Where to go if you don't enjoy sudden electric bolts from the sky.

There's an old idiom that says lightning never strikes twice in the same place. While storm observers and meteorologists have proven this adage demonstrably false, a new map from global lightning detection network Vaisala shows that some places in the world are more disposed to lightning than others.

Vaisala tracked roughly 8.8 million lightning strikes between 2013 and 2017 and compiled the data into a colorful density map. If you're concerned about the (very low) likelihood of getting hit by lightning, it's best to look at the purple and blue bits. In North America, the Great Plains and Gulf Coast regions are the most prone to these white bolts of heat. Northern parts of Australia's coastline, southern India, the Swiss Alps, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and inland Brazil are just a few of the susceptible hot spots in the world.

The electrical sparks typically result from opposite charges between two storm clouds or a storm cloud and the ground. Up to 24,000 people die of lightning strikes a year globally. For context, around 1.25 million people die in traffic accidents. If you are looking to minimize your chance of an encounter with one of the 8 million bolts that hit Earth every day, Antarctica is the one of the safest options. Egypt and the Patagonia area at the bottom of South America are some alternatives, if you don't like year-round cold.

One last bit of good news: Of those unlucky folks who do happen to become the perfect conduit for a bolt from the sky, 90 percent survive to see another day and another lightning strike.

The genre has had a vibrant life since being born from songs that woke up Muslims during Ramadan.

Across working-class Muslim neighborhoods in Yorubaland, for nearly 50 years, a high-energy sound has been heard on busy street corners and at parties. Fuji, a raw and percussive musical style, was born out of these communities; a cultural cornerstone adapted by a number of players to a backdrop of an continually shifting Nigeria.

Of Fuji’s main proponents, two famous faces sum up the distinct directions the music was taken in. Siriku Ayinde Barrister, often credited as Fuji’s originator, took Yoruba traditions very seriously and would rarely be seen in public without a richly embroidered agbada robe on. Wasiu Ayinde, also known as K1 De Ultimate, the Fuji King, has, over time, become increasingly Westernized: When performing he often dons jeans, a white shirt, suede, a wristwatch (which he collects avidly), and a jacket.

“If you talk about Afrobeat,” says Wale Ademowo, a Nigerian newspaperman who covered music during a 20-year stint at the Tribune in Ibadan, “you say Fela Kuti.” Siriku Ayinde Barrister is the Kuti of Fuji. A gifted vocalist and insightful storyteller, Barrister had performed a Fuji precursor known as Were—tonally complex Koranic chanting played during Ramadan—since 1966. Wale describes it as like gospel music for Yoruba Muslims. The musician excelled in yearly contests where rivals would compete to crowds of onlookers, hoping to impress esteemed judges with their musicality and grasp of current affairs.

Renowned as a social commentator, Barrister later began performing a more secular music that was emerging from Were’s embers. The name was likely a blend of the Yoruba words furuji (used back then as “What’s happening?”) and faaji (meaning “enjoyment”). Rumors of other origins for the name, however, have since circulated—mostly centered around Japan. One such speculation, which Wale disputes, is that Barrister named the genre after the country’s most famous mountain. Another says that the Japanese camera brand, popular in Nigeria at the time, was part of the inspiration for the name, perhaps unconsciously.

Whatever the case, Fuji came to be distinctive in its lyricism. Only the sharpest vocalists could sing it because lyrics were often completely improvised, like in Dancehall or Hip Hop across the Atlantic. Songs about society, politics, love, death, and corruption became commonplace. This, along with lengthy praise-giving tangents—often accompanied at live shows by the throwing of bank notes over the praised person, a sign of wealth in Yoruba tradition—came to define Fuji.

The genre also became known for its rhythmic complexity and its urgent pace. It sounded unlike anything produced in the States or Europe. In the beginning, backing bands, often consisting of over 20 members uniformly dressed in brightly colored prints, would mostly be made up of percussionists and singers. Performers played traditional drums like the calabash, the sekere, the omele, and the bembe, among others. Western instruments were added later, bringing more of a focus on melody alongside pure percussion.

A combination of the name dropping of friends and family, political themes that criticized two military dictatorships, and track lengths that could reach well beyond 15 minutes, meant that Fuji’s radio play was limited. Despite this, in 1988 Barrister recorded the genre’s best-known track, “Fuji Garbage”—one that refused to take itself too seriously. The video of a later version is a 17-minute surrealist marathon, featuring Barrister (clutching a keytar) and friends dancing in cocaine-white trousers, sets of garish sunglasses, and bright orange tops. The Fuji Creator’s righteous reputation among his core fans remained, however, and on the back of the song’s national success, he went on to rework it again and again.

In the years that Barrister was coming up as a musician, his friend’s younger brother watched in awe. Hailing from the slums of Lagos Island, 7-year-old Wasiu Ayinde would stand at the back of the crowd, among large groups of traditionally robed devotees, transfixed by the leader and his 30-strong band.

Having eventually plucked up the courage to approach Barrister, the kid from Lagos confessed that he, too, wanted to be a Were singer. “He laughed it off,” Wasiu recalled some years on, though the exchange gave him “great motivation.” The budding vocalist was hell-bent on becoming a great and he began work as a roadie for Barrister’s band when he was barely a teenager, handling equipment until he was old enough to take his own music seriously.

And take it seriously he did. Winning every regional Were competition, Wasiu started his own band and began to perform Fuji at 15. But it was two records, released back to back, that established him at the top of the genre’s pyramid as a modernizer: Talazo System and Talazo 84. These albums introduced lyrical street slang and upped the tempo for the dance floor, appealing to a younger crowd who were breaking further from the Islamic traditions the style was steeped in. From then on, his ever-changing backing band, the Talazo Organisation, was based on the fringes of the enormous and chaotic Balogun market on Lagos Island—one of the largest shopping districts in West Africa.

The genesis of “talazo,” the word that came to define Wasiu’s new sound, was a curious one. Due to the Fuji singer’s lean and rakish frame, he had become known as Igi Zegege among fans, meaning “The Slim One” in Yoruba. A rumor (or joke) spread that he must have been taking a drug called Talazo, popular at the time for dealing with an upset stomach, to reduce the size of his belly. Seizing that reputation as an opening, the Fuji musician reclaimed the word as synonymous with his danceable music.

“Wasiu became [to Nigeria] what Michael Jackson was to America in the mid-eighties,” Wale wrote in a biography he published on the Fuji musician in 1996. On the back of that success, which the singer proclaimed “Wasiumania,” he would go on to be crowned the King of Fuji in 1993 by the Nigerian Association of Promoters and Artistes Managers—an accolade that was equal parts publicity stunt and actual award. It caused friction between him and Barrister. Wasiu’s old mentor was in the running among other prominent Fuji singers of that era, including Ayinla Kollington, Abass Obesere, and Adewale Ayuba, though Barrister felt aggrieved not to have been chosen. Above all, he had taught Wasiu everything he knew about music; their once watertight friendship began to fall apart.

The coronation, as Wale remembered it, crammed countrywide crowds into a yellowish hotel called the D’Rovens near Ibadan’s busiest highway. There, Wasiu was presented with a crown and a scepter (which he still uses when he plays today), and gave an impassioned performance into the early hours. “They crowned me because they knew I could be the symbol they were talking about,” Wasiu later said.

While Fuji had come from the streets, originally played in open-air venues to crowds of working-class people, it was reported that violence had plagued performances. Rivalries between Fuji musicians, which the press played on, were said to have bred fanaticism among fans; it got to the point, Wale recalled, that band leaders like Barrister were actively paying off rival gangs to avoid confrontation at shows.


A byproduct of this was a kind of class war that became a strong undercurrent in Fuji’s politics—and still is today. The middle and upper classes, especially the Christians among them (the second most common religion in Nigeria, at around 40 percent of the population), had always disassociated themselves from the music and its grassroots, and their fear of violence—however justified that fear actually was—gave them a reason not to attend shows. Although these detractors often knew every word to Fuji’s biggest hits in private, they looked down on the genre in public.

“There are a lot of closet Fuji fans,” says Sekinat Ayeyemi, a leading Nigerian journalist. She explains that these people often come from richer neighborhoods. Wale, when asked whether there are many secret Fuji fans, responds, “A lot of them. A lot of them. They listen to it but they wouldn’t want to associate.”

In light of this phenomenon, promoters and the press saw Wasiu Ayinde as an opportunity. The Fuji King, who had risen from an unprivileged background, would be restyled as a premium musician for the country’s elites. This was a contrast to the everyman public image that Barrister had carved for himself—an image truer to the working-class origins of the music. Wasiu began playing to smaller, seated crowds of moneyed fans in security fortified venues, like the D’Rovens. For a while, backers tried to withdraw Fuji from average Nigerians: the laborers, the shop keepers, and the bus conductors.

“You can’t be going to a party where they’re breaking bottles,” Wale says. “That’s why we [the press] brought Wasiu to this level.” He thought the Fuji King’s story could inspire fans from the “downtrodden” communities where the sound originated; that wealth and success were simply around the corner. After all, he says, Fuji artists often sung about their wealth. Wasiu had done that in a recent record, Orin Dowo, meaning “music has turned to money,” and celebrated his profitable talents.

“Wasiu created a class,” Wale says, and, unlike Barrister, began to wear a jacket and jeans when performing. This new Western-influenced image gained him followers in high places but lost him many in ordinary districts. The fanbases of these two giants became divided; “Barrister,” Wale says, “has more followers in that area—in the real ghetto because [residents] believe so much in him and his music.”

Today, having toured the world, Wasiu lives in an enormous mansion two hours from Lagos, with rare birds, gazelles, and tortoises roaming the grounds of his estate. Even before he was inaugurated as king in 1993, he and his promoters pandered to richer audiences in the hope of establishing themselves—and Fuji—worldwide. He made the music more “corporate,” Wale writes in Wasiu’s biography. “Those who dance Fuji are now well read, they are professionals.” Part of that masterplan was introducing, from the early 1990s onwards, instruments like the keyboard and the saxophone, and using melodies more at home in Highlife (a music traditionally enjoyed by Nigerian elites but originating in Ghana), to soften Fuji’s indigenous character for the Western ear. Yet, something in Fuji’s DNA wasn’t globally transferable: it hasn’t had the same impact outside of Nigeria that, say, Afrobeat or Juju has. That’s to an extent because of where the music was first rooted: the religious working-class—where a Western and colonial influence on culture is less pronounced.

If the genuineness of his music is to be judged on how near he was to Fuji’s original sound and sentiments (mostly conceived by Barrister), then Wasiu certainly took the style in another direction. But money and status were always going to do that to a grassroots musical movement like Fuji. Barrister was, in contrast, less aggressive in seeking elite or global recognition, though, paradoxically, is better known outside of Nigeria to this day—even after his death in 2010.

At 61, Wasiu still performs regularly and recently returned to where his career began, a rundown but tight-knit district of Lagos Island, to do just that. There, surrounded by his band of around 25, he began to dance. The Fuji King could still move gracefully and as he swung his hands in a marching motion, the crowd became fired up. The music had taken hold of him, as it often would when he played, and for the shortest moment his head tilted downwards and he closed his eyes.

A festival atmosphere surrounded the raised stage, with gazebos pitched among a sea of partygoers all dressed in identical red, white, and blue traditional clothing (known as Aso ebi), made specifically for the occasion. Tired apartment blocks and drooping washing lines bordered the site, while residents stood on their balconies and hung out of windows trying their best to catch a glimpse of the most famous man from their neighborhood.

Gripping the microphone with one hand, raising his sparkling technicolor scepter in the other, Wasiu’s booming Yoruba vocals carried over the whole site. A moment later he was addressing the crowd and they looked up at their king with reverence—a ceremonial crown perched on his head and beads around his neck. “Lagos Island is where I began my career,” he said, as his band played on. “This is dedicated to all of you.”

Now you can wear hot dogs, pizza, and sushi on your head.

Earlier this month, people walking past New York’s East Village Hats were treated to a rare sight: window mannequins wearing hats seemingly made of all kinds of fast food. One hat was a floating burger and basket of French fries, which dripped Swarovski crystal ketchup. Another was a soaring, vertical tier of donuts. While the hats suggest a designer such as Ronald McDonald or Homer Simpson, this craftsmanship is the work of Israeli designer Maor Zabar.

Even 60 years ago, hats were a part of everyday life. These days, outside of the occasional royal wedding or church service, it’s rare to see elaborate hats out in the wild. But Maor Zabar’s food hats aren’t just elaborate, they’re statement pieces that have appeared in shows and museum exhibitions.

The road to becoming a singular milliner (hatmaker) in Israel proved a challenge. Zabar studied fashion and design in college, making costumes for operas and stage shows. But he had always been drawn to making hats. Nine years ago, while working as a designer, he decided to learn how to do so professionally.

There was one problem. “In Israel we don’t really have any millinery industry,” says Zabar. He had to find a private tutor to teach him to work with classic materials such as felt and straw, and finding the right supplies was difficult. But he grew confident enough in his skills to open an Etsy store where he sells his hats online. That was five years ago now. The themes of his hats have varied widely, from sea creatures and coral to carnivorous plants, along with the traditional sun hats and fedoras. His most recent collection is a second debut of food hats.

The food hats have always gotten a lot of attention. One of Zabar’s first collections of hats portrayed relatively healthy food, such as a salad, sushi, and silvery fish wrapped in a net. Those hats, he says, had more traditional structures. The food pieces, made of hardened felt and painted for effect, are perched on headpieces. Round bases, called “pillboxes,” and flat fascinators allow the felted food sculptures to be worn. But in Zabar’s more recently released collection, many hats are baseless, with foods balanced on the head atop caps or headbands. Also, they’re all “melting, succulent, juicy” foods. Zabar had fun portraying their drippiness with embroidery and crystals. “I’m a sucker for American fast food,” he says.

The beauty of the sea and plants, which Zabar references in his other collections, are more common artistic inspirations. But Zabar makes food hats for a very personal reason. Due to his Crohn's disease, he can’t eat any of the fast food he portrays. Making foods in felt, he says, allows him to “explore” some of their lusciousness without eating them. “These are foods I’m not allowed to touch,” he says.

While hats are his focus, Zabar still works on clothing design. Recently, a purple and red dress of his was in the international spotlight. After meeting singer Netta Barzilai at Israel's fashion week, he was contracted to make her outfit for the upcoming Eurovision song contest. He watched the competition in a gay bar (a popular spot for Eurovision-watching parties), and when she won, Zabar says, "I started to cry." Hats off to that.

Under the right circumstances, it's possible to visit an aviation boneyard.

Almost 50 years after the first Boeing 747 went into service in 1970, United Airlines has retired its last models of the classic plane. When they die, airplanes don’t go to some mythical place in the sky; they go to boneyards, where they await their fate.

United’s 747s have laid down their wings at an aircraft disassembly center in Tupelo, Mississippi. As planes stay in service for longer, a market for second-hand airplane parts has grown. A facility like this one, which is owned by a Chinese company, will take out a plane’s engine and other valuable parts, then break down the plane for scrap metal and other materials. Some every day objects—computers, TVs, floor tiles—have materials in them that once flew high above the Earth.

Just a few years ago, only about 50 percent of a plane could be recycled; now, following the most up-to-date recycling standards, a facility like the one in Tupelo can find a way to re-use around 85 percent of a plane. It takes a few weeks to break down a plane, and the parking lot for doomed planes is relatively small.

Out in the American Southwest, though, and in other dry places around the world, airplane boneyards might be filled with thousands of planes. Some of these could be put back into service, especially if they’ve been parked for three years or less; the dry desert conditions helps keep them in flying shape. The largest boneyard for military aircraft, which started growing immediately after World War II, is at the Davis-Montham Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona.

As part of its good-bye to the 747, United is offering a unique opportunity for fans to use their frequent flyer miles to buy a visit to the Tupelo recycling facility. But for those of us who haven’t proved their loyalty, it’s possible to visit the Tucson boneyard through the Pima Air & Space Museum. (You need security clearance in advance, so plan ahead.)

There are also less official boneyards around the world, where it’s possible to see aging aircraft up close. But some of the best of those have already disappeared—after airplane recycling has become bigger business, the planes became more valuable as scrap.

A photographer has spent decades capturing these symbols of Americana and the open road.

A distant glow appears on the edge of a desolate two-lane highway. As you pull up, the buzzing grows loud, drowning out the engine and the desert crickets outside. Voicelessly, it promises color TV, a kitchenette, and a phone in every room. Symbols of American expansionism and the Space Age, these iconic neon signs once topped countless motor lodges on Route 66 and other stretches of two-lane blacktop.

The rise of automobile culture at the end of World War II gave Americans an easy and affordable way to see the country. Subsequently, mom-and-pop motels began appearing to meet the demand created by these new travelers. The motels strove to differentiate themselves with kitschy themes and eye-catching neon signs, which eventually emerged as distinctive images of Americana.

Steve Fitch, who refers to himself as a visual folklorist, has documented the changing landscape of the American West since the mid-1970s. His new photo book, Vanishing Vernacular: Western Landmarks, is a striking visual commentary on how these once ubiquitous signs—alongside thousand-year-old petroglyphs, small-town murals, and drive-in theaters—are becoming part of the collective memory of the West.

Aside from his work as a photographer, Fitch also creates neon sculptures as an amateur neon bender. Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from his new book, and spoke to him about his interest in neon bending and his views on the changing landscape of the West.

What is it that appeals to you most about neon?

The way that you can draw with light.

What inspired you to work with neon, and how did you learn the craft?

I became inspired to learn to bend neon because of the photography that I was doing in the early 1970s, photographing vintage neon signs along our highways. In 1972 I made my first night photograph of a motel in Deadwood, South Dakota, that had a neon clock in the window. I began to make more and more photographs at dusk and at night, and I became very attuned into the many striking neon signs and murals that adorned our landscape. There were many beautiful neon murals on drive-in theaters, as well as figurative neon signs at motels and restaurants, many of them animated.

Many of these photographs are in my first book, Diesels and Dinosaurs. I was so taken by the beauty of the material that I started to think about making my own neon art pieces, and decided that I needed to learn how to bend (i.e., “fabricate”) neon. At the time I was living in Berkeley, California, and would go to various sign companies in the Bay Area asking if they would teach me the craft. None of them were interested because at the time neon was dying out. When I moved to New Mexico in 1978 I encountered the same response. Then in 1981 I learned of a small neon school in Antigo, Wisconsin, that offered six-week, full-time courses in the skills needed to work with neon. The class I took was small, with only six students, and it got me started on the road to becoming a skilled neon bender. In 1982 I set up my own shop and began making my own neon artwork. It is a difficult craft and takes hours and hours of practice to become good.

How do you find places with neon signs to shoot?

Discovering neon signs or murals to photograph was simply a matter of spending a lot of time driving on our two-lane highways. I developed a sixth sense as to what roads might be good ones to explore. Cross-country highways like Route 66 were prime hunting grounds for interesting neon motel signs, and the state of Texas and the city of Los Angeles had many drive-in movie theaters with beautiful murals using neon. I was looking for neon signs or murals that were beautifully designed, well made, and that had a special flare or character to them. Often this meant that they related to their environment, such as neon cowboys in the West or animated neon Indians in the Southwest.

What are the special challenges of shooting neon signs?

It actually can be quite difficult to make a good photograph of a neon sign. I learned that working at dusk was usually the optimum time of day because you can show detail in the surrounding environment without the neon itself flaring out and becoming too bright. Because I am using a tripod and making long exposures, another difficulty can be all the commotion of the place, such as the streaks left by the lights of passing cars. I grew to appreciate the beauty of light at dusk, which is this charged time between day and night.

Do you have a favorite sign or photograph in this new collection?

That is a tough question because I like so many of the photographs. Perhaps I could pick the photograph of a motel off of Highway 287 [above], which to me is very melancholy, even sad and lonely. Or the photograph of the Greyhound Motel [below], which I find to be funny: a row of cacti measured against a neon line, almost like a police lineup of suspects.

What appeals to you about places like old truck stops, diners, and motor lodges?

When I was a kid in the 1950s, my family would make road trips from northern California to visit relatives on the family farm in South Dakota. We would stop at rock shops and dinosaur parks and eat in funky roadside diners and stay in neon-lit motels. What happened along the way, especially to a kid, was thrilling. Today, so much of our travel is on planes or interstates, where the excitement of exploration has been diminished or eliminated. What appeals to me about many of my subjects is the sheer folk inventiveness of so many of the signs and drive-ins. Many of the signs, for example, are not particularly sophisticated, but they are not ordinary, either. And, as I write in my book, they represent a pre-franchise and pre-interstate highway period, when there were many treasures to be discovered along our two-lane highways. The message they send, I think, is that the journey is as important as the arrival.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

"I don’t believe that there’s a monster, but if I’m wrong, well, that’s OK."

The Loch Ness Monster is maybe the greatest and certainly the most sturdy cryptid myth of the modern age. But after a century or so of searching, no one has been able to find irrefutable evidence of any strange creatures lurking in the murky depths of Scotland’s Loch Ness. So why would a team of serious genetic scientists decide to head back to the loch in search of the legend?

Ask Neil Gemmell, whose Super Natural History Project will do just that early next month. Gemmell, a genetics expert from the University of Otago in New Zealand, says he sees the Loch Ness Monster myth as a great way to bring attention to the study of environmental DNA (eDNA) research. “It’s a project that’s bringing people together, and it’s created more of a buzz about eDNA than probably any other project I’ve been involved in,” he says.

Environmental DNA is trace DNA that is collected from a particular environment, and then compared to available databases of genetic information to identify the various forms of life recently present in an area. Researchers working with eDNA isolate the biological scraps left over in an environmental sample (think skin cells, waste, or other biomaterial), and try to match their DNA sequence to a known creature, proving that it was there.

The technique has proven effective at finding hard-to-locate creatures such as the Alabama sturgeon. But it took a little more than science to convince Gemmell to head to Loch Ness, ostensibly in search of a monster. “My kids think this is the coolest idea that dad’s ever had, and all their their school chums thought it was a great idea too,” he says. “Spurred on by that enthusiasm, I think I’d stumbled on a way to talk about the science that I care about in a way that captures people’s imaginations.”

We spoke to Gemmell just a day before he set out for Scotland, where he and his team are set to spend the next two weeks or so collecting taking samples from the loch. “We’re going to be sampling and filtering an awful lot of water. It’s not overly glamorous to be fair,” he says. The team will be taking around 300 different water samples from different parts of the loch in order to get as wide a range of environmental data as possible. This means skimming water off of the surface in some places, and in others collecting samples from hundreds of feet down. “I don’t know quite what’s down there, but we’ll probably pick up some bacterial species,” says Gemmell. “Because it’s deep, it’s dark, and it very quickly goes from a light-driven ecology to something that’s driven by bacteria. What we find down there might be quite interesting.”

Gemmell expects that from the samples his team will be able to establish a survey of the common types of life in the loch, including bacterial life, specific plant life, and species of fish known to inhabit the waters including salmon, char, trout, and others. It’s also hoped that they might find evidence of rarer types of fish thought to inhabit the lake, such as flounder.

It’s obviously unlikely that they’ll find evidence of the Loch Ness Monster, but that doesn’t mean their study won’t shine some light on the truth of the myth. “I think the chances that we’ll find a monster are extremely small,” says Gemmell. “Of course there’s also this idea that some of the monster myth may be underpinned by giant fish that were introduced to Loch Ness or have been there. Things like sturgeon, catfish, or sharks may all be explanations of what people have seen from time to time.”

No matter what the team finds, true believers in the legend should take heart—the results of eDNA analysis are limited to the time and place they were collected. “It’s only telling us about what’s present in Loch Ness in June 2018, and probably a few days before we arrive. It’s not a history of the entire loch,” says Gemmell. This point is relevant to the many Loch Ness Monster believers who contend that the monster periodically leaves the loch to go out to sea. “If that’s true, and Nessie’s on holiday, then we aren’t going to pick up anything.”

Just for the sake of argument, what if they did find evidence of a monster?

First they would have to identify it as monster DNA. “If the sequence is totally new to science, it should stand out,” says Gemmell. It has been posited that the Loch Ness Monster is alien or supernatural in origin, in which case no one knows what traces of it would look like. But the most common version of the Loch Ness legend is that the monster is a plesiosaur that has somehow survived into the modern age. If that’s the case, the Super Natural History Project is ready. “We’re starting from the position that it is a biological entity, and that there will be a DNA signature that will fit somewhere on the Tree of Life,” says Gemmell. “While we haven’t got plesiosaur DNA, we can pretty much make a good guess of what plesiosaur DNA would look like, using a process called ancestral state reconstruction.”

Essentially, if the team found DNA that they couldn’t match with available databases, they would begin checking to see if it fit in anywhere close to where they speculate a plesiosaur’s DNA might have fallen—somewhere near crocodilians and birds.

Still, if the team did find anomalous DNA, don't expect them to rush to announce the monster’s existence to the world. Gemmell is not interested in becoming another in a long line of Loch Ness hunters who too quickly announced their findings, only to have them swiftly fall apart under scrutiny. “Ultimately you want your results to be reproducible by a separate study, one that we have no role in,” he says. “An extraordinary claim, like for example, that the Loch Ness Monster is real, needs extraordinary evidence.”

Chances aren’t good that the Super Natural History Project will finally prove the existence of the Loch Ness Monster, but the popularity of the legend is set to produce some great scientific data. “This is why we search, this is why we investigate. We don’t fully understand our natural world, and when we do these investigations, it throws up surprises,” says Gemmell. “I don’t believe that there’s a monster, but if I’m wrong, well, that’s OK. I’d suddenly write my Wikipedia page. It wouldn’t be quite what I expected it to be.”

Paolo Galeotti unearthed the citruses at Florence's Villa di Castello gardens, which belonged to the Medicis.

It’s the summer of 1980. In a private garden, tucked away in the outskirts of Florence, Italy, Paolo Galeotti, a citrus expert, is giving botanic advice to a grower. The tree that he’s examining, citrus aurantium, is a bitter orange towering at almost three meters high. It’s in bad shape. Galeotti lowers his gaze and suddenly notices a small sprout, a young twig. The shape of the leaves is similar to the others, but it’s not exactly the same. It’s familiar, though seems alien to that particular tree.

At that moment, Galeotti has a startling realization: This is the last descendant of an ancient citrus variety that disappeared more than a century and a half ago. Specifically, it’s a rare kind known as citrus bizzarria (fittingly, “bizarria” means “oddity”). It’s the only citrus tree that produces three kind of fruits (which resemble a cedar, orange, and lemon, respectively) on the same plant. “I was sure that it was a bizzarria, however, I had to wait three years to announce it,” he says. “I grafted that twig on a tree I had at home and waited to see which fruits it produced.” His instinct was right.

Galeotti's unexpected discovery led citrus bizzarria to make a return to the garden of Villa di Castello, where the Medicis coveted the precious, rare plant during the Renaissance. The Medicis, who held power in Florence and Tuscany from the 15th century into the 18th century, helmed the garden at a time when displaying rare plants was a matter of prestige between Europe’s competing noble families. The Medicis left behind a legacy of extraordinary cultural and artistic patrimony: Today, the garden hosts the largest collection of potted citruses in the world. There, almost 600 species and varieties of plants, ancient and otherwise, flourish. They were brought to Florence by monks, explorers and, sometimes, by members of the Medici family.

But only 40 years ago, that astonishing collection ran the risk of disappearing into obscurity. Galeotti, who is director of the Parks and Gardens Office of the Tuscany Museum Centre, re-introduced dozens of citruses to the garden such as citrus medica digitata (a fruit whose extremities resemble human fingers) and citrus lumia (known as “Adam’s Apple,” as some academics hold that the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden was a citrus, and not an apple). Through his work, he helped classify and give names to 100 species and varieties. Gardeners had referred to many of these trees simply as “lemons” for decades.

“When I was assigned to this garden in 1978, no one had the slightest idea of what those pots contained,” Galeotti says as he strolls through the gravel paths of the park. He explains that when the final gardeners of the Savoia family—the last Italian royal family that reigned until the end of the Second World War—left this garden, it was the end of an era. “[These successors] didn’t have the same passion nor the same curiosity for the treasure they were surrounded by."

Galeotti’s curiosity was piqued, though. He asked academics and botanists which species the garden of Villa di Castello hosted, to little avail. So he turned to history. “No one was able to give me a thorough answer, so I locked myself in the Italian National Archive and National Library of Florence,” he says. “An entire world opened up to me.” In those weeks Galeotti studied many authors, such as Giovanni Battista Ferrari, a Jesuit monk who lived in the 16th and 17th century, and the engraver Johann Christoph Volkamer, who published his works at the beginning of the 18th century.

The rigor and the accuracy of those ancient reproductions allowed Galeotti to compare the citruses illustrated with the unidentified plants he was taking care of. Bartolomeo Bimbi, one of the most famous painters of Renaissance still life, particularly helped Galeotti in his research: In four canvases, Bimbi depicted 116 citruses present in the Medicean gardens at that time. Thanks to his work, Galeotti found that 80 of those still remained in the garden of Villa di Castello, although no one was aware of that.

To confirm that the plants in his care truly matched their centuries-ago counterparts, Galeotti turned to modern science. He went to the CNR (Italian National Council of Research) and obtained the DNA of the ancient Medicean citruses. Through that, he not only confirmed his suspicions, but also discovered that dozens of natural hybrids exist between lemon and cedar. “That may seem obvious today, but it wasn’t so at that time,” he says. In order to preserve the heritage for future generations, he then donated the genetic archive to a Sicilian institute of research.

At that point, Galeotti only had to take one more step: Classifying the dozens of species and varieties he rediscovered. “I’m not a taxonomer,” Galeotti says, “I only allowed myself to decide the nomenclature of plants and species in order, as in the ancient texts, the same citrus can be named in many different ways. And still today many people confuse a species for another.”

The Medici family cared so much about Villa di Castello that they kept the Primavera, one of the most famous paintings in history, on this property, where it remained until the beginning of the 20th century. Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco dé Medici commissioned the artwork from Sandro Botticelli, and it’s thought that the villa’s garden inspired the artist. He drew many oranges around Venus and Cupid, as well as flowers on the ground where the scene develops.

When the Medici went into disarray, the Hapsburgs-Lorraine took command of Grand Duchy of Tuscany and all Medicean properties. While they heavily restyled the garden of Villa di Castello, they also recognized the value of the botanic collection they had inherited. So the family built two large buildings (1200 square meters altogether) just to give a winter shelter to the citruses (limonaie in Italian), which are still used today. Until then, the citruses had been stored in a great space near the stables. The animals' warmth helped the plants withstand winter, as citruses are very vulnerable to lowered temperatures.

During the First World War, the two limonaie buildings were used as a field hospital. “It was in those years that the Medican citruses suffered the worst damages,” Galeotti explains, “Because the plants were left outside for three winters. All the aerial parts died and the branches [were] used as firewood to warm the wounded soldiers.”

Some plants died and were lost forever. Others were pruned and, slowly, began to vegetate again. Those cuts are still clearly visible today. “It’s like these plants were war survivors: Some have crutches, but they fought and survived,” Galeotti says, while he stares at a bicentenary cedar. “Plants’ power is unbelievable.”

But these plants, particularly citrus bizzarria, still hold many mysteries. It's possible that bizzarria may have died during the First World War. Or maybe it simply transformed. “As it gets old, this plant comes back to its ancestral features and returns to be a bitter orange,” Galeotti says. “There’s still not a definitive answer, but I think that bizzarria is the result of a natural hybrid originated by a different bud in the point where wild and domesticated parts connect.”

He has some time to keep digging, but not a lot of it: In three years, the guardian of this priceless collection will retire. And he still does not have a successor, so the plants' fate is uncertain. “I’m training some people, but it’s not easy,” he says. “The economic resources to run this park, as many others in Tuscany, are fewer and fewer. These plants are like old artworks, but they are not safe in a museum as a painting is. They need care and water. Otherwise, we risk losing them forever.”

How to spend three obscure days exploring Pensacola.

Pensacola is a city brimming with natural wonders, maritime history, and oftentimes, a combination of the two.

Known for beaches, lagoons, and bayous, Pensacola is an ideal place to explore the region’s untamed beauty. On the historical front, five different flags (Spain, France, Britain, the Confederacy, and the United States) have flown over the city since its founding in 1559. Today, an active naval base ensures that military and political heritage are still at the forefront of the city’s culture.

And with over two dozen tugboats, battleships, and scrapped naval vessels submerged just off the coast, Pensacola is a wreck diver’s paradise. Whether you’ve earned your scuba certification or not, the area offers plenty of opportunities for adventure above and below the water.

Day 1: Explore beneath the waves

• Dive to the shipwreck of the USS Massachusetts

• Swim through the remains of the Ocean Wind

• Walk downtown Pensacola

• Take a seat at the Tin Cow and try the lionfish dip

Grab your gear and dive (literally) into Pensacola’s undersea history. Be sure to work with an experienced crew like the folks who run the Jolly Roger to choose your dives. Some of the best wrecks in the area are the USS Massachusetts, the Ocean Wind, and the San Pablo or “Russian Freighter.” If you’re an advanced diver, consider a trip to the USS Oriskany, an aircraft carrier that earned battle stars in the Korean and Vietnam wars. It’s a deeper dive in more ways than one: veterans visit to change the underwater flag four times a year.

As you motor out of the inlet past frolicking dolphins, glistening beaches, and a trio of stone forts into the Gulf of Mexico, watch for the moment when the water turns from the dark blue of the bay to the stunning aquamarine of the gulf.

The wreck of the USS Massachusetts sits in 30 feet of water (her turrets sometimes peek above the waves). Built in 1896, she’s considered the oldest American battleship still in existence—ironic, given her notoriously poor design. After surviving the Spanish American War and WWI (and sustaining an explosion and several run-ins with land), she was finally decommissioned in 1919. Two years later, she was anchored in her current location to be used as a target for experimental artillery, where she eventually sunk.

Since then, the USS Massachusetts has assumed a more dignified purpose as an artificial reef, providing surfaces to which algae and invertebrates can cling, in turn attracting fish to the area.

“The Massachusetts is like New York City,” Danielle Williams, a local diver, said of the area’s wildlife. “They don’t all live here, but everybody comes to eat and hang out.”

As you circle the hull, try to discern which parts of the old battleship you’re looking at as you interact with the sea creatures around you. Spend some time with the purple-jointed arrow crabs that cling to the wreck, and keep an eye out on the sandy side for passing stingray. Massive goliath grouper who, true to their name, can weigh upwards of 600 pounds, lurk in the shadows of the shipwreck.

Climb back on board the dive boat to motor to the wreck of the Ocean Wind, a tugboat that was submerged in 2016 solely to serve as an artificial reef. Because the reef is new, patches of pale metal are still visible, offering a visual contrast to the mossy brown Massachusetts. While an ecosystem is rapidly taking over, the boat remains fully intact. Wear gloves and you can swim through the vessel. Don’t miss the wheelhouse, where you might encounter a school of striped spadefish who seem to have anointed themselves the ship’s new captains.

Once you’ve returned ashore, head into historic Downtown Pensacola and try the smoked lionfish dip at the Tin Cow on South Palafox Street. Lionfish are an invasive species that pose a severe threat to local marine life, so eating them supports Pensacola’s overall ecosystem.

Day 2: Sail a racing Condor across Pensacola Bay

• Watch the Blue Angels practice overhead

• Explore the remains of Fort Pickens

• Try the oysters at Peg Leg Pete's

• Dance on the beach with a Bushwhacker in hand

Captain Michael Kirk’s racing Condor sailboat is called the Dare II. As in, “Dare to be adventurous.” One of only 21 ever built, she’s a tri-hull catamaran that is both fast and stable. These boats were built for nonstop around-the-world-races, and this is the only place in the world you can ride one as a tourist.

Book a spot on the 11 a.m. trip on a Tuesday or Wednesday and you’ll be guaranteed one of the best seats to view a practice session of the Blue Angels, the U.S. Navy's flight demonstration squad. Once on board, the captain hoists the mainsail and you’re off, speeding across Pensacola Bay toward the naval base. Soon, you’ll see the telltale plumes of smoke that indicate the start of practice. Kirk maneuvers beneath the planes so they repeatedly buzz directly overhead in formations of three or four, their wingtips 36 inches apart.

After practice is over, sit back and bask in the breeze as you sail across the bay. Kirk takes an interactive approach to captaining. Everyone gets a chance to man the ship, and the boat is so steady you’re free to stroll its decks. Take a seat on the very tip of the bow and let your feet dangle. With the waves brushing your heels, the sensation is akin to surfing and flying at the same time.

Back at the marina, hop in a car and drive about 20 minutes to the beach. Once on Fort Pickens Road, continue to the westernmost tip to explore the sandy passages of the eponymous Fort Pickens, the only fort in the area to remain in Union hands during the Civil War.

Once you’ve had your fill of history, hit the beach nearby. For dinner, try the oysters (one variety, available about 10 different ways) just down the road at Peg Leg Pete’s. If you’re in town on a Tuesday night, check out who’s playing at “Bands on the Beach,” a spring and summertime beachfront music series.

Top the night off with a Bushwacker, a creamy, frozen drink that originated in the Virgin Islands but gained a reputation as Pensacola’s signature cocktail. The folks at the Sandshaker Lounge claim to have the original recipe.

Day 3: Hike through the Bayou

• Explore the Tarkiln Bayou Preserve State Park

• Eat a picnic lunch at historic Fort Barrancas

• Grab a drink at the famous Cubi Bar Cafe

On day three, stop by Joe Patti’s seafood market to pick up a picnic lunch, then head to Tarkiln Bayou Preserve State Park. Named for the 19th-century kilns that processed pine tar used in building ships, the park is today one of the best places in Florida to spot rare, carnivorous pitcher plants.

From the Tarkiln parking lot, head right and follow signs for the Perdido Bay Trail. On this course, you’ll find yourself winding through a pine forest blanketed with ferns and lichen that eventually opens to a beach on the shore of Perdido Bay. Across the water, you can see Alabama’s shores.

Hike back through the pine forest, and take note of the burnt-to-a-crisp tree stems that provide a surreal contrast in scenery. Though they may appear ominous, these controlled burns are vital to plant preservation in the area.

The other path will take you on a boardwalk to the bayou. Along the way is a massive grove of carnivorous plants, including Florida’s largest cluster of white-top pitcher plants. You also can spot the sweet pitcher plant and Chapman’s butterwort waiting to snack on a bug or two. The plants are harmless to humans, but they use their bright colors and aromatic nectar to lure insect prey to their deaths.

At the bayou there’s a viewing platform from which you can watch birds diving into the water to catch fish, and fish jumping from the water to catch bugs. You also might spot the occasional dolphin (they’re ubiquitous in Pensacola).

After wrapping up at the bayou, take your picnic lunch over to the nearby, and publicly accessible, Naval Air Station Pensacola. At the base’s civilian entrance, ask for directions to Fort Barrancas, an abandoned fortress dating to the pre-Civil War era, built upon the structure of an even older Spanish bastion. Once a contested site between Union and Confederate forces, echoes of military conflict still hum through the now-tranquil environs.

If you’re craving a respite from the sun, stop by the naval aviation museum on your way out of the base. Grab a drink or a bite at the Cubi Bar Cafe, a near perfect recreation of a storied bar that, for decades, served U.S. naval officers at Cubi Point in the Philippines. Veterans of the original hangout may find the resemblance uncanny—that’s because when the bar closed in 1992, most of its famous furnishings were packed up and shipped to Pensacola.

For even more lively decor, head back into town and treat yourself to an evening at McGuire’s, a sprawling Irish pub with multiple theme rooms and dollar bills stapled to every square inch of wall and ceiling. Ask your server to bring you a staple gun and marker and you can add your own.

Built in an old fire station and expanded over the years, McGuire’s is a Pensacola institution. Don’t miss the $0.18 Senate Bean Soup, a popular menu item from the U.S. Senate cafeteria that used to sell for 18 cents in D.C. It still does at McGuire’s.

The dollars on the walls of McGuire’s have accumulated over 40 years. They’re a delightful metaphor for Pensacola’s multi-layered history. Whether you come for the maritime history or the scenery, you’ll leave charmed by Pensacola’s people, stories, and unabashed willingness to be itself.

In the late 1860s, a barge helped the "Crystal City" usher in a new era of innovation.

In 1868, just three years after the conclusion of the American Civil War, a barge set off from Brooklyn, New York. Loaded with equipment and supplies, it was bound, via New York’s extensive waterways, for the upstate town of Corning. Few could have predicted the way the vessel and its contents were about to change the world.

The barge’s mission was the relocation of the Brooklyn Flint Glass Company, which would soon be renamed Corning Glass Works. Corning was a transportation center for canal and railway networks that provided easy, relatively cheap access to the resources necessary for glass production. The Houghton family, which owned the company, had already forged a relationship with Elias B. Hungerford, a Corning businessman with a patent for glass window blinds, and so they decided to pack the company up and send it on a journey up the newly enlarged Erie Canal.

The move came at a fortuitous time: in the wake of the war, America was changing rapidly, and demand for glass was high. Among the trends driving this demand was a hunger for luxury goods, including elaborately detailed lead glass tableware known as brilliant cut glass. With Corning quickly establishing itself as an important center for glassmaking, the town, and its surrounding areas, began to attract an influx of skilled glass cutters and artisans from around the world. Before long, Corning Glass Works was no longer the only glass game in town. Dozens of glass cutting firms, including the famed T.G. Hawkes & Co., established themselves in the area, leading Corning to be dubbed “The Crystal City.”

While Corning was becoming famous for the detail and artistry of its decorative glass exports, the city’s glassmakers were also quietly driving much of the technology that would define the next century. Thomas Edison may have invented the lightbulb, but if not for the innovations happening in Corning, it may never have had a chance to take hold.

When Edison first commissioned Corning Glass to manufacture light bulbs, in the early 1880s, the means to produce them was limited. Skilled glassblowers had to make each one by hand, at a rate of only two per minute. It wasn’t until the 1921 invention of the Corning Ribbon Machine, by William J. Woods and David E. Gray, that this would change. In just a few years, the new machine was able to pump out 300 lightbulbs in the same amount of time it had previously taken to produce just two. Suddenly, light bulbs were cheap and accessible enough for widespread use. The world lit up.

This would prove to be only the beginning of the many technological advances coming out of Corning. Some of these technologies are now so woven into our everyday lives that it’s easy to forget how innovative they were in the first place. After all, who doesn’t have a Pyrex measuring cup, or a set of heat-resistant Pyrex dishes? In fact, the glass used in these dishes is a temperature-resistant borosilicate glass first developed in Corning for use in railroad lantern globes.

Other advances were more dramatic, if less culturally iconic. Glass techniques developed in Corning in the 1930s are still used to create the giant reflective lenses in telescopes that allow us to see into the far reaches of space. And without the fused silica used in fiber optic cables, the internet as we know it likely wouldn’t exist.

The story of Corning isn’t just a story about glass. It’s about the roiling cycle of progress, with small changes leading to big ones, all reliant on the confluence of artistry, craftsmanship, and scientific innovation. It’s about how elaborate, carefully crafted wine goblets led to mass-produced light bulbs, and how one city became the center of it all.

This summer, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the relocation of the Brooklyn Flint Glass Company—now known as Corning Incorporated—The Corning Museum of Glass will send GlassBarge on a four-month expedition via New York’s waterways. GlassBarge will offer glassblowing demonstrations daily from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., every hour on the hour. Visit www.cmog.org/glassbarge for schedule information and to register for free tickets.

Contrary to popular belief, it wasn't because lifts were terrifying.

It takes the Empire State Building’s marble-lined elevator approximately one minute to travel almost 1,000 feet up to its 80th floor, where visitors can peruse an exhibit of the building's history before their final ascent to the observation deck on the 86th floor. The elevator is so fast the electronic numbers whizz by quicker than the display on a stopwatch. But it feels even faster: On the ceiling, an animated display shows the elevator rising at perilous speeds through a whirl of activity—cranes, construction, sitting men balanced perilously on a beam.

When the building opened in 1931, the journey took a little longer. But there was a different distraction to while away the seconds: canned music played throughout its elevators, lobbies, and observatories. Rather than bossa nova or cheesy “elevator music” themes, this was likely simple classical music—a 1945 New York Times article about the Army B-25 bomber that crashed into the Empire State Building’s 79th floor described a scene of chaos against “the soothing sounds of a waltz.”

Why was this waltz there at all? The most popular theory about the origins of music on elevators, repeated everywhere from the New Yorker to the writer Joseph Lanza’s history of Muzak, is that elevators were terrifying, and people needed the music to calm their frazzled nerves. As Lanza writes: “Next to roller coasters and airplanes, elevators were perceived by many as floating domiciles of disequilibrium, inciting thoughts of motion sickness and snapping capables.” Gentle background music, he suggests, helped to minimize that terror, particularly after these conveyors were automated in the 1920s. Attendants stopped being a standard feature, and people were left alone in the box. Only music could help take their minds off the experience.

Yet on closer interrogation, there are a few holes in this explanation. The earliest known references to music in elevators are from the early 1930s—the same time the Empire State Building opened its doors. By then, people had been riding elevators for decades. Fully automated elevators, which did not require attendants, had been around since 1918. And as early as January 1886, around 30 years after Elisha Otis invented the modern elevator, the New York Times observed: "The many lofty buildings which have been completed in New-York during the past year have brought into great prominence the passenger elevator as an indispensable means of transit and the security of this class of labor.” Were people really afraid of elevators nearly 80 years after they were invented?

“I don't think elevator music was really designed to soothe the raging beast,” says Patrick Carrajat. Carrajat is the go-to guy on all things elevators: The former chief executive of an elevator parts business, he is also the author of The History of the Elevator Industry in America 1850-2001 and founder of the erstwhile Elevator Historical Society. Instead, he says, elevator music was there as a distraction to fend off boredom and keep people’s minds off the interminably long time it took to get from floor to floor.

By the 1930s and 1940s, when music first became common in many high-end elevators, elevators themselves were already quite smooth—not the jolting deathtrap Lanza suggests. Certainly they were sufficiently quiet that elevator music, which was always “pretty nondescript,” says Carrajat, could easily be heard. At first, in other elevators as in the Empire State Building, it was gentle, instrumental music. In 1934, Muzak released its first recording—as the years went by, and the service gained popularity, their cruisey tunes, which have been parodied in thousands of television programs and films since, became the standard. Elevators were boring, not scary, and music helped take your mind off that fact.

That’s not to say that no one was ever afraid of an elevator, as indeed they were of early escalators. In the very, very early days, they probably did seem terrifying, or at least mildly perturbing.

At the 1853 World’s Fair, in New York, the entrepreneur and inventor Elisha Otis made his original “elevator pitch.” This included a death-defying drop, in which he “dramatically cut the only rope suspending the platform on which he was standing,” according to Otis Elevator Company lore. “The platform dropped a few inches, but then came to a stop. His revolutionary new safety brake had worked, stopping the platform from crashing to the ground. ‘All safe, gentlemen!’ the man proclaimed.” The display raised eyebrows—and although elevators were adopted enthusiastically, with 2,000 Otis elevators in use within 16 years, it must have taken a while for people to come to terms with the fact that they were not, in fact, in free fall.

But accounts of the Empire State Building’s opening don’t focus on any such terror. Instead, journalists were most interested in how many elevators there were and how they worked simultaneously. A Popular Science feature from the time describes 58 elevators with “automatic starting, stopping, level-ing, and door opening and closing devices,” and an additional nine “with various degrees of self-operation” for the top seven stories. The installation of these 60-odd elevators cost an eye-watering $4 million, the magazine reported, or around $65 million in today’s money.

Even then, elevators were extremely safe. If one of the six cables supporting the Empire State Building’s elevators snapped, the Popular Science journalist wrote, “the safety of the car would not be interfered with.” In fact, if “one, two, three, four, or even five cables [were to] break, the car would not drop, as one cable is sufficient to carry the whole load!”

In addition to distracting people from their boredom, elevator music had a certain cachet: It revealed that a building’s administrators had extra cash to spare entertaining people in the lift. Having piped music playing in the background was seen a sign of classy refinement. Muzak became the most prominent name in background music, leaking out of the elevator and into the vestibule or even the office, where it purportedly increased workers’ productivity. Even the White House, writes Ethan Trex for Mental Floss, was susceptible to its anodyne charms: “The presidential residence was wired for Muzak in 1953 during Dwight Eisenhower's administration. (He wasn’t the biggest presidential fan, though; Lyndon Johnson actually owned Muzak’s Austin franchise during the 1950s.)” These smooth tunes would have been played not just in the elevators, but everywhere in the building.

But in the 1960s and 1970s, people seem to have begun to find elevator music irritating. Before then, no one had used the term specifically, subbing in “piped music,” “canned music,” or simply Muzak, whether or not it was. The earliest references to the specific terms “elevator music” or “lift music” all date to around this time—and they’re mostly pretty disparaging. In 1963, the Lima News, in Ohio, described elevator music on a “monstrous” par with “airplane music” and “factory music”; in 1976, the New York Times described a restaurant’s background track as “overamplified elevator music.” (Contemporary references from across the Atlantic in the Times of London talk about “lift music” in similar tones.) Gradually, Carrajat recalls, elevator music was stripped out of low-end and high-end lifts alike as people grew disillusioned with background crooning. “I think the last time I remember hearing it was probably in the late '60s or early '70s,” he says—though it’s been a fixture of many, many television shows in the time since.

These days, people don’t need music in elevators to distract them—instead, we all thumb mindlessly through our smartphones. But in the interim, Carrajat recalls another way elevator companies helped to make the time pass faster.

He remembers installing an elevator in a building on New York’s swish Upper East Side. “They said, ‘Can’t we do anything to speed it up?’” Actually making the elevator faster would have been prohibitively expensive, Carrajat says, so he put a mirror above the push button station instead. “As soon as you did that, you saw people stop complaining about the waiting—because whether they were a guy or a gal, they’d come up and check their hair, their women checked the make up, et cetera,” says Carrajat, laughing. “They weren't aware of how long they were waiting.”

After decades of organ donation, Brattleboro is looking for new homes for old musical instruments.

In its heyday, the Estey Organ Company factory was the beating, bleating heart of Brattleboro, Vermont. It produced more than half a million organs in total and, at its peak, employed more than 500 people. On a fateful day in 1960, however, the assembly lines shut down and workers departed. After nearly a century in operation, the organ factory had gone silent.

And then, like the most improbable boomerangs, the organs started coming back.

Families with old, unwanted Estey organs started to donate them, one by one, to the Brattleboro Historical Society. First a few, then a few more, and the organs kept coming. Over the years, hundreds of organs have made their way back home. At first, the historical society was at a loss for what to do with them all.

In 2002, the society chose the most interesting and playable organs and opened the Estey Organ Museum on the premises of the old factory. A once-booming coal-fired engine room became a showcase for the great variety of organs that were manufactured in the surrounding buildings: the ornate, carved Pompadour, the mother of pearl–keyed Melodeon, a deconstructed pipe organ that you can walk inside, and many others.

Beyond the museum, since the 1970s, the Brattleboro Historical Society amassed what might be the largest organ collection in the world, at around 200 instruments. The majority are stored in other adjacent factory buildings owned by Barbara George, a historic preservationist and longtime Brattleboro resident.

“In a way, it’s my fault that we have all these organs,” says George. She was generous with the old factory space, which at first provided ample room. But after years of accepting any and all organ donations, many of the buildings began to fill up. It was a unique predicament for any local society. What do you do with hundreds of antique, mostly unplayable organs?

Twenty-four of the factory’s original 29 buildings still stand, recognizable by their blue-gray slate shingles, installed in 1870 to prevent fires. Inside them, piles of sawdust speak to a family of raccoons that might take up residence in the winter. But even a thick layer of dust can not hide the elegance or craftsmanship of the instruments—carved wood, mirrors, elaborate bracketry. Some of the organs are arranged neatly in rows. The children’s organs are stacked on shelves. In some rooms, heavy organs are strewn about, creating mazes.

“They’re a curse,” George says, only half-joking. Today, the museum only accepts donated organs in perfect working condition, or rare or unusual examples. But this hasn’t completely stopped the tide. On a couple of occasions, organs have been anonymously left outside the door of the museum. “In the museum world, we call that a ‘drive-by donation,’” says George. The museum received between five and 30 organs a year when it was still accepting them.

When an organ does arrive at the museum it gets cataloged and assigned a unique number. In the labyrinth of organs on the second floor of one of the factory buildings, George points out an instrument with a tag that reads, “2004.024.” The 24th organ of 2004.

Estey’s flagship product was the reed organ, a musical chimera with the air power of an accordion, the metal reeds of a harmonica, and the keys of a piano. A foot-powered pump pushes air through reeds, resulting in resounding notes that are determined by the fingers on the keyboard. Reed organs reached the height of their popularity in the early 1900s. Cheaper than pianos and easier to maintain, they became a staple of the middle-class family parlor. The Estey Organ Company was one of the largest producers in the world.

They came in an astonishing range of shapes, sizes, and uses, from children’s toys, to living-room centerpieces, to the crown jewels of community churches and theaters. Some of the organs were designed to fold up into little suitcases and could be taken anywhere. The historical society has photos of chaplains playing portable Estey reed organs in World War II, and the society boasts that their organs have pumped out tunes on six of the world’s continents (poor Antarctica). “The Estey Organ Company provided hundreds and hundreds of jobs and put Brattleboro on the map,” says Dennis Waring, ethnomusicologist and author of the book, Manufacturing the Muse: Estey Organs and Consumer Culture in Victorian America. “This was one of the more important enterprises in American music history.”

Rock ‘n’ roll and the rise of electric instruments, however, did the old organs in. “The sound of the reed organ is pretty snoozy … lugubrious. It’s not a lively instrument,” Waring adds. “The reed organ was becoming outmoded with other kinds of upbeat sounds.” However, the instrument is still occasionally found in contemporary music—John Lennon and Nico were fans.

Collecting so many of them, in one place, was never George’s plan. “The mission of the museum is to promote continued use and enjoyment. They’re certainly not doing anyone any good in here,” she says, referring to the dozens of organs in yet another factory room. As she walks around, she occasionally presses down on a foot pedal, which generates a wheezing sound and suggests hope for that particular organ. “If they play, we want to find new homes for them.”

That applies to the ones that don’t play anymore, too. George and others have organized “re-homing” events, where members of the public can visit a part of the old factory and adopt an organ. George hopes that some of the non-playable ones can be fixed by amateur engineers or people who like tinkering—or repurposed into something else entirely. “They make wonderful furniture,” she says, suggesting that old organ parts may provide the basis for a creative bookshelf or bar. She points to a pile of ornate organ parts and pipes, which are arranged in a neat row, sorted by size. “Someone could make something out of this stuff.”

Estey may have the most inventory, but isn’t the only defunct organ factory in New England. The famous Sterling Organ Company factory was located in Derby, Connecticut. The Derby Historical Society’s website explicitly states that it does not accept donations. John Carnahan, who manages the Estey Organ Museum’s email account, says that he receives at least one message a week from someone looking to donate an organ.

“People don’t want them,” says George, “but they also don’t want to throw them away.”

Brattleboro’s best bet for its tidal wave of busted organs is to raise awareness about just how many they have, so they can find people willing to breathe new life into them. Says George, “We’d most like to see a reed organ revival.”

At least, it's the oldest that's been scientifically dated.

High in the mountains of Pollino National Park, south of Naples, Italy, a team of scientists was looking for old trees. This park, the largest in the country, has a few small villages within its borders, but the landscape can be harsh and, even in a densely populated part of the world, has been mostly undeveloped. The team was conducting a three-year survey, hoping to better understand aging and senescence in forests, as well as the changes in the landscape over time.

On one rocky cliff, they found a tree that looked even older than the rest. How old was hard to tell—inside, the scientists found that its core had begun to disintegrate. But by using radiocarbon dating and examining the rings of the tree’s roots, they were able to come up with a year when the tree’s first ring would have formed: 789.

That makes this tree, a Heldreich’s pine now named Italus, approximately 1,230 years old. It’s now the oldest scientifically dated tree in Europe.

Trees can live for millennia, often in places humans are reluctant to live. That’s part of what keeps them safe. Many of the trees in the park are hundreds of years old; not far from Italus, the team found other millennium-old trees, too.

Much of Italus’ crown is dead, but parts of the tree are still growing and could live for many years to come. “It lives in a harsh high mountain environment with many types of natural disturbances,” says Gianluca Piovesan, of Tuscia University, the lead author of the Ecology paper describing the tree’s discovery. “We don’t know how many years Italus will survive but a comparison with millennium-old trees of the genus Pinus living in North American indicates that the tree can live for many years.”

Explore the "100 Aker Wood" for only $200,000.

"Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, about last Friday, Winnie-the-Pooh lived in a forest all by himself." So begins A. A. Milne's first book about the beloved "bear of very little brain," first published in 1926. Eventually, this slim clothbound volume would launch three other books (one of which made the New York Times bestseller list—in Latin), six feature films, and a raft of other adaptations.

But all the adventures of a boy and his bear started here, alongside illustrations by the English artist E. H. Shepard. In its opening pages, a map shows the way around the Hundred Acre Wood, sometimes stylized as "100 Aker Wood." There's "Where the Woozle Wasnt" and the route to the North Pole. Now, for the first time in nearly 50 years, the original map is on sale at the British auctioneer Sotheby's, along with four other illustrations. They are expected to fetch as much as $580,000 together when they go on sale at the auction house in July, the BBC reported.

It's a lot of money for a map—but then, this isn't any old map. If you're down in the dumps, it leads the way to Eeyore's Gloomy Place ("rather boggy and sad.") If you're anxious about dangerous beasts on your way there, Pooh Trap for Heffalumps should put your mind at ease. And if you're just here for a good time, the "sandy pit where Roo plays" is located just south of a woody grove. (Bonus: It's "nice for piknicks.")

Last time the map went on sale, in 1970, it fetched around $35,000 in today's dollars. It is now expected to raise more than five times that—a handsome investment for the private collector who bought it 48 years ago. In fact, Sotheby's senior specialist Philip Errington told the BBC, there's been a renewed interest in illustrations from the Pooh universe. "They've never been brought out in the U.K. or the U.S. with illustrations by anyone else apart from E. H. Shepard," he said. "That is the power, and ability of the illustrator, and why this is probably the most famous map in English literature."

For those who don't have $200,000 burning a hole in their pocket, the map features prominently in the 1966 Disney adaptation. And after August, you'll be able to see the whole gang back together in the forthcoming feature film Christopher Robin—though its tagline, "Out of the Wood and Into the City," suggests that this map may not be much use.

It was discovered on shards of pottery uncovered 20 years ago.

Olive oil has long been an important part of Italian life. In Rome, there's even a hillside made of shards of olive oil containers, which ancient Romans discarded in a giant mound. According to a new study, though, olive oil has been enjoyed in Italy for even longer than previously thought: by at least 700 years.

The discovery was hiding in plain sight, inside pottery excavated 20 years ago. In the study, Professor Davide Tanasi of the University of South Florida, Dr. Anita Crispino, and others examined three artifacts from the prehistoric settlement of Castelluccio, Sicily. One of them was an unusual jar, which Crispino describes as unique in its size and decoration. Pieced together from 400 fragments, it was an "egg-shaped 3 ½ foot storage container adorned with rope bands and three vertical handles on each side."

Using techniques such as nuclear magnetic resonance and gas chromatography, the research team found organic residues. Oleic and linoleic acids indicated that the jar, along with other artifacts from the same site, once contained olive oil. Due to the designs on the jar and where it was discovered, the researchers concluded that it dated from around 2000 B.C. While evidence of earlier olive oil has been uncovered in Israel and Greece, evidence of Italian olive oil from the early Bronze Age "[pushes] back the hands of the clock for the systematic olive oil production by at least 700 years," the study states. According to Tanasi, this project is part of a larger investigation into the eating habits of prehistoric Sicilians and Maltese societies.

While the discovery is remarkable, using chemical analysis to uncover food from the past is getting more and more common. Even decades after excavation, researchers are able to examine residues on ancient containers for clues on what they once held. Though the unusual Sicilian jar was dug up 20 years ago, it only recently revealed its secrets. In another case, researchers chemically identified foods from a feast held by the semi-mythic King Midas nearly 50 years after cauldrons and jugs from the event were discovered. But for the olive oil artifacts, the discovery was of liquid, and not actual, gold.

What it's like to find yourself among 721,620 warblers, all in a hurry.

Songbirds fly all night because it's what they do. Take the Cape May warbler, for example. Every spring, the fist-sized, yellow-and-brown bird takes a trip from the West Indies to the boreal forests of Canada, where it nests, breeds, and feasts on spruce budworms. The journey is nearly 3,000 miles long, and is mostly nocturnal, so that the birds can avoid predators.

Humans, on the other hand, generally only travel all night when they've got something to see. Take Ian Davies, for example. This past Friday, May 25, 2018, Davies drove from his hometown of Ithaca, New York, to Tadoussac, Quebec, a journey of 600 miles. He and his friends—dedicated birdwatchers all—were hoping to see the warblers.

The weekend was a bust, bird-wise. But on Monday, as morning rain showers began to lift, warblers started flickering past in groups of about a dozen. Around 6:30 a.m., the rain stopped, and, as Davies later wrote, "things were never the same." The trickle of birds became a torrent. "Solid streams of warblers were moving through: below eye level, over the river, over the trees," says Davies. At times, more than a thousand birds flew by per minute.

"In our wildest dreams," Davies says, he and his companions had hoped for maybe a 50,000-bird day. Instead, they found themselves smack in the middle of a group about 10 times that size—one that experts are now calling the biggest North American warbler migration in recorded history. There was nothing to do but hold onto their binoculars and keep counting.

Tadoussac is a small town north of Quebec City, at the junction of two rivers, the St. Lawrence and the Saguenay. Birders may go there on purpose, but most warblers actually find it by accident, waylaid while winging from their winter habitats in Central and South America up to their forest breeding grounds. "Warblers want to come back to the same area where they bred last year," explains Pascal Côté, the director of the Tadoussac Bird Observatory—but they're so exhausted from their journeys, many overshoot their intended destinations, like sleepy drivers missing their exits. In the morning, when they've realized their mistake, they'll hop onto a southwest wind, which brings them right over Tadoussac.

May 28 provided the perfect conditions for this kind of course correction, which birders call a "morning flight." For one thing, there's a big population this year, thanks to a bumper crop of spruce budworms, a favorite food of many warbler species. For another, the weekend was bad for migration, as Davies and his crew found out when they didn't see much on Saturday or Sunday. By the time the winds kicked up again on Monday, a huge crowd of birds was ready to head back.

"I think millions flew over Quebec, and all over the whole province," says Côté, who adds that he has never seen a migration like it. "It's the biggest one ever [recorded] in North America." Birds were overtaking lawns and highway medians. Radio stations were flooded with calls from confused residents. (Côté says about 100,000 birds were found dead on Monday, victims of window strikes.) Weather radar picked up on the flocks as though they were clouds.

Meanwhile, from their spot on the Tadoussac dunes, Davies and his friends were just trying to keep up. "It was basically nine hours of scanning," says Davies. "A couple of times some of us made food runs to the nearby town to just stay alive." Counting each individual bird soon became impossible, so they pulled out different techniques.

Some people clocked the rate of passing birds in a particular slice of the sky, and then extrapolated that to cover the whole migration area. Others paid attention to composition, or which type of bird was which, as different species mixed and mingled. "It was like, 'Whoop! Cape May. Whoop! Bay-breasted,'" describes Côté, who was nearby.

At times, things got a bit Hitchcockian. "Three species flew between my legs," says Davies. "One flew into my camera." Another member of the group, Tom Auer, went to stand in a patch of vegetation, and soon had warblers "whipping by my ears [and] my knees... darting around me like I was a tree." There was so much warbler chatter, "you just had to kind of tune it out," says Auer. (Davies affirmed that they escaped true disaster: "I don't think anybody got pooped on," he says.)

Things ended as quickly as they began. At about 3:00 p.m.—nearly 10 hours after they had first arrived—"birds were still going by at about 20 a second," says Davies. "Just 20 minutes later, it was only one per second. And then there were no birds moving." They packed up their binoculars and cameras and headed back inside. Later that afternoon, Davies published an official account of the day in the form of an eBird checklist. (Davies is the eBird project coordinator for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.) Their final estimate: 721,620 warblers.

This is certainly a guess: Côté thinks the number was maybe closer to half a million, and Davies estimates an error bar of at least 100,000 on either side. But at these bird levels, worrying over exact numbers just feels like nitpicking. "Back home in Ithaca, if you saw a Cape May warbler in your yard in the morning, that would be a highlight you'd tell your friends about at lunch," says Davies. "Like, one. And we saw over 100,000. It feels like a dream."

The dessert, which was part of an art exhibit, caused an uproar when a politician had a slice.

In Catholic doctrine, transubstantiation is the phenomenon where the bread and wine in the Eucharist are thought to become the body and blood of Christ. But eating a likeness of Christ in cake form? That might be akin to sacrilege. At least, that’s the reaction that Argentinian artists Pool Paolini and Marianela Perelli (who collaborate in the duo Pool y Marianela) incited when they served a life-sized Jesus cake at the openings for their latest exhibit, Kidstianism—especially when a national politician was seen eating part of Christ’s arm.

Online, the artists describe their exhibit as an exploration of “religion from the eyes of millennial children.” They transformed the likes of pop culture figures, dolls, and action figures (such as Leonardo, of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fame) into religious iconography. It’s a traveling exhibition, and at each opening, the two serve slices of a red velvet Christ cake—grisly stigmata wounds and all. On Instagram, they said that the cake was “the Kidstianism communion, our Eucharist.”

But Catholics didn’t take kindly to a video that showed Enrique Avogadro, the Minister of Culture for Buenos Aires, eating a slice of the cake at the recent FACA contemporary art fair in Argentina. (The country is predominantly Catholic and the birthplace of Pope Francis.) On social media, religiously-inclined commenters denounced it as “a lack of respect to one self and to what it represents” and called on Avogadro to resign. The Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Cardinal Mario Poli, also wrote a scathing critique of Avogadro in a letter to the chief of the city’s government.

Others praised the artists, and Avogadro, for imbibing art in a critique of religion, calling it “high-impact” and “genius.” Either way, Avogadro took to Facebook in response to the cake incident, saying that he believed “that the place of art is precisely to make us uncomfortable” but that “I understand … that public employees have a role that transcends what’s personal, and as such, we’re responsible for our actions. For this same reason, I want to apologize.”

The fate of Jesus cakes at future Kidstianism exhibitions is unclear. Although it has been traveling over the past few months, the artists have been laying low in light of the backlash. They deleted the video of Avogadro, as well as their Facebook page. For those curious about trying the cake themselves, it might have to wait, though; as of right now, the pair don't have plans to take the exhibit elsewhere.

How researchers revealed the continent's undiscovered topography.

There are mountains under the ice in Antarctica. That’s how thick it is, in places. Hidden under the vast frozen expanse of the southern continent, a complicated topography determines how the ice can move. In parts of the continent, satellite imaging has revealed the shape of the land below the ice. But those satellites have a blind spot—because of the angle of their orbits, they don’t capture data about a crucial area close to the South Pole, where the West Antarctic Ice Sheet meets the East.

The ice sheet in the west is smaller and less stable than the ice sheet in the east, and scientists thought that, if the western sheet were to start to disappear, ice from the east could flow in. Antarctic ice sheets aren’t static; in ice streams, for instance, a section of ice flows faster than the ice around it. (“Faster” is relative here; we’re talking less than a mile per year.)

In the past few years, a project led by the British Antarctic Survey, called PolarGAP, has worked to collect data to fill in satellites’ blind spots, using planes equipped with radars and other tools that can give a sense of what’s happening under the ice. In a new paper, published in Geophysical Research Letters, a team of scientists describes the discovery of mountain ranges and troughs under the ice in that crucial zone where east and west ice sheets meet.

“We expected to find mountainous subglacial topography but the size of the troughs did come as a surprise because we had no indication that they were there before,” says Northumbria University’s Kate Winter, the lead author of the paper.

Those mountains will limit the movement of ice from East Antarctica to the West. “The mountains will act as a barrier, holding back the East Antarctic Ice Sheet,” says Winter. The troughs, though, provide a path through the mountains; Live Science calls them “massive ice highways,” which could ultimately speed the flow of ice from the interior of the continent into the sea as the planet warms.

This new information will help modelers predict how Antarctica’s massive ice sheets will respond to climate change. There are more areas of the continent, though, that could be explored using ice-penetrating radar surveys. “The ice is over four kilometers thick”—that’s close to 2.5 miles—“in places, so we’re always finding new things under the ice,” says Winter. That includes lakes, mountains, ridges, troughs, and even volcanoes.

Mapping the oldest and least-disturbed tracts of trees is easier said than done.

In Kay Nielsen’s illustrations for the Brothers Grimm story of Hansel and Gretel, the deep woods are full of secrets. The trees are towering, gnarled, and knotted. Their canopies, crunchy and brown, blot out the sky. On the ground, clusters of ferns unfurl around tree roots; there are patches of grass, and verdant trees studded with blooms. In a glen, of course, sits that devilishly tasty house built from bread and cakes.

The woods are a character in the story. They are thick, tall, and deep—so much so that the young duo could wander them for days. Their allure, and a dash of horror, comes from the fact that they are unknown, and maybe unknowable.

In 2018, they aren’t many truly unknown corners of the globe—few places are pristine and untraveled the way they might be described in a fairytale. Still, dense clusters of primary forests—where trees have grown, for ages, largely undisturbed—exist in patches of the Amazon basin, Southeast Asia, and Canadian and Siberian Taiga. Slivers of Europe are still luxuriant with trees, too, and very old ones at that. But they’re dwindling.

A team of researchers, led by Francesco Maria Sabatini of Berlin’s Humboldt‐Universität, recently set out to map exactly where those oldest, least-disturbed forests are, and how many of them are left.

Since focusing on utterly untrammeled forest would have yielded a very brief list, the team took a broader view. They reviewed 17 years’ worth of studies on primary forests, which they took to include any tracts that were “primeval, virgin, near‐virgin, old‐growth, [or] long‐untouched.”

When they analyzed that data, the researchers found that most of the primary forests—at least those for which they had records—sprouted in Finland, or on the Carpathian or Balkan mountain ranges that slice across Romania and Bulgaria. Even where they’re most plentiful, these aren’t huge or especially numerous. Known primary forests account for just 0.7 percent of Europe’s forest area, discounting Russia, the scientists write in a new paper describing their results. So, unsurprisingly, these are small parcels—the median was 24 hectares, or roughly 0.09 square miles—largely scattered in northern latitudes, far from roads and among rugged terrain. Remote location and low density also makes it likely that the lumber industry hadn't rumbled through town.

Still, the authors caution that this is certainly only a partial picture of the distribution. "Some of the patterns that can be seen in the map derive from data availability, rather than reflecting the actual distribution of primary forests," Sabatini says. There was no data for Latvia, Belarus, Moldova, or Ireland, and just scattered snapshots for Sweden, Austria, or the U.K. It’s quite possible that there are primary forests there that didn’t make it into the mix because the data wasn't available. To begin to account for that, the researchers also modeled areas where they suspect that unrecorded forests are most likely to be.

“There's a recent surge of interest on Europe's remaining wild areas,” Sabatini says, and there are ecological reasons for pinpointing where they are and what protections insulate them. For animals that thrive in primeval forests, a changing landscape can be disastrous. The western capercaillie bird, for instance, depends on “a mosaic dominated by old-growth, natural forests, mixed with bogs and younger successional stages,” Sabatini says. His colleague Martin Mikoláš, a forest ecologist at the Czech University of Life Sciences, found that when the bird’s habitat in Slovakia’s Low Tatra mountains decreased by 7,000 hectares, the population plummeted by 40 percent.

Many of these areas that are already recorded don’t sit within areas governed by strict protections. Governments sometimes skirt those regulations, anyway, and that’s already causing conflicts. Back in 2012, spruce bark beetles infested some of the centuries-old trees in Poland’s Białowieża Forest, an old-growth cluster and UNESCO heritage site home to wolves, lynx, and many other species. Poland’s government green-lit a massive logging project, ostensibly to contain and defeat the menace. As many as 100,000 trees were felled in the process, and more than a few researchers felt they’d been duped—that the effort had been a lumber project dressed up as a conservation one. “Logging of infested spruces does not stop a bark beetle outbreak, it just leaves thousands of hectares of clear-felled sites instead,” Bogdan Jaroszewicz, a researcher at the University of Warsaw and director of the Białowieża research station, told The Guardian. In April, the European Union mandated that the chainsaws stop buzzing, but it’s unclear what happens next.

Re-naturalization projects are often controversial, and Sabatini says there's probably no "right answer" about how to pull them off. The best approach will vary by place and conditions. If the goal is to buoy species that are struggling to find habitat, he says, one tactic might be creating proxies for natural deadwood, and carving cavities into trees to give bats, woodpeckers, and other birds a spot to nest. In other instances, a hands-off strategy might be better.

In any case, returning a forest to its primeval state isn’t feasible, and it takes decades to even get close. "Restoring primary forest is important—for many forest types there's simply no primary forest left, at least in Europe—but preserving what's left is crucial," Sabatini says. "Once a forest loses its primary status, there's not much you can do, except waiting hundreds of years until the signs of human activities blur."

The best way to explore what Sabatini describes as "last-of-their-kind patches" might be in the pages of storybooks, or in the chapters of our imagination. Perhaps the "best way to express one's love to these wild areas," he says, "is to keep them wild."

Our newest title will officially be released in September.

The seeds of adventure are planted at a young age.

When you're a kid, reading a book that makes the world feel more vast, mysterious, and magical can be one of the most thrilling experiences in the world. That was certainly the case for me.

That's why I'm so proud to announce that Atlas Obscura is planting its own seed of adventure with our newest book from Workman Publishing, The Atlas Obscura Explorer’s Guide for the World’s Most Adventurous Kid. It will be released on September 18, 2018, and is now available for pre-order.

Written by yours truly along with co-author Rosemary Mosco and illustrator Joy Ang, the book takes young readers on a trip around the planet to discover its most mesmerizing and mysterious wonders. It's a journey to ice caves, dinosaur discos, abandoned theme parks, and so much more. Along the way, kids of all ages will learn about the connections that bind our world together in the most unexpected ways.

The Atlas Obscura Explorer’s Guide for the World’s Most Adventurous Kid contains the best of Earth’s secret wonders between two covers, proving that the world is vast and there are marvelous treasures behind every corner—or even right under your feet.

Each location—100 real destinations in 47 countries on every continent—is illustrated in stunning full-color. The book also features fun extras such as a handy packing list, a world map, obscure facts, GPS coordinates, and a list of useful travel advice on how best to get to any adventure.

If you loved our New York Times best-selling first book, you won't want to miss this chance to introduce Atlas Obscura to the young (or young-at-heart) reader in your life. Pre-order the Atlas Obscura kids' book today.

And they would have gotten away with 40 pairs, if it weren't for the police.

In the city of Nagaokakyo, in Japan's Kyoto prefecture, a thief (or thieves) prowled the streets, sniping footwear from unsuspecting homes. It started with just a few sandals, here or there. But according to The Mainichi, between May 10 and May 19, eight households reported to the Mukomachi police station that their sandals, which are typically placed in an entryway outside the door, had been poached from their residences. No one could figure out who or what stole their shoes, but the victims wanted answers.

At midnight, on May 20, the police conducted a stakeout near an empty house about a half-mile away from City Hall. They waited patiently and by the sixth hour, spotted two foxes roaming around in the backyard. They inspected the foxes' burrow, and found an assortment of 40 pairs of sandals. The police did not bring the foxes in for questioning, but Kyoto City Zoo chief Naoki Yamashita suspects an ulterior motive.

"The two foxes that the police officers spotted could have been building a burrow to breed and collected the sandals out of their instinct to stock up on food and other items," Yamashita told The Mainichi. There have been similar fox robberies, The Guardian reports, in Germany and England.

The police sent residents leaflets warning people to keep their footwear indoors. It's unclear if the foxes have anything to say for themselves.

“I can’t believe that foxes stole my sandals,” a woman told The Mainichi.