Calaveras created by the Mexican artist have been repurposed for generations, with wildly varying intent.

You may recognize the image above. It's a difficult one to forget: a laughing skeleton in a flowery hat. You might have seen her in Diego Rivera's iconic mural, Sueño de una Tarde Dominical en la Alameda Central (Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in the Alameda Central). There, she links arms with a likeness of her creator, José Guadalupe Posada. Or you might have spotted her in the Disney/Pixar film Coco, taking the hand of the main character in order to guide him into the Land of the Dead.

This skeleton, known as "La Catrina," is one of Posada’s best-known calaveras: illustrations of skeletons, boldly drawn and thickly inked, and much more energetic and expressive than you'd expect, given their biological state. Although the figures have become closely associated with the holiday Dia de Muertos (Day of the Dead), Posada originally drew his calaveras as political cartoons, commenting on various issues of the day. ("La Catrina," for instance, was meant to poke fun at early 20th century Mexican women who imitated European fashions.)

Over the century or so since they were first created, though, these calaveras have thrown off the shackles of their initial context. They’ve been repurposed by artists to express ideas and opinions across the political spectrum, as well as by advertisers, animators, and activists. For skeletons, they live a whole lot of different lives.

Although he is the most famous illustrator of them, "Posada did not invent the calavera," says the cartoonist and activist Rafael Barajas Durán. As Regina Marchi writes in Day of the Dead in the USA, images of skulls and skeletons have long been a part of Mexican culture, particularly in the context of Day of the Dead celebrations. (The decorative sugar skulls and darkly funny poems associated with the holiday are both also called "calaveras," which is Spanish for "skulls.")

As Durán explains, the skeleton drawings that now go under that name first began appearing regularly in Mexican publications in the 19th century, particularly in journals like La Orquesta, which was known for its biting political satire. "They celebrate the moment when [the country] opened the civil cemeteries," Durán says. "Before that, all cemeteries in Mexico were the property of the church." Marchi also points out a connection to the the Danse Macabre, a European motif in which skeletal figures demonstrate various intense, sometimes comical emotions while dancing to their graves. Other scholars trace them even further back, to Aztec depictions of gods and goddesses of the dead.

Like his creations, Posada himself has a complicated and multi-layered legacy. He was born in 1852 in Aguascalientes, Mexico. Not much is known about his early life, although experts think he was first exposed to design work at his uncle's ceramics studio and a local drawing school. By the 1880s, when he began working as an illustrator at La Patria Ilustrada—run at the time by Ireneo Paz, Octavio Paz's grandfather—it wasn't unusual to see skeletons cavorting across newspaper pages.

Over the next few decades, Posada worked for a number of publications, making lithographs and woodblock prints. As a hired illustrator, he was prolific by necessity. "There were little publications all around Mexico City at that time," says Jim Nikas of the Posada Art Foundation. "They would say, 'Hey, could you make this?' And he'd have a deadline, and he'd sketch it and make it, and it would go to press."

Influenced by his fellow artist Manuel Manilla, he developed a distinct style, bold and high-energy, that set him apart. (“His calaveras are wonderful,” says Durán.) He eventually became the head illustrator for Antonio Vanegas Arroyo's print shop in Mexico City. Often, his illustrations appeared on one-sheet broadsides, accompanied by playful verses that connected them to the issues of the day.

Although Posada's work spread far and wide, he did not find fame during his lifetime. He died in 1913, "practically alone," says Durán. "He was not a very well-known artist. He was a popular phenomenon, but he was not acknowledged by … other cartoonists."

It wasn't until about a decade later, in the 1920s, that tastemaking artists like Jean Charlot and Diego Rivera began to promote his work. “Since nobody knew about Posada’s life, they made it up,” says Durán. “They made up the idea that he was a revolutionary,” which was likely not true. In a way, they did for Posada what Posada had done for calaveras: they took him, changed him a bit, and cemented him into the popular consciousness.

Meanwhile, other artists were still making calaveras. Many of these were stylistically inspired by Posada, sometimes so much so that they were mistakenly attributed to him. (One of these is La Calavera Huertista, a drawing of a many-legged, skull-headed creature surrounded by the wreckage of other, half-devoured calaveras. Named for Victoriano Huerta, a general who helped overthrow the Mexican President, the drawing referred to events that happened after Posada’s death.)

In the late 1930s, an artist’s collective called The People’s Workshop formed in Mexico City. “They used calaveras left right and center,” to promote communism, antifascism, and other political ideas, says Nikas.

As time went on, calaveras spread further, and began showing up in unlikely places. One fan was Eleanor B. Roosevelt, a photojournalist and seamstress and the wife of Teddy Roosevelt's son, Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. As described in an earlier Atlas Obscura article, during the Republican National Convention, Roosevelt began stitching a version of La Calavera Huertista. She eventually labeled the scorpion creature "The New Deal," after the Democratic legislation she and her husband disagreed with.

To all appearances, Roosevelt was drawn to the aesthetic and form of the calavera, separate from its history and message. In her memoir, Day Before Yesterday, Roosevelt describes herself as having a "taste for the unearthly and the macabre." She also apparently made a habit of borrowing and recontextualizing imagery in this way: In the same memoir, Roosevelt describes basing her embroidery on everything from "Chinese paintings" to "such ancient and modern artists as Bosch, Brueghel, Artzybasheff, and Charles Baskerville." There is at one other case where she appended a current events-related caption to an unrelated image, stitching "Recognition of U.S.S.R. 1933" beneath a Russian market scene.

It's unclear where Roosevelt came across La Calavera Huertista, or got a copy to study. Durán and Nikas both suspect she might have seen the Monografia, a compilation of sketches attributed to Posada that was put together in 1930 by the press Mexican Folkways, and which found some popularity in the United States. (Because the image was originally attributed to Posada, it was featured in the book.) It's also unclear why Roosevelt told the International News Service that she had "devised" the scorpion image, rather than appropriating it from an existing work.

But purposefully or not, Roosevelt was taking advantage of another vital aspect of calaveras: their malleability. Over the years, these images have constantly been repurposed for various means. "[Posada] himself used to do that quite often," says Durán, citing another famous design: the "Calavera Madero," which depicts the former Mexican President as a straw-hatted skeleton with a blanket thrown over his shoulder. “It was printed several times for different purposes," he says—first with a text that criticized him, and then, after he won the Mexican Revolution and became President, with one that praised him. The drawings were so adaptable that “he published them at different times, with different intentions.”

After Posada died, other artists at the printing house reused his blocks, too. "If the image was neutral enough, you could change the text and use it as an illustration for any story," as a time- and cost-cutting measure, says Nikas. "To this day, that goes on," as new generations repurpose, remix, and riff off of Posada's work.

Take Rivera's Sueño de una Tarde Dominical en la Alameda Central, which went up at the Hotel Prado in Mexico City in 1947. In it, La Catrina is transformed from a figure of fun into the centerpiece of a complex, surreal retelling of Mexican history. This sparked a kind of rebranding, and helped La Catrina take her current place as a symbol of cultural pride. (Some say Rivera even rechristened the image, which used to be called "La Calavera Garbancera.") In the present, as Marchi writes, the image is "endlessly reproduced on Day of the Dead promotional flyers and T-shirts," and "the original social commentary [has been] largely lost on the general public."

Or take pioneering Chicana artist Ester Hernández's 1982 screenprint Sun Mad, made to protest the overuse of pesticides endangering Mexican-American farm workers in California. It looks just a red Sun-Maid raisin box, but the slogan reads "Unnaturally Grown With Insecticides, Miticides, Herbicides, Fungicides," and the smiling face of the Sun-Maid Girl has been replaced with the skeletal head of La Catrina. (In a 2012 version, Sun Raid, the calavera wears a monitoring bracelet, and the box advertises "Guaranteed Deportation" instead.)

In 2001, Nikas himself remixed a canonical calavera, La Calavera de Don Quixote, along with the artists Art Hazelwood and Marsha Shaw. In the original, a calavera Don Quixote on an equally bony horse charges through a crowd of smaller skeletons, knocking them left and right. Nikas, Hazelwood and Shaw's 2011 version was made during Occupy Wall Street. In it, the Quixote skeleton trails a banner reading "We are the 99%," and the tossed-around victims bear the names of various major banks.

"We are the 99 percent, and we are laying havoc to this 1 percent that control so much of the wealth in the country," Nikas explains, saying they chose this particular image for its freneticism. Nearly a century after it was first made, the calavera remains visually identical, its message smoothly swapped out for a more contemporary one. It jumps entire genres with equal efficacy—La Calavera de Don Quixote also shows up on the label for Espolon Tequila Blanca, this time riding a giant chicken. There, it's not political art at all, but branding.

What accounts for this boundary-crossing appeal? David Lozeau, a U.S.-based painter who combines calavera imagery with motifs from other cultures, thinks it has something to do with the fact that the calaveras are specific enough to spark recognition, but general enough that they don’t really offend. "They're so cheeky," he says. "He [could] do things with skulls that you can't with people." Jazmin Velasco-Moore, an artist working in the U.K., calls his style “endearing and clever.” Although she avoids depicting skeletons herself, she says she is particularly inspired by his bold, strong compositions and his limited color palette.

In America, as Day of the Dead becomes more widely celebrated, "everyone knows the traditional image of 'La Catrina,' but [many] don't know it's [Posada]," let alone its original meaning, says Lozeau, who points out that folk artists and non-Europeans tend to get short shrift in the United States. In Mexico, it is the opposite situation: “Posada is everywhere, omnipresent, like God,” says Velasco-Moore. “We grow up with [him] in our subconsciousness.”

In both of these cases, the man has been overtaken by the art. Because his images have been used so many times, Nikas says, "we'll never really know Posada's real [political] leanings." As Durán puts it, “he became a myth.” But his work transcends these concerns—it wears all different skins by wearing no skin at all. “We all have a skeleton inside of us," Nikas says. "So we can all relate."

There's more to them than meets your nose.

In a collection that’s been growing for decades, Ann Mahony has what she estimates are over 5,000 vintage handkerchiefs, depicting everything from nursery rhymes to leisure pursuits, such as skiing and golfing. Most of her cloths are from the U.S. and range from 70 to 100 years old. However, collecting hankies is more than just a personal hobby for Mahony. She is a handkerchief historian and a member of the Textile Arts Council at San Francisco’s de Young Museum. It’s her job to interpret the story arc depicted on these fabrics.

What most people consider a charmingly antiquated sneeze-catching accessory can also showcase sociocultural history. Hankies, she says, offer a “perfect reflection” of what concerned and entertained people at the time a particular pattern was produced. “Handkerchiefs tell the tenor of the time, the mood of the country, what people were thinking and focused on,” she says. In other words, there’s more to handkerchiefs than meets your nose.

Handkerchiefs show up in world history as early as the first century BC, when they were mentioned by the poet Catullus and used for utilitarian purposes, such as wiping one’s brow or general-purpose cleaning. They would not become fashion accessories until at least the 17th century.

At early Greek and Roman athletic games, seas of spectators frantically waved white cloths, some of which were likely sudariums, a neckerchief worn by Roman military officers. Handkerchiefs occupy a key role in Shakespeare's Othello and in textile history. In the Elizabethan era, hankies were high-end gifts, which nobles were known to present at New Year’s to the royal court. And in the 1840s, they were so ubiquitous among certain classes that the French novelist Honoré de Balzac wrote of his desire to unravel and demystify the female psyche based on “how [women] hold their handkerchiefs.”

By the turn of the 20th century, hankies were a necessary part of city life, as urbanites would breathe through the cloth to combat the smell and toxicity of air pollution. Presidential campaigns produced commemorative hankies, and handkerchiefs became popular wedding favors and special event keepsakes. As the handkerchief historian Helen Gustafson put it, from around 1800 until the early 20th century, handkerchiefs were ubiquitous. "Everyone everywhere [had] them," writes Gustafson.

Thanks to increased industrial production and the widespread use of colorfast dyes that do not run or fade, an affordable, beautiful consumer handkerchief heyday emerged in the United States in the first half of the 20th century. During the Great Depression, no one was splurging on new clothes, but a single hankie, brightly adorned with embroidery or a graphic print? Mahony says that type of affordable accessory was still within reach for even working-class women.

In the 1930s, floral, polka dot, and other bold patterns emerged. Geometric prints became popular during the 1940s. Even puppy prints followed the popular breeds of the day. When Zsa Zsa Gabor and Elizabeth Taylor favored poodles in the 1950s, so did handkerchief designers keen to keep up with the times.

During the mid-20th century, handkerchief design took a decidedly modern turn. With the Great Depression and World War II in the sociocultural rearview, consumers were looking for new diversions. Mahony notes that trends toward suburbanization and leisure pursuits during this era made their imprint on handkerchief design.

“Handkerchiefs were also fun conversation starters,” Mahony adds, offering handkerchief owners a shorthand to signal their knowledge of certain topics. There were calendars; astrology guides; how-tos on palmistry and graphology; card game rules; travel-related guidelines on customs and tariffs; currency exchange rates; foreign language phrases; dance steps; weight-loss and fitness exercise routines; housekeeping tips; flora and fauna identification; calorie counts; and recipes, for both cooking food and making cocktails.

Businesses and popular leisure activities that grew after World War II show up on midcentury handkerchiefs. The dance instructor Arthur Murray had already expanded his studio franchise in the 1930s, but saw his business model steadily expand in the 1950s. He ordered numerous hankies that depicted not only general dance instructions, but also the phrase, “Arthur Murray taught me dancing in a hurry!” Mahony explains that this was one way people accessorized to show off cultural relevance. This particular usage of hankies was not unlike how we conceive of sports memorabilia or concert merchandise today. “You went to Arthur Murray and learned, then you got hankie with the dance steps on it,” she says. Murray hankies also list the type of dance learned, including the waltz, rhumba, or fox trot.

Eventually handkerchief designers developed cult followings and even paved a path for textile designer trends. Tammis Keefe is among the most prolific handkerchief designers of the mid-20th century, signing her name on her fabrics before it was common for designers to do so. Her bold, colorful designs depicted animals, landscapes, and mythical creatures, and were also used for household textiles and furnishings including dishtowels, tablecloths, and even clothing. “Handkerchiefs are fun to do, and I try to make them fun to give,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1949. Before her death in 1960, she is believed to have produced over 400 of her bright, whimsical handkerchief designs.

Keefe is largely known for her exclusive deals with high-end department stores such as Lord and Taylor, which sold her signature line. But she skirted exclusivity by also signing handkerchief designs as Peg Thomas, in order to sell other designs through lower-tier retailers.

Keefe’s contemporaries, including Pat Pritchard, Jeanne Miller, Carl Tait, and Fay Austin, were among other handkerchief designers of the era to sign their vivid canvases. In the 1960s and 1970s, Anne Klein and Hanae Mori also signed their designer hankies.

Like any gifted designer, Keefe had high-minded ideas about the seemingly simple handkerchiefs she created. She has been quoted as saying, “Color is the most important factor in design generally, and in handkerchief design, specifically, color prepares the emotions for the design itself, as music sets the mood of the play."

As the 20th century progressed, handkerchiefs were largely seen as a cult relic, primarily due to stiff competition from disposable tissue manufacturers. Keepsake handkerchiefs continued to pop up intermittently, such as with Monty Python’s 1973 album, Matching Tie and Handkerchief, which indeed came with the matching accessories. And while ladies handkerchiefs were mostly consigned to textile collections and rarely received focus from the fashion world, in the mid-2010s, the handkerchief’s close cousin, the decorative pocket square, re-emerged as a popular colorful accent piece, most notably for dapper men who included them in their blazers.

Despite their small size and seemingly antiquated purpose, handkerchiefs are a strong thread throughout history. With so much historical fascination with these humble accessories, it’s a shame we no longer think that much of hankies, let alone track trends with our pocket squares, laments Mahony. After all, she says, “Handkerchiefs are really a record of history.”

Ti leaves have long been thought to have powers of protection.

Among the astounding and forbidding images of the Kilauea eruption on the Big Island of Hawaii, there is a striking photo of lava advancing on a row of leafy branches, stuck into a crack in a pavement so that they look like a row of soldiers about to be overwhelmed by an enemy army. These are ti leaves, and the Associated Press identifies them as a “sacred offering” to Pele, a goddess associated with fire and volcanoes.

In 1986, during another Kilauea eruption, a UPI reporter noticed a similar detail. “Hawaiians scattered sacred ti leaves atop rampaging lava flows disgorged by fiery Kilauea volcano,” he wrote. “Tradition has it that surging lava flows won't cross a ti leaf barrier.”

Ti plants (also called ki) have had many uses in Hawaii over time. They’re made into skirts, coats, and shoes; they’re woven into leis and used in thatched roofs. They’re wrapped around fish or meat and used as medicine.

But as Darde Gamayo writes for Big Island Now, “Early Hawaiians believed that the ti leaf plant had great spiritual power.” The leaves were associated with Lono, a god of fertility, and Laka, the goddess of hula, and they were used in rituals by religious and political leaders. In The Ruling Chiefs of Hawaii, the historian Samuel Kamakau describes how ti leaves were used in a ceremony to end restrictions on eating pork, for instance. Today, they’re still used in offerings to Pele at the rim of the Kilauea, a practice that has been popularized (and misunderstood) by tourists.

Sometimes, ti leaves are associated with protection from volcano-related dangers. One anthropologist in the 1920s observed ti leaves being used to shield a woman visiting a volcano, and ti leaves were carried by people performing the feat of walking on still-hot lava.

But over their long history in Hawaii (they’re thought to be “canoe plants,” brought to the islands with settlers from Polynesia), ti leaves have come to be thought of, more generally, as a plant that offers protection. They’re often used to keep away evil spirits. The anthropologist was told that ti leaves were laid under bed mats for this reason; some people believe the plants can contain vengeful spirits in their graves. Traveling with pork can attract “angry spirits,” too, and the leaves offer some protection. One of the more common ways to use ti leaves for protection is to plant them around your house.

Hundreds of people have had to evacuate the area where the volcano's lava is flowing, and in four days, the eruption destroyed 35 homes and other buildings. For people hoping that their houses will survive, anything that could offer extra protection could be worth a try.

The “shipwrecked Mozart” who wowed Victorian audiences, including the Queen herself.

An advertisement from the paper proclaims, in all caps, "ORIGINAL MONSTRE ROCK BAND." A few lines below: "SOLID ROCK.” Nothing unusual there, because who doesn’t want to know where to find music that goes to 11? The only problem is that, in this case, the newspaper is from 1846.

Concertgoers at the time probably wouldn’t have been ready for guitar feedback and drum solos, but they were eager enough to see a family making music with actual rocks, hewn from a volcanic mountain called Skiddaw (which, to be fair, sounds pretty metal).

The Original Monstre Rock Band was the creation of Joseph Richardson, a stonemason from Keswick, England. Richardson had created what he called a “rock harmonicon,” one of a class of instruments called lithophones, which feature stone bars shaped, tuned, and assembled in the style of a modern mallet percussion keyboard, such as a xylophone or glockenspiel.

The resonant properties of local Keswick stone had first gained attention in the 18th century, when Peter Crosthwaite, proprietor of a local museum, built a small stone instrument that covered two octaves. Richardson would likely have known of Crosthwaite and his cabinet of curiosities. Being of the maker sort himself, Richardson got to work on a full-scale version.

Beginning in 1827, he spent 13 years carting and carefully chipping pieces of a metamorphic rock known as hornfels until he had an instrument composed of 61 stones, 12 feet long, with a five-octave range. The largest piece of stone was roughly three feet in length, an octave below middle C, and the smallest was a mere six inches long. Each note-producing slab was laid on twisted straw across a pair of long wooden bars. Players used an assortment of specialized wooden and leather mallets to play the instrument.

Lithophones such as Richardson’s work because of the specific nature of the rock. Just as a tapped wineglass goes silent when you put a finger on the rim, the vast majority of stones dampen vibrations nearly immediately because of their internal structure. Most rocks make no special noise to speak of.

Hornfels is different. This stone, and in particular the variety from the northern Lake District of England, naturally resonates to create a sound that can be very sweet and mellow. One article describes the rock harmonicon's tones as “equal in quality and fullness to those produced on a piano-forte.” Modern acoustic engineer Trevor Cox is more circumspect in his assessment, noting that some stones indeed ring beautifully, “while others sound like a beer bottle being struck with a stick.”

To play the harmonicon for audiences, Richardson’s three sons worked in frenzied concert, wielding mallets with heads the size of baseballs. Crowds were amazed with their intricate classical repertoire. A July 1841 issue of The Athenaeum raved about the Richardsons, calling the spectacle “like fabled things made real,” and comparing Richardson himself to “a shipwrecked Mozart” capable of calling forth beautiful music from the rudest, crudest, most improbable materials.

By 1845, the Original Monstre Rock Band was performing regularly at London's Egyptian Hall, and played multi-week engagements at the Royal Surrey Zoological Gardens, amid traditional bands, animal feedings, and reenactments of the Siege of Gibraltar. They toured the country, and even played two royal command performances at Buckingham Palace, where Queen Victoria was said to have been delighted. (She was, apparently, a rock purist, and was displeased when the Richardsons chose to sully the show with the addition of steel bars the second time around.)

This style of rock music fit naturally into 19th-century entertainment culture, which was curious, occasionally inventive, and reckoning with industrialization. Also, audiences just enjoyed it. The addition of “Original” to the name of the Richardsons’ act had become necessary because there were several competitors trying to get in on the action. Copycats, however, were limited somewhat by the availability and unwieldiness of tuned instruments that could weigh as much as a saddle horse.

The Richardsons were followed in widespread fame by the Till family, who were particularly active in the 1880s, and made an acclaimed tour of the United States. In an effort to keep the novelty factor fresh on the road, rock bands came to offer add-ons such as additional instruments or new innovations. The Tills, for example, brought an Edison phonograph with them on tour. Technologies like that are what eventually put them out of fashion.

Lithophones are part of a long creative history of percussion, and they are still in use today. The Richardson’s massive instrument can still be played at the Keswick Museum & Art Gallery. The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns one of the Till instruments, there is a tradition of similar instruments in Asian music, and modern manufacturers continue to make lithophones for both art and amusement. Edward Troxell, a college professor who also served as Connecticut’s state geologist, manufactured his own “Stone Age Steinway” in the 1940s, using rocks he gathered during fieldwork on and around Avon Mountain. Though a skilled craftsman, he was no great musician and somewhat sheepishly admitted to the Hartford Courant that he could only manage to play “Chopsticks” on his creation.

Naturally occurring ringing boulders have been discovered in locations from Pennsylvania to Azerbaijan. Some also speculate that even Stonehenge was some kind of giant resonant stone instrument. According to Thomas C. Duffy, a composer and Director of Bands at Yale University, this should be no surprise. “For centuries, instrument makers have experimented with the sonic qualities of wood, bone, brass, steel, bronze, and metallic alloys; and quartz, glass, and other stones,” he says. “Stone instruments—less practical because of their weight, mass, and fixed timbre—resonate with a sense of primitive purity. Although some stone ‘instruments’ are sculpted and shaped into tuned strikers, others, like the Luray Caverns Stalacpipe, are presented in their natural state.”

All of this is to say that the human impulse to whang away on whatever is around us a longstanding tradition, and it bears meaning. As one happy reviewer wrote of the Richardsons, “Truly this is bringing home to our hearts the poetry of common things.”

Phytoplankton get busy.

Out in the middle of the North Sea, between the coast of the United Kingdom and northern Europe, there aren’t any trees or flowering grasses to herald the arrival of spring. But, even in this watery part of the world, plants are bursting with new life. Over the weekend, NASA captured an image of a giant bloom of phytoplankton swirling through the sea.

Taken by the imager on the Landsat 8 satellite, this image shows the natural colors of the bloom, made up of legions of microscopic plants. Most likely, NASA explains, the lighter-colored swirls are made of one type of plankton, coccolithophores, and the greener areas are crowded with another, diatoms. A conveniently placed ship gives a sense of scale.

Spring blooms of phytoplankton occur in sub-polar waters, the North Atlantic, and waters off the coast. Because these plankton can reproduce so rapidly, the size of the population can grow exponentially.

In the spring, changes in the ocean—the amount of light and warmth available, the stratification of nutrients and salt—help create conditions where plankton can thrive. Scientists aren’t entirely sure what sets off a bloom, though: In a paper published earlier this year in Nature Geoscience, a team using specially designed robots reported that smaller, winter blooms could set off these spring explosions.

Phytoplankton aren’t the only underwater plants excited about spring, of course. One Twitter user noticed a patch of river moss covered in bubbles and wondered what the cause could be. The most likely explanation? The moss is photosynthesizing so hard that it’s expelling enormous (well, relatively) amounts of oxygens, which forms bubbles and floats to the river’s surface.

An iconic fruit tree is suffering from an incurable fungal disease.

Bramley apples aren't much to look at. They're muted green, with one side flushed a dull red, like a slapped cheek. And if you pulled one off the tree and bit into it, you might regret it. This is a cooking apple, and sour when raw. It's only when baked that the fruit comes into its own, with its flesh suddenly golden, sweet, and yielding. For generations of British people, these have been the foundation of countless apple pies, crumbles, sauces, and compotes.

All of these dishes find their roots in the British town of Southwell, in Nottinghamshire. Here, the BBC reports, grows the original Bramley apple tree from which all other trees are descended. For 209 years, it has quietly flourished in the cottage garden of a local resident. First planted by Mary Ann Brailsford, a local child, in 1809, its apples bear the name of the local butcher, who bought the house and garden.

But there's a problem: This tree has an incurable fungus, which is almost certain to be fatal. It makes its way into the tree's internal water transport system and then chokes up the pipes. Once they're entirely clogged up, the tree will die, and with it a steady stream of visitors from around the world, who have come to pay homage at its trunk.

While "we can never be 100 percent certain with a tree," bio-scientist Ted Cocking told the broadcaster, he acknowledged the outlook seemed bleak. The question now is how best to take care of this magnificent plant in its final years. "Even if it is dying," Cocking said, "we all want to die with dignity. It needs to be nursed in its terminal years."

To help out, Nottingham Trent University has purchased the plant and promised continual tending from staff and students for the rest of its life. People who wish to visit the tree while it still stands may want to do so quickly. But if you can't make it, all is not lost: Planned grafts from the tree will be dotted across the university's campus, extending its legacy for decades or centuries to come.

Throughout May, the gas giant will be close to Earth and visible all night long.

Jupiter is always in the sky, of course, but sometimes it's especially dazzling.

It takes the gas giant 12 years to wend its way around the sun. At this point in its orbit, it is at opposition—the position where it is closest to Earth, on the side farthest from the sun. (“Close” is relative, though: Even when Jupiter appears to be in our celestial neighborhood, it’s still 410 million miles from us.) Jupiter is among the brightest objects in the sky, and if you plan to attempt a close-up look at the planet this year, this week will yield particularly stunning views.

When to look

Your ideal viewing window depends on where you are, and what may be blocking your view of the horizon. Bright lights won’t dampen it much. “Even in the worst light-polluted city in the United States, you will see Jupiter,” says Michelle Nichols, director of public observing at Chicago’s Adler Planetarium.

The bigger concern is a horizon line chewed up by buildings or trees. The fewer structures blocking your sightline, the earlier you’ll see Jupiter. In a city, skyscrapers may limit your view until after midnight, when the planet rises above them. At its highest, Jupiter will be about 33° in altitude when it is due south, says Peter Tagatac, president of the Amateur Astronomers Association of New York. Using a body as a calculation device, 33° is roughly “three fists with capped thumb at arm distance above the horizon.” Jupiter will be most visible when it climbs 20° or greater above the horizon, says Tagatac. Today, that’s about 10 p.m. EST; as the month progresses, it will be a little earlier each day.

What you'll need

The planet will be visible all night, and when you do scan the sky, you’ll be able to glimpse it with the naked eye. “There’s no mistaking it,” says Nichols. Look southeast: Jupiter will be the bright dot. One way to differentiate Jupiter from stars is by the extent to which they appear to flicker. Jupiter is closer to us than many stars are, and even though it also reflects light from the sun, it’s brighter, steadier, and less affected by gusts or other fluctuations in the atmosphere. “If it’s really windy and the air is turbulent, you might see some twinkling, but you’d notice that stars are twinkling a lot more,” Nichols says.

Through binoculars, Jupiter will appear as a slightly larger dot flanked by dimmer ones. These are four of its moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. (Galileo, the first astronomer to record sightings of those moons, did so in 1610 with magnification 18.) Binoculars are ample enough to glimpse the moons, “but their drawback is that sometimes it's hard to hold them still enough to enjoy the sight,” says Shana Tribiano, an associate at the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. If you’re peering through binoculars, it might help to mount them.

Details on the planet’s surface will emerge when you look through a small telescope with a magnification of 75 or 100 power. “The brownish equatorial bands stands out with a ruddy hue,” Tagatac says, and when a Jovian moon slinks between the Earth and Jupiter, a small telescope would suffice “to see its shadow transit like an inky black dot.” Some public libraries have telescopes available to borrow. If yours doesn’t, contact your a local astronomical society or club about public viewing hours.

To peep the Great Red Spot, says Tagatac, you’d need a bit more: a telescope with at least a 150-power magnification. Tagatac suggests the awe-inspiring name is a little bit of a misnomer; he calls it the “Disappointing Pale Spot.” Even so, he adds, it’s exciting to gaze at the dot, a massive storm twice the diameter of Earth that’s been swirling for at least 300 years.

How to make sense of the sky

For a more precise read on what you’re looking at, Nichols suggests sky charts and apps, such as Sky Safari. When you enable your phone’s GPS, point it at the sky, and zoom in, these will label the moons and tell you which is which. (Remember, if you’re looking through a telescope, the image will be backwards.)

Whether you’re spending time with an old friend or meeting the gas giant for the first time, this month is a great chance for any skyward-looking Earthlings to get to know our most massive neighbor a little bit better.

A new look at the fossil shows plants of the era may have been greener and more vascular than we thought.

So far, 2018 is quite the interesting year for the Czech National Museum in Prague. During a major construction and audit of the building, officials discovered much of their five-carat diamond and 19-carat sapphire collection had been replaced with fakes. One sapphire, reportedly worth tens of millions of dollars at today’s exchange rate, was replaced with an artificially made stone, and another diamond turned out to be cut glass. They are still investigating the collection's authenticity, working with police to uncover the heist details, and have tightened security since.

So, when museum scientists realized via a new study that one of the items in the collection, an unassuming petrified plant smelted into volcanic deposits, was one of the oldest plant fossils in the world and could produce oxygen, it came as a relief.

At six centimeters long, the 432-million-year-old plant, part of an extinct grouping called Cooksonia, is also one of the largest terrestrial plants of its age. The second-oldest Cooksonia fossil, which dates to approximately 425 million years ago, is just a few millimeters long.

In the early 19th century, Joachim Barrande, a French paleontologist and geologist, stumbled across the larger fossil stem around Loděnice village, which is located in Czechia’s central Bohemian region. The plant, along with much of his findings, became part of the National Museum’s collection. For years, it remained in a dark crate deep in the basement.

In 2011, while shifting around collections to prep for construction, paleontologists unearthed the prehistoric fossil. They traveled to where Barrande came across the stem to see what else they could learn about the fossil and potentially unearth others. They found similar Cooksonia fossils, but they were far smaller than the museum’s one. The small size of other Cooksonias proved to be a challenge for researchers.

“It was supposed that so small a plant could not have contained supportive, conductive or even photosynthetic tissues. Paleontologist Kevin Boyce even supposed that those first plants could not be green,” National Museum stated in a press release. In a recently published Nature Plants study from the Czech National Museum, the Faculty of Natural Sciences of the Charles University, and the Institute of Geology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, researchers overturned this thesis and concluded that “this Cooksonia plant's body volume was sufficient for it to secure the basic functions of a vascular plant, including photosynthesis, the distribution of water and nutrients, and to be capable of independent life.”

The museum plans to put the fossil on display this fall—with guards watching, of course.

Silent meals, a buddy system, and wine “in moderation.”

Graybeards were thin on the ground in the 13th century. For even wealthy landholding males, average life expectancy was about 31 years, rising to 48 years for those who made it to their twenties. The Knights Templar, then, must have seemed to have some magical potion: Many members of this Catholic military order lived long past 60. And even then, they often died at the hands of their enemies, rather than from illness.

In 1314, Jacques de Molay, the order’s final Grand Master, was burned alive at the age of 70. Geoffrei de Charney, who was executed in the same year, is usually said to have been around 63. This longevity seems to have been almost commonplace. Fellow Grand Masters Thibaud Gaudin, Hugues de Payens, and Armand de Périgord, to name just a few, all lived into their sixties. For the times, this would have been positively geriatric.

“The exceptional longevity of Templar Knights was generally attributed to a special divine gift,” writes the Catholic scholar Francesco Franceschi in a journal article about their salubrious practices. But modern research suggests an alternative: The order’s compulsory dietary rules may have contributed to their long lives and good health.

Contrary to many modern portrayals, the Knights seem to have lived genuinely humble lives, in service to God. Their dietary choices and obligations reflect this. Though the order grew rich from carefully handled donations and by safeguarding traveling pilgrims' money, the men themselves took formal vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. They were not permitted even to speak to women. For nearly 200 years, the order thrived across Europe, peaking at around 15,000 members by the end of the 13th century. Most of all, they were expert warriors, and their ranks comprised some of the best fighters, warriors, and jousters in the world.

Early in the 12th century, the French abbot Bérnard de Clairvaux helped assemble a long and complex list of rules, which structured the knights’ lives. This rulebook became known as the Primitive Rule of the Templars, and drew from the teachings of the saints Augustine and Benedict. But many of the rules originated in the order. Though the document was completed in 1129, writes Judith Upton-Ward, the Templar Knights had already been in existence for several years, “and had built up its own traditions and customs … To a considerable extent, then, the Primitive Rule is based upon existing practices."

The rules were many, and various. The knights were to protect orphans, widows, and churches; eschew the company of “obviously excommunicated” men; and not stand up in church when praying or singing. Even sumptuary laws prioritized humbleness: Their monk’s habits were one color alone, though on warm days between Easter and Halloween, the rules decreed, they were allowed to wear a linen shirt. (Pointed shoes were always forbidden.) But the rules also extended into their dietary practices: How they ate, what they ate, and who they ate with.

Their meals do not seem to have been raucous affairs. Knights were obliged to eat together, but to do so silently. If they needed the salt, they had to ask for it to be passed “quietly and privately … with all humility and submission.” A sort of buddy system existed, partly due to a mystifying “shortage of bowls.” This may have been more a show of abstinence than anything else, like the knights' emblem, which was of two men sharing a horse.

Knights ate in pairs, and were told to “study the other more closely,” to make sure that neither was scarfing more than his share or entertaining any kind of “secret abstinence.” (It’s not clear what knights were supposed to do if their partner wasn’t eating as he should—though shouting at the table seems to have been especially forbidden.) After eating, everyone sat in silence and gave thanks. Scraps of bread were collected and given to the poor, and whole loaves set aside for future meals.

The knights’ diets seem to have been a balancing act between the ordinary fasting demands on monks, and the fact that these knights lived active, military lives. You couldn’t crusade, or joust, on an empty stomach. (Although the Knights Templar only jousted in combat or training—not for sport.) So three times a week, the knights were permitted to eat meat—even though it was “understood that the custom of eating flesh corrupts the body.” On Sundays, everyone ate meat, with higher-up members permitted both lunch and dinner with some kind of roast animal. Accounts from the time show that this was often beef, ham, or bacon, with salt for seasoning or to cure the meat.

It’s likely that these portions were considerable: If the knights weren’t allowed meat due to a Tuesday fast, the next day it would be available “in plenty.” One source suggests that cooks loaded enough meat onto their plates “to feed two poor men with the leftovers.”

But on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays, the knights ate more spartan, vegetable-filled meals. Although the rules describe these meals as “two or three meals of vegetables or other dishes eaten with bread,” they also often included milk, eggs, and cheese. Otherwise, they might eat potage, made with oats or pulses, gruels, or fiber-rich vegetable stews. (The wealthier brothers might mix in expensive spices, such as cumin.) In their gardens, they grew fruits and vegetables, especially Mediterranean produce such as figs, almonds, pomegranates, olives and corn. These healthy foodstuffs likely also made their way into their meals.

Once a week, on Fridays, they observed a Lenten fast—no eggs, milk, or other animal products. For hearty fare, they relied on dried or salted fish, and dairy or egg substitutes made from almond milk. Even here, however, there are pragmatic concessions. The weak and sick abstained from these fasts and received “meat, flesh, birds, and all other foods which bring good health,” to return them to fighting shape as quickly as possible.

All the while, brothers drank wine—but this too was restricted. Everyone had an identical ration, which was diluted, and they were advised that alcohol should “not be taken to excess, but in moderation. For Solomon said … wine corrupts the wise.” In the Holy Lands, they allegedly mixed a potent cocktail of antiseptic aloe vera, hemp, and palm wine, known as the Elixir of Jerusalem, which may have helped accelerate healing from injuries.

Franceschi describes other regulations beyond the Primitive Rules that were “specifically designed to avoid the spreading of infections." These included mandatory handwashing before eating or praying, and exempting brothers in charge of manual tasks outdoors from food preparation or serving. Some of these innovations, picked up without any awareness of germs, may have resulted from interactions with Arab doctors, renowned during the period for their superior medical knowledge. By medieval medical standards, Templar Knights were at its apex, able to treat many illnesses and to take care of their weak.

The order was one of the richest in the world—yet these rules prevented the knights from sitting on their laurels or gorging themselves on fatty, cured meat. In fact, many of these rules resemble modern dietary advice: Lots of vegetables, meat on occasion, and wine in moderation. A meal fit not for a king on a throne, but a knight with some serious crusading to do.

Bottles of Linie Aquavit have made a winding sea journey for centuries.

When pouring Linie Aquavit into cocktails at The NoMad Bar in New York City, bar manager Nathan O'Neill often regales customers with a unique yarn: about the journey that the spirit has traveled to reach their glass. The Norwegian spirit, which emits hints of caraway and star anise, isn't simply shipped directly from a manufacturing facility. Before it’s even bottled, every single drop goes on a lengthy sea voyage that involves crossing the equator twice. It's also what gives the spirit its name: The word "linie" refers to "line," or equator.

“It was discovered by chance,” says Romain Jourdan, category product manager of international premium spirits for Arcus Norway, the company that produces Linie Aquavit. In the early 1800s, the vessel owned by the successful local shipowner, Catharina Lysholm, set sail for present-day Indonesia with aquavit and other goods onboard. There, the Lysholm family hoped to find a new market for their wares. But people weren't interested in purchasing the aquavit that had come aboard the Trondhiems Prøve.

So the ship, still full of aquavit, sailed back to Norway. During the two-year journey, the beverage matured further onboard and cultivated its distinct flavor, which intermingles with a combination of secret spices and herbs. Upon its arrival again in Scandinavia, aquavit was a hit. The drink became so beloved that distillers continued sending it out to sea each time.

Early on, people used aquavit for medicinal purposes. In Norway, it became a comforting drink on frigid winter mornings before working outdoors—partially because it didn’t freeze solid. Now, aquavit is the country's national drink. It’s usually imbibed neat, often in between bites of traditional Norwegian foods such as smoked, cured, and salted meats, as well as fermented, pickled, and dried wares. People often drink it as a digestif, too, to help settle the heaviness of fatty and salty dishes.

These days, the spirit no longer travels to Indonesia and back, but it does stop at ports on several continents along the way. This is key to making it taste the way it does: The rolling waves, in addition to changing temperatures and humidity levels, help to perfect the aquavit, according to Jourdan. The rocking motions also helps accelerate the spirit’s maturation and pull out the aromas from the casks, not unlike the way a tea bag might do so in warm water. “The movement of aquavit in the barrels extracts more of the sherry cask from the barrels,” he says. “Also, there is a kind of magic happening with temperatures from cold weather in Norway to warm weather in Ecuador, and back to cold weather in Norway.”

Thanks to the careful labels on each of the bottles, we can track the journey of a single bottle of Linie Aquavit from the beginning—in this case, the bottle that O’Neill cracked open at his bar this spring. Long before the bottle goes to sea, it all begins with distilling the spirit from potatoes—which must be Norwegian spuds, according to law (by contrast, Danish and Swedish varieties are often made from grains). In June 2015, the ensuing liquid was then poured into sherry casks. These casks, previously used to make Oloroso sherry, help transform the clear spirit into a gold-hued liquid. From there, the aquavit traveled to the company's facility in Hagan, a stone's throw from Oslo’s city center, where it matured for a year. Then, the time came to set sail.

This particular bottle made its way around the world from mid-July 2016 to mid-November 2016. That first July day, the bottle boarded a Wilhelmsen cargo ship in Oslo, Norway. Typically, these ships stop in over two dozen different ports, from Savannah, Georgia, to Shanghai, China, and places such as Panama, Australia, and Singapore, among many others, on their excursion. The bottle is shipped as deck cargo, due in part to potential fire danger. There, it also receives the greatest amount of exposure from the sea’s swaying and rolling waves.

The aquavit doesn’t travel alone: It’s a small part of a much larger cargo load, and is in the company of cars and other items that need to cross seas. Jourdan estimates that out of a 1,000-container ship, maybe 20 or so containers contain bottles of Linie Aquavit. But since it just needs to return to its final destination in Norway, the aquavit simply goes along for the ride as the other cargo is picked up and dropped off at ports along the way.

The ship with The NoMad Bar's aquavit first went around Europe, stopping in Germany, Belgium, and the United Kingdom. It then zipped across the Atlantic, bound for Baltimore and Savannah, on the eastern coast of the United States, before sailing down to Panama. From there, it set off for New Zealand, and made various stops in Australia before heading north to Singapore. The ship made its way through Shanghai, China, Korea, and Japan. Next, it crossed back over to the United States, hitting several western coast destinations including Tacoma, Washington, and Long Beach, California. It went on to Mexico, Panama, back around to the east coast of the United States. Almost four months to the day it left Norway, and after crossing the equator twice, the ship returned home.

From there, distillers blended, filtered, and finally bottled this particular one on January 31, 2017. It made its way through a distributor and ultimately to O'Neill's bar, where he recounted the tale of the spirit’s creation while pouring it in cocktails for customers. He says that aquavit pairs especially well with low alcohol by volume selections, such as vermouths, aromatized wines, and sherries. “If it is something higher in proof, the pairings that work include whiskey, and cognac, which pair well due to the notes coming from aging the spirits in barrels,” he adds.

The dry spirit has seen a growing popularity outside of Scandinavia in recent years, thanks in part to mixology trends and a boom in domestic distillers. As NPR notes, the number of American aquavit distilleries shot up from fewer than 10, in 2012, to over 50 iterations in 2017 (to date, no other aquavit bottles appear to take long sea journeys). While it's tough to definitively say if the months-long sojourn or the varying sea temperatures do indeed create such drastic variations in Linie's taste, it's an exciting tale nonetheless. “More guests are starting to realize what aquavit is, and the background story of traveling the world on a ship,” O'Neill says. While Linie Aquavit's production methods may seem unconventional, it's part of what makes this seafaring spirit special, and also gives its fans a taste of adventure.

All aspiring Augustus Gloops should report to Poland.

Drivers on their way to the Polish capital of Warsaw on Wednesday morning found the road blocked by an unusual impediment: tons of liquid chocolate that spilled onto the A2 motorway.

A tanker carrying the sweet load hit a road barrier and overturned, blocking two lanes. The ruptured tank spewed a pool of rapidly-hardening chocolate from both ends, which quickly covered the width of the road. While the driver has been taken to the hospital with a broken arm, firefighters are struggling to remove a reported 12 tons of solid chocolate from the roadway.

A representative for the firefighters told local news source TVN24 that scraping up the bittersweet barricade was worse than dealing with snow, a bold statement coming from chilly Poland. After contacting the chocolate manufacturer, the firefighters resorted to spraying hot, pressurized water to melt the sticky roadblock, while the New York Times reports that a bulldozer has been spotted scraping away.

Authorities are unsure when the cocoa-buttery blockage will be cleared. TVN24 also noted that the cleanup spans more than a mile, since in the aftermath of the crash, drivers simply drove through it, leaving a long chocolate trail. But despite the sticky situation, firefighters and police attending to the cleanup are reportedly cheerful about the long task ahead. After all, who could be mad about 12 tons of chocolate?

Filipino tribal tattooist Fang-od Oggay has built an economy on the back of skin art.

After a grueling hike through the jungle, traversing valleys and vibrant rice terraces to the top of the mountain where the teetering village awaits, visitors, tourists, and fans arrive sweaty and gleeful at Buscalan village, Kalinga, in the Philippines’ far north.

Buscalan, which has narrow dirt walkways, limited electricity, and no cell phone service, is the most popular destination in Kalinga Province. Tourism to the village has increased significantly from an estimated 30,000 in 2010 to 170,000 in 2016.

Fang-od Oggay emerges from her wooden hut in the distance, and there is a literal rush towards her. Everyone wants a glimpse of this quirky, fastidious centenarian.

She is known worldwide as a living legend and the last tribal tattoo artist to hold the title of Mambabatok—the name given to traditional tattooists by the Kalinga ethnic group for thousands of years.

“When you die, a tattoo is the only thing that will remain on your body, so it is a treasure, a treasure that lasts,” says Oggay.

For over eight decades, Oggay has been single-handedly keeping the traditions of the Butbut tribe alive through a unique method of hand-tap tattooing.

It is an archaic procedure in which Oggay uses citrus thorns to prick the skin—either from calamansi, a cross between citrus and a kumquat, or pomelo tree branch. The thorns are threaded into a bamboo reed. Oggay marks the tattoo design on the skin with a delicate piece of straw. Charcoal and water are mixed together to make the tribal tattoo ink, which is wiped onto the thorn and hand tapped into the skin using a 12-inch bamboo hammer.

I travelled to the remote Philippine Cordillera Mountains to learn about Kalinga tattooing culture from Fang-od Oggay herself.

Kalinga means “outlaw,” which is highly appropriate.

During 400 years of occupation by Spain and the U.S., the Kalinga were one of the few tribes to not come under foreign rule, due to their fighting skills and contempt for outsiders.

Thousands of years ago the tribe was involved in bloodthirsty battles for land and honor with neighboring villages. At night, their victorious battles were celebrated with rice liqueur, drunk out of the skulls of enemies, and dancing to the beat of gongs made out of human jaw bones.

Triumphant Butbut head-hunters and male warriors of the indigenous tribe would go to the mambabatok in Buscalan, Kalinga to get the batok (a hand-tapped tattoo), a symbol of their bravery and courage for protecting their village against enemies, to the extent of killing them. And the number of tattoos on a warrior was directly related to the number of heads they took. This tradition has long since ceased, and the last warrior to receive a tattoo from Oggay for killing was in 2002, she says.

Now, just 30 warriors remain in Buscalan.

Anyone wanting to learn and practice the art of tattooing has to know what it feels like, says the Kalinga. They have to experience the pain in their bodies.

For men, a Kalinga tattoo was traditionally a sign of strength, wealth and power. But there is also a romanticism around Filipino tribal tattoos. Tattoos here represent beauty. A tattoo turns a girl into a woman, and the more tattoos you have, the more beautiful you are, says the Kalinga.

“We were tattooed because we wanted to have sex appeal and to be attractive to men,” says Oggay. “Many of the elders here have the same tattoos as their husbands. It’s a Kalinga tradition for the wives of warriors to match their tattoos with their husbands.”

There are 20 female elders in Buscalan with full-body tattoos, many of whom received their first tattoo at just 13. And these women and their daughters and granddaughters place a major role in the village.

“They are the breadwinners,” says Oggay. “They work in the fields and rice terraces. Women are hardworking and strong, we can carry heavy loads and do labor work … if a man can, why not a woman. We want to support our families and village, it is the Kalinga way.”

And it is also the women who carry on the indigenous inking of the batok.

Oggay was the first female tattoo artist in Kalinga. But she may not be the last Mambabatok. Over time there has been a shift, with young women taking up the ancient tradition. Through tattooing, they are economically supporting the whole village.

“The women have more interest and passion in carrying on this millennium-old technique,” says Oggay, “And they are patient. Men cannot be as still and precise for long periods of time as a woman can.”

Oggay may have spent her whole life tattooing head-hunters, but these days her time-honored folk art is practiced on the countless tourists that visit Buscalan village each year.

At 101 years of age she moves freely, indifferent to the public adoration, feeding her ducks and pounding rice. Visitors sit next to her posing for pictures with their thumbs up and sidle up to her to kiss her cheek.

Her fame is undeniable. But no one seems to really get her attention, which she saves for her tattooing.

“When I was young my friends and I were always tattooing each other but my tattoos were always the better ones,” says Oggay.

“Whagay, the Mambabatok from the neighboring village of Ngibat, tattooed me when I was 15 years old, he took three days to tattoo my full body,” says Oggay. “He then went on to teach me the art of Kalinga tattooing.”

Oggay never married and has no children. She does everything on her own in absolute independence. “I have boyfriends but when I was 25 years old the man I loved died during the Japanese occupation, so instead of marrying another I choose to dedicate my life to tattooing,” she says. ”Through it I support myself and my village. In fact, the proudest moment in my life was when I started tattooing.”

Thousands of hopeful tourists from all corners of the earth make the journey to Buscalan each year to get a “Fang-od tattoo,” having read about her on the internet. And one must wonder how the stardom around Oggay, in the Philippines and globally, affects her and her craft.

In October 2017 Oggay traveled to Manila to appear at the Manila FAME trade show, an international showcase for the country’s artisans. Her appearance received global criticism globally after a photograph surfaced on social media showing Oggay sleeping at the tattoo show after tattooing an estimated 300 trade show attendees in two days. There was debate over whether Oggay should have traveled from her remote tribal environment at her age, and whether she was being exploited.

“It was an honor to be invited and I wanted to see what Manila was like,” she says. “The organizers said I should stop and rest, but I didn’t want to waste the journey of the many people who had come to see me for a tattoo.”

“On social media they were saying that I was exploited but I love what I do and I chose to go and earn money for the village, which has little other income outside of Kalinga tattooing.”

Just two months ago Oggay was nominated by the Philippine Senate for the honor of National Living Treasure. “The batok survived centuries of foreign influences. Bestowing [Oggay] the National Living Treasures award does recognize the beauty and grace of the ancient art of tattooing and ensures that such Filipino heritage will survive and continue to exist,” said Senator Nancy Binay in a statement.

“I work seven days a week from 8-5 p.m., so I am proud to be recognized for the work that I do,” says Oggay. “I have a great responsibility. With every tattoo, I am sharing a piece of Kalinga’s history and culture with someone new.”

Oggay is the oldest witness of the Kalinga tribe to see her home turn into a destination for travelers from around the globe. And in many ways she is an entrepreneur, having turned her craft into a booming business that supports the whole tribe.

“I do more selfies then tattoos these days,” she laughs.

Filipino tattoos symbolize unity and belonging to a tribe, in contrast to the western tattoo culture where designs are often used to show individuality.

“I used to tattoo village warriors, and the Kalinga designs meant a great deal to them, but these symbols don’t have the same significance to foreigners who choose more ‘aesthetically pleasing’ designs, no matter the meaning,” Oggay says.

The income from visitors, however, is welcome. “Kalinga tattooing supports the village, and without the tourists we would not survive.”

Buscalan Village has a population of over 700, of which 20 young girls are practicing the art of skin painting. The youngest, Inga, is just nine years old.

Of these tattooing descendants of warriors, Fang-od’s grandnieces Grace Palicas and Elyang Wigan are arguably the most experienced and sought after. They are also the only two girls who Fang-od allows to tattoo with her. Grace started tattooing when she was nine and used to practice on Oggay’s arms.

“Grace and Elyang watch me and learn off me, but I never taught them, they are not my apprentices, I took no apprentices,” she says. “Kalinga tattooing cannot be taught, there is no school for it, you either have the talent or you don’t.”

The Kalinga believe that the art of tattooing can only be passed through the bloodline. “If someone outside the tribe were to continue the tradition, the tattoo would be infected,” explains Oggay. “As I have no children, my grandnieces are the only choice and my knowledge of traditional tattooing is my only inheritance, so I let them watch and learn.”

On one hand, the women practicing this ancient art are giving life to the tradition through thousands of skin jabs daily. On the other, Buscalan village has become completely reliant on tourism, brought about by Oggay and money that tattooing brings. “I’d be sad if this art form were to die with me,” she says.

The future of the village and of the Kalinga tattoo lie in the keen hands of the next generation of female inkmasters, whose reservation books are already full. These young women have been learning to adapt tribal designs to suit the tastes of modern visitors. This does represent a shift in meaning from the traditional Kalinga approach, but, as Oggay says, “I am happy that anyone can have a tattoo now without having to kill someone.”

At 101, she tires easily, but her eyesight remains sharp. She pledges to “continue tattooing until I lose my vision,” but also imagines a life less hectic.

“You asked what I want to do in my future,” she says. “I want to rest.”

One of the world's most hazardous jobs is known for its intense pressure.

For 52 straight days this winter, Shannon Hovey woke up in the company of five other men in a metal tube, 20 feet long and seven feet in diameter, tucked deep inside a ship in the Gulf of Mexico. He retrieved his breakfast from a hatch (usually eggs), read a briefing for the day, and listened for a disembodied voice to tell him when it was time to put on a rubber suit and get to work. Life in the tube was built around going through these same steps day after day after day … while trying not to think about the fact that any unintended breach in his temporary metal home would mean a fast, agonizing death.

Hovey works in one of the least known, most dangerous, and, frankly, most bizarre professions on Earth. He is a saturation diver—one of the men (right now they are all men) who do construction and demolition work at depths up to 1,000 feet or more below the surface of the ocean.

Diving to that depth—or just about any depth—involves breathing pressurized air. Inert gases in it, such as nitrogen, dissolve benignly into your blood and tissues—as long as the weight of all the water above you keeps them compressed. But when you want to return to the surface, that gas needs time to diffuse out slowly. If not, if a diver shot straight to the surface, the gas would form bubbles, like in a shaken can of soda. Inside that diver’s body, it would be as if millions of tiny explosives began to detonate. Known as the bends or, more technically, decompression sickness, the condition can be catastrophically painful and debilitating, and, depending on the depth, nearly impossible to survive. Diving to 250 feet for an hour, for example, would require a five-hour ascent to avoid getting even slightly bent. (The condition was first seen in the 19th century, when men leaving pressurized caissons, used to dig tunnels and build bridges, mysteriously took ill and began dying.)

The world—and, specifically, the oil and gas industry—needs commercial divers like Hovey who can go to the seabed to perform the delicate maneuvers required to put together, maintain, and disassemble offshore wells, rigs, and pipelines, everything from flipping flow valves, to tightening bolts with hydraulic jacks, to working in tight confines around a blowout preventer. Remotely operated vehicles don’t have the touch, maneuverability, or judgment for the job. And so, a solution. Experiments in the 1930s showed that, after a certain time at pressure, divers’ bodies become fully saturated with inert gas, and they can remain at that pressure indefinitely, provided they get one long decompression at the end. In 1964, naval aquanauts occupied the first Sea Lab—a metal-encased living quarters lowered to a depth of 192 feet. The aquanauts could move effortlessly between their pressurized underwater home and the surrounding water, and they demonstrated the enormous commercial potential of saturation diving. It soon became apparent that it would be easier and cheaper to monitor and support the divers if the pressurized living quarters weren’t themselves at the bottom of the sea. At this moment, all around the world, there are commercial divers living at pressure inside saturation systems (mostly on ships, occasionally on rigs or barges), and commuting to and from their jobsites in pressurized diving bells. They can each put in solid six-hour working days on the bottom.

Hovey and his fellow divers spent that six-week assignment working at the relatively shallow (but still quite deadly) depth of 250 feet, and living in a shipboard capsule pressurized to the same level. Pressure can be measured in atmospheres (atm) or pounds per square inch (psi). Pressure at sea level is 1 atm, or 14.7 psi. Inside a bicycle tire is about 65 psi. Hovey was living at over 110 psi. An ocean-and-a-half away, diver Steve Tweddle was making his way through a 28-day job in “storage,” as they call it, for work at a depth of 426 feet (190 psi) in the North Sea. The Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea share a history of offshore drilling, sparked by the worldwide oil crisis of the 1970s, which sent prices skyrocketing and saw offshore oil and gas rigs pop up like giant galvanized lily pads. The vast majority of saturation dives are for maintaining or taking down this oil and gas infrastructure.

A saturation diver starts a job when he leaves the “beach” (any solid ground) and steps onto a flat-bottomed ship known as a dive support vessel (DSV). Every piece of equipment and person on the ship is there to support the work and lives of the divers. There are subsea managers and dive supervisors, life support supervisors, life support technicians, and assistant life support technicians. They control what the divers breathe and eat, supply personal necessities, and even help remotely flush the toilet—whatever is necessary to keep them comfortable (such as it is) and alive.

Before taking up residence in the saturation chamber, the core living space of the system, every diver must pass a medical workup including, among other things, a hunt for any signs of infection. Even a simple cold can be incredibly hazardous to a saturation diver—clogged ears and sinuses trap air that the divers won’t be able to equalize to the pressurized air, potentially causing permanent damage that can end a career. Before entering the sat system, Tweddle always takes shower with antibacterial soap to scrub off any hitchhiking germs.

In their last moments before a job, both Hovey and Tweddle call their families, even though they can use cell phones while in the chamber. Hovey, a 42-year-old American with intense, mournful eyes and a gray-dappled beard, used to work as a sound engineer and is now (most likely) the only saturation diver who works as an herbalist when on the beach. He tries to find a sunny spot on the ship’s helipad for his phone call. It’s his last chance to breathe fresh air, and his last chance to speak in a voice his family will understand. Once he’s at pressure, he’s going to sound like Donald Duck after huffing a roomful of helium balloons.

Air—compressed or otherwise—is about 21 percent oxygen, 78 percent nitrogen, and one percent everything else. Below about 100 feet divers breathing compressed air, including recreational scuba divers, can develop what’s known as nitrogen narcosis, which does an excellent job of mimicking the feeling of being drunk. The deeper you go, the drunker and more incapacitated you feel: Beyond 200 feet you might become acutely disoriented, at 300 feet you can black out. It’s not a good condition to be in when you’re in a place where you have to be calm, careful, and methodical if you want to survive. In addition, that amount of compressed oxygen becomes toxic to the human body. Around 1919, electronics engineer and inventor Elihu Thompson figured that divers could avoid nitrogen narcosis by breathing a mixture of helium and oxygen. In the following decades a gas cocktail called heliox was developed—mostly helium, with sufficient oxygen and maybe a little nitrogen. (Other breathing gases, such as trimix and nitrox, are also used by deep divers.)

Saturation divers breathe heliox for the entire time they are in storage. And this brings us back to those final family phone calls. Helium is about seven times lighter than air, and sound waves travel much more quickly through it. The result is that buff, often ex-military men performing deadly serious jobs end up sounding like cartoon characters—and not just for a few moments, but for weeks on end. In the unfortunately named BBC series Real Men, a saturation diver in storage calls his son to wish him a happy birthday. “It’s hard to understand my dad because he talks in a duck language,” the boy says later, “and I don’t speak duck.”

The divers and their support teams adjust pretty quickly to the vocal distortion, but it can still make communication tricky—especially when accents are involved. “A helium Geordie [a native of Newcastle] from the northeast of England in a team with a South African and a Belgian makes communicating quite a challenge,” Tweddle says. Tweddle, an affable, 39-year-old former police diver with a shaved head that takes on a gray cast by the end of a job, is the Geordie in the above scenario. Support vessels are usually equipped with a kind of descrambler for when the divers need to be in constant communication with the onboard support team, but the equipment is notoriously unreliable, and many dive supervisors choose not to use it.

When it’s time to enter the chamber (Hovey calls it the “house”), the divers pass through a tight, circular hatch at one end, like one might see on an old submarine, that closes with a “tunk.” The hatch is sealed, and even though they’re on a boat, just feet from support crew and fresh air, the divers might as well be on the International Space Station. Even farther actually: It takes about 3.5 hours for an astronaut to make it back from space. Saturation divers have to decompress for days at minimum. On a dive early in his career, when Hovey was on a job at a depth of 700 feet, he learned that his wife had miscarried. It would have taken him 11 days of decompression to exit the chamber. They needed his salary (not surprisingly, saturation divers are well-compensated, up to $1,400 per day), so his wife told him to finish the job.

The layouts of saturation systems differ from company to company, vessel to vessel, and oil field to oil field. Generally, the North Sea facilities tend to be slightly roomier, thanks to strict regulations, but that’s not to say they are in any way spacious; they are even the mildest claustrophobe’s worst nightmare. For Tweddle, entering that first hatch puts the him in a miniscule round room known as the “wet pot.” It is used to transfer the divers to the diving bell through a hatch in the ceiling—and it’s also the bathroom, with a tiny metal sink, toilet (more on that later), and showerhead. Through the wet pot, another hatch leads to the living space, where there is just enough room for four to six seats around a removable aluminum table. In other words, for up to six weeks, the divers will spend their waking hours either under hundreds of feet of water on the ocean floor or squeezed into an area the size of a booth at Applebee’s.

Beyond that, past a droopy blue curtain, is the sleeping area, with six double-stacked bunks squeezed into a “U” shape. The bunks at the far end are partially blocked by the others, and therefore particularly cramped (especially for six-foot-four-inch Tweddle). So bunk choice is a big deal. In the North Sea, divers draw lots. Among American divers, Hovey says, it’s seniority—or whoever gets there first. But at least divers do all get their own sleeping spaces. In the bad old days, Tweddle says, six guys would have to hot-bed three bunks, with one group working while the other slept. There are still ways to keep the work going 24/7. On some vessels, up to four saturation chambers can be linked together through side hatches in the wet pots, and connected by large metal hamster tubes. This enables multiple dive teams to be in constant rotation.

Once the divers are tightly ensconced in the saturation chamber, the life support crew begins pumping in heliox, and the “blowdown” begins. The time it takes to get fully pressurized depends on the depth of the work site. On this latest job, Hovey’s blowdown took a mere three hours. On another job, with a storage depth of 750 feet, blowdown was 10 hours. In essence, pressurization transforms the saturation chamber into a space in which the air around them—and filling their lungs and saturating their tissues—is exerting pressure equivalent to the weight of the water they will be working under. Getting pressed to 750 feet requires 333 psi or 22.66 atms. It means squeezing into the chamber 22 times the amount of air it would normally hold.

During the blowdown, the rapid increase in atmospheric pressure makes the chamber very hot and humid (fluid dynamics are so strange), and sometimes needs to be paused so the climate control system can catch up. Later, the thermostat will get turned up to 90 degrees because the poor thermal properties of helium leave the divers perpetually chilly. The divers fan themselves and work constantly to equalize their ears: yawning, swallowing, and using the Valsalva maneuver (the formal name for pinching your nose, closing your mouth, and blowing). The blowdown also leaves them achy for hours or even days. “Anything not liquid or solid is affected by the physics of the gas,” says Hovey. “The cartilage in your joints is porous and shrinks for a couple days. All your joints hurt or click with movement.”

Once the divers are at pressure, they can only try to get comfortable, and make the chamber something of a home. In truth, they don’t bring or need a lot of gear—just a few items of clothing, toiletries, magnets for attaching family pictures to the walls, reading material, some personal electronics, the occasional Star Wars pillowcase. Everything else can be sent in via one of the two airlocks—a porthole-sized one in the living quarters known as the medlock and a larger one, for things such as their dive suits, off the wet pot. An assistant life support technician (Hovey says all American divers he knows call this person a “sat Betty”) is available to collect dirty clothes and linens through the medlock. Books, tools, and dive logs also make the journey in and out regularly, with each transit taking a minute or two.

Four times a day, someone sends in a menu with meal options, which come from the ship’s mess in disposable to-go containers (more hygienic than reusable plates and cups). Not surprisingly, the food quality varies greatly by vessel and chef, but mostly it sounds like the bill of fare from a discount cruise. Steak, chicken, fish, mushy vegetables, and a salad bar including cheese and cold cuts. Mostly the divers see food as little more than fuel—they might consume up to 6,000 calories each day (more than double the recommended intake) to keep up with their demanding shifts in the water. They also take healthy doses of multivitamins, with an emphasis on vitamin D, to make up for the lack of sunlight. The food itself is unaffected by the pressure, but taste buds tend to get muted. Hot sauce is a popular personal item, but the divers must be sure to loosen the cap—otherwise the bottle of hot sauce (or shampoo, or clove oil in Hovey’s case) will implode during pressurization or explode during depressurization.

The toilet and shower are in the wet pot, and it is no easy feat to flush a toilet safely at that kind of pressure. There is a famous, unverifiable, and, we can only hope, apocryphal story about a diver whose buttocks created a seal with the toilet seat, so that when he opened a valve to flush, the pressure differential—well, it’s best not to say too much more, other than that toilet safety is taken very, very seriously. “The toilet must be filled halfway with water before use,” says Tweddle. “After use we request a flush, [a technician] opens a valve on surface, allowing us to operate two valves in a particular order to empty the toilet into the holding tank, then empty the tank into the ship’s wastewater system.” In other words, every flush is at least a two-person, multi-step job.

The six-man dive crews split into teams of two or three and alternate shifts. They are woken up an hour before they need to leave the ship. They eat and hydrate and use the bathroom (Tweddle says that one quality that makes a good saturation diver is “the ability to shit on command.”) They put on a layer of their own clothing, followed by their water-tight diving suits, which are equipped with circulating hot water systems to prevent hypothermia.

The dive team seals itself off in the wet pot and then, through the hatch in the ceiling, gets into a diving bell, at the same pressure as the chamber. Both spaces are sealed, and then they disconnect—what’s known as a “transfer under pressure.” Anytime seals are made or broken under that kind of extreme pressure there is the danger that a mishap could lead to an explosive decompression. One of saturation diving’s worst accidents occurred in 1983, when a dive bell was detached from the transfer hatch before it was completely sealed. Four divers and one dive technician were killed instantly and gruesomely. (Newer saturation systems have locking mechanisms to prevent this from happening.)

The bell, shaped like an egg and about the size of a shower stall, is crammed with gauges, switches, communication equipment, and loops of hoses, referred to as umbilicals, that carry gas, electricity, voice communication, hot water, and video feeds back and forth between the divers’ helmets and the ship, via the bell. Once the bell detaches from the chamber, it is guided over to a moonpool—a hole in the boat’s hull, essentially—where it is lowered by cable to the working depth. One diver stays in the bell to monitor breathing, hot water, communication, and electrical systems. The other diver (or other two) puts on a dive helmet (a “hat” to the divers) and departs out the bottom for six uninterrupted hours in the water. During that time, urinating isn’t an issue—it’s pretty much the only job in the world where it is expected that you will pee in your pants.

Hovey, on his Gulf assignment, was working to clear a hurricane-toppled, garbage-strewn platform dating to the 1970s. The job was supposed to take 14 days—52 days later work was suspended until the spring because of bad weather. Most of the work involved collecting massive amounts of junk—“anything bigger than a breadbox or smaller than a VW bus”—and placing it in large baskets that could be raised by the ship’s crane. There were old barrels and pipes and chemical tanks and stainless-steel banding material that comes in huge rolls but littered the area like 500-foot-long Slinkys. Divers carry minimal tools with them; everything else they need gets sent down directly from the ship—saws, torches, wrenches, welding equipment, collection bags.

Hovey and the others also needed to cut the platform’s original eight legs off, 20 feet below the mud. This required using a massive water jet to create ditches around them and then cutting through the legs with an oversized band saw—all while keeping an eye out for a mudslide in near-zero visibility. “Say an old diesel engine that's halfway up your ditch wall finally starts working its way out,” Hovey says. “Everything kind of moves slow, so you'll notice a little mud going past your leg and then all of a sudden there's this huge bunch of pressure on your lower back and then it’s on your upper back and it’s starting to push you over and unless you climb onto the top of it you'll definitely get buried.” Generally, the divers aim for neutral buoyancy, but they’re not swimming around with fins like recreational divers. They hop-walk like moon men, often in beat-up rubber boots.

Nobody works deep at the bottom of the ocean without an extensive background in commercial diving in shallower waters and lengthy, costly training in areas such as mixed-gas and closed-bell diving. Just signing up for those advanced courses requires a substantial amount of commercial dive time and even once one is fully certified, it can be hard to get hired for a saturation dive job without trusted people to vouch for your ability to work under those conditions without losing it. Despite all this effort, the occupation has a high attrition rate—though leaving the field isn’t always voluntary. Hovey guesses that of every 20 guys who graduate from a training program, maybe one is still doing the work after five years. Some leave because of the difficulty or long weeks away from home, but this is also a job that takes lives. There are not good statistics about saturation diving death rates, but a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report from 1998 estimated that the occupational fatality rate for all commercial divers is 40 times the national average for other professions. Many divers have close calls that convince them that it’s not worth the risk.

Hovey recalls moments of deep panic. Once, his umbilicals got tangled up in a tool rack that had been lowered down. The movement of the boat above began to jerk him around and he worried the force was about to separate him from his gas supply. “You have to calm down, take some breaths, and say, ‘You are the only one that can help yourself. No one's going to come down here and help you.’” Some divers have cheated death, with help from their partners, or through a combination of discipline, training, and luck, but usually when things go wrong, they go wrong very fast, with catastrophic consequences.

In 2016, Hovey was working in the Gulf of Mexico, replacing a long piece of vertical pipe. The crew attached a temporary support, a heavy rod they call a “strong back”—to keep the pipe from bending during installation. Because of a miscommunication, the strong back was released from the top before the bottom. It rolled around and, Hovey believes, crushed a diver—the one on the shift just after his—against the pipe. Back in the sat system, Hovey got word that there had been an accident. As attending medic, he readied first-aid items, but when the bell returned, he saw right away that the diver’s hat had been crushed. Protocol required Hovey and the other divers to perform 45 minutes of CPR. Then they respectfully moved his body to a hyperbaric lifeboat/decompression chamber available to all sat systems. The support team could do an accelerated, emergency decompression, since he was already dead. It still took two days.

Tweddle believes that all the crazy stuff he saw as a police diver (dead bodies) makes him pretty hard to rattle, but he’s had scary moments, too. In particular, there have been the times when he started breathing so hard that the system couldn’t keep up. It’s a perfect storm for panic, as you breathe an excess of carbon dioxide and begin to huff harder and harder. The only way out is to wrestle down the fear and breathe as slowly as possible until the system catches up. It’s so common a phenomenon that divers have a name for it, “Breathing past your hat.”

In addition to the physical demands, moving around large pieces of equipment in a medium the human body is not well suited to, the work requires incredible focus and is done in near-zero or zero (black water) visibility. The dive hats have lights, but that can make things worse when particles in the water scatter light around. The divers must be in constant communication with the topside dive supervisor, who guides the work, troubleshoots, and sends down equipment. But ultimately whether they succeed or fail at the job—and stay alive—is on the divers alone.

Much of Tweddle's work these days is helping plug and cap wells. You might imagine that beneath each platform is a single well, but wells might be as far as five or six miles away from the platform, and they often come in clusters—imagine using 10 straws to drink a milkshake instead of just one. But now the North Sea oil run is winding down, as the price of oil stagnates and the cost of extraction from increasingly empty fields grows. New exploration has gravitated to areas too deep for even saturation divers. Soon, the jobs will be harder to come by.

Days in sat become a blur of work and rest and boredom, perhaps punctuated by fear. Sometimes, despite dynamic positioning systems that compensate for wind and swells, bad weather suspends work, and the vessel might even return to port without the divers knowing—until a strange face suddenly pops up outside one of the chamber’s portholes. The divers soon realize that they are being stared at like monkeys in a cage. Or, rather, monkeys in a small, pressurized metal tube.

The general rule for depressurization—desat—is 24 hours for each 100 feet of pressure. Those are some of the hardest days, the divers say, with no work to break the monotony and with the comforts of home—sunlight, big beds, privacy, home-cooked food, wives, kids—so close. Desat mostly takes place in the chamber, but Hovey has done two-man desats in the small hyperbaric lifeboat (which can keep the divers under pressure for 72 hours if the ship were to sink), so work can continue with a new team.

Even desat is stressful on the body. Divers report joint pain, headaches, shortness of breath. Experienced divers know the difference between these symptoms and the start of something more serious. On one job, Tweddle worked with a relatively inexperienced diver who felt panicky about his symptoms during desat. The only cure for early signs of the decompression sickness is to return to higher pressure, so the whole team had to start again. It’s imperative, in this job, to err on the side of safety.

When the divers finally come out of the chamber, the adjustment is both emotional and physical. They emerge pale and disoriented, like prisoners released from solitary, drained and irritable, body clocks out of whack. Tweddle finds it hard to train his body not to eat quite so much. He has to be on guard for waistline expansion since there are now strict body mass index guidelines for North Sea divers.

Hovey owns some land in the central Texas pine woods, and he usually spends a few days there alone before trying to reintegrate with the noise and chaos of family life. His kids give him a wide berth after a job, and he and his wife like to start dating all over again as a way to reconnect. It’s hard to shake the feeling that he is in suspended animation while in sat, even though life goes on. “My family is constantly trying to grow and be better versions of themselves,” he says. “Sometimes being away for work, I get left in the dust.”

But by the time the phone rings for the next job, both he and Tweddle will be ready. There’s something about the isolation and asceticism and discipline (and, of course, the money) that they are drawn to. Or maybe it’s the idea that they are working on the edges of human capability, facing danger with calm and planning, members of a club with very, very few members. They are, in so many ways, like astronauts. Only no one’s ever heard of them.

* This article was updated for the correct spelling of Steve Tweddle's name.

Pyongyang has a pizza scene, but only for the upper crust.

Hwang Kim, a South Korean artist, recently made headlines for smuggling unusual contraband across the border to North Korea: home-cooking videos. They are part of a series of short films Kim directed, dubbed “Pizzas for the People,” that he burned onto 500 DVDs. His culinary espionage wasn’t for kicks, though. It was a sly act of resistance intended, in his words, to “subtly [challenge] an ideological status quo.”

“Pizzas for the People” is a cooking show-cum-fake documentary series that follows several South Korean actors. "The film is intended to be a highly stylised satire of NK, where you need to be part of the political élite to eat pizza," he writes. But Kim’s films also ask the audience to imagine the unthinkable: “What if North Korea became democratic? What mechanisms will be at play in this transformation?” And, “What will North Koreans do with their newfound freedom?”

His answer includes making pizza together. In the first film, the young protagonist shows viewers how to hack a pizza at home by using a whiskey bottle as a roller. In it, she criticizes the exclusive nature of pizza restaurants in Pyongyang, which has seen several Italian-inspired eateries open in recent years, despite years of ongoing food shortages and undernourishment. “It is so hard to get the chance to eat there,” she says. “It’s like asking for the moon and stars.”

Kim made the films in response to the highly-publicized opening of a Pyongyang pizzeria in 2009. "In North Korea, there is very limited access to influences from other cultures, for ordinary people, at least,” Kim told Deutsche-Welle. “The political leadership has these privileges, of course. And suddenly there was a pizzeria in North Korea. But very few people could actually eat there."

At around $5-10 each, pizza is still astronomically expensive for many locals. (In 2016, North Korea's per capita gross national income was estimated to be around 1.5 million won, or $1,342 a year.) So only a small elite in the North Korean capital, as well as diplomats and wealthy foreigners, can afford to enjoy the growing pizza scene.

But that's not the story told by North Korean-adjacent media. Ri Bong Nyo, a server at one Italian joint, told NK News that everyone could enjoy the pies, and that they were so popular that street vendors are now hawking Italian fare, too. "General Kim Jong-il said that the people should also be allowed access to the world's famous dishes," Kim Sang-Soon, a manager for the restaurant, told Choson Sinbo, the Tokyo-based newspaper that's said to be chummy with the regime.

The Hermit Kingdom isn’t exactly known for embracing outside influences. But as Munchies notes, the rise of a middle class in the past 10 years (it's small, but very well-off compared to the average North Korean family) has propelled the expansion of non-Korean restaurants. This includes a western-style coffee shop, popular sushi bars, and a burger restaurant. But in a city with only a handful of visitable restaurants, it’s Pyongyang’s handful of Italian places that stand out. In fact, in 2016, there were more Italian restaurants in Pyongyang than Chinese restaurants.

The first of these establishments to serve pizza, the Pyolmuri Café, was a European-inspired establishment. Run by the Adventist Development and Relief Agency, its profits funded local relief work. But like many North Korean developments, the country’s burgeoning Italian scene was largely due to its dictator’s whim. That’s especially true in the the case of the aptly-named Pizza Restaurant, which opened in 2009. A decade or so in the making, it fulfilled Kim Jong-il’s longtime dream to open a pizzeria in North Korea. Back in the 1990s, he flew in a team of Italian chefs to teach local cooks how to make pizza (down to the spacing between olives). Jong-il shuttled chefs to Naples and Rome to accrue pizza-making secrets, reportedly had stone pizza ovens flown in, and eventually opened the pizzeria.

A more recent addition, Italy Pizzeria, opened its doors in 2016. North Korean chefs sling pies in an extravagant-looking space, chandeliers and all. Some tourists and guides have said that while the pizza in Pyongyang isn’t exactly authentic, it’s decent enough, with a few twists. The chefs don’t throw the dough, and they cover pies with less cheese in lieu of toppings such as kimchi and fruit—something we also see in one of Kim’s videos, where the dough is likened to “a western pancake.” Other reviewers struggled with the slices because, among other issues, the dough was “soft and flavorless, and lacked any bite.”

But for many North Koreans, pizza is something they seldom get to see or try. That’s what makes Kim’s smuggled videos especially impactful. By imagining the country as a place where anything is possible, the films invite North Koreans to explore food on their own terms—and to question why mostly politicians and military leaders get to enjoy Pyongyang’s pizzerias. It helps that distributing the videos on the black market, as Kim did, apparently isn’t that tough to do. "It's an open secret that cross-border smuggling is thriving," Kim said. "Goods and money are always getting into the country that way. Officially, of course, it's banned, but the North Korean government turns a blind eye because it's good for its economy."

Kim has said that the smugglers eventually brought back fan mail from people who had seen the videos in North Korea. Upon returning, they told Kim that they quickly found takers for the videos. Due to the country’s isolation and censorship, and going just on reports from the smugglers, it’s tough to know whether Kim’s pointed message resonated among many North Koreans. But just the fact that some people included photos of themselves with their homemade pies is a strong testament to the power of pizza—especially when it’s in the hands of the people.

They tried to make industrial alcohol too lethal to drink.

On January 15, 1922, the New York Times reported that 35-year-old Robert Doyle, a veteran of World War One, was found blinded and afraid in his rooming house on West 23rd Street. A doctor conveyed Doyle to the hospital, where he died six hours later. The paper also reported the death of another local man—he had brought alcohol home from his workplace to add to his coffee. The problem was that America was in the midst of Prohibition, and he had worked at a furniture-polishing company. Both men had drunk a fatal dose of wood, or methyl, alcohol.

These deaths were part of an epidemic of alcohol poisonings that swept the country after the United States made the manufacture and sale of alcohol illegal in 1919. An illicit alcohol industry boomed, and despite increased border security, alcohol flowed in from Mexico and Canada. But some bootleggers, eager to cash in on black market prices, wanted to sell alcohol made closer to home. The government could ban the brewing of beer, but not the production of industrial alcohol, which was used to make everything from perfume to paint. So when bootleggers redistilled industrial alcohol to make it drinkable, the federal government responded by requiring manufacturers to add in increasing amounts of poison.

Doyle was an early casualty of the resulting showdown between federal chemists, who tried to make the country's industrial alcohol deadly to drink, and speakeasies' and bootleggers' chemists, who tried to remove the poisons. The Times article describing Doyle's death noted that an unnamed but “prominent” local club had employed a chemist to double-check that patrons’ booze was safe to drink. The problem, reported the anonymous writer, was that much of the liquor flowing into speakeasies hadn’t been brewed abroad, but was in fact “denatured” industrial alcohol.

Manufacturers had been adding poison to industrial alcohol in America for decades. In 1906, Congress passed a law decreeing that industrial alcohol was exempt from taxes, provided that enough toxic additives made it undrinkable. The government also configured dozens of official formulas for denaturing alcohol to make it poisonous. But during Prohibition, well-paid chemists working for bootleggers soon found that boiling industrial alcohol in stills evaporated most of the poison. However, they also discovered that it was often impossible to remove it all.

The results were deadly. Bootleggers sold the treated alcohol, and newspapers kept tallies of Americans suspected of dying from poisonous liquor. Often, victims were working-class or poor—people who couldn’t afford smuggled beer or whiskey. But anti-Prohibition activists were sure of one thing: The National Prohibition Act, which had been ratified to halt alcohol’s negative impact on society, was the cause.

Chemists with criminal leanings found ready employment during Prohibition. Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York, writes that the easiest alcohol to convert was Formula 39b—it was mild, intended for perfumes and cosmetics, and “renatured” almost perfectly into entirely drinkable liquor. As the federal government introduced formula after formula, chemists managed to distill out the danger. According to Blum, by 1926, the federal government had retired three formulas entirely, since bootlegger chemists had gotten so good at distilling them away. A former administrator remembered raiding illicit distilleries and finding advanced chemistry setups on site.

By Christmas 1926, it was impossible to ignore the crisis. In New York alone, dozens of people died from drinking during holiday festivities. On the cusp of that shocking death toll, the federal government announced a requirement to add twice as much methanol, which was deadly and impossible to filter out. But officials also ordered the addition of benzine and oxidized kerosene, in order to increase the alcohol’s foul smell. This would become known as “Formula 5,” and it was rumored that three drinks containing the mix would result in blindness or death. Despite the increased danger, proponents believed that its noxious aroma would warn people away. The greatest cheerleader of poisoned liquor was Wayne B. Wheeler, the general counsel of the Anti-Saloon League, who frequently stated that people poisoned by alcohol were committing suicide.

That attitude was widespread. To many “dry” activists, the idea that people would still drink despite the danger was baffling. But others denounced the policy. Senator Edward Edwards from New Jersey accused both Wheeler and the federal government of “legalized murder.”

In April 1927, Popular Science magazine attempted to explain the furor. “Uncle Sam has been on trial before the bar of public opinion,” observed writer Dr. Frederic Damrau, “charged for no less a crime than willful and premeditated murder.” Damrau weighed the opinions of both sides, before stating that “the alcohol is made poisonous not with the idea of killing drinkers, but because the only known unremovable denaturant happens to be poisonous.” Federal chemists, meanwhile, were working to develop a noxious but non-lethal substance that could not be removed.

In 1930, they announced that they had found one: alcotate, a petroleum byproduct. With its sulfurous odor of garlic and rotten eggs, it would make drinkers violently ill without poisoning them. But by then, bootleggers had shifted to brewing their own hooch from yeast, water and sugar. According to Blum, an estimated 10,000 people may have died during Prohibition from federal denaturing requirements: a gruesome death toll for a program intended to help people.

Old parchment is full of creative fixes.

In the Cantonal and University Library in the ancient city of Fribourg, Switzerland, is a 14th-century manuscript with some gloriously beautiful defects. Scattered throughout the text are small tears and holes. And many of them have been carefully, intricately stitched together with colorful thread.

Medieval manuscripts have all sorts of interesting quirks, from strange marginalia to dazzling jeweled bindings, and the basis of most of these books, parchment, has its own story. Parchment is created by soaking an animal skin—usually sheep, goat, or calf—in a lime solution and then stretching it onto a wooden frame. The parchment maker then repeatedly scrapes the skin with a curved knife to remove any flesh or hair until the skin is suitably taut, thin and smooth. It is a lengthy process, and has always been susceptible to mistakes and natural imperfections.

“Any sort of defect in the skin itself will open up into a hole because you're stretching the skin,” says Christine Sciacca, Associate Curator of European Art at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. In addition, stretched skin has “an irregular perimeter, so you're trying to transform an irregularly shaped piece of animal skin into a rectangular book form,” she explains. The parchment could also be damaged by the scraping. Holes in the parchment weren’t always dealt with, but when they were, any repairs needed to be done before it could be written on. This might include both patching over holes and evening out edges, explains Sciacca. The repair method could be crude or rudimentary—“Frankenstein” repairs, as Sciacca jokingly calls them—but, as writer Paul Cooper recently highlighted, sometimes they could be quite beautiful.

In that same 14th-century text in Fribourg, a single page is elegantly adorned with two sets of thin stitches, one pink, one green. Elsewhere in the same manuscript there are rainbow-hued repairs of different shapes and sizes. In a text held at the Engelberg Abbey library in Switzerland, stitches at the edge of the page create a “rope”, as Sciacca refers to it, to fill in the edge of the parchment. And from the same library, the missing side of one page has been patched with an additional square of parchment.

As medieval book historian Erik Kwakkel points out, these repairs must have been common in certain monasteries. “Where I was finding a lot of these embellishments were in manuscripts that came from either nunneries, or from what they call in Germany, double cloisters,” Sciacca says. “So you have this paired male and female monastic community. They live separately, but they're allied with each other, and they're physically located next to each other. So it seems that this may be part of what was, in fact, women's training, what was nuns’ training, which was to practice embroidery. And they were doing it not just on textiles, but also actually in manuscripts."

Stitching wasn’t the only way to make the best of flawed parchment. There are instances of holes being incorporated into illustrations, or used to reveal an illustration on the following page. The stitches themselves could even be embellished. In a text in Germany’s Bamberg State Library, a curve of plain-colored stitching is surrounded with the drawing of a man so that the thread resembles his skeleton.

Embroidered repairs weren't the only use of textiles in medieval manuscripts—or even the only use of textiles on a single page. In a 13th-century text held at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, a silk flap obscures an illuminated letter, while the bottom corner of the same page has been repaired with thread. Sciacca says this type of embellishment—curtains, she calls them—was mainly used in liturgical texts, and added an extra element to a priest's reading. “It’s a very performative thing,” says Sciacca. Sometimes they were placed over more disturbing imagery—depicting the Apocalypse, for example—to add weight and meaning for the viewer.

Atlas Obscura has a selection of images of these beautifully flawed manuscripts.

The notorious photo editor who introduced "America to Americans."

From his office at the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in Washington, D.C., Roy Stryker saw, time and again, the reality of the Great Depression, and the poverty and desperation gripping America’s rural communities. As head of the Information Division and manager of the FSA’s photo-documentary project, his job was to hire and brief photographers, and then select images they captured for distribution and publication. His eye helped shape the way we view the Great Depression, even today.

Professionally, Stryker was known for two things: preserving thousands of photographs from being destroyed for political reasons, and for “killing” lots of photos himself. Negatives he liked were selected to be printed. Those he didn’t—ones that didn’t fit the narrative and perspective of the FSA at the time, perhaps—were met with the business end of hole punch, which left gaping black voids in place of hog’s bellys, industrial landscapes, and the faces of farmworkers.

In 1935, the Resettlement Administration (RA) was established as part of the New Deal to provide relief, recovery, and reform to rural areas. The FSA, created in 1937, was its spiritual successor. The FSA’s duties included, but were not limited to, operating camps for victims of the Dust Bowl, setting up homestead communities, and providing education to more than 400,000 migrant families. Communicating about its efforts was also part of its mandate.

Prior to the dissolution of the RA, its head, Rexford Tugwell, lured Stryker, a fellow economist and amateur photographer, to Washington to be involved with the agency. According to James Cletus Anderson's Roy Stryker: The Humane Propagandist, he instructed Stryker to “show the city people what it's like to live on the farm," and what became the FSA’s documentary photography project was born. The goal was to introduce "America to Americans," and keep public opinion, especially in the cities, favorable toward the New Deal.

Until that point, the U.S. government had appeared largely uninterested in supporting the economic security of its citizens, unlike some other countries at the time. Public sentiment was that the government doesn’t owe you anything: no federal minimum wage, no social security, no system of low-cost healthcare. If you were broke, you were on your own.

In 1932, Herbert Hoover’s sluggish response to the burgeoning economic crisis handed Franklin D. Roosevelt over 80 percent of the vote. Though many programs of his New Deal were temporary (Civilian Conservation Corps, National Recovery Administration, Works Progress Administration), others continue to this day, including the Social Security Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and what would eventually become the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Roosevelt’s policies were met with opposition, on the foundation that state welfare went against America’s individualistic nature. To combat this, supporters of the New Deal wanted to show just how dire the situation had become, and illustrate the necessity of intervention. According to various sources, urban Americans had a hard time understanding the intense suffering in the countryside. “Seeing is believing” had long been used as a tool for social reform, and Stryker believed in its power.

Stryker sought out photographers, among them Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks, and Arthur Rothstein, and made their images readily available to the press. Given the lack of new photography and art being produced during the Great Depression, the photos regularly appeared in magazines such as LIFE and Look. He also had them displayed at the 1936 Democratic National Convention, the 1936 World's Fair, the Museum of Modern Art, and other prominent venues. The publication of a series of early photographs, including Lange’s Migrant Mother, proved instrumental in pushing the federal government to provide emergency aid to migrant workers in California.

In the effort to represent the FSA and Roosevelt’s signature domestic achievement in a positive light, the chosen photos captured how the idealistic views of farm life were being tainted by poverty, and how the FSA programs were helping farmers reclaim their dignity. Common elements were decrepit housing conditions, the lack of food and clean water, and harsh work environments.

It was government propaganda, and there were certainly some within the government (both supporters and detractors) who saw it that way, and more who considered both the FSA and its photography project as communist and un-American. In a 1972 Interview, Stryker admits to having felt political pressure from the Department of Agriculture to portray the effectiveness of the New Deal. "Go to hell," was his response. His photographers "were warned repeatedly not to manipulate their subjects in order to get more dramatic images, and their pictures were almost always printed without cropping or retouching."

But there is a way to manipulate the story being told without altering the images themselves—the process of photo editing, of choosing which images to highlight and which to discard. And this Stryker did with a particular zeal. He was known to be “a little bit dictatorial in his editing,” recalls Ben Shahn, a photographer who worked with him, in an interview from the time. Many photographers both appreciated and disliked him. Lange called him “hospitable” and a “genius,” and Parks stated in an interview that they all owed “a great deal of thanks to Roy for what he did for us,” but also acknowledged that “there were times when I thought he was a real mean hombre.” Others, including Walker Evans, did not get along with Stryker at all, and left the project over his ideological differences.

Stryker never said why he killed certain photos and kept others, or why it was necessary to ritualistically kill negatives with a hole punch. But a review of the killed images, which survive in digital and physical form in the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives Collection at the Library of Congress, reveals some of his preferences. The most prominent feature of the photographs is illustration of the resoluteness of the “American Spirit,” and the rugged individualism of rural families. These images appear to depict the New Deal as a leg up for struggling Americans, rather than a crutch for the lazy. Empathy and subject-viewer connection are also strong themes, as is inviting viewers into the subjects’ private spaces and moments.

Another theme is scale, including images that show a larger setting or environment, or that capture communities as a whole. Stryker also tended to kill images with people smiling. Interestingly, it is possible in the collection to see sets of images depicting the same subjects—such as the portrait of the washerwomen below—in which Stryker chose somber moments over moments of levity. These are clear cases in which the story of the photos is dictated by the editor’s hand. Given the choice between pathos and smiles, Stryker put a hole in any image that could leave city-dwellers with clear consciences. And sometimes, he just chose the best image.

After the beginning of World War II reoriented the country’s efforts, the FSA became the Office of War Information (OWI). Stryker grew concerned that the images that he had fought so hard to insulate from political influence might be misused by the OWI, so he used his still-substantial political clout to ensure the images were preserved in the Library of Congress.

Today, more than 170,000 prints are publicly available. Not only do they offer a peek into lives that most Americans know little about, they continue to inspire documentary photographers and serve as a reminder of how easily dissolution and desperation can become regular presences in American life.

From this vast collection, Atlas Obscura has curated a selection of Stryker's hole-punched photographs below, each above its approved counterpart.

Alexander Fleming, the researcher who discovered it, started culturing commemorative keepsakes.

The wood box fits in the palm of a hand. The brass medallion inside it is the size of a sand dollar, or the bottom of a cup. It looks vaguely geological—like a fossil, sandy brown and eggshell white—and rests on a bed of velvet.

At first glance, “it’s almost like you’re opening a jewelry box,” says Anne Garner, curator at the New York Academy of Medicine Library. “Then here’s this bacteria.”

The medallion was made by Alexander Fleming, the Scottish microbiologist who first stumbled upon the mold that would become the basis of penicillin. Once he started fashioning little objects to commemorate his discovery, he couldn’t stop himself from churning them out.

Fleming’s discovery of penicillin was the product of luck and a slovenly streak. In 1928, he was working in the inoculation department at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, where he researched the treatment of boils. One night, he left his workspace in disarray. Some accounts say he piled his dishes in the sink, while others maintain that he left them strewn across the lab bench; some recount that he left town for weeks, and others suggest that an assistant simply cracked a window overnight.

What’s certain is that his untidy habits turned out to be fortuitous. Fleming had been studying Staphylococcus, and when he returned to the lab, he spotted yellow-green mold growing on one of the cultures where he’d smeared the bacteria. It looked like the whole thing was ruined. But before he pitched it into the garbage bin, he took a closer look. There were a handful of patches from which the bacteria seemed to have been scrubbed. Where the mold grew, it turned out, Staphylococci didn’t.

Fleming dubbed the fungus Penicillium notatum. Over the next few years, he performed a few experiments and determined that it wasn’t toxic. But he then moved on to other projects, and it wasn’t until the 1930s and '40s that two other scientists, Ernst Boris Chain and Sir Howard Walter Florey, fully investigated the mold’s potential as an antibiotic and began to scale up production of penicillin. In 1945, the lot of them—Chain, Florey, and Fleming—shared the Nobel Prize, "for the discovery of penicillin and its curative effect in various infectious diseases.”

Once he achieved laureate status, Fleming couldn’t stop making moldy medallions. Fleming used portions of the original culture to grow more on slips of paper, then pressed these between lenses from his brother, an optician. The result was a transparent display with the benefit of a tight seal.

It’s unclear exactly how many were in circulation. Fleming described them as rare, but also appeared to consider them to be a kind of social currency to mint when it suited him—which it often did. He handed them out to esteemed colleagues and leading ladies, including Marlene Dietrich. (“It almost seems like a flirtation,” Garner says. “Like, ‘Here, have a culture.’”) The one in the NYAM collection was a gift from Fleming to the American actress Ruth Draper, whose father—a prominent New York City physician—donated it to the collection. Fleming also gave moldy keepsakes to President Roosevelt and the Pope, Garner adds, as well as members of the British royal family.

The gifts weren’t always well received. By the time Fleming presented one to Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, in a June 1954 celebration commemorating the 25th anniversary of the discovery, the royals were already flush with bacterial cultures. It was the second medallion that Fleming had gifted the prince in the span of six months, and the Queen Mother already had one of her own, too. Philip was said to quip that maybe he had all the bacterial cultures he needed, telling one of his household officers, “every time I meet this chap Fleming, he gives me one of these bloody things.”

Garner suspects that Fleming created roughly 20 medallions in all. These days, at least a few people seem glad to have them—or at least are willing to pay for the privilege. A medallion held by Fleming’s niece netted $14,592 at auction in 2017, and the Pfizer corporation bought one from Sotheby’s for $35,000 in 1996.

Though this type of object is more immune than, say, books are from being damaged by moisture and temperature fluctuations, NYAM still houses it in a vault equipped with environmental monitoring tools. “It’s one of our more secure locations in the building,” Garner says.

This September, the medallion will be on view as part of the exhibition, Germ City: Microbes in the Metropolis, a collaboration between the NYAM and the Museum of the City of New York. Meanwhile, Garner occasionally brings it out to show to library visitors. “People are often really moved by it,” she says. “People have cried in front of me. It’s an amazing moment of medical progress.”

Even in the era of antibiotic-resistant infections, it’s hard to overstate the drugs’ contributions to prolonging human life. (Penicillin also kept Fleming himself afloat during a bout of pneumonia in 1953.) “You’ve probably taken penicillin in some form or another, or had a kid or a mother who took it,” Garner says. Hundreds of millions of prescriptions have been dispensed over the decades, and the medallions are a tangible way to consider how it all began—by accident, in a petri dish.

Mobile medics make the trek to care for aging Gurkhas, a group of Nepali soldiers recruited by the British Army.

On an early Monday morning in April, in a Kathmandu valley suburb, a dozen young men dressed in green gym shorts and jerseys are sweating through the last round of sit-ups. The branding on their backs—“Royal Gurkhas Training Centre”—is all that sets them apart from countless morning workouts around the globe. Their goal is to compete against approximately 10,000 other Nepalese men for just around 250 openings in the British Army’s Gurkha units, a tradition with a 200-year history.

“Most of them are from poor families; they come from villages,” says Urgendra Lama, a teacher at Lotus Training Institute, a popular Gurkha training center in Pokhara, central Nepal. Lama teaches the boys English, math, and interview skills, all part of the British Army’s annual selection process.

Others are following in the footsteps of their fathers and grandfathers, and those Gurkhas before them who have served in nearly every British war over the past two centuries.

When Britain’s East India Company and Nepal’s army fought over territory in 1815, the Europeans were so impressed with the courage and discipline displayed by the men of the Himalayas, they began to recruit the so-called “martial race,” a colonial designation for ethnicities with warrior-like qualities. To this day, the Brigade of Gurkhas—a collective reference that encompasses various Gurkha-staffed units—has the legendary reputation in the U.K. of being elite fighters, and is bestowed with the highest prestige in Nepali society.

There are currently 2,900 Gurkhas in the British military, but at one point, during World War II, there were 120,000. Those who survived Burmese jungles, European winters, and African deserts to return home, found themselves in a bureaucratic battle with a British Army that denied them equal pay and benefits.

Even today, thousands of elderly Gurkha veterans, and their families, depend on charity for basic needs, including pensions and healthcare.

It took a seven-hour bus journey, along winding roads from the capital city of Kathmandu, and a two-hour walk on dirt paths too small for a car, to reach Chandra Kumari’s village, perched on a picturesque hillside in the western Himalayas. Her husband, who had fought for the British in World War II, had died just over a month prior, so now the 93-year-old widow is one of thousands of beneficiaries of the Gurkha Welfare Trust, a British charity set up in 1969 to keep Gurkha veterans and their families from destitution.

Despite the distance, this house call was not terribly daunting for Dr. Sobi Maya Tamang, who is used to trekking for three days along cliffs in the eastern Himalayas to reach a patient. Tamang has been the Trust’s mobile doctor for seven years, visiting Gurkha veterans in some of the world’s most remote areas. That far in the mountains, a walk between one house and the next can take an entire day.

“That’s the life in the village,” says Tamang. “If you have to go to another relative’s house, or if you have to get to a certain place, you have no choice but to walk up and down the hill.” She, like other Nepalis, calls everything short of snow-capped peaks such as Mt. Everest “hills.”

Every three months, the Trust’s beneficiaries collect their pensions from a district office, which also requires days of walking, typically barefoot.

“Even if we give them slippers or shoes, they find it very difficult to wear,” Tamang says of the villagers. “They just carry the shoes and walk barefoot because all their life they have been walking barefoot. If I ask them why don’t they wear the shoes, they say, ‘It’s very uncomfortable for me.’”

The quarterly visits to the district office are also opportunities to report medical problems, and that’s one of the ways Tamang gets notified that she’s needed. Typically, anyone under 90 makes the trek themselves, and if they are too old, or not well, a family member might come in their stead, according to Tamang.

All things considered, Kumari’s village was not far from the town of Gorkha. With some help from neighbors, Tamang swiftly located her patient’s one-room house built from red clay and corrugated iron, and Kumari pulled out woven mats for seating on the cement porch. With neighbors and extended family watching, Tamang checked her patient’s pulse and blood pressure, and listened to the wheezing in her lungs. The woman confessed she didn’t know how to properly use an inhaler she’d been given, and Tamang patiently went through the steps.

In other house visits, the doctor would be welcomed into the home. But despite her hospitality, Kumari didn’t make such an offer.

“She is a Brahmin,” Tamang explains, referring to Kumari’s Hindu caste. Considering her culture and way of life, Tamang concluded the elderly woman likely didn’t want “beef-eaters” in her home, thereby risking bad luck. Dietary practices vary depending on region and culture, and some Brahmin and Hindus are vegetarian, and many don’t eat beef. Tamang, like many Nepalis, incorporates both Buddhist and Hindu practices into her daily life, and says she knew Kumari’s caste by seeing the patient’s name.

Despite being a tiny country of 29 million sandwiched between India and China, specifically the autonomous region of Tibet, Nepal is incredibly diverse There are more than 100 ethnic groups or castes, as well as languages, in a country half the size, in terms of both population and land area, of the United Kingdom. Tamang regularly comes across patients in remote villages who speak one of over 100 dialects instead of the national Nepali language.

Regardless of this diversity, any Nepali serving in a foreign military or police force—including those in the U.K., India, and Singapore—is called a Gurkha. The Indian Army, which inherited ten Gurkha regiments when India gained independence in 1947, uses the spelling Gorkha. This is in reference to Gorkha, a populous district in the western Himalayas, and a place of significance in Nepal’s history.

Not far from Kumari’s village is Gorkha Durbar, the hilltop palace of Prithvi Narayan Shah, the king who unified rival kingdoms into Nepal in the middle of the 18th century. The kingdom spread from Kashmir to east of Bhutan, and integrated many different peoples.

Gorkha Durbar is now under renovation, three years after a devastating earthquake killed 9,000 people and destroyed much of Nepal. It’s a rare stop for the nearly one million foreigners who visit Nepal each year, but remains a popular destination with domestic tourists, who revere their history.

This is, after all, where the legendary Gurkhas get their name. It was the army, known as the Gorkhali, of the king who ruled from Gorkha that clashed with the world’s largest empire in the Anglo-Nepalese War from 1814 to 1816. During the battle of Kalanga, in one of the numerous near-mythical stories that kicked off the centuries-long relationship between the two militaries, just 600 Gorkhali held a mountain against 4,000 well-armed British troops for a month. The war ended with the signing of the Treaty of Sugauli, which ceded some of Nepal’s territory to British India, and established the U.K.’s right to recruit the warriors who so impressed them in battle.

Tamang, the mobile doctor, grew up hearing her grandfather’s stories about World War II. While her childhood memories are fuzzy, certain details stuck in her mind: the 11 days her grandfather’s captured regiment starved, for example, leading some of the men to attempt to eat bird feces, or the time they needed to figure out which wild plants in the Burmese jungle were edible, by comparing them to vegetation in Nepal.

Tamang’s grandfather returned home a hero and, like so many others, found himself without an income or social safety net.

The Centre for Nepal Studies U.K. found that some 6,500 ex-Gurkha soldiers were not receiving pensions in 2013, and nearly 23,000 ex-Gurkha pensioners or their widows were receiving benefits significantly lower than their British counterparts. Until 1989, that difference was 1,000 percent and, in 2013, it was still 300 percent.

After much public pressure, including from Gurkha associations, celebrities, historians, and lawyers, the U.K. government has made a number of revisions to benefits policies and complicated pension schemes for Gurkhas over the past two decades. In 2007, a decision was made that any Gurkha entering the British Army will receive the same compensation as their British counterparts. In 2009, former Gurkhas received permission to settle in the U.K. The British government has said in public statements that its pension rates for ex-Gurkhas have kept up with standards of living in Nepal.

Despite the family history—and the ongoing battles by advocates for equal benefits and backdated compensation—Tamang’s father, brother, uncles and cousins also joined the British Gurkhas.

“Becoming a Gurkha and going abroad is an opportunity to earn more, to help the family,” Tamang explains. Once a boy is born, what he’ll hear from the family is “one day you’ll be a Gurkha,” she adds. “Even though they have the opportunity to get an education now, still that concept exists.”

Some Nepalese politicians have demanded an end to the recruitment practice, accusing the British and Indian militaries of mistreatment and discrimination. But if the 10,000 hopefuls preparing for this year’s Gurkha selection process all around Nepal are any indication, the tradition with its roots in the British Empire is not going anywhere anytime soon.

The layers of Panga ya Saidi reveal millennia of subtle cultural and technological change.

The Dzitsoni hills wiggle down the Kenyan coast, starting west of the country's oldest city, Mombasa, and stretching some 50 miles north. They're several miles from the shore, with a limestone foundation invisible beneath a thick crust of humid, tropical forest. For 78,000 years, these hills have been home to generation after generation of people, living in a tangle of caves in the foothills.

The entire cave network of Panga ya Saidi is a little over half a mile in length, Michael Petraglia, of the Max Planck Institute, told Haaretz. It is used to this day, though no one has lived inside for many centuries. Instead, these caves, with a main chamber around the size of a small church, are the site of burials and rituals. Petraglia was one of 28 researchers from around the world involved in a recent archaeological excavation and study of Panga ya Saidi, with results published this week in the journal Nature Communications. These excavations, the scientists say, show tens of thousands of years of subtle cultural and technological change.

People first started living in the caves in what is usually called the Middle Stone Age. At first, their technology use seems to have been minimal. Then, some 10,000 years later, the archaeologists say, something shifted, and they began shaping stone into more sophisticated arrowheads, blades, and other tools. From 20,000 years after that, they began producing art, carving images and designs into pieces of bone or tusk.

Three seasons of excavation, between 2010 and 2013, reveal other facts about how these people lived. Despite being close to the coast, they don't appear to have fished, instead living off the animals and plants they found in the forests around the network of caves. (They did, however, gather shells, which they made into beads.)

Flora, fauna, and human life alike seem to have been protected against the fluctuating climates across the rest of Africa, where rainfall waxed and waned. Here, on the Kenyan coast, rain levels remained consistently high. This may be part of the reason why, around 60,000 years ago, the number of people living in the cave increased quite so rapidly.

There are plenty of conclusions to be drawn from these caves—most notably, that people flourished in all kinds of environments, including coastal tropical forests. "The finds at Panga ya Saidi undermine hypotheses about the use of coasts as a kind of 'superhighway' that channeled migrating humans out of Africa, and around the Indian Ocean rim," Petraglia said, in a statement. Instead, for many, they seem to have been a permanent home.