Each subway line in a big city can be surprisingly pleasant or expectedly miserable in its own way. Maybe one line always has plenty of seats in clean, new cars. Maybe another is plagued by broken ventilation systems and relentless delays. Researchers from the University of Hong Kong recently wondered about the differences between lines at a much smaller level—the microscopic one.
In the past, scientists have studied the microbes that colonize subway systems in New York, Boston, and Hong Kong by swabbing ticket booths, hand rails, poles, and other oft-touched surfaces. These studies have revealed the hidden geography of the subway, and how it maps onto the world above. In New York, for instance, a team from Weill Cornell Medicine found bacteria species associated with kimchi, mozzarella cheese, and other comestibles, brought in by riders. This time around, the Hong Kong team wanted to know how passengers carry microbes around the system and out with them when they disembark.
The researchers sent six volunteer straphangers into the morning swarm and the evening rush. These folks washed their hands with soap and water immediately before boarding the train, and then clutched rails or poles for 30 minutes at a time. Afterward, their palms were swabbed for DNA. The team cycled through each line three times over the course of three weeks.
Their takeaway, published today in Cell Reports, was that subway lines have different microbial signatures that depend on where they go and the time of day. First thing in the morning, the lines teem with microbes that are geographically specific. The Ma On Shan line, which travels past the brackish Shing Mun Channel, had the most aquatic microbes, while the West Rail line, which goes through the mountainous New Territories, hosted some that flourish at altitudes above 1,000 meters.
In all but the most isolated of these lines, however, those distinct menageries became much more homogenous by the evening. Over the course of the day, “with more and more people using the subway during the day, the microbial communities of all the lines become more similar, dominated by human skin commensal bacteria," said coauthor Gianni Panagiotou, a systems biologist at the Hans Knoell Institute in Germany and the University of Hong Kong, in a statement. The microbial hitchhikers that riders carry around with them tend to dominate the microscopic world by the end of a long day of commuting. Routine disinfecting resets the microbial community to some extent, starting the cycle over.
Most microbes are harmless, these ones included, but the researchers did detect traces of antibiotic-resistance genes, which help contribute to the ineffectiveness of medication for treating certain infections. By evening, these signals appeared across all of the lines, including the East Rail, which connects to lines serving mainland China, where antibiotic resistance can be a particularly serious concern. There's no reason to panic, though, as the bacterial load is pretty low and such genes can occur naturally. But, the authors argue, it's worth thinking about how human movements shape the microscopic world—for better or worse.
Designer Fernando Laposse is no stranger to playing with his food—his artistic endeavors have included many projects with sugar as his medium. But when London-based Laposse had a residency at the Centro de las Artes de San Agustin (CASA) in his home country of Mexico, it led him to create Totomoxtle: a project that means "corn husk" and that he hopes will preserve heritage corn varieties.
Laposse decided to use his skillset as a product designer to showcase the colorful husks of Mexico's heirloom corn by turning them into veneer, a decorative covering for everything from tables to vases. The kernel of this idea came from CASA founder Francisco Toledo, who Laposse calls "probably the most famous living artist in Mexico nowadays." Toledo, Laposse says, is famed for his activism that aims to preserve Mexico's corn. So in 2015, Laposse decided to develop a way of creating a material from gorgeous corn husks, which he remembered from the markets of his childhood.
His preservation efforts were in response to a pressing threat. Laposse believes that international trade agreements, aggressive use of herbicides and pesticides, and the influx of highly modified foreign seeds have decimated the practice of growing native corn across the country: It simply isn't very profitable anymore. As a result, Laposse couldn't even find much colorful corn for his project.
"The last guardian for the native seeds are the indigenous communities of Mexico," Laposse says, adding that for many, the value of heirloom corn lies in tradition and gastronomy, instead of money.
So Laposse visited one of the towns of his childhood in search of corn: Tonahuixtla, nestled in the Sierra Madre mountains. The town's soil was trickling away due to erosion, and along with it the town's population, many of whom had migrated. Remembering the once-vibrant corn, Laposse teamed up with a Tonahuixtla community leader, Delfino Martinez, on the growing and veneer-making process. Martinez, a family friend, is also the leader of the town's communal agricultural lands, or ejido.
But there was no local corn left, dashing Laposse's hopes of planting regional seeds. The corn seeds were instead provided by the Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo (CIMMYT), a corn and maize research institution that also provides seeds to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. Martinez already had devised several local projects to foster local agriculture, including a cactus forest to halt soil erosion and a community compost pit. Growing the corn for Totomoxtle was a natural fit, with local farmers growing and harvesting corn types such as Cacahuacintle and Cónicos in once-abandoned fields.
Creating the veneer, though, is complex. Laposse and the others allow the corn to dry over months. Then, workers cut the husks carefully off the cob, to preserve their shapes. The husks are soaked and ironed flat, and applied with a special thermal glue to a firm backing. A special punch creates geometric shapes, or Laposse uses a laser cutter for more intricate designs. The last step is a coating of water-repelling oil. The process is long and finicky, and Laposse says that local young women hired to make Totomoxtle are now pros at the process. Applied to lamps, walls, or tables, the result showcases the glorious colors of corn husks, from deep purple, to pink, to glowing orange. Totomoxtle is growing 12 varieties of corn in all, including colorful varieties from Peru and the Philippines.
While juggling other projects, Laposse currently designs and builds Totomoxtle-covered objects in his London carpentry workshop. He's shown them in European galleries, and a showing in the U.S. is in the works for May. While some funding for Totomoxtle comes from the Future Food Design Award that Laposse received in 2017, he also hopes that increased sales will allow the project to grow, while raising the profile of Mexico's heritage corn as a luxury good.
Laposse has quite a few goals, in fact. He wants to help support the Tonahuixtla community, which is now a mere 147 people. With 25 residents working on Totomoxtle, it's a significant impact. Growing the corn will also refresh CIMMYT's collection. Stored seeds need to be regularly replaced: The older seeds get, the less viable they often are. Plus, Tonahuixtla residents are eating heirloom corn once more, with a significant surplus. Laposse recently sent 2,000 kilos to a restaurant run by a Mixtec chef: the same indigenous ethnic group that makes up much of Tonahuixtla. Laposse also speaks fervently about the need to preserve biodiversity in a world where plant disease and climate change will likely make the few crops widely cultivated harder and harder to grow.
Above all, he hopes to preserve the cultural legacy of native corn, in honor of the grain's outsized impact on Mexican daily life. "It's present in every single meal," Laposse says. "From tortillas to atole to tamales."
Generations of nocturnal fishermen have lured their catch with fire.
It’s pitch black on Taiwan’s waters, and in a few minutes, all hell will break loose. A boom and blaze of fire explode into the night sky, followed by the sour stench of sulphur. Thousands of tiny, ray-finned sardines suddenly leap out of the Pacific Ocean—in a wild, graceless dance—hurling themselves towards the scorching flames. Meanwhile, fishermen work feverishly to scoop them up, before they plunge back into the sea. The scene is utter chaos.
Traditional sulphuric fire fishing is a century-plus-old practice found only in Jinshan, a sleepy little port city near the northern tip of Taiwan. Fishermen use a bamboo torch and soft sulphuric rocks to ignite a fire fierce enough to drive hordes of silver-scaled sardines to the water’s surface. And the golden hour for making fish fly? Set sail during a “moonless night,” when the sun has long dipped below the horizon and the fish are starving for light, says 71-year-old Ketong Lee, a boat captain who’s been fire fishing for more than half a century.
Sulphur is one of Jinshan’s most abundant natural resources, found everywhere from the village’s rocky golden cliffs to the murky-colored hot springs. Each fire-fishing boat carries a metal cauldron full of these dusty sulphuric rocks, which produce flammable gas that is fed into a long, skinny bamboo rod affixed to the boat’s rear. In a process known poetically as “phototaxis,” the fire’s blinding brightness “attracts the fish so fervently that they leap out of the water towards the smoldering light,” says Yushan Han, a professor at the National Taiwan University Institute of Fisheries Science.
Moreover, nothing is measured. The fishermen know everything by heart: how much sulphur to use and for how long. But there’s no room for mistakes, warns Lee. “Fire fishing can be dangerous,” he says. If the fire lingers too long, the boat and everyone onboard could explode.
The fishermen rise from their slumber just as the oven-hot sun dips below the horizon. This is when the grind begins. Their work won’t end until the sun’s morning glow appears again and birdsong fills the air. In the small city of Jinshan, the glitz of Taipei’s skyscrapers fade into the craggy coastline and steep mountain passes that spit out into the dead quiet Huangguang Fishing Harbor. It’s the beginning of the fire-fishing season, which will last from May to August, when the sardines migrate south from Japan to Taiwan’s northern shores.
After slurping down a bowl of rice flour noodles, the crew of eight prepares the traditional boat, a dazzling collage of earthy red, green, and blue colors. A clunky pair of wet boots and yesterday’s laundry still hang from the side—the fishermen spend most of their waking hours on the boat. “Whether or not the fish is caught is decided by the gods,” says 56-year-old fire fisherman Zhiyang Xie. He sees fire fishing as a higher calling, with an overwhelming “sense of mission.”
At the helm of the boat, the grizzled Captain Lee barks orders. He’s the oldest among them. Like a conductor, Lee directs the men and sets the rhythm. Each fisherman has his own part, his small beat in the larger melody. Fasten the ropes. Fill the tanks. Load the ice buckets. “You can’t make a fire on your own. That’s the difficulty in fire fishing,” says Xie. “You must rely on a lot of people to work together: Someone to man the fire, someone to draw the nets, and someone to steer the boat. If you lack one, it will be hard.”
These fishermen describe sulphuric fire fishing as not just a way of life, but also a sacred form of art, indelibly linked with the place in which they were born and raised. Captain Lee, like the others, wields decades of experience that’s been passed down from generation to generation, from father to son. “It’s a lot like learning math,” he says, taking a small breather before grabbing another load of ice for the boat. Once you get the hang of things, the formulas, the rules, everything else just falls into place. On a good night, the fishermen can catch hundreds of barrels of fish, up to three tons of sardines per boat, which can rake in as much as $4,500. But that’s just a tiny fraction of the larger fishing industry in Taiwan, says Professor Han. Each kilogram sells for a mere 33 cents, peanuts compared to the value of more popular fish breeds. Some days, the fish don’t even bite. “If you go out to sea everyday and don’t catch fish, there’s really nothing you can do about it. That’s just fate,” says Xie.
As the evening sky unfolds, the fishermen heave up the anchor and set sail at high tide. They suck on cigarettes and wait for the swarm of fish to arrive. But on the horizon, storm clouds start to roll in.
In its glory days, this painstaking practice was used by thousands of fishermen all across the lush islands of Taiwan. The technique was first developed by the Pingpu aboriginal tribe, according to local guides and a local cultural bureau, and honed during Japanese colonial rule in Taiwan more than 100 years ago. Now, there are only four fire-fishing boats left and a dwindling number of fishermen.
Yet young people are unwilling to continue such a backbreaking tradition. After all, the fire-fishing boats are rickety and the equipment is rusted. Not to mention, says Lee, “the work is exhausting, the pay is unstable, and the reward is low,” especially compared to the sleek, more modern commercial-fishing ships that use electric light bulbs to attract fish. Most of his fellow fishermen are already in their fifties and sixties. As he leans on the boat’s edge, he struggles to fluently speak Mandarin Chinese, the dominant national language. So, he instead settles for his mother tongue, Taiwanese Hokkien, a local dialect that’s less common these days in northern Taiwan, just like his chosen trade. “We don’t want to part with this tradition, so we begrudgingly continue.”
However, a full-blown publicity campaign is underway. To plug the leak on fire fishing, the local government provides a small subsidy to fishermen who elect to use the traditional technique. But according to the local fishermen's association, the incentive is not nearly enough to make up for the dwindling profitability of fire fishing. Moreover, a few years ago, the local government set up the official Jinshan Sulphuric Fire Fishing Festival in order to raise money, promote the practice, and spread awareness of its decline. Now, every season, large, comfortable sightseeing boats filled with eager tourists and photographers set sail alongside the traditional fire-fishing boats. It’s a chance to see the spectacle up close, and people are taking the bait. The half-day tour package includes a lengthy introduction to the region’s different fishing practices, a modest dinner, and boat fare, with total fees ranging from $45 to $100 per person.
However, some worry that these efforts, while earnest, are still not enough. “If we fail to hand down fire fishing to the next generation and let the practice die out, everything will disappear,” says Xie. “Now it can be said that my generation is the final fire-fishing generation.”
As fat drops of rain start to pour down, a nearby sightseeing boat full of gawking twenty-somethings blocks the way of a fire-fishing boat. They cheer the small group of fire fishers on, coaxing them to keep plodding forward. Others pout at the bad weather and swipe at their smartphones. In many ways, the tour is a strange performance—the tourists are the audience while the fishermen are the reluctant actors. Placing these fishermen’s work on a makeshift stage—to be photographed and uploaded to social media—may save their livelihood, but at the potential cost of changing its meaning.
“Currently, there are only four sulphuric fire-fishing boats left in all of Taiwan. As the age of the fishermen slowly climbs up, the fire fishing industry might also gradually enter history,” says Professor Sheng-Ping Wang, the chair of National Taiwan Ocean University’s Department of Environmental Biology and Fisheries Science. “Sulphuric fire fishing may be able to be developed or maintained by becoming a cultural tourism industry, but it will no longer be a commercial fishery industry on which fishermen can depend on for their livelihood.”
People are fighting to save this tradition, but others, even some of the most respected fishermen, feel more ambivalent. “If it continues, then it continues,” sighs Lee. “But if it doesn’t continue, then it doesn’t. That’s just life.” Xie feels similarly. “I’d like to say that I want to continue passing on this tradition,” he says, the wrinkles on his world-weary face creasing at the corner of his eyes. “But if you can’t really catch fish, this sense of mission will also become empty talk.”
A few years ago, the fire fishing tradition even got an official nod from the city government as a “cultural asset” and “national treasure” to be protected by the New Taipei City Cultural Bureau. But ultimately, nothing changed, says Zhengcheng Xu, a tour guide for the fire-fishing sightseeing trips and Jinshan chairman for the New Taipei City Leisure and Tourism Association. “It was just a name, a title,” he adds. The shrinking fire fishing fleet is still facing extinction.
As the sardines start flying, the fishermen ready their small mesh scoop nets. They frantically collect the fish, but gingerly place them on a bed of ice. The cold will keep them fresh until the morning, when the fish markets open at dawn. Tonight, they will toil for another six hours, sailing the darkened seas as the rest of the country snoozes, until their hands are raw and muscles are sore. “People who live off the sea have to accept their fate, to be optimistic, to try to make a living. If they can’t catch fish, there is nothing more to be done,” says Xie. By now, the four-hour tour has ended and sightseeing boats are long gone. The grit and sweat of his labor will go unseen.
Condiments aren’t typically known for being cuddly. But at one Los Angeles supermarket, any ketchup bottle you encounter—along with all 31,000 grocery products—will likely be delightfully fuzzy.
Fret not, this is no health code violation. This is Sparrow Mart, the fully felted grocery store created by 32-year-old British artist Lucy Sparrow. Sparrow spends most days surrounded by layers of fabric in the “Felt Cave,” her studio located on a secluded farm in the east of England. Here, she tirelessly stitches and paints all of her creations by hand, accompanied by a few sewing assistants, her studio director, and a plethora of true-crime podcasts to keep her going.
Sparrow first became interested in making felt art as a young girl in the hopes of creating toys she couldn’t find in stores. Intent upon making “everything cuddly,” the artist was drawn to the fuzzy fabric because of its versatility. “Felt is an amazing medium because of the color palette,” she says. “You can literally make anything.”
For Sparrow, that’s not an overstatement. In the past five years, she’s outfitted an entire corner store, bodega, and sex shop with thousands of realistic, hand-stitched felt products. Her most recent installment, 8 ‘Till Late, sold everything you’d expect to find in a ‘90s New York bodega, including felted booze, peanut butter, Vagisil, and a collection of self-help books. For the sake of authenticity, a fabric bodega cat perched on the counter by the sausages, presumably on the lookout for any felted rodents.
Now, Sparrow is focused on unveiling her newest, biggest installation. Open throughout August, 2018, at The Standard Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, Sparrow Mart will feature felt iterations of every food, drink, and cleaning product imaginable. The supermarket’s shelves will be stocked with everything from bright red bags of Lay’s Flamin’ Hot potato chips to hug-worthy boxes of Kraft macaroni and cheese.
It may seem arbitrary to turn food to felt, but Sparrow’s cuddly creations tap into the strong emotions, and often sense of comfort, specific foods can evoke. “Food is really nostalgic, and we all have really strong relationships with our favorite products,” says Sparrow. According to the artist, people often make decisions about what food they buy from a place of emotion.
One food Sparrow feels particularly emotional about? Bananas—particularly her beloved felted version, Basil, who she’s quick to call “the most handsome plantain on the planet.” The artist refers to Basil as her “constant companion,” and has several tattoos in homage to her favored fruit.
Among some of the artist's favorite products available in the supermarket are Windex (for its “gorgeous pump action handle”) and the meat section. There's also a wide array of prepared felt foods available, from a stocked sushi bar to smiling Sparrow Mart burgers and fries.
Sparrow advises those visiting the mart to be sure to read the labels. She paints each item by hand, which means both that they are intricate and that there are likely a few, precious misprints. “If they find a product with a spelling mistake on the label, they should buy it. They’re rare, but after 12 hours straight painting in the studio, it’s inevitable!”
One of the fiercest opponents of British colonialists had rockets unlike any his enemies had seen.
Here’s how Tipu Sultan, the ruler of the Indian Kingdom of Mysore at the end of the 18th century, felt about the British. He commissioned an automaton, more than two feet high and about five-and-a-half feet long, of a tiger—his emblem—that had pounced on a European man. Winding the crack on the tiger’s side would move the man’s arm up and down over his open mouth, as he emitted a mournful high-pitched note, which was followed by the deeper, resonant “growl” of the tiger.
As a military leader, Tipu's prowess backed up the growl of his automaton. He’s considered one of the fiercest opponents of British colonialism in India, and he had a frightening weapon on his side—iron-cased rockets, the first of their kind to be successfully used in battle. Recently, at the site of a fort in the Shimoga district of India’s Karnataka state, archaeologists dug up more than 1,000 Mysorean rockets hidden in the 18th century for later use.
When Tipu Sultan took power after his father’s death in 1782, Mysore had already been battling with the British East India Company for years. Tipu’s father had made sure his son was highly educated and had experience overseeing affairs of state and war from an early age.
One of the most alarming and powerful weapons that Mysore had against the British was its rocket technology: Under Tipu, the army had a contingent of 5,000 rocket launchers. The rockets were made of iron tubes, bladed on their sides, that contained the propellant.
Under Tipu, the Kingdom of Mysore fought to improve the quality of life of its people, while keeping British invaders at bay. France was a close ally, both on military and economic matters. In the 1780s, he struck a trade deal with France and worked to expand the local silk production industry, creating a thriving economy in his territory.
When Mysore first used its rockets against the British, they were taken by surprise and described them as a “flying plague.” They were a decisive factor in the end of the Second Mysore War. In the fourth and final war, which ended in Tipu’s death, a turning point came when a British shell exploded a cache of rockets. After the battle ended, the British captured examples of the rockets and sent them back to England, where the technology helped inspire the rockets used in the Napoleonic wars.
Back in 2002, though, a small supply of centuries-old, rusted rockets turned up near a fort in Shimoga. They were dated back to the era of Tipu Sultan, and after additional research, the state archaeology agency decided to search for more rockets. At the end of July, they excavated a dried-up well where the ground smelled of gunpowder, reports Suryaa, a Hyderabad-based news outlet. After three days of excavations, they had turned up more than 1,000 rockets, each around a foot in length and still filled with potassium nitrate and other propellants. Examples of the rockets will be held in a local museum, an artifact of Tipu's resistance to colonial power.
What would happen if briny Martian liquid met an Earthling cucumber?
Deep under the ice cap of Mars’s southern pole, there could be a store of water, the first stable body of liquid water ever found on the planet. After the paper announcing this discovery came out, reporters described a “lake of liquid water,” about 12 miles in diameter. Hearing that phrase, it’s easy, perhaps even natural, to imagine a bubble of crystal-clear water, hidden under the cap of frozen water and carbon dioxide, pure and sweet and waiting.
But the reality would be less appealing. The pressure of a mile-thick layer of ice changes the conditions under which water can be liquid, by decreasing its freezing point. Even so, to stay liquid at around -90°F, the “lake” would have to be a briny layer of water, rather than a pool of pure (or even drinkable) water.
Briny water has its uses, though. For instance, what if Martian water was used to make pickles?
On Earth, going back centuries, brines made with salt (the NaCl kind) and other chemical compounds, such as calcium chloride, have been used to preserve food. Sugar is an energy source for microbes, and if the wrong ones start feasting on a vegetable, it becomes unfit for human consumption. But salt can cultivate an environment that only certain desirable bacteria can survive. The salt also helps leach sugars from the cells of the vegetable, and the bacteria consume the sugar and excrete lactic acid. Many microbes also have a problem tolerating acidity, so the acid also keeps at bay microbes that are undesirable (for the purposes of human consumption, at least).
Ultimately, pickling is meant to deal with the microbes that were already living in and on the vegetables and that, given a chance, would create rot or mold or otherwise make the vegetable inedible. “The purpose is to eliminate the indigenous microbiota, essentially,” says Ilenys Perez-Diaz, an associate professor of food science at NC State University.
Too much salt, though, can stop advantageous bacteria from working. It can still keep the food from rotting away—ham, for instance, is preserved simply by adding a ton of salt—by stopping all microbial growth. If the goal is preservation through fermentation, though, too much salt can slow the process down to a crawl. Also, there’s a limit to how much salt a person can take, and an overly salty brine can make pickles inedible.
The Mars water would definitely be too salty to survive for the lactic acid bacteria that are key to Earthling pickling processes. Measured in “practical salinity units,” ocean water has a salinity of around 35 PSU; the Dead Sea has a salinity of around 40 PSU. Pickling brine falls somewhere in between. But there are lakes in Antarctica where the salinity hits 200 PSU or more, and it's possible that the Mars water could have similarly high salinity.
So, if you were to immerse a cucumber in Mars water, it probably wouldn’t rot away. But it wouldn’t be transformed by those hard-working lactic-acid producing bacteria into a delicious, sour treat.
What about other bacteria, though? One of the exciting things about liquid water on Mars is that it could be a habitat for microbes—the first alien lifeforms we’re likely to encounter. If those microbes stumbled upon a cucumber, would they be at all interested in it as a potential source of food?
We obviously don’t know much about microbes on Mars, because we’ve yet to discover them (assuming they exist at all). One of the closest analogues on Earth, though, are extremophile microbes that live in subglacial lakes, not unlike the Mars lake.
While most microbes we know about on Earth, like most life on Earth, get their energy from a food chain that starts with the sun and photosynthesis, microbes in subglacial Antarctic lakes don’t have access to the sun. Instead, they use inorganic compounds as their source of energy. As the ice sitting over these lakes moves (albeit slowly), it puts pressure on the bedrock below, grinding the rock down and releasing compounds such as iron and sulfides into the water. The lake-dwelling microbes can oxidize those minerals the way other living things fix carbon, creating energy and keeping themselves alive.
Ultimately, though, we know very little about these microbes. “We’ve sampled one of these lakes in Antarctica,” says Brent Christner, a microbiologist at the University of Florida, who studies subglacial lakes. “There are 400.” The microbes they’ve found so far resemble microbes that live in other, somewhat more accessible places where sunlight and organic materials are impossible to come by. Christner and his colleagues are planning on sampling another subglacial Antarctic lake soon, and the microbes living in that next lake could look similar—or be totally different. We just don’t know.
Given this limited information, though, it’s safe to say that the glucose and fructose of a cucumber would be totally foreign as a potential food stuff for subglacial lake microbes. Cucumbers do contain small amounts of iron, but even that likely wouldn’t be of much interest to these microbes—although it would depend on how bioavailable the iron was, Christner allows.
To the extent that any subglacial Mars microbes (that may or may not exist) might resemble extremophile microbes on Earth, they probably wouldn’t have much interest in the cucumber, either.
There’s one more reason, though, that trying to make pickles with Mars brine wouldn’t work out. Assuming that the salts that have made their way into the brine are similar to the salts that have been found on the planet’s surface, they’re likely to be perchlorate, a type of chemical compound containing an ion made up of chlorine and oxygen. Perchlorates exist on Earth, too, and they’re commonly used in “rocket propellants, munitions, fireworks, airbag initiators for vehicles, matches, signal flares” and fertilizers, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. These compounds are not what you want to be putting into your body: Prolonged exposure to sodium perchlorate, through swallowing, for instance, can cause organ damage.
Pickling in Martian water, then, is not likely to be a success. If we ever do figure out how to grow food on the Red Planet and we want to preserve it, we’ll need some good old Earth-style water and microbes to do the trick. Cultivated in the right fashion, though, who knows what wonders Martian microbes might work on our food? Perhaps they'll work some chemical magic that will result in a new type of delicacy never encountered on Earth. (Assuming, of course, that they don't kill us first.)
The flying insects usually go solo—but one lepidopterist surprised hundreds snoozing together in a hollow tree.
Andrei Sourakov, a lepidopterist at the Florida Museum of Natural History, is something of a bug paparazzo. Every time he passes a hollow tree with an opening he can reach, he sticks his camera inside, flips it upside-down, turns the flash on, and snaps a photo—just to see "what lurks there," he says. He is often surprised: Once, he interrupted about 100 mating stick insects. "They sprayed my camera with nasty stuff," he remembers. "I became quite a bit more interested."
Other discoveries are somewhat less titillating. In 2010, Sourakov found a dozen moths, perched on the inside of a small sweetgum tree near the museum. They weren't eating. They weren't mating. They were just… resting. "When I zoomed in, they were all the same species"—a particular member of the genus Idia, he says. "I immediately thought, this must be some kind of specialized behavior."
Over the next eight years, Sourakov kept returning to that tree, as well as another, a large red oak in San Felasco Hammock Preserve State Park. Often, he found moths: 60 of them, or 100, or once, over 400. Eventually, he collected his observations in a paper, which was published last month in Tropical Lepidoptera Research.
It's not every day you get to peek inside an insect dorm. On the 400-moth day, Sourakov shot a video, which you can see above, and which is somehow both sleepy and exciting. "This is unbelievable," he says, gazing at walls hung with slumbering critters. "So many moths."
But this discovery is notable for other reasons, too. Adages aside, most butterflies and moths aren't very social. There are exceptions—monarchs congregate famously and spectacularly every winter in California, milkweed butterflies travel together in Taiwan, and bogong moths hang out in groups during Australian summers. But even in these cases, "this is seasonal behavior," generally associated with migration, says Sourakov.
With these Floridian Idia, "it looks like they do it daily, basically," he says. "It's like roosting in bats… They go out at night, and then they come back for the day." He suspects they group up by sensing each others' pheromones, and that resting in large numbers might help ensure they don't all get gobbled down by predators.
Sourakov still wants to figure out exactly why the moths are doing this, and how common it is. Since he published the paper, he's gathered a few more data points: A correspondent started smacking on dead trunks around North Carolina and managed to scare some Idia moths out.
And last week, Sourakov was running a science camp for middle school kids and decided to check a hollow tree, just for kicks. "I wasn't hoping for much," he says. "But there were about a dozen Idia moths."
The campers were impressed, and Sourakov was happy for the opportunity to pass along his philosophy. "It kind of proves my general feeling that while many young researchers want to go far to make discoveries, you don't have to," he says. "You should look in your neighborhood."
Visiting the remains of the doomed ship causes it damage—but so will just leaving it there.
The bride wore a flame-retardant suit—and so did the groom. In July 2001, an American couple got married in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, thousands of feet below the surface. In the background was an international landmark every bit as familiar as the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal or any other postcard-perfect wedding photo destination. David Leibowitz and Kimberley Miller wed on the bow of the Titanic shipwreck, in a submarine so small they had to crouch as they said their vows. Above the water, Captain Ron Warwick officiated via hydrophone from the operations room of a Russian research ship.
The couple had agreed to the undersea nuptials only if they could avoid a media circus, but quickly became the faces of a troubling trend: The wreck of the Titanic as landmark tourist attraction, available to gawk at to anyone with $36,000 singeing a hole in their pocket. (Leibowitz won a competition run by diving company Subsea Explorer, who then offered to finance the costs of their wedding and honeymoon.)
As opprobrium mounted, particularly from those whose relatives had died aboard the ship, a Subsea representative told the press: "What's got to be remembered is that every time a couple gets married in church they have to walk through a graveyard to get to the altar." Was the Titanic no more than an ordinary cemetery? The event focused attention on a predicament with no single answer: Who did the wreck belong to, what was the “right” thing to do to it, and what was the point of a landmark that almost no one could visit?
People had been wrestling with earlier forms of these questions for decades, long before the nonprofit Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution discovered the Titanic wreck in 1985. The most prominent of these earlier dreamers was Briton Douglas Woolley, who began to appear in the national press in the 1960s with increasingly harebrained schemes to find, and then resurface, the ship. One such scheme involved him going down in a deep-sea submersible, finding the ship, and then lifting it with a shoal of thousands of nylon balloons attached to its hull. The balloons would be filled with air, and then rise to the surface, dragging the craft up with them. As Walter Lord, author of Titanic history bestseller The Night Lives On, ponders, “How the balloons would be inflated 13,000 feet down wasn’t clear.”
Next, Woolley coaxed Hungarian inventors aboard his project. The newly incorporated Titanic Salvage Company would use seawater electrolysis to generate 85,000 cubic yards of hydrogen. They’d fill plastic bags with it, they announced—and presto! But this too was a wash. They had budgeted a week to generate the gas; a scholarly paper by an American chemistry professor suggested it might take closer to 10 years. The company foundered and the Hungarians returned home. (In 1980, Woolley allegedly acquired the title to the Titanic from the ship and insurance companies—his more recent attempts to assert ownership have proven unsuccessful.)
Woolley might not have raised the Titanic from the depths, but he had succeeded in winching up interest in the vessel, and whether it might ever see the light of day again. In the following decade, some eight different groups announced plans to find and explore the ship. Most were literally impossible; some were practically unfeasible. One 1979 solution involving benthos glass floats was nixed when it became clear that it would cost $238,214,265, the present day equivalent of the GDP of a small Caribbean nation.
In the early 1980s, various campaigns set out to find the ship and its supposedly diamond-filled safes. But as they came back empty-handed, newspapers grew weary of these fruitless efforts. When the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution set sail in 1985 with the same objective, it generated barely a media ripple. Their subsequent triumph in early September made front page news: the New York Timesproclaimed tentatively: “Wreckage of Titanic Reported Discovered 12,000 Feet Down.”
Within days of its discovery, the legal rights to the ship began to be disputed. Entrepreneurs read the headlines and saw dollar signs, and new plans to turn the Titanic into an attraction began to bubble up to the surface. Tony Wakefield, a salvage engineer from Stamford, Connecticut, proposed pumping Vaseline into polyester bags placed in the ship’s hull. The Vaseline would harden underwater, he said, and then become buoyant, lifting the Titanic up to the surface. This was scarcely the least fantastical of the solutions—others included injecting thousands of ping pong balls into the hull, or using levers and pulleys to crank the 52,000-ton ship out of the water. “Yet another would encase the liner in ice,” Lord writes. “Then, like an ordinary cube in a drink, the ice would rise to the surface, bringing the Titanic with it.”
Robert Ballard, the young marine geologist who had led the successful expedition, spoke out against these plans. The wreck should not be commercially exploited, he said, but instead declared an international memorial—not least because any clumsy attempt to obtain debris from the site might damage the ship irreparably, making further archeological study impossible. “To deter would-be salvagers,” the Times reported, “he has refused to divulge the ship's exact whereabouts.”
Somehow, the coordinates got out. Ballard’s wishes were ignored altogether: in the years that followed, team after team visited the wreck, salvaging thousands of objects and leaving a trail of destruction in their wake. Panicked by the potential for devastation, Ballard urged then-chairman of the House Merchant Marine and Fisheries Committee, Congressman Walter B. Jones, Sr., to introduce the RMS Titanic Maritime Memorial Act in the United States House of Representatives. The Act would limit how many people could explore and salvage the wreck, which would remain preserved in the icy depths of the Atlantic.
Despite being signed into law by President Ronald Reagan in October 1996, the Act proved utterly toothless. The Titanic site is outside of American waters, giving the U.S. government little jurisdiction over its rusty grave. In 1998, the Act was abandoned altogether.
In the meantime, visits to the site had continued. In 1987, Connecticut-based Titanic Ventures Inc. coupled with the French oceanographic agency IFREMER to survey and salvage the site. Among their desired booty was the bell from the crow’s nest, which had sounded out doom to so many hundreds of passengers. When pulled from the wreck, the crow’s nest collapsed altogether, causing immense damage to the site. People began to question whether it was right for people to be there at all, let alone looting what was effectively a mass grave. Survivor Eva Hart, whose father perished on the ship, decried Titanic visitors as “fortune hunters, vultures, pirates!”—yet the trips continued. A few years later, director James Cameron’s team, who were scoping out the wreck for his 1997 blockbuster, caused further accidental damage.
Gradually, researchers realized that nature, too, had refused to cooperate with the statute introduced above the surface. “The deep ocean has been steadily dismantling the once-great cruise liner,” Popular Science reported in July 2004. One forensic archaeologist described the decay as unstoppable: “The Titanic is becoming something that belongs to biology." The hulking wreck had become a magnet for sea life, with iron-eating bacteria burrowing into its cracks and turning some 400 pounds of iron a day into fine, eggshell-delicate “rusticles”, which hung pendulously from the steel sections of the wreck and dissolved into particles at the slightest touch. Molluscs and other underwater critters chomped away at the ship, while eddies and other underwater flows have broken bits off the wreck, dispersing them back into the ocean.
A century after the Titanic sunk in 1912, over 140 people had visited the landmark many believe should have been left completely alone. Some have had government or nonprofit backing; others have simply been wealthy tourists of the sort who accompanied Leibowitz and Miller to their underwater wedding. With its centenary, the ship finally became eligible for UNESCO protection, under the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage. Then-Director General Irina Bokova announced the protection of the site, limiting the destruction, pillage, sale and dispersion of objects found among its vestiges. Human remains would be treated with new dignity, the organization announced, while exploration attempts subject to ethical and scientific scrutiny. “We do not tolerate the plundering of cultural sites on land, and the same should be true for our sunken heritage,” Bokova said, calling on divers not to dump equipment or commemorative plaques on the Titanic site.
The legal protections now in place on the Titanic wreck may have been hard won, but they’re bittersweet in their ineffectiveness. The Titanic has been protected from excavation, but it’s defenseless against biology. Scientists now believe that within just a few decades, the ship will be all but gone, begging the question of precisely what the purpose of these statutes is.
In its present location, protections or no, Titanic’s destruction seems assured. It’s likely, but not certain, that moving the ship would damage it, yet keeping it in place makes its erosion a certainty. A few days after the wreck was found in 1985, competing explorer and Texan oilman Jack Grimm announced his own plans to salvage the ship, rather than let it be absorbed by the ocean floor. “What possible harm can that do to this mass of twisted steel?" he wondered. Grimm, and many others, may have been prevented from salvaging the site for its own protection—but simply leaving it alone has doomed it to disappear.
A massive mollusk recently found in the Hudson River is the latest example of two centuries of appreciating behemoth bivalves.
The year 1903 was a bad one for oysters—or, rather, it was an unsavory time for the New York gourmands who craved heaping piles of goodly mollusks. In February of that year, from his float at the base of Gansevoort Street, which runs straight to the Hudson River, one anonymous exporter lamented that the oysters were so spotty and small that “it is scarcely worth bringing them to market.” Succulent large ones, or even acceptably average contenders? Those, he said, “are as scarce as grapes in Greenland.”
And the little ones were not going to get much play in the city's seafood bars. “New York does not like the small oyster,” the exporter continued. Restaurants and hotels demanded mollusks with a theatrical streak, “that would make a show in a fry, or panned, or stewed.”
As the 19th century rolled into the 20th, New York newspapers were full of dispatches about oysters—enormous ones in particular. One described bivalves that washed ashore in Australia, measuring more than a foot across the shell. Another reported that one had turned up on the banks of Christchurch, on England’s southern coast, weighing in at 3.5 pounds.
For a time in the 1800s, the city drooled over Saddle Rock oysters—a splendid, sizable variety that carried with it a whiff of myth. (They were said to be named for their home, an equestrian-shaped rock in in the East River, where a bed was revealed during low tide one day in 1827.) Though this crop was exhausted soon after, the name lived on, and was attached to many large varieties. Just how big New York’s biggest oysters usually were, though, remains as murky as a sediment-swirled river. “New York oysters, like so much in New York, were not really bigger, just better marketed,” wrote Mark Kurlansky, author of The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell, in the New York Times. Meanwhile, the Bluepoint oyster—the mild-mannered species Kurlansky has described as the state’s most famous—isn't all that big.
Two centuries ago, oysters were so wildly abundant that they weren’t treated as luxury foodstuffs. But soon the city's bottomless appetite for them—combined with pollution and dredging—resulted in the near-extinction of oysters in the city's waterways. In recent years, however, the mollusks have started to return. For the most part, they’ve been coaxed along as part of environmental remediation projects—the filter-feeders can help form the foundation of a healthy habitat.
Last week, a construction crew working on a set of pilings on Pier 40, in Manhattan, happened across a truly massive specimen. They brought the 8.6-inch-long oyster to the River Project, a research and education group focused on the Hudson River. “It was the biggest oyster I’d ever seen,” says Toland Kister, an educator at the River Project. It visibly dwarfed any oyster you might see in a restaurant, and it maxed out the group’s triple-beam scales, which go up to 610 grams (roughly 1.3 pounds).
Also, it was still alive.
At first, Kister says, the team was worried about it—a large, old creature wrenched from the place where it was settled. But it spent the weekend in one of their flow-through tanks, which hold river water. Then, on Monday, it was returned to the water—this time, suspended in a cage.
There's a lot left to learn about the find. Like trees, oysters carry growth rings that enumerate the chapters of their lives, but these are somewhat unreliable narrators. Since they're affected by food scarcity and stress, the exact age of the found is unknown. A conservative estimate puts it somewhere around seven or eight years old, Kister says, and some people suspect it's closer to 15. That would make it positively ancient among local mollusks.
Was the oyster all alone on its piling? "We don't know the exact situation down there yet," Kister says. "This one could be incredibly unique—it could be the only one like it, or it could be part of a group." The only way to know for sure will be to go inside the construction zone, and Kister is working to get access to the dock.
As far as anyone can tell, no one is planning to attempt to swallow this briny beast—but its presence in the local waterways is promising for the future of these urban estuaries, if not exactly a harbinger of a return to New York's rapacious past.
Lots of people have certain items they never go anywhere without. Some of these objects are practical, while others are more emotional, but either way, maintaining a personal 'explorer's kit' can be a key part of leading an adventurous life.
Recently we asked Atlas Obscura readers to tell us what they carry in their adventuring packs, and the results were both utilitarian and unsurprisingly idiosyncratic. By far the most popular item among our readers was the trusty Swiss Army knife. It's a classic for a reason. Some people leaned heavily toward practical items such as lighters and compasses. Others said they carry objects that help them stay in the right frame of mind for discovery, like an important letter or a collection of stones from previous travels. Each list of items ended up saying a lot about the people who put them together, as well as simply providing great ideas for travel gear.
We've compiled some of our favorite reader submissions below. And (blatant, if helpful, plug alert) if you're looking to fill out your own explorer's pack, you can check out some of our suggestions in the Atlas Obscura Shop, complete with recommendations from members of our staff. We can all use things that help make our explorations, and indeed our lives, more wondrous.
1. Swiss Army knife 2. Electronics chargers and battery pack 3. Sewing kit 4. First aid kit 5. Torch
“I carry these (and more!) because they're useful. I have a literal 'explorer's kit' that goes with me everywhere. So my phone never runs out of charge, I can repair any wardrobe malfunctions, patch up any minor injuries, make notes, go shopping (with my reusable shopping bag), light a fire, cut, screw or clip things. I also stay dry (plastic poncho) and clean (soap). I'm also often the only person with jump leads and a car-starting battery pack, a shovel, and with the wherewithal to make minor repairs to an aircraft propeller. It's surprising how often I've needed the useful things I carry, and how often I'm the only person in the group that has what's needed.” — Tiffany Elliott, England
“These are things not carried on my person, but in the trunk of my car at all times. Never know when you need to have an impromptu party.” — Samantha Byrd, Austin, Texas
"My wife loves to document our crazy and usually humorous adventures with what she calls her 'adventure journal.' We always make it a habit to have a positive outlook on our travels and try to enjoy the moment versus getting lost in social media documenting. I know there’s so much you can bring with you when exploring new places but these are just a few of our favorite things that we enjoy! No matter what you decide just make sure it’ll add value to your adventure and not be a burden." — Kory Piorkowski, Cleveland, Ohio
1. Vaseline. Good for cuts, moisturizing, lip balm, etc. 2. A quick-dry towel, à la Hitchhikers Guide 3. Nail clippers/small scissors 4. Tea bags 5. Fruit/nut trail mix
“Everything else changes depending on the trip, but I have these with me if I’m going somewhere longer than a day. Physical comfort is important to enjoying one’s experiences.” — Jamie Vanderzee, New York City, New York
1. West Marine compass 2. Signal mirror 3. Plastic whistle, no ball 4. Flashlight 5. Swiss Army knife, multi-tool
"Compass to orient myself in cloud-covered skies, flashlight for dark places, twine for mending stuff, whistle to alert help or scare potential threats, lighter to start fire, knife for multiple uses." — Jonathan Saunders, Santa Fe, New Mexico
1. Q-tips 2. Scissors (both fabric and paper) 3. Nail clippers 4. Headphones 5. Notebook with several pens (color-coding is my life)
"I am a very particular person, and an extension of that is needing to feel prepared All. Of. The. Time. There is no feeling I hate more in the world than not having what I need on me at all times. I also travel super frequently and my backpack needs to hold as much as possible, so I've just gotten used to holding a bunch of toiletries in there. Sometimes my friends make fun of me for carrying all of the things that I do, but none of them seem to complain when they have a hangnail in the middle of class." — Luke Bagdon, Detroit, Michigan
1. Tin box containing glasses, cleaning cloth, spare toothpick, spare ink cartridge (for a fountain pen), band-aids, and two toys 2. Tape measure 3. Swiss Army knife (Victorinox) with Magen David 4. Tin box containing ibuprofen 5. Pen, pencil, pencil sharpener, and signal splitter
“These make my daily life possible. As a rare book and manuscript curator, I never know when I will need a tape measure. The Swiss Army knife has the usual useful tools, the scissors being the best; pen and pencil are always necessary, pencil because pens are not allowed in special collections reading rooms; the toys because you never know when you will need to entertain a child; the glasses cleaning cloth the better to see you with, my dear; and the ibuprofen because headaches can strike at any moment.” — Elizabeth Denlinger, New York
1. Swiss Army knife 2. Notebook and pen 3. Chapstick 4. Tiny first aid kit 5. Mini-unicorn
“Most of my things are practical. I think you can get pretty far in life with a Swiss Army knife and a first aid kit! The chapstick is because I can't live without it, and the unicorn is because what isn’t better with a tiny unicorn?” — Katie, Madison, Wisconsin
1. Dr. Bronner's lavender hand sanitizer 2. Pen & notebook 3. A St. Christopher medal 4. A package of tissues 5. A chip from the ashes of the World Trade Center
"The hand sanitizer, pen & notebook, and tissues are purely practical. I like to adventure with my five year-old, and the places we visit don't always have spotless bathrooms or crayons and kid's menus. I also like to write, so having someplace to jot down ideas when they come to me is important. The St. Christopher medal was given to me by my mother. I think of it as a symbolic reminder of her protection. My mother also gave me the chip from the World Trade Center, that she picked from the ashes when she was stuck in NYC after 9/11. I don't really know why I keep it in my purse, but I have for 17 years now.” — Claire, Denver, Colorado
1. Honey-infused chapstick 2. Mini nail kit 3. Small crossword puzzle booklet/pen 4. Post–It note with my family/friends numbers on it 5. Charger bank and ear buds/headphones
“Honey infused chapstick: can be used for uncomfortably chapped lips, peeling cuticles, itchy skin spots, and small scrapes (honey has antibiotic properties). Nail kit: i always have to have my nails perfect, plus it functions as a multi-tool (nail clipper, small scissors, file, ect.). I hate being bored but I never want to come off as rude if i'm made to wait, so the crossword puzzle takes care of that. Plus if i need to makes notes, i jot them on the back of the cover. Post–It note with numbers. For a while I worked in a police detainment center and at night police would pick up individuals walking alone and bring them to the center (for their safety). They were allowed to call someone to pick them up. However, the #1 thing people lost after a night at the bars was their phone and many hadn't memorized the numbers of their closest contacts and then they had to stay the night. So, I keep the post it note in my wallet in case I'm ever in a situation but i lose my phone. Charger bank/headphones: I love music, it both motivates me and calms me down. So if i want to listen to music on the train or am feeling anxious and want to block out the outside world, I can count on my charged phone headphones.” — Cole Petersen, Fargo, North Dakota
1. Bear spray 2. Head lamp 3. Bottle opener 4. Camera 5. Bug spray
“Summers in the Yukon mean that you're never too far away from wildlife, especially bears. And summers also mean we're out camping a lot, so the other items are crucial as well!” — Myles Dolphin, Whitehorse, Yukon
1. Peanuts (for any potential squirrel or chipmunk companions I might meet along the way) 2. A hair elastic, safety pin, and carabiner (three essentials that can fix most problems and come in handy at the strangest moments) 3. A mini-Sharpie marker (because you just never know) 4. Ear plugs (years of loud concerts taught me that valuable lesson) 5. A catkin from a pussy willow branch (a little fluffy piece of nature that always reminds me to cherish the small things in life)
"Everything I carry with me has a use, be it an emergency need for a safety pin, or as a reminder to take in everything around me with a deep breath and appreciation of life. For safety, life, and adventure. I'll never be caught without one when a hungry little squirrel friend holds up his little hands and asks for a peanut." — Bevin Sane, Toronto, Canada
1. Travel watercolor set 2. Local stamps 3. Chapstick with SPF 4. Socks 5. Plastic bag
“These items, for me, are all about being prepared for spontaneity. When I stumble upon a beautiful scene, I'll want to paint a landscape on a blank postcard. Slap an address on it, put a local stamp on it, and it's better than any souvenir. Also, writing postcards is a great way to soak in local life at a cafe. If you travel to sunny countries to eat incredible food, consider the SPF chapstick. If you've ever applied lipstick before dinner, you know it gets eaten off. And if you've ever had sunburnt lips, it sort of ruins your appetite. SOCKS! Very useful: you're on a hiking trip and need a quick change in a rain storm; you're wearing sandals and it gets chilly; you bought a brass deity at an antique shop and need to protect it in your backpack. Ok, now the plastic bag. I love wandering through open air markets and buying local fruit to eat as I wander some more. It's also great for wet bathing suits, holding stuff you bought, keeping electronics protected from water, and barfing into (you thought that tripe would stay in your intestines… just make sure you remove the electronics first).” — Aliza Gans, New York
1. A small plastic dilophosaurus named Viktor 2. Band-aids 3. Ibuprofen, melatonin, motion sickness medication, and anti diarrhea medication 4. Duct tape and super glue 5. A pack of crackers or granola bar (to save people from my hanger)
“I take a picture of Viktor in front of each country’s flag. He was a gift from friends when I was traveling for work and he's an excellent conversation starter, although he's terrible at maintaining them. The medical items are self explanatory. You fix just about anything with duct tape and super glue. I have repaired clothes, shoes, books, and even people with them. Food because you don't want to see me when I'm hungry.” — Fae, Vietnam
1. Lights (matches, headlamp) 2. Densely packed nutritional snacks and water filter 3. First-aid kit and meds 4. Compass 5. Spare socks and space blanket
“I am 62, female, infirm, AND I hike alone. I plan to enjoy these solo adventures for as long as I can. If I fall or otherwise become stuck, I'd be able to stay alive and strong til found with these basic items. My camo pants pockets carry bug spray, strong knife, notebook/pencil, bandana, and collecting bags.” — Charlee, Vermont
1. Postcards 2. Small notebook to draw with pen 3. Emergency light 4. Woollen cap 5. Water
"While I'm travelling, I love to sketch, which is, in a way, remembering the details of the place, and so I always carry a notebook and a pen so that I can sketch whenever I feel like and also to write numbers or email IDs of the friends that I make on the go. A woollen cap so that when the hair is a mess I can just don a cap in a jiffy and carry on travelling :). I always love the golden times, the bygone eras, and so i always make a habit of writing letters and sending postcards to my dear ones." — Sheethal, India
1. A silk bag containing nine stones: hawkeye tigereye, amethyst, raw emerald, herkimer diamond, black garnet, double-terminated Tibetan crystal, labrador, celestine, and a tiny herkimer diamond given to me by a crow 2. A silver turtle for wisdom and longevity 3. A scrap of red felt for luck 4. A pocket-sized “manageable man” because you may never know when you may need one! 5. A black star
"I have carried these items for so long that they have become a part of who I am. It feels very natural to have these items on my person wherever I go. The nine stones have brought insight and prosperity to me over the years. The scrap of red felt was to honor a Chinese New Year tradition, red for good luck! I gave my children scraps of red felt as well, which they carry with them always. The silver turtle I found at a time when I sought wisdom and longevity for a loved one. The black star is a remembrance, to honor the life of David Bowie. Lastly, which is not visible, is a sense of adventure, which you can not see unless you look for the twinkle in my eyes. I thoroughly endorse adventure! It is good for one’s spirit." — Suzanne Colton, Windsor, Connecticut
1. No-sew buttons 2. A laminated, hand-written note that my late mother wrote for me on the original stationery of the Walt Disney World Polynesian Resort Hotel 3. Spare Rx glasses 4. Monogrammed leather notebook 5. Phone cables/adapters
“I'm pretty practical when it comes to packing. So much so, that I have a printable traveler's checklist!” — Tony Chiroldes, New York, New York
1. Peanuts and water 2. Ziplocs 3. Flat plastic thing that seals a sink without a plug 4. Batik sarong
"Peanuts are perfect when there's nowhere to eat, or on a plane. Light, unbreakable, high protein. The perfect snack/survival food. Ziplocs are the way I sort and arrange things. They also make it easy if Customs goes digging around. Sink plug is obvious; cheap hotels are ALWAYS missing the plug. Makes washing out clothes easier. A sarong or any piece of large cloth can be a shawl, skirt, dress, shade, blanket, carry-all, towel... I even saw a Malay family turn one into a hammock for their child in a train once!" — Renee Lajcak, Madison, Wisconsin
1. Wheelbarrow for everything 2. See above 3. See above 4. See above 5. See above
Niches in the walls hinted at the building's past.
Cologne is one of Germany’s oldest cities, founded at the beginning of the first millennium as a Roman colony, and it’s the sort of place where if you dig into the ground, you can find something spectacular. In 2017, a Protestant church was working to build a community center and unearthed a set of ancient walls, which dated back to the city’s Roman era.
The building had been large enough to have some notable purpose, but archaeologists initially weren’t sure what that might be. They had discovered niches in the walls that seemed too small for statues. But when they compared those features with other Roman-era buildings, they were convinced they knew what the building had been used for.
Those niches, about 30 inches by 20 inches in size, would have been used to hold thousands of scrolls, perhaps as many as 20,000 or so. The building itself was about 65 feet by 30 feet in size, perhaps two stories tall, and located in the center of town. From the beginning, archaeologists had thought it was a public gathering space of some sort, and they now believe the library would have been open to the public.
That will continue to be the case—when the community center is finished, a window in the basement will give the public a glimpse of three of the niches used long ago to store knowledge.
"All right Mr. Herpetologist, I'm ready for my close-up."
It's time for the photoshoot, but the model is not cooperating. In fact, the model—a pinkish-gray skink about the size of a pea pod—is trying to get the heck out. He scurries off the makeshift runway, a copy of a thick field guide called Flora del Ecuador opened to the title page. Lucas Bustamante, the on-scene photographer, nudges him back into place with a gentle finger. "Stay, stay," Bustamante urges. He does not stay.
It's hard to blame the model. He was discovered just yesterday, in the cloud forests around Wildsumaco, a tourist lodge in northern Ecuador. He spent the night in a vial with some wet leaves and moss, and now that he's free again, he's trying desperately to get back outside. "It may be a while before we know if it's a new species," says Bustamante to the small crowd of onlookers.
Bustamante is used to wrangling confused skinks. As one of the founders (with Alejandro Arteaga) of Tropical Herping, an Ecuador-based research group and science communication company, he spends much of his time catching, cajoling, and photographing reptiles and amphibians. Some of them are familiar, even iconic, like the loggerhead sea turtle. Others—like the five snail-sucking snakes he and his collaborators officially discovered earlier this year—are brand new.
It's not quite clear yet where this skink falls. But if Bustamante can get some decent glamour shots using his two diffused portable flashes, which he has propped against each other to make an improvised lightbox, it will be much easier to figure that out.
The tropical forests of Ecuador are some of the most biodiverse places on Earth. Five percent of the world's reptile species can be found there, hanging from branches, clinging to tree trunks, and swimming in the rivers—not bad for a country the size of Arizona—and more are being discovered all the time.
Tropical Herping is in the process of documenting every single one: "not just the species, but the morphology," says Bustamante. "Male, female, juvenile." The results will be published in a guidebook, Reptiles of Ecuador, slated to be released later in 2018.
Most of the reptiles in the book received the same treatment as the skink: snagged in the wild, lovingly documented, and then rereleased. "The picture has to be digital and high-resolution," says Bustamante. "As much as possible, it has to show all the taxonomic characteristics."
Bustamante and his colleagues always make sure their lizard models are showing off their feet and tails. They pose and re-pose each snake into an elegant squiggle. By the end, between the chasing and the wrangling, the photographers might be covered in mud and sweat, but the photos are pristine. Each ridge pops against the white background.
Such detail is scientifically vital. To the naked eye, this skink's skin looks smooth and undifferentiated. But magnified by Bustamante's camera, you can count every scale—something he will do eventually, to try to narrow down what species it belongs to.
Tropical Herping is also working with natural-history collections around Ecuador, as well as the American Museum of Natural History, to associate multi-angle sets of photographs with physical specimens. Although it lacks DNA, a photo can add new dimensions to a catalog, as well as some helpful redundancy: it won't degrade or lose color, and there's less risk of it being lost to a fire, or a fire sale.
Maximizing the details on display also helps to democratize the research process, Bustamante explains: "Say the [physical specimen] of this animal is in the United States, but you’re a researcher from Africa and you can’t afford to go to the U.S. or borrow the specimen. You can at least use the picture to start doing the first basic counts and measurements."
Bustamante and his colleagues also have a broader audience in mind. "The most important use of this [technique] is for the public," he says. "We want people to get involved—to know what they have in this country and why it’s endangered, and decide to protect it." Along with their stunning biodiversity, Ecuador's tropical forests are full of more easily extractable resources: oil, timber, precious metals. And even those working to preserve wildlife tend to focus on a certain subset of easily recognizable creatures, like toucans or wooly monkeys.
"In general, reptiles and amphibians are not so loved," says Bustamante. But in Tropical Herping's photographs, every snake and turtle has near-mammalian charisma, including our friend the skink. It was cute on its own, but under the lens, it gains individuality. The blur of pinkish gray differentiates into stripes, speckles, and an orange underbelly. Its front claws are splayed like a ballerina's feet.
"You can really see the details," says Blake Olmstead, lead designer at Atlas Obscura and the traveler who first found the skink on a trailside leaf. "It really just brings a different depth to what you're experiencing." Somehow, in the photograph, it becomes even more real.
After the photoshoot is finished, Bustamante sets the skink free. It will take a little while for him to comb through the photos and figure out the animal's age, its species, and its sex. (Although we’ve been calling it “he,” we aren’t yet sure.) But the most important step is complete: we all know that we like it.
More lightbox photos from Tropical Herping are below:
Just because it's not real doesn't mean it can't make your mouth water.
Any time I watch a scene from a Star Trek show that involves a big spread of goofy-looking alien foods, I really want to know what they taste like. Such scenes are usually played for gross-out effect, but I’ve always wished I could try things like Klingon gagh or Ferengi tube grubs. Would they truly taste alien, or more like a bizarre version of flavors I’m familiar with?
The culinary mysteries of the Star Trek universe are my own personal obsession, but we want to hear yours: what fictional foods do you most want to sample?
From ancient mythology to literature to popular TV shows and movies, our cultural landscape is rich with made-up foods and dishes. Maybe your mouth waters at George R.R. Martin’s elaborate descriptions of Westerosi cuisine. Or perhaps you've always wanted to know what food laced with the Spice Melange tastes like, a la Frank Herbert's Dune series. If you’ve ever wished you could dine on a giant mushroom with Mario, fill up on some Soylent Green (don’t read the ingredients), or quaff some ambrosia straight from Greek myth, we want to hear about it.
Tell us what fictional food you’ve always wanted to try via the form below. Let us know why you want to try it and what you think it would taste like. Let’s explore the food cultures that our world will never know!
His latest work is a disturbing thought experiment that ensures that anyone who reads it will never look at a blueberry pie the same way again.
Sandberg is a user of Physics Stack Exchange, where anyone can ask a physics-related question and hope for an answer. One user, Billy-bodega, asked the following:
Supposing that the entire Earth was instantaneously replaced with an equal volume of closely packed, but uncompressed blueberries, what would happen from the perspective of a person on the surface?
And Sandberg, eschewing the usual can’t-be-bothered attitude of Physics Stack Exchange towards such whimsical questions, decided to give the question serious consideration. “The end result,” he writes, “is a world that has a steam atmosphere covering an ocean of jam on top of warm blueberry granita.”
Sandberg grew up in Sweden, where smaller, thin-skinned blueberries grow wild, and he has “very fond memories of exploring the forest and gorging myself as a kid.” But he loved the blueberry question not because of his childhood affinity, but because it immediately got him thinking about sphere packing (a deep issue in physics and math), elasticity, and complex substances. (A planet of blueberries is a more interesting problem than a planet of gold.)
“I like crazy-sounding questions that make me think in the next moment, ‘Hey! I could actually calculate this!’” he says. “Many good physics questions involve taking something everyday and pushing it to the extreme—what if the speed of light was really slow, or we tried to build the maximally tall tower?”
This process of imagining blueberry earth begins with fat, thick-skinned highbush blueberries (the kind you find in grocery stores, not in the blueberry barrens of Maine). Given the estimated density of blueberries, the mass of an Earth made of berries would be a fraction of its current mass, with weaker gravity. Blueberries, Sandberg points out, are not particularly strong, able to resist the weight of a sugar cube but not a milk carton. Within a few yards of the surface of whole blueberries, the force of gravity would pulp the blueberries into mash, releasing the air that had separated each berry from its neighbors and shrinking the planet to a smaller radius. If no other forces were involved, the blueberry planet would collapse under its own weight in an estimated 42 minutes.
But there are other factors at play. The air released by the pulping of berries would create a thick, dense atmosphere, which Sandberg compares to Titan’s. Little light would filter through to the surface, so the dramatic events that followed would happen in almost total darkness.
The air released from the pulp would burst to the surface “as bubbles and jets, producing spectacular geysers (especially since the gravity is low),” Sandberg writes. At the same time, the compaction of the earth would release enormous amounts of energy, heating blueberry earth into “a roaring ocean of boiling jam, with the geysers of released air and steam likely ejecting at least a few berries into orbit.”
Deep under this ocean of jam, though, the pressure would change the dynamics. Even if it’s hot, the conditions would compress the jam into ice, most likely “some kind of composite pulp ice.” Meanwhile, the Moon would have long since fled the scene. In the end, Sandberg finds, the Earth will be akin to one of the oceanic exoplanets discovered elsewhere in the universe—a place where no human would want to live (but could perhaps be a resource for future space mining companies in search of ready-made jam products).
This process isn’t entirely unique to blueberries. It would play out in similar fashion for other fruit. “I have been asked about bananas," he says—there's a question about how potassium-40 decay would contribute to geothermal heating over time—"and watermelons, but nearly all behave the same way."
There are still open questions to answer about blueberry earth. How would the chemistry of blueberry pulp play into these dynamics? Long-term, the planet could dry out, so what would that mean for the oceans? How bad are hurricanes on the planet?
Sandberg says he would visit the jammy planet he imagined—"With protective gear. And probably a supply of ice cream." Which brings us to another question raised on Physics Stack Exchange, one that caught his eye: What material is best suited for eating ice cream from, without the ice cream melting too fast on the edges? (Would diamond bowls be good for delicious ice cream?) He was also intrigued by a question about how Venus flytraps count and another about how diffraction patterns would change if atoms were triangular instead of spherical. And of course there's always the classic: What if the Moon were actually made of cheese?
Rich Francis is reclaiming and reinventing an erased food culture.
The author would like to thank Sila Rogan and Angela Bellegarde from the Indigenous Innovation Initiative at Grand Challenges Canada for their support and insight during the researching and reporting process.
In Canada, true Indigenous cuisine is relatively unknown. Ask almost any Canadian to name an Indigenous dish, and their answer will almost certainly be “bannock,” a kind of dry skillet bread. Chef Rich Francis, based in Six Nations of the Grand River, Ontario, refuses to serve it. “Bannock isn’t even Indigenous, in the truest sense,” he says. “It was what we made when our land was taken, our movement limited, and our provisions reduced to a sack of flour. It was taught to us—it’s Scottish traditionally—it’s colonization food.”
Chef Francis, who is Gwich’in and Haudenosaunee, has been in the spotlight over the last few years, often for challenging beliefs such as those about bannock. In 2014, he was the first-ever Indigenous contestant on Top Chef Canada, where he took third place despite being a favorite to win. His incorporation of Indigenous medicine flavors (sweetgrass, tobacco, sage, and cedar) throughout the season won him praise, but the judges were unforgiving about his offering featuring muskox. Some undercooked quail in the dish didn’t help, either.
Francis is working to help change the narrative around Indigenous cuisine not exactly by recreating it, but by bringing some of its ingredients and techniques to modern tables and palates. Over the past few years, Francis has hosted dinners around the theme of reconciliation, to explore what modern Indigenous cuisine is, and could be. To do so, he’s looking within himself, to nature, and to elders across the country—but there are few who can fully recall the flavors of a pre-colonial palate.
“It isn’t something you can just pick up a cookbook and learn,” he says. “It’s been erased, and so many of the elders can hardly remember the tastes of these foods. They were taught not to taste it.” Here, he’s particularly referring to the residential school system, which took Indigenous youth away from their homes, and sought to “kill the Indian in the child.” It’s said that South Africa’s apartheid policies were modeled after Canada’s policies.
Many of the challenges that Francis has faced are part of a continuing legacy of marginalizing Indigenous people, culture, and cuisine in Canada. His reconciliation dinners have often been underground affairs, because as of right now, restaurants cannot legally serve many of the traditional things he wishes to bring back to the Indigenous pantry. “If I was to serve all the things I wanted to, I would be shut down in a minute,” he laments. “You can’t serve whale, or seal, or other hunted game, and that makes some important aspects of Indigenous cuisine impossible. I can’t in my right mind call a dish with factory-farmed beef ‘Indigenous.’”
Francis wasn’t always set on making Indigenous cuisine, though. He recalls going to public school about 100 kilometers from Toronto, outside Reserve No. 40, where kids would tease him for bringing cured meats and a handful of Indigenous foods that were still being eaten. Experiences such as those distanced Francis from his roots. Decades later, he has come to terms with those early years, and has since sought to both unearth and reinvent Indigenous cuisine.
In early July, I went to Francis’s home on the Six Nations Reserve No. 40. Almost as a first lesson in the importance of land and climate to Indigenous cuisine, our original plans to hunt for venison are dissuaded by the searing sun, leaving us to prowl for produce at the local grocer.
Once we're there, Francis begins weaving through the aisles. “Sorry if I get quiet for a second—I’m building the dish,” he says, smelling and touching everything, with an eye out for the “Grown in Ontario” signs. This tactile intuition has always been a part of his process, and taps into a much larger, centuries-old knowledge that he says is deep within him. It was this intuition that guided him through his culinary education at the acclaimed Stratford Chefs School, where he recalls feeling the motions in his muscles before he had ever learned them.
“I remember the moment they were announcing the winner of the ‘Top in Class’ award in culinary school—everyone, myself included, though it would be this other guy. Then they called my name. I didn’t even have half an idea for a speech,” Francis recounts. “I always cooked from a place that was beyond myself: I learned the French techniques, but the knowledge was already in me. And now I cook what I want to, as I want to. Indigenous food.”
Spring peas, cod from the east coast, bone marrow, and early-season cherries fill our bags as we head back to the Francis residence. We brush off the wooden table and kick up a stir of mosquitos as we toss kindling into the fire pit. While it seems foolish to stand by a fire at midday in July, the smoke keeps the bugs at bay. Francis places the bone marrow and cod on a grill suspended between cinder blocks, then he heads out to forage a “salad.” He returns moments later, his hands full of soft, purple wild chive flowers, bright yellow nasturtiums, and stunning orange tiger-lilies.
“The tiger-lilies aren't from here—they’re an invasive species that has absolutely taken off in the GTA [Greater Toronto Area],” he notes. “But they’re pretty, and they have this crisp flavor, so might as well use them,” he says, while separating petal from stem. This adaptation is a cornerstone of Francis’ modern Indigenous kitchen, in which he uses old knowledge in new ways. Not everyone within the Indigenous chef community agrees with his rejection of some “traditional” foods (which Francis sees as colonial), though. “Sure, lots of people don’t agree with what I’m doing,” he says. “But I always wanted to be different, and I guess when you want to be different, you don’t find yourself with a lot of people to work with.”
This afternoon, he stews the cherries with the wild herbs, and crisps the cod ever-so-slightly. Just before the fish leaves the flame, it receives a glaze of yellow birch syrup from Quebec: my contribution to the meal. Birch has long played a role in Indigenous life, best known for the quintessential birch-bark canoes of the Algonquin First Nations. Birch syrup takes nearly double the amount of sap to syrup as maple. It’s savory at first, then eases into a rich maple flavor on the back palate.
As we prepare to plate the meal, I realize that Chef Francis had only brought out one dish, and one spoon for us to share. It feels significant, as the land we stand on was part of the Dish With One Spoon treaty. Believed to be among the earliest pre-contact treaties, it represents a collective responsibility to share the land and its resources (the dish) with all who sought to live on it (the shared, singular spoon).
On our shared plate, the early-season cherries are flavorful but not overly sweet, and balance perfectly with the richness of the marrow. The birch syrup seeps into the moist, flaky cod, and each bite is crisp with tiger-lilies and spring peas—a far cry from bannock.
Francis believes that Indigenous cuisine can be sharp, complex, and dynamic—just as the culture is. There’s still a lot of work to be done, though. “The Indigenous palate itself has been colonized,” Francis says. “We were given tastes for three things: white sugar, white flour, and white… well, you can guess.” There is a need to rediscover old food memories, and Francis thinks that non-Indigenous Canadians will come to appreciate Indigenous cuisine as well—especially in urban centers, where Francis sees modern food trends as a slow realization of centuries-old Indigenous ways.
“It’s kind of ridiculous, all these food trends and diets. The 100-mile, paleo, keto, slow food—they’re all pieces of the larger Indigenous food puzzle that we’ve known for thousands of years,” he says. “When it returns, Indigenous food will not be a fad.”
On the evening of July 26, California’s Carr fire, one of the most destructive fires in the state’s history, was burning in Redding, when conditions aligned to create a massive whirl of smoke and fire. It lasted for an hour and a half, and the people who caught it on video called it the “Firenado.”
On Thursday, the National Weather Service said that, according to preliminary information, the winds of the column were moving at speeds of 143 mph, classifying it as an EF-3 tornado on the Enhanced Fujita scale, which rates tornado intensity on a range of zero to five.
The heat of wildfires can sometimes create short-lived “fire whirls,” and at first, experts were reluctant to call the Redding fire column a tornado. But given its strength and how it was formed, some are now calling it a “fire tornado.”
Vegetation in California is deadly dry, and the Carr fire has been burning unusually hot. When it reached Redding, a plume of smoke rose 20,000 feet into air, before hitting a cap in the atmosphere, a set of conditions that kept it from rising further. But when two plumes broke through, that created an fast-moving updraft, conditions similar to those of tornado formation.
The “firenado” also left behind damage that looked more like the work of a tornado than a wildfire—tiles stripped from roofs, trees uprooted, cars moved, a transmission tower tipped over. If it is considered a tornado, this destructive whirl would be the most powerful in California's history.
Often, they traveled by rail and were built that way too.
In the early 20th century, Americans were hungry for a quick bite. Yet long hours and late nights made going home to eat difficult. Through that, entrepreneurs saw an opportunity. It might come as a surprise to know that all aspiring restaurateurs had to do to fill this demand was to order a pre-made diner, modular and modern, often looking rather like a train car. It would even likely arrive by train.
Diners started out on wheels. In the late 19th century, street carts selling snacks and lunches had morphed into roving lunch wagons. While some lunch wagons sported Gilded-Age decor, such as elaborate coffee urns and etched windows, many were ramshackle, giving them an iffy reputation.
The person credited for creating the polished diner image was a lunch wagon manufacturer named Patrick Tierney, whose prefabricated and eventually stationary eateries featured tiled floors and a revolutionary indoor restroom. Meanwhile, on the rails, dining cars were setting the standard for food service on the move. Train historian Joe Welsh describes "a traditional [dining car]" as consisting of a "long "tunnel" of tables and chairs." Tiny lunch wagons couldn't accommodate the demand for fast, tasty meals. So manufacturers began building shippable, train-like "dining cars," which people had shortened to "diners" by the mid-1920s.
As with train cars, diners were manufactured with mobility in mind. Trains took on a chrome, streamlined look in the 1930's, epitomized by the glorious design of the 1934 Burlington Zephyr train. Diners followed suit. Roland Stickey, a New York inventor and designer, dreamed up the Sterling Streamliner diner model for the J.B. Judkins Company of Massachusetts. It looked so much like a train that "[only] the tracks and the passenger cars were missing," writes roadside culture historian Michael Karl Witzel. With it convenient shape and cutting-edge look, similar designs soon were shipped across the country, a culmination of what Witzel calls the diner's "strange alliance with trains." Often, they were built in New Jersey: Today, the state has 600 diners in operation, and is still considered America's diner capital.
Shipping diners happened either by truck or train, which understandably limited diner design. "For example, all diners shipped to Florida went by rail," writes diner expert Richard Gutman. For years, they could only be shipped in one piece, limiting their size and how many seats could fit inside. In the 1940's, the Paramount diner manufacturer finally devised a way of building a diner that could be shipped in pieces and built compromising structural integrity, freeing diners from their restricted, dining-car shapes. One example is the now-abandoned Comet Diner in Hartford, Connecticut, made by Paramount, that has an upper and lower level.
Many still-existing diners retain long, train-like shapes. Though the vast majority of classic diners were prefabricated, a handful were even made out of old train and trolley cars, since they fit so well the pre-conceived idea of a diner's structure. While diner design is no longer limited by what can fit atop a train track, these train-inspired diners continue to serve up breakfast and burgers for hungry people on the go.
When the red planet comes close to Earth, some people have tried to tune in to see if it has anything to say.
On recent evenings, as July has melted into August, Earth’s rocky red companion has dropped by for a visit. Earth and Mars, when they're on opposite sides of the Sun, can be as many as 250 million miles apart. This week, however, Mars has been just shy of 36 million miles from Earth, the snuggest our planets have been since 2003. Looming bright and orange in the night sky, it has been easily visible to the naked eye. The close-up comes courtesy of opposition—the point at which Mars, Earth, and the Sun align, with us sandwiched in the middle.
When the planets approached a similarly cozy distance 94 years ago, in August 1924, some people, including Curtis D. Wilbur, the Secretary of the U.S. Navy, thought it might be possible to actually hear message from our neighbor. If Martians were ever going to drop us a line, they suspected, that'd be the time.
From an office in Washington, D.C., Wilbur’s department sent orders to every naval station clear across the country. An outpost in Seattle received a telegram asking operators to keep their ears tuned to anything unusual or, maybe, otherworldly.
“Navy desires [sic] cooperate [sic] astronomers who believe [sic] possible that Mars may attempt communication by radio waves with this planet while they are near together,” it read. “All shore radio stations will especially note and report any electrical phenomenon [sic] unusual character …” The orders asked for operators to keep the lines open and carefully manned between August 21 and August 24, just in case.
This request didn’t come out of nowhere. There was a long buildup to the idea that Mars might be trying to tell us something, with technologies that were then new to us. As early as 1894, Sir William Henry Preece, the top engineer at the British General Post Office and a champion of radio and wireless technology, proposed that it might be possible to ring up our planetary neighbor. Say Mars was populated “with beings like ourselves having the gift of language and the knowledge to adapt the great forces of nature to their wants,” he wrote. And imagine that those fluent, expressive beings had managed to “oscillate immense stores of electrical energy to and fro in electrical order.” Under those conditions, Preece said, he saw no reason why it wouldn’t be possible “to hold communication, by telephone, with the people of Mars.”
It was far-fetched, sure, but it probably didn’t strike readers as unthinkable. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, the popular press was enamored of the idea that Mars was neither unknowable nor utterly alien. In Atlantic Monthly, astronomer Percival Lowell suggested that Martians were dredging a series of canals on their planet, which looked fairly similar to ones freshly dug out on Earth. Scientific American and a slew of university professors nodded in agreement. (We now know they are natural features.) And in 1901, Nikola Tesla claimed to be intercepting signals from Mars.
Then there was Guglielmo Marconi. An Italian engineer often considered the founding father of radio, Marconi began severing the cables that had tethered telegraphs to Earth. As he advanced wireless communication, he also became the face of the quest to message Mars.
In the early 1900s, Marconi began telling newspapers about “strange sounds” that he found in his transmissions. He imagined these to be “distinct, unintelligible” messages rather than wayward noise—they bore some similarity to the sound of the Morse-code “S” (dot-dot-dot)—and he attributed them to “the space beyond our planet.” Newspapers quoted Marconi beside illustrations of pot-bellied, antenna-sporting Martians fiddling with the dials of their own radios beneath a canopy of stars and planets.
Some scientists swatted the idea away, but others were less inclined to dismiss the possibility. Thomas Edison endorsed it, though a young Albert Einstein was half-convinced: If Martians were trying to tell us something, why wouldn’t they use light, which was easier to manipulate than sound?
Marconi’s purpose in all this was likely somewhat self-serving: It happened to make the wireless look great. Some skeptics doubted that his wireless would supercede the telephone and the wired telegraph, but who would doubt its chops if he managed to ping the cosmos?
Eventually, Marconi disputed some of these accounts, blaming “reportorial enthusiasm” for crediting him with “saying and doing things I never thought of saying or dreamed of doing.” In the book Marconi: The Man and His Wireless, Orrin Dunlap, a radio historian and former vice president at the Radio Corporation of America, recounts how journalists had made a habit out of turning Marconi’s glib or winking answers into sensational stories. When the inventor tried to dodge journalists’ questions about what he was up to with a vague description of a “machine that sees through walls,” papers around the world sprinted to tell the story, and Marconi was flooded with letters from readers decrying the death of privacy. Marconi vowed that he wasn’t attempting to communicate with Mars, and had no plans to do so.
But even when he tempered his comments, Marconi wasn’t willing to rule out contacting Mars, as he didn’t want to imply that wireless wasn’t up to the task. (And just in case Martians didn’t speak English, he had a contingency plan that involved broadcasting lantern-slide images of trees or humans, with captions transmitted in “dots and dashes,” Dunlap writes.)
Against this backdrop, radio was busy knitting together homes and communities, from dusty towns to dense cities, that had previously lacked any other connections. Could the same unifying principle scale up—to space—and help us be better people? “There was a hunger for contact over great distances and with beings who presumably knew more, and were wiser, than most contemporary Americans,” writes the radio historian Susan J. Douglas in Inventing American Broadcasting 1899–1922. Douglas continues, “such contact would bring wisdom; it would be reassuring; it would be religious.”
In that summer of 1924, many members of the public earnestly believed that a message might arrrive. Scientists on the other side of the Atlantic were planning to give it a go, too, as the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, England, installed a team to listen in. A month before the experiment, the Miami News reported, “There is a stupendous interest manifested by a credulous public in this international experiment.”
Average Americans couldn’t listen in to the radio signals, but they still wanted to have a look. Across the country, people flooded observatories. More than 300 visitors crowded the observatory at Drake University, in Iowa, in the hope of glimpsing canal boats and mules. Many among them were disappointed to see little more than a “reddish colored splotch” in the eyepiece. The university’s president complained that the public “expects too much from a telescope,” and reiterated that “We have as much reason to believe that Mars is inhabited as the Earth.”
The opposition came and went with no extraterrestrial message. As far as anyone can tell, the Navy’s few days of silence yielded nothing but static. It was the same for the British scientists. But that hasn't stopped us from trying to communicate with anyone who’s listening. And even when our planets are at their closest in the celestial dance, it's all relative. The space between us is still vast, and any Earthlings looking up at that orange spot might still feel alone.
It’s a sweltering July morning and stein collector extraordinaire George Adams is enjoying a glass of Yuengling from the kegerator. Sitting at the workbench of his home-museum, Steins Unlimited, in Pamplin, Virginia, the 79-year-old attempts to match a “nice, somewhat rare” 18th-century earthenware stein with a period-correct pewter top.
“This one came out of a box of crap I bought from an estate auction up in Maryland,” he says with a chuckle. Tall with a sweep of silver-white hair, Adams delights in finding new treasures—especially at bargain prices. Lining the table are a number of Old Style brewery steins from the early 1980s. Though they aren’t very rare, to get the beauty, he had to buy the whole lot.
The size of a small tankard, the piece in question features a beautifully speckled cobalt glazing and is etched with ornate patterns of leaves and flowers. Adams says he can get an idea of its age with a quick glance.
“The gray clay tells me the materials were sourced from quarries in the Westerwald, which is a mountain range outside of Höhr-Grenzhausen, Germany,” he explains. The etching is of a type that came into vogue in the early 18th century. The coloration and orange-peel-like speckling—produced by “throwing salt into the kiln once the clay got red-hot”—point to techniques used by regional manufacturers between 1720 and 1800. Lastly, there’s the handle: “See that circle shape at the bottom there?” he asks. “Those didn’t appear on Westerwald steins until about 1740 and were replaced soon thereafter.”
Fitted with a lid, Adams dates the stein between 1740-1750 and places it among an array of similarly aged German vessels. With more than 10,000 steins organized by country, manufacturer, artistic style, and historical epoch, Steins Unlimited is home to one of the world’s largest and most preeminent collections.
Adams has been stockpiling beer vessels for more than 50 years—an obsession that dates to early childhood. “My grandfather was a first-generation immigrant from Germany,” says Adams, “and brought a lot of the Old World traditions over with him.”
In Adams’s childhood home, a hand-carved wooden cup with a handle and top hung above the mantelpiece. When his mother explained that the object had belonged to his great-grandfather and was a “stein,” it took on a mythical significance. “That word was so odd; it fascinated me. I started to imagine where this ‘stein’ thing came from and what kind of world it had been a part of.”
Adams says he started collecting steins “seriously” in his early-30s. At antique shows and flea markets, if a vessel caught his eye and the price was reasonable, he’d buy it. He purchased books and guides, too, and immersed himself in steins’ 600-plus-year history.
“The word stein is a shortened form of steinzeugkrug, which is German for stoneware jug or tankard,” writes Gary Kirsner, author of The Beer Stein Book. “By common usage, however, stein has come to mean any beer container … that has a hinged lid and a handle.”
The distinctive lid was originally added to prevent plague. After the Black Death killed more than 25 million people in the 1300s, Europeans, who believed dirtiness had given rise to the plague, sought ways to be more cleanly. So when “hordes of little flies … invaded Central Europe in the early-1400s,” Kirsner says, principalities in what is now Germany, “passed laws requiring that all food and beverage containers be covered.” The common mug soon had a hinged lid with a thumb-lift.
Combined with further mandates that “beer could be brewed only from hops, cereals, yeast, and water,” and “strictly enforced regulations concerning [its] quality and transport,” Kirsner says, a golden age of beer production ensued. As average consumption rose to “about two liters per person, per day,” taverns and beer houses proliferated. By the 1500s, “everyone in Germany needed a personal drinking vessel to be proud of.”
As steins were transformed into status symbols, competition arose among manufacturers. “Renaissance artists supplied designs,” says Kirsner. Tankards were soon “decorated with family crests and historical, allegorical, and biblical scenes,” and colored glazes added. In other words, beer-drinking was accompanied by a “pleasure for the eyes.”
“The more I learned, the more I got hooked,” Adams confesses. Soon, his collection had grown into the hundreds and filled multiple rooms.
In 1980, he attended his first event as a vendor. Selling provided both a “thrill” and an “excuse to buy more.” By the mid-80s, Adams had purchased a trailer and was regularly showcasing upward of 700 antique and specialty steins. Despite working full-time as a meat inspector, he attended about 20 expos a year. By unloading 20-30 steins at each, his gross sales averaged around $25,000.
In 1994, Adams took a leave of absence from Oscar Meyer to travel to Germany. There, he apprenticed to learn the art of crafting pewter tops “by hand, the old-fashioned way.” In rural beer pubs, he witnessed stein culture first-hand.
“It was like stepping back in time,” he says. “The townsfolk all had their steins hanging on pegs above the bar. They’d come in after work and have a pint before heading home.” Sometimes whole families would gather—the kids sipping from tiny steins filled with special low-alcohol beer.
Moved, Adams quit the meat business to pursue his passion. For a decade, he toured the East Coast and Midwest, selling rare and collectible steins. While most sold for about $50, his biggest sale was around $10,000. “At my best show, I sold 150 in four days,” he boasts, grinning.
Health concerns and a floundering market forced Adams to park the operation in 2009. By then, he’d accumulated more than 9,000 rare and historically significant steins. Seeking a way to give the public access to the collection—and his knowledge—he founded the Steins Unlimited museum.
It's an unconventional museum. Located just off U.S. Highway 460 on the periphery of a tiny 200-person hamlet, Steins Unlimited is essentially in the middle-of-nowhere. The bulk of the collection is housed in a two-room shed in Adams’s backyard, and prized artifacts are displayed in his five-bedroom brick rancher. A pull-behind trailer provides storage for overflow.
Adams has no official Facebook page or website—the museum advertises its presence by way of two hand-painted signs: One hanging from the mailbox; the other rising from a road-fronting garden. Still, Adams says as many as 1,500 people visit each year. And those that do experience a fantastic treat.
Stepping inside the shed, I am greeted by a massive, 32-liter vessel. Gorgeously crafted, it stands about four feet tall, is made of porcelain, and features a Dürer-esque tavern scene in blue and white relief. Crowned by what Adams describes as a “German beer king,” the piece was part of a limited run produced in the early 1950s and was, he says, the the world’s largest stein. “A company recently produced one slightly bigger,” he jokes, “so now it’s the world’s second-largest.”
The colossus is surrounded by more than 3,000 European steins. Starting on the right-hand side of the room at the kegerator, a tour begins with the question: “Would you like a glass of America’s oldest beer?” If so, Adams is happy to pour you a Yuengling. (Pints and admission are free, though donations are welcome.)
Proceeding counter-clockwise, he launches into an account of the history of the stein. Selecting examples from the floor-to-ceiling shelves, he uses vessels as illustrations. We peruse offerings from the 14th to 19th century, pausing to examine technical details, family crests, and scenes ranging from bawdy to religious.
We dwell on the superior craftsmanship of 1850-1910, the “golden period of steins,” when “German laborers were willing to spend as much as a week’s pay” on a personalized vessel. Sometimes, guilds awarded members with “occupational steins” commemorating achievements or mastery. At this point, Adams retrieves a stein with an image of a uniformed constable ambling along the hilly streets of an idealized village.
From there, it’s on to an exhibit called “The War Years.” Starting with the unification of Germany under Otto Von Bismarck, it continues through World War I and concludes with an eerie collection of Third Reich materials.
“Notice how the symbols get more and more aggressive as Hitler’s power increases,” says Adams. Indeed, featuring leaves and softly rounded tridents, Nazi steins from the 1920s look rather quaint. By the early '30s, swastikas and iron crosses have appeared, albeit small and mostly hidden in banners. Just before the war, they became flagrant.
Other parts of the tour include a large room whose 6,000 pieces, according to Adams, represent every major U.S. brewery of the 20th century. In the house, there are dazzlingly carved wooden steins, glass steins, steins with dragons’ tails for handles, steins with portraits, and steins made of sterling silver and even lidded with gold. In his “prize room,” Adams has about 500 such vessels. Dating from 1350, he says they are all hundreds of years old, were likely made for German elites, and would have been used only as table decorations or on special occasions.
By the end of the two-hour tour, I’ve had a happy three pints.
“The funny thing is, I’ve been to Europe countless times and know bunches of collectors, but in truth, most of my stuff came from auctions where people were just trying to get rid of what they thought was a bunch of crap,” laughs Adams. “What’s that they say about treasure—one’s man’s junk is another man’s museum?”
A wildfire has just uncovered one of these "Éire" signs from World War II.
In County Wicklow, Ireland, a wildfire is blackening parts of the coast, and airborne crews have released around 40,000 gallons of water to try to stop it. High above the coast, an air support crew of An Garda Síochána, Ireland’s National Police Service, spotted a relic of World War II—a white stone sign spelling out "Éire," which was meant to guide wartime pilots passing over this neutral territory.
The signs were meant to identify the land for pilots crossing above it—Éire is the name of the country in the Irish language. Each one was numbered, too, and they became navigational aids for British pilots. (Though officially neutral, in practice, Ireland favored the Allies.)
This one—Éire 8—had been hidden beneath overgrown gorse, a spiny evergreen shrub. But when the fire burned the gorse away, the letters emerged, a reminder of the country’s past.
