenings ruined by Poet Voice. As an English professor and scholar, she has been listening to it for years. (Before she heard it called "Poet Voice," she even developed her own evocative term for it: "monotonous incantation.") "I just felt like there was a style of poetry reading that I was hearing a lot that sounded highly conventional and stylized," she says. Although she was annoyed, she was also intrigued: "I became curious about what exactly it was, and why so many people were doing it … I wanted to define it more empirically."

She started by plumbing the literature, undertaking what she calls "a cultural-historical investigation of where this vocal cliché came from," and connecting it with both religious ritual and the university's distaste for the theatrical. "People in academia are just more comfortable with suppression of emotion," she says. (She collected these insights in a 2016 paper, "Monotony, the Churches of Poetry Reading, and Sound Studies," published in PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association of America.)

But this research left her with more questions. So she decided to go deeper. In a new study published in Cultural Analytics, MacArthur and two colleagues, Georgia Zellou and Lee M. Miller, skipped the human middleman and ran various recorded readings through a rigorous sonic analysis. In other words, they tried to use data to nail down Poet Voice.

For the study, the researchers chose 100 different poets—half born before 1960, and half born after—aiming for "a variety of aesthetic educational backgrounds, as well as some ethnic, racial, class, and sexual diversity," as they write. They found audio and video clips of these poets reading their own poems by scouring websites like PennSound and Poets.org. Then they took the first 60 seconds of these recordings, first chopping off any introductory chit-chat, as most poets use their "normal" voices for that.

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Their final data pool includes everything from Mark Strand incanting "Man and Camel" behind a podium at Skidmore College to Audre Lorde performing "1984" in 1992 while seated in a brightly colored armchair in Berlin. (You can find a list of the poets, as well as their demographic information and links to the readings used, in the paper itself.)

Next, they gathered another set of 60-second snippets, this time from the Buckeye Speech Corpus, which is made up of recordings of native Ohioans talking about "everyday topics such as politics, sports, traffic, [and] schools." This served as a conversational control group, which the researchers called the "Talkers." (Although it might have been better to compare each poet's reading voice with their own conversational style, "It proved challenging to find adequate recordings of some of the 100 poets doing anything other than reading poems," they write.)

The researchers then fed each of these recordings into a series of algorithms that measured various aspects of pitch and timing. They focused specifically on 12 attributes, ranging from simple metrics, such as reading speed and average pause length, to more complicated ones, including pitch acceleration ("how rapidly the changes in pitch change … which we perceive as the lilt of a voice," the researchers explain) and "rhythmic complexity of phrases," which measures how consistently a speaker draws out, or doesn't draw out, groups of words.

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By comparing Poets and Talkers along these lines, the researchers were able to draw two overall conclusions. First, when compared to the Talkers, the poets tended to speak more slowly and stay within a narrower pitch range. Second, very few Talkers indulged in long pauses, but plenty of poets—33 percent—had no trouble leaving their listeners hanging for two seconds or more.

And what about Poet Voice more specifically? MacArthur's own list of notable culprits includes Michael Ryan and Juliana Spahr, as well as the aforementioned Glück and Trethewey. When the researchers compared these poets' vocal stats with each other, a set of common attributes emerged. "The pitch range tends to be narrower, but that by itself is not enough," says MacArthur. "It's also what you're doing with your voice within a given pitch range." Devotees of Poet Voice tend to exhibit slow pitch speed and pitch acceleration: in other words, though the pitch may go up and down over the course of the reading, it's more rolling hills than rollercoaster. "You could think about it almost as the same melody over and over," says MacArthur. This contrasts with the more conversational or expressive styles of reading exemplified by, say, Amalia Ortiz or Rae Armantrout.

This is also, perhaps, why it can seem grating or detached: "In a more natural conversational intonation pattern, you vary your pitch for emphasis depending on how you feel about something," says MacArthur. "In this style of poetry reading, those idiosyncrasies ... get subordinated to this repetitive cadence. It doesn't matter what you're saying, you just say it in the same way." Overall, the researchers write, "from this small sample, we would conclude that perhaps when some listeners hear poets read with one or more of these characteristics—slow pitch speed, slow pitch acceleration, narrow pitch range, low rhythmic complexity, and/or slow speaking rate—they hear Poet Voice."

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It's easy to make fun of Poet Voice. But its proliferation across the space of academic poetry may have more serious implications as well. In a 2014 essay, "Poet Voice and Flock Mentality," the poet Lisa Marie Basile connects it to an overall lack of diversity in the field, and a fear of breaking the mold. The consistent use of it, she writes, "delivers two messages: I am educated, I am taught, I am part-of a group … I am afraid to tell my own story in my own voice."

Although MacArthur emphasizes that this study is far too small to draw any major conclusions, some of the researchers' findings so far seem to support the idea that contemporary poets—especially those from marginalized groups—feel pressure to lean into certain aspects of Poet Voice in order to find success in a landscape dominated by white men. "Female poets as an overgeneralization are getting less expressive, but this doesn't happen on the male side," says MacArthur. In addition, "some of our most successful younger African-American female poets are the least expressive" according to this analysis, even as the older African-American female poets in the study were the most expressive as a group.

In a response to the study, literature professor Howard Rambsy II wrote that these findings suggest that "perhaps … low expressiveness in poetry readings is one of the requirements of being a major award-winning black woman poet." MacArthur agrees: "[The results suggest that] there's something about assimilation to the mainstream, or just success in the mainstream, that encourages a less expressive style," she says. "That to me was kind of startling. I think there's something there to investigate, and I will."

MacArthur is also working to apply the techniques used in this paper to larger samples, and may expand to other genres of performative speech, like radio dramas or political stumping. "These tools help us figure out, what is it that we're responding to?" she says. "I think there's a lot of potential for testing our perceptions of speech that we find entertaining, or boring, or engaging, in ways that are very hard to put a finger on." If nothing else, it's something to think about around stanza number four, when you start nodding off.

Behold Generations of Withered Royal Wedding Cakes

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Who wouldn't pay thousands of dollars for really old fruitcake?

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On February 10, 1840, Queen Victoria married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. The sumptuous wedding breakfast included a 300-pound fruitcake. Her wedding was widely influential, and is said to have inspired traditions ranging from the exchange of engagement rings to brides wearing white. The couple also served fruitcake, which, although typical at the time, now seems stodgy and old-fashioned. Nevertheless, future British royals followed in Victoria's footsteps and served fruitcake on their big day.

Today, the choice has a lingering effect: Thanks to fruitcake's longevity—along with a longstanding tradition of guests and dignitaries receiving slices of royal wedding cake in elegant boxes as souvenirs—pieces of Victoria's cake still exist. And hers are not the only slices of centuries-old cake floating around today as collectibles.

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The main cake at the wedding breakfast of Queen Victoria was three meters tall and decorated with a massive sugar figure symbolizing the nation of Britain blessing the couple. Fruitcake for big occasions had long been a British custom, as their rich fruits, sugar, and liquor were costly. Victoria and Albert's cake fit the bill: According to a report at the time, it was made of "the most exquisite compounds of all the rich things with which the most expensive cakes can be composed, mingled and mixed together into delightful harmony."

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The association between fruitcakes and weddings even gave rise to a number of customs. When tiered wedding cakes became the fashion, along with less-heavy cake recipes, the top tier remained fruitcake. New couples still occasionally set it aside to eat on their first anniversary or the baptism of their first child. (Fruitcake's dense texture and traditional soaking in alcohol means it lasts longer than your typical cake.)

Boxed royal wedding-cake souvenirs emerged from the tradition of sending slices of un-iced "groom's cake" home with guests in the 17th century, writes Carol Wilson in her article Wedding Cake: A Slice of History. One piece of Queen Victoria's cake, preserved in a silver box, came with a hand-written note: "To Dream upon." Unmarried people sometimes slept with pieces of wedding cake under their pillows, in hopes of dreaming about their future spouse. The wedding cake of a queen would likely be especially potent.

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More than a century later, then-Princess Elizabeth's wedding cake was even more spectacular than her great-great-grandmother's. At nine feet tall, it weighed 500 pounds. Many of those pounds were made up of ingredients sent in from all corners of the British empire, earning it the title of "the 10,000 Mile Cake." The Australian Girl Guides made a particularly large contribution to the wedding, and the Queen sent a tier back to them in thanks.

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Through the 20th century, boxed cake souvenirs persisted. In fact, they've become collectors' items, going for thousand of dollars at auction. A slice of wedding cake from the wedding of Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor sold for $29,900 in 1998. This June, Julien's Auctions in Los Angeles will sell five slices of royal wedding cake that span nearly 40 years of ceremonies. From the wedding cake of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips in 1973, to that of Prince William and Catherine Middleton in 2011, the slices of fruitcake are enclosed in neat tins or boxes. If it seems strange that so many slices of royal wedding cake still circulate, wonder no more: Ancillary cakes were often baked for the occasion, and some were even donated by bakers hoping for royal acknowledgement.

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The tradition of boxed fruitcake souvenirs might soon be bucked: Prince Harry and Megan Markle's cake will not be fruitcake, and it's unlikely that their lemon-and-elderflower cake will last for centuries. But needless to say, no amount of sugar, alcohol, or preservatives will make decades-old cake taste good. The royal wedding cakes that have survived are long past their shelf life.

Photographing the Unbridled Power of a Supercell Storm

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Nature at its most tempestuous.

It was just three days. Just three days between when photographer Camille Seaman first saw storm chasing on television and when she was hunting down a supercell herself. Even ten years later, the experience is still vivid in her mind: “It really was like watching a galaxy being born from a nebula.”

In total, Seaman spent seven years searching for gathering clouds in some of America’s stormiest states: Nebraska, South Dakota, Kansas. Her photographs, now brought together in the new book The Big Cloud, are an spectacular document of nature's power. They show clouds thick and ominous, or funnel-shaped, hovering over a rural landscape or spiked with lightning. For all the drama she captured, she reveals that storm chasing involves a lot of data—and a lot of patience.

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“There's a lot of really boring parts, where you're sitting in a car for many hours and stopping in gas stations for bathroom breaks and bad food,” she says. A day would typically begin with a meteorological briefing. After analyzing everything from dew point to wind direction, Seaman and her crew would try to pinpoint the location of a potential supercell.

Storm chasers have their own vocabularies for meteorological formations. A supercell can be called a "mother ship," for its otherworldly, spaceship-like appearance. They're actually rotating thunderstorms that can generate hail, high winds, lightning, rain, and, occasionally, tornadoes, and they're often topped by a dense cloud formation known as an "anvil." That's something most people don't want to stand beneath.

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After the briefing is over, the team hits the road. Once they’re in what Seaman calls “chase mode,” there are “no bathroom breaks, there is no stopping for food, no nothing.” At that point, “as things start to actually set up in the storm, our whole objective is to stay with that storm in the right position, which is usually—not always, but usually—the southwest corner of the storm, and follow it safely, so that we can photograph it and see if it produces a tornado.” The goal is to observe and photograph without being in danger. “The worst thing for storm chasers to end up being storm chased.”

Seaman is aware of how storm chasers are perceived. “Quite often our vehicles are noticeable, because we have special antennas on the car, and we just all pile out of the car in the middle of nowhere,” she says. “We do often drive through areas that have been totally devastated, sometimes days before, sometimes years before, by tornadoes. And you can still see signs of that devastation. So we—at least I can speak for my particular group—are very compassionate and empathetic. Because we understand that these are people's lives, and their homes, and how it is one of the most frightening things to be in a motel and hear that siren go off, the tornado warning.”

It's a situation that Seaman has been in herself. “I've had at least three warnings go off at night, and [during] one of them, I said to my meteorologist, ‘What exactly should we do because we're in a motel that doesn't have a basement?’” she recalls. His advice was to grab the mattress, jump in the bath tub, and pull the mattress over you.

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In 2014, Seaman stopped chasing storms. An experience a year earlier in El Reno, Oklahoma, was the beginning of the end. “Everything about that storm—for the first time ever, my whole body was like 'This isn’t good.'” The El Reno tornado turned out to have been the largest ever recorded: 2.6 miles wide, with winds of nearly 300 miles per hour. It also caused 19 fatalities, including three storm chasers, friends of Seaman’s.

Climate change models suggest that America will experience severe storms more frequently, which means more potential fatalities. Storm chasers, Seaman says, have been critical in helping develop early warning protocols. "I know for a fact—for a fact—that if not for these storm chasers, people would not have the advanced warning that they do," she says. "We obligate ourselves to say that if we see something that touched the ground, and we know its GPS coordinates, we call in to the local weather station, we call it into the police."

Seaman still feels the awe of those days of boredom punctuated with risk and reward. No two storms were alike, she says. Each had its own light and color and smell. “It sounds like something out of Greek mythology, but it really was like watching the gods play.”

Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from The Big Cloud.

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Meet the Man Behind Indonesia’s Chicken Church

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How Daniel Alamsjah's divine dream became a poultry-shaped reality.

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A giant, chicken-shaped church, known as Gereja Ayam, is perched on a hill in a forest on the Indonesian island of Java. It’s less than a 20-minute drive from Borobudur, the world’s largest Buddhist monument. On clear mornings, if you climb onto the platform inside the chicken’s gleaming white crown and face southeast, you can watch the sunrise illuminate the topmost candi (stupa) of the ancient temple.

The church’s farcical avian design has inspired many debates and fan theories over the years, each one attempting to solve the mystery of why someone would spend money to build a hollow chicken in the middle of the jungle. “It was left behind by the Dutch colonists,” one person wrote on Kaskus, a popular Internet forum. “No,” someone replied. “It’s haunted. I’ve seen kuntilanak [vampiric female demons from Indonesian lore] there.”

But the chicken church isn’t a Dutch remnant, and it’s not haunted by ghosts, either. It was built by a man named Daniel Alamsjah, who’s now 75.

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Alamsjah, a Christian, says that in 1988, after his nightly prayers, he received a vision of a dove with snow-white wings, resting at the top of a hill. (An interview with Alamsjah was conducted in a mix of Indonesian, Javanese, and English.) A disembodied voice asked him to build a house of worship for all people. When he awoke, he tried to dismiss the vision as a mere hallucination.

In his telling, Alamsjah started taking the dream more seriously when one of his employees failed to show up in Jakarta after Ramadan, the mid-year fasting season. Then a manager for the German chemical company BASF, he was in charge of making sure his team ran smoothly. He went to Magelang, the man’s hometown, to track him down. Alamsjah found his employee, who asked for one more day at home and invited his boss to Bukit Rhema (Rhema Hill) to see the sunrise, before returning to Jakarta.

“I was amazed!” Alamsjah says. “It was the same hill and the same view that I saw in my vision.” He prayed all night and read his Bible for guidance. One verse kept popping up. The verse in question, Isaiah 2:2, reads: “In the last days, the mountain of the Lord’s temple will be established as the highest of the mountains; it will be exalted above the hills, and all nations will stream to it.”

In the morning, a passerby mentioned that Bukit Rhema, situated between the small Indonesian villages of Kembang Limus and Karangrejo, was surrounded by nine different Javanese mountains, which Alamsjah understood to be a reference to the verse and thus a confirmation of his dream.

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Before returning home to the city, Alamsjah left his contact information in Magelang with the local head of Karangrejo. Two weeks later, someone who owned part of the land on Bukit Rhema came to Jakarta to offer Alamsjah his share. After several negotiations, Alamsjah paid Rp. 3,500,000 (around $2,000 at the time) for 5,000 square meters (a little over an acre) of land.

Despite his lack of architectural experience, Alamsjah says he designed the church himself, trying to stay faithful to the dove he’d seen in his vision. Wasno, the head of the nearby village of Gombong and a member of Alamsjah’s 30-person construction crew, says, “Actually, it did look like a dove—in the beginning. But then we added the crown. Daniel wanted it to symbolize holiness, but people thought it was a rooster crest. So they started calling it a chicken instead of a dove.”

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Construction began in 1992—the process of getting legal permission ate up four years—and the team used handmade cement, bricks, local sand, and scrap metal to build and fill in the dove’s frame. But the project was plagued by problems from the start.

According to Alamsjah, a major newspaper in Indonesia ran a report on him in 1996, stating that a Christian man was building a church in a Muslim neighborhood. Local officials, spurred by the rush of complaints that followed the article, tried unsuccessfully to withdraw Alamsjah’s building license.

“I tried telling them that it wasn’t for just Christians,” Alamsjah says. “I was making rooms for Muslims, Buddhists, atheists, Catholics, everyone—it was designed to be inclusive.” But complaints were constantly being filed—the stack of reports in the Borobudur district police’s office from the 1990s about Alamsjah are so numerous that they’re too heavy for a person to carry on their own.

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Beyond conflict with the community, there were also financial issues. In 2000, a lack of funds forced Alamsjah to quit the project in the middle of construction. The second and third floors hadn’t been started at all, and half of the 12 underground prayer rooms were mere holes in the ground. Alamsjah says he couldn’t afford to tile the floor, so visitors would either stand or sit down on the dirt.

Without a caretaker, the chicken quickly fell into disrepair. The weeds around the structure grew back, and vandals snuck in to hang out and scribble on the walls. Once in a while, curious tourists would stop by, eager to see the huge chicken for themselves. Richard Lomanta, a Jakartan who traveled there in 2008 when it was abandoned, says, “Everyone I knew called it the chicken church, even back then. Just look at it—it looks nothing like a dove.”

Alamsjah had switched careers at this point and now managed a rehabilitation center nearby. He told some of his employees to stay near the church and collect entrance fees. A few people would stop by each week, but the number barely reached 100 per month. For nearly two decades, it seemed that the church was fated to be reclaimed by nature.

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Fifteen years after the project was halted, however, the chicken church suddenly went viral on international media. The Daily Mail and the Huffington Post both released features about it on July 13, 2015, and a year later, it served as a shooting site for the sequel of the Indonesian cult classic film, Ada Apa Dengan Cinta (What’s the Deal With Love).

The recognition spurred the arrival of a flock of tourists: up to 2,000 a week, according to Alamsjah’s ticket records. The proceeds from the nominal entrance fee (Rp. 10,000, or less than USD $1 per person) gave Alamsjah enough money to resume construction.

“I was so relieved,” Alamsjah says. “The locals saw how popular the site was, and they began to benefit as well [from the tourism].”

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These days, the chicken church is no longer abandoned. The renovations made in the last two years include jeweled tiles; paneled windows; a small, paved access road; and work on the underground prayer rooms, which are nearly finished. Displays in the main hall (the body of the chicken) document the project’s growth from a divine dream to a full-fledged poultry temple. So many tourists come each year that Alamsjah even built a small cafe inside the chicken’s rear (it sells traditional Indonesian snacks and coffee).

“You know, everyone said I was crazy,” Alamsjah says. “In the 90s, I kept rereading that [Bible] verse, trying to find the courage to continue. My children were very angry at me. I had to keep telling them, this isn't my plan. This is God's plan. It’s been 30 years, and I’m glad I continued—thousands of visitors come each year to pray or to reflect on their lives, and my children finally respect what I’ve accomplished.”


Found: An Ancient Horse Skeleton in a Utah Backyard

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The 15,000-year-old find dates back to the Late Pleistocene age.

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Over the years, Utah residents have discovered Ice Age creatures such as Huntington mammoths, saber-toothed cats, and a short-faced bear well below ground. Yet, one family’s roughly 15,000-year-old find still came as a shock.

While removing a sandbank from their back yard, the Hill family came across a strange skeleton they could not recognize. So, they got in touch with Rick Hunter, a paleontologist at the Museum of Ancient Life at Thanksgiving Point.

“They showed me a photograph of when that first exposure happened, and I knew right then it was not a mammoth,” Hunter told Fox 13 News Salt Lake City.

Based on the hooves, Hunter surmised the unearthed collection of bones was an ancient horse, but how the horse died and most of its skeleton remained intact is a mystery.

The sediments that encased the horse were from Lake Bonneville, which dates back to the Late Pleistocene age 14,000 to 16,000 years ago and covered much of Utah. “We don’t know how this horse got there. It’s fun to speculate and say maybe a predator was chasing him along the shoreline, horses can swim, maybe [it] escaped that way and was unable to make it back in,” Hunter told Fox 13 News Salt Lake City.

The bones were well preserved, which indicated to Hunter that the horse was buried quickly after it died, before decomposition set in.

Hunter and other paleontologists are working to uncover more details about the horse. They found the horse's skull fragments and 10 teeth about 50 feet away from the skeleton, which to Hunter means the skull was destroyed somehow.

Once they've stabilized and prepared the specimen, they’re hoping to study the ancient horse for several years to come, and one day, display it at the Museum of Ancient Life.

The Quest for an Ancient Culture's Cannabis-Filled Cooking

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The Svans, from Georgia's Caucasus region, had their weed culture (and plants) uprooted.

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Khachapuri, the cheese bread native to Georgia, is a regional staple. But a local rumor holds that the Svans—an ancient community living in the highest settlements of the Caucasus—eat a fragrant, weed-filled iteration. From the moment a Georgian friend told me about this elusive dish, I couldn’t stop thinking about it—I wondered what it tasted like, whether anyone still made it—and, naturally, whether or not it would get me stoned.

Nobody seemed to know if this yarn was true or not. Some of my friends in Tbilisi speculated that weed-based dishes would’ve gone extinct during the Soviet crackdown on narcotics. Others wondered if the ever-rebellious Svans still secretly indulged in cannabis cuisine today. A few scoffed: After all, the idea that “edibles” could exist in a remote part of Orthodox Christian Georgia was ridiculous. When trying to reach historians and anthropologists specializing in the region, I got radio silence. “Who are the Svans?” asked the academics who’d written books on cannabis. Intuiting my next move, my friend Mako Kavtaradze, a tour guide who travels often to the region, warned: “Don’t go looking for answers in Svaneti. The Svans won’t take well to a foreigner trying to uncover local secrets.”

Several years ago, I’d left the Caucasus with a knot in my stomach after hearing Svans lament the erosion of their millennia-old traditions. A variety of factors—including rural flight, a new road, and a sudden uptick in tourism—tested the resilience of their cultural DNA, from their pagan-inflected religion to their polyphonic folk music. If cannabis was also integral to Svan culture, I wanted to learn about that heritage before it, too, might be lost in the tides of globalization.

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To understand how cannabis is entwined with ancient cultures, we first have to travel back approximately 2,500 years to the Turpan Basin (in contemporary Xinjiang, China). A 35-year-old man has just died, and members of his community, the Jushi, are preparing his body for burial. They lay him on a wooden cot, tucking a reed pillow under his head. Then, they shroud him from neck to waist with carefully interlaid cannabis plants—13 in total, some over three feet tall—before lowering him into the ground. Archaeologists are stumped as to the leafy stalks’ significance, but this exceptionally well-preserved tomb, unearthed in 2016, bears one of the oldest known instances of ritualized cannabis use. It’s especially compelling because of these specific plants’ biochemical makeup, which boasts high levels of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). In other words, humans have likely been getting high for centuries.

There’s even earlier evidence—dating back some 10,000 years—of people spinning fiber from hemp. But the distinction between cannabis and hemp is important. “In the last decade, science has confirmed what many scholars already suspected, that there are two distinct genetic groups of cannabis,” says Chris S. Duvall, associate professor at the University of New Mexico and author of Cannabis, a cultural and geographical history of the eponymous plant. “Historically, the plants grown for hemp in temperate Eurasia weren’t psychoactive, while those native to southern Asia were,” he adds, debunking the myth that virtue was the primary reason Europeans, as avid hemp producers and consumers, didn’t use cannabis as a narcotic.

Non-psychoactive cannabis seeds, which contain trace amounts of THC, were once a common ingredient in dishes across Europe and Asia, prized for their piquancy and nutrient-packed oil. Russians added them to peas, Poles boiled them in a Christmas soup called siemieniatka, and, in some parts of China, people still eat them by the handful like popcorn. The seeds were so popular that they even appear in the first cookbook ever printed (circa 1465), De Honesta Voluptate, by Bartolomeo Platina. It includes several recipes that call for cannabis seeds, including the unceremoniously named “hemp dish”:

[...] cook a pound of well-washed hemp until it splits open. When it is cooked, add a pound of almonds. When it has been pounded with bread crumbs in a mortar, moisten it with lean stock, and stir it into a pot through a sieve. Then, when it has been placed on the hearth, stir it frequently with a spoon. When it is almost cooked, put in a half-pound of sugar, a half-ounce of ginger, and a little saffron with rose water. When it is cooked and apportioned on serving dishes, sprinkle with rather sweet spices.

Beyond its textile and culinary applications, cannabis took on a mystical significance in many ancient cultures, including the Jushi. For example, Herodotus wrote in 440 B.C. that the Scythians, a nomadic people, observed funerals by retreating into sealed woolen tents to burn cannabis seeds and inhale the smoke, only to emerge “transported with the scent” and “howl[ing] aloud.” (Though it’s curious to think about prehistoric mourners hotboxing away their sorrows, it’s unlikely that smoke would’ve had a narcotic effect, given the conspicuous absence of THC-heavy buds and flowers in Herodotus's description.)

The more I learned about the ubiquity of cannabis in prehistoric Eurasia, the more hopeful I was that the Svans hadn’t lost their affinity for it through the centuries. After all, thanks to Svaneti’s impenetrable geography, the Svans had eluded invasions that ravaged the rest of Georgia. They had remained all but closed off from the outside world (Even today, most of the region is snowbound for seven months of the year). But with Georgia’s location at the crossroads of trade routes between north and south, east and west, the question lingered: If the Svans really cooked with weed, were they using it to get stoned like the Jushi, add flavor like the Russians, or commemorate sacred rites like the Scythians?

Next to nothing has been written about the origin of cannabis culture in Georgia, much less Svaneti. But Duvall reckons weed has been growing in and around Georgia for at least 2,700 years. “Based on geography and recovered remnants of cannabinoids in the larger Caucasus and Middle East, most of the crop would’ve been non-psychoactive, but certain populations probably had access to the psychoactive type,” he says. “To get high, people would have heated the cannabis in milk, butter, or oil, and consumed it as a drink.” (Fat is essential to extract the THC.) Dairy is the Svans’ main calorie source, so if the psychoactive strain was available in Svaneti, using it recreationally was certainly a possibility.

Luckily, some hints about Georgia’s cannabis-growing past can be gleaned from its neighbors. “Without a doubt, cannabis was cultivated for domestic purposes in Ancient Armenia,” says Yulia Antonyan, assistant professor of the Department of Cultural Studies at the Yerevan State University, citing recent research by Hrachia Beghlaryan and Suren Hobosyan. “But it isn’t until much later, in the 15th-century treatise on medicine Angitats Anpet ("Useless for Ignoramuses"), by Amirdovlat Amasiatsi, that we see cannabis explicitly mentioned for its narcotic effect, and even then it’s unclear whether Armenians were using it to that end.”

Conversely, references to cannabis are “staggeringly abundant” in the medieval texts of Azerbaijan, according to journalist and researcher Seshata Sensi. Between the 9th and 18th centuries, people ingested cannabis oil to treat various ailments, she writes, including catarrh, flatulence, and nausea. But that’s not all the plant was being used for: Medical scholar Farid Alakbarov notes in an in-depth study that some 2,600 years ago, Zoroastrian Azerbaijanis knocked back a hallucinogenic brew called haoma that could’ve contained cannabis as well.

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The dearth of answers is how I find myself in a banged-up four-by-four, juddering toward the snowy peaks of Svaneti. I'm splitting a taxi to Ushguli (a hamlet above the treeline known for its UNESCO-protected 9th-century guard towers) with two twenty-something Georgians, Miriam Gigani and Ana Akhalia. At one point Ana takes her coat off, and I blink, bewildered at what I’m seeing: Her sweatshirt is emblazoned with the word “weed” in big, bold letters. Before I know it, Gigani (whose family is Svan) regales me with childhood memories of meter-high marijuana plants in her grandmother’s garden. “Before the drug laws were strengthened, it was totally normal to grow cannabis in this part of Georgia,” she says. “I think I tried weed khachapuri once when I was a child, but it’s impossible to find these days—everyone’s too afraid of getting caught.” As the chassis groans under our hiking boots, relief washes over me. Finally, some confirmation that I'm not on a fool’s errand.

Everyone I talk to in town—from the waitress at a local tavern to the patronne of the guest house where I’m staying—tells me the town's local history expert is Mevluti Charqseliani, the 55-year-old owner of Ushguli’s Ethnographic Museum. I find him in his front yard sawing timber and gesture him over. I explain that I’m writing about Ushguli, and in typical Georgian fashion, he invites me into his home without a second's hesitation. As I sit down across from him, I realize, this is it. If anyone knows what the deal is with cannabis in Svaneti, it’s him. But my palms are sweaty: Weed is a touchy subject, and I’m nervous he might interpret my questions as disrespectful.

Yet as soon as I say the word “cannabis,” he grins. “People don’t know about this important part of our history,” he says, explaining that until Soviet inspectors arrived in the ‘70s, every Svan household grew cannabis plants, which were used in their entirety. People plied the stem fibers into cloth and rope, and pressed the seeds for oil. Buds, flowers, and leaves (plus ground-up seeds) found their way into gooey cheese breads (knash), vegetable-walnut spreads (pkhali), and juicy meat pies (kubdari). And like the Scythians and the Jushi, the Svans associate cannabis with death: Knash was the most important dish at funeral banquets.

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Georgian police ripped up the last of the for-domestic-use cannabis plants in the early '90s, but by that time, most Svan families had gotten wind of the crackdown (and corresponding fines) and viewed growing weed as too risky. Charqseliani misses the oil most. “It was a cure-all, for everything from upset stomach to insomnia to earache,” he muses, adding that Svan cannabis oil was pressed using five-ton machines and so prized along the Silk Road that the Greeks paid top dollar for it.

I asked if the cannabis-based dishes were psychoactive. “Absolutely not,” he says, though his wife, Iza, remarks that she always slept like a baby after eating knash for dinner. (That’s probably the CBD talking.) “Politicians,” he scoffs, throwing his hands in the air, “they took away our marijuana and everybody got sick, and the irony is, nobody smoked weed here until it became the forbidden fruit. Today drugs are a problem in Svaneti.”

The current cannabis legalization debate in Svaneti is about far more than one’s right to smoke a joint: It’s about a community’s prerogative to preserve a millennia-old tradition. But cannabis was decriminalized in Georgia last December, after years of protests spearheaded by the liberal Girchi political party. Minor cannabis-related offenses that previously carried up to 14-year jail sentences will now be waived, and some hope that Tbilisi might someday become the “Amsterdam of the former Soviet Union.” It's not out of the question, then, that cannabis khachapuri might make its way from folklore to dinner fare once again.

The Vineyard Where Retired French Soldiers Make Wine

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In Provence, Foreign Legion veterans report for duty among the vines.

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“Tu n’abandonnes jamais les tiens, ni au combat, ni dans la vie.” These words grace the back label of Esprit de Corps Grand Cuvée, a Vermentino from Côtes de Provence Sainte–Victoire. It means, “You never abandon your own, not in combat, nor in life.”

The phrase references Article VII of the French Foreign Legion’s Code of Honor, which is a hint at the bottle’s unlikely provenance: a retirement home for former legionnaires. Nestled in postcard-perfect vineyards in Provence, the Domaine du Capitaine Danjou winery is the antithesis of abandonment. It provides lodging, purpose, and, most importantly, brotherhood. Leave it to the land of grands crus to properly care for its veterans through wine—sales of Esprit de Corps Grand Cuvée and other bottles help pay for the institution.

Set off the main road from the medieval village of Puyloubier, the Domaine has 100 acres of vines spread on gentle slopes around the estate. Along the Champs Elysees, the cheekily named path that extends between the vineyards, the Syrah vines are tidily trellised, stretching uniformly in straight rows. Further out, the Grenache grapes hang from gnarled, solitary bush vines. Armed with secateurs, men work with military precision, clipping off dead branches. The work is methodical, physical, and particularly challenging on days when the ferocious mistral wind whips through. But the men are undaunted; they belong, after all, to an elite military force.

“All their life they’ve been ordered around … go here, do that,” explains vineyard manager Adjutant-Chef Alan Lonjarret.

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The French Foreign Legion has been a unique institution since King Louis-Philippe created it in 1831. Its initial composition of criminals and foreigners on the run—soldiers get a new identity and French citizenship in exchange for three years of service—fed its reputation as a rowdy band of mercenaries. Hardened by training and punishments, which included being tied to a wagon and dragged for falling behind on 40-kilometer marches, the soldiers were even brute in play: In the drinking game Buffalo, two men down a bottle of vermouth, then charge each other head on, resulting in severe concussions or death. The modern version of this notorious multi-national military cadre (soldiers hail from 150 countries, and 12% are French-born) is less savage, yet still embodies the fierce fraternité born from men leaving their homelands to pledge allegiance to the Legion.

How did the Legion go from battling enemies to bottling wine? In 1954, the First Indochina War left hundreds of young legionnaires injured. These soldiers, who were mostly German, Czech, and Hungarian, were too injured to return home, but in unfamiliar territory in France. In response, the Legion opened IILE, Institution des Invalides de la Légion Étrangère, to care for their brothers in need. They purchased a 17th-century chateau set beneath Sainte-Victoire, the stunning limestone mountain ridge made famous in Cezanne’s paintings. When they discovered the vineyards surrounding the sprawling estate were prime terroir, they stopped growing wheat and started making wine. The name, Domaine du Capitaine Danjou, comes from the revered officer who shared a bottle of wine with his soldiers before dying in the famed Battle of Camarón—a seminal event in the Legion’s history that is commemorated each year.

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Today, the IILE lodges 74 pensionnaires between 32 and 99 years of age. They are here voluntarily, craving the camaraderie they enjoyed as legionnaires. “We are offering [the soldiers] eternity here, because you are already dead if no one thinks about you,” explains IILE’s new head, Lieutenant-Colonel Gilles Normand.

To live in wine country, a veteran must have completed his service with a good behavior certificate, be single, respect the rules of communal living, and participate in the center’s activities, which include bookbinding, ceramics, a uniform museum, and winemaking. These projects keep the soldiers’ brains and bodies busy while helping to fund the center—Lonjarret describes the life and work as occupational therapy.

Many countries’ veterans struggle to integrate back into civilian life and find purpose outside the military, but the problem is especially acute for legionnaires. Having shed their nationalities and left friends and family behind, foreign-born soldiers often base their identities on the Legion itself. Retirement means losing home, community, and employment all at once. In his article “The Hard Truth About the Foreign Legion,” Max Hastings writes about how legionnaires “find the rigors of service life less onerous than coping with the daily choices and decisions demanded of a civilian.” So while the IILE houses wounded veterans, the fields that fill with camo-wearing men picking grapes each harvest address the emotional and financial hardships that former legionnaires face.

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Working in the vines is “a psychological wake up call,” says Alan Lonjarret, who is the veterans’ unofficial advisor and counselor. Toiling together in the vineyards is a salve for soldiers who suffer from loneliness or depression.

Corporal Alex—the retired legionnaires still address each other by rank—has worked the vines since his arrival 22 years ago. “When I was a kid in Bordeaux, I also got to harvest,” he says. Though his wild, white beard, weathered skin, and soft voice make him appear a decade older than his 68 years, he spends most mornings pruning, weeding, or harvesting grapes.

Clément, a fellow sexagenarian, is in his seventh year. (Official policy allows for the pensionnaires to only be identified by first name.) The hardworking Italian discovered the IILE 40 years ago—active-duty regiments arrive throughout the year to help the retirees with physically demanding tasks. Non-resident ex-soldiers also work at the winery, including 36-year veteran Jean Jacques Lalande, the chef du cave (cellar manager). Like the others, the slim 62-year-old had no wine experience. “Before I managed ammunition; now I oversee bottles and labels,” he says with a wink. Lalande enjoys his new post. “With work,” he says, “you leave behind loneliness.”

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Though the Domaine has produced wine since the Legion’s arrival—the area’s wine history dates back to 600 B.C.—their oenological forays weren’t always successful. In 1962, only 25 of the 568 acres around the Domaine were planted with vines. The legionnaires sold the 32,000 bottles of wine to nearby regiments, but not to the public—it was as rough as pinard, the rustic red wine rationed to French soldiers in World War I. Realizing they didn’t have the know-how or the francs to make wine properly, the Legion began bringing their grapes to be vinified at the local cooperative, Vignerons de Mont Sainte-Victoire, in the 1980s.

In 2006, two volunteer oenologists from Bordeaux, Bertrand Leon and Philippe Baly, began consulting. Since their arrival, they have replaced low-yielding vines with more productive ones and moved the harvest date earlier to avoid overripe, overly alcoholic wines. With wine quality and production improving, the Legion was ready to give the public a taste. The winery commercialized in 2008.

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That year also marked Lonjarret’s arrival. Having been born and raised in Bourgogne, the revered wine region, the appointment allowed him to resume a way of life interrupted by 30 years of military service. He continues his education on the job, managing the retirees and a staff of three tractor-machinists, two of whom are former legionnaires. He’s improved irrigation and upped the use of organic treatments, including manure sourced from the local cavalry unit. Like all winemakers, Lonjarret grumbles about paperwork, but enjoys his time amidst the vines and men. He likens the constant, physical work to military service. “If one doesn’t maintain a vine, it dies. With a soldier, it is the same.”

In 2017, 100 acres produced 220,000 bottles of wine, launching the legionnaires into the top five Sainte-Victoire producers. The soldiers preferred wine is red, and theirs is made from the classic Southern Rhone trio—Syrah, Grenache, and Mourvedre. The crisp whites come from 100 percent Rolle, also known as Vermentino. The rosé is a refreshing blend of Cinsault, Grenache, and Rolle—perfect for apèro hour. The area benefits from clay limestone soil that holds in the sun’s heat to keep the grapes warm at night, and the famous mistral wind dries the grapes, preventing disease naturally. According to specialists who test the soil annually, the Domaine has some of the region’s best terroir.

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The cuvées labels capitalize on the mystique embedded in the Legion. On the Vin Classique, soldiers sport kepi blancs, the white toque worn during desert campaigns. A 1950s style pin-up girl flirts from the front of Miss Kepi Blanc rosé—she’s a caricature of the Legion’s annual pageant winner. The General Reserve, the first vintage to be aged in oak barrels, has an embossed bottle like those in nearby Châteauneuf-du-Pape; instead of the keys of St. Peter, there’s the Legion’s flaming grenade logo.

Wines run from 4.50 to 10 euros, save for the hefty 25-euro General. The bottles are shipped worldwide to former and active legionnaires, and are sold at bases, the IILE boutique, and online. “I just sent a shipment of vitamins to Lebanon,” Lalande jokes. The stockrooms empty out each year, which Lieutenant-Colonel Normand chalks up to the improved wine quality and the appeal of the Legion’s brand.

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These best-selling bottles help clean up the negative connotations between the Legion and booze. The popular credo “legionnaires drink to forget, but they seldom forget to drink,” stems from binge-drinking bouts on foreign deployments and the strains of service that drive soldiers to self-medicate with alcohol. Normand says that in the current Legion, wine represents conviviality more than debauchery. It is the beverage of celebration and tradition, like the pour la poussière ceremony in which soldiers toast in unison before a meal, remembering troops serving in Africa who had to rinse desert dust (poussière) out of their glasses with wine when water was scarce.

At Domaine Capitaine Danjou, wine is the fuel that keeps the place and the veterans running. How fitting that foreigners who fought for France can spend their retirement engaging in the most French of traditions.

Why Is New Zealand So Often Left Off World Maps?

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An island nation's call for help.

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A little over 2,000 miles from Australia, there is a cluster of distinctively shaped islands. The northern one is shaped a bit like a lamb chop, the southern one like an artistic smear of mashed potato, sweeping south-west into the Tasman Sea. There are around 600 others, ranging from tiny freckles of rock to life-sustaining land masses two-thirds the size of Rhode Island. These islands are known as New Zealand. Perhaps you already knew that: Many of the world's mapmakers, it seems, do not.

This is New Zealand's complaint. It's not a huge country, certainly—not a Canada or a China—but it's not that small, either. At around 100,000 square miles, it's similar in size to the witch-shaped British Isles, which certainly do make it onto the world map. If it were an American state, it would be the country's ninth largest by land area, just slipping in between Colorado and Wyoming. Yet for some reason, it keeps being wiped from the map, and New Zealanders aren't happy about it.

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These struggles have been laid out for the rest of the world on the Tumblr blog World Maps Without New Zealand with the slogan: "It's not a very important country most of the time." This compendium names and shames organizations that really should know better: the Atlantic Media publication Defense One, Forbes, Mashable, Pyongyang International Airport. (Actually, the site's curators say, there could be upsides to North Korea forgetting New Zealand exists.) Heck, even the New Zealand government has, on occasion, left themselves off the map.

There's a kind of masochistic joy to this collection, and to an accompanying subreddit with 40,500 subscribers. New Zealanders don't take themselves too seriously: If the rest of the world takes that one step further and forgets about them entirely, well, it could be worse.

Now, New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is getting in on the fun. In a new tourism campaign, utilizing the hashtag #getnzonthemap, a video shows Flight of the Conchords comedian Rhys Darby ringing up Ardern in a panic about the cartographic omissions. Is it a conspiracy, he wonders, or has New Zealand simply been forgotten? "Perhaps people are just leaving us off, thinking we’re a mistake?” he ponders.

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Most world maps use the Mercator projection. This 16th-century projection leaves New Zealand in the bottom right-hand corner of the world, and places Europe in the center. There are upsides and downsides to the projection: Greenland, which is roughly a third the size of Australia, looks gargantuan, while Alaska and Brazil appear comparable in size. In fact, the South American country is five times larger. And New Zealand's spot in the hinterlands of the Pacific make it easy to misplace with a thoughtless crop.

But there's no particular reason to position it that way. New Zealand could just as easily be in the center of the world, with everywhere else pivoting around it. And, in fact, in New Zealand's schools, it frequently is. On the posters hung on classroom walls, the Mercator projection is often adjusted to place Middle Earth in the actual middle of the earth—making it much, much harder to accidentally lop off.

Plants Are Communicating With Each Other Using Underground Signals

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A new report shows that touching one plant can affect the behavior of its neighbors.

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Plants are more sensitive than they might seem. Although they stay in one spot, they are monitoring and reacting to the world around them; in some cases, they even remember the stresses and stimuli of the past. They’re also aware of the community of plants around them, and in a new paper, published in PLOS ONE, a team of scientists shows how plants monitor underground signals and react to the stresses their neighbors experience, too. How do plants react, they wondered, when they know a nearby plant has been touched?

On a very basic level, plants split their energies between growing above ground, to harvest the resources of the sun, and below ground, to harvest the resources of the earth. But they can change how those resources are allocated depending on the situation in which they find themselves. Previous research has shown that when a plant’s leaves come into contact with another plant, it will allocate more resources to growing above ground than below. All plants put down roots, but how deeply? Their behavior can change, if their neighborhood is crowded.

In the PLOS ONE paper, the team was interested in how this sort of behavior in one plant might affect the behavior of others. “Because the plants are allocating more resources above ground, it should change the development of root systems and that probably will also change the emission of root exudates [chemical signals sent out by the roots] and the quality of root exudates,” says the lead author Velemir Ninkovic, a senior lecturer at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. In their experiments, Ninkovic and his colleagues looked how those underground signals changed the way neighboring plants grow.

To start, they stimulated certain plants, gently touching the leaves “from the base to the top… with a soft squirrel hair face brush." They then left those touched plants to grow in a hydroponic solution, which would also capture any chemical signals from the plants’ roots.

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Using that growth solution, the scientists tested the reactions of other plants to any signals the touched plants' roots had released. In one test, they set up untouched plants in a Y-shaped tube, with the growth solution from the touched plants in one branch and a new growth solution in the other, giving the plants a choice between two different environments for their roots. In another experiment, they tested plants’ reactions to those signals by immersing their roots in the solution from a previously touched plant. In a third experiment, they observed how plants reacted when grown next to a plant that was touched.

In all three experiments, the plants changed their growth strategy in response to the root signals from touched plants. When given the option of choosing, plants preferred the new solution over the solution belonging to touched plants. (Sometimes they even switched course, away from the touched solution.) When reacting to the sudden contact with the touched solution, they put more resources into growing their leaves and stems, instead of their roots. When they were grown alongside touched plants, they grew bigger altogether, increasing their overall biomass production.

It’s clear that a stress on one plant—that light touch—can impact the behavior of plants around it. In the paper, the scientists write that more work needs to be done to understand the ecological implications of these findings. You could think of it sort of like gossip: One plant warns the others that it’s been touched and that there’s competition over in its direction. But Ninkovic says he tends to think the right analogy is listening. “Probably the plants would not like to release any cues that neighboring plants can detect,” he says. It might be better not broadcast information to potential competitors. But there’s an advantage to gathering information about neighbors, so the plants absorb any signals that come their way.

When Ninkovic first started working in this field, he says, he was skeptical of the idea of plant-plant communication. But over the past several years, a growing body of evidence has shown that plants are paying much more attention, in their particular plant way, to the world around them than we ever realized. Ninkovic is interested now in understanding the complex set of signals that plants are exposed to and how plants parse them: Which signals are the most important and when? How do plants take all the information available to them and change their behavior accordingly? The world, even to a plant, can be a complicated place to navigate.

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