We asked our readers to describe the scent of childhood, and their answers didn't stink.

What does home smell like to you? It's a simple question, but the answer for any individual person can be as unique as a fingerprint. We recently asked Atlas Obscura readers to tell us about the specific scents that always transport them home, and we received hundreds of responses—no two exactly alike.

Many of you described a blend of several aromas, while others were triggered mostly by cooking smells (turns out an awful lot of you grew up in homes that smelled like cabbage). Below, we've collected some of our favorite responses. As you read, perhaps you'll be inspired to try to recreate your own smells of home, at, well, home.

Potpourri

Moth balls, arthritis cream, and boiled cabbage

“My 80-year-old little Polish immigrant grandmother came to live with us and brought these with her. I was a 12-year-old American boy coming of age and of course for me, at first it was an invasion, until I got to both appreciate her as a person and also eat her delicious cooking almost every day! Forty years later, if I smell any of these I can see her still in the kitchen in her apron singing polkas to herself and rolling out dough.” — Joseph Healey, Edwardsville, Pennsylvania

Pine Sol cleaner, freshly mowed grass, cigar smoke, and Mom’s perfume tray

“Pine Sol permeated the air in the kitchen on Mondays and Wednesday mornings. On Saturday, the clean aroma of freshly mowed grass wrapped around the yard like a pungent blanket. My uncles sat outside in the evening, smoking wonderfully fat cigars, their laughter pressing cocktail breath on my cheek, with loving embraces of family joy.” — Barbara Ann Engel, Birmingham, Alabama

Toasted peppers, suave hairspray, wet concrete, laundry detergent, hot cast iron

“Saturday mornings, getting ready for church, screaming, things being broken, playing outside.” — Brianna Lomeli, Austin, Texas

Benson & Hedges menthol cigarettes, Steak-umms, and Heinz Baked Beans

“How hard my mother had to work (after my father financially abandoned us) to keep us from going homeless.” — Mike Quindlen, Baltimore, Maryland

Cleaning Products

Washing powder, earthenware pots, brown sugar

"The little local store that sold clay pots and cleaning products. My grandma’s pantry." — Patricia, Leamington Spa, England

Clorox bleach

“Reminds me of going to bed with clean, dried in the sun, Clorox-smelling sheets that my mother hand washed.” — Pat, Ocala, Florida

Lemon Pledge

“My stay-at-home mom was a consummate neat freak and we lived in an early 1900s house full of wooden banisters, accents, and furniture, so I always associate Pledge (or in later years Lemon Pledge) with the smell of home.” — Amanda, Northeast Pennsylvania

Food

Rotting cabbage

“The smell of rotting cabbages will always remind me of the house my Hungarian grandmother lived in when I was a child. It seems like she always had a pile of green cabbages rotting in the bottom of her refrigerator. They were so potent they stunk up the entire house, even though the fridge remained closed. She also kept her milk out of the fridge, so the smell and taste of unrefrigerated whole milk will always remind me of her, too.” — Jenny Respress, Boise, Idaho

Roasted red peppers

“Every fall in my country people would make ‘ajvar,’ a traditional winter dish with peppers. I knew as a kid playing outside on hot summer evenings that school is approaching if I could smell the sweet, roasted scent.” — Ivana, Serbia

Cardamom

“My grandmother was from Sweden and brought with her many Swedish recipes, one of which was bullar or sweet rolls. Flavored with cinnamon and cardamom, she made this every week and would often ask me to help her crush the cardamom seeds with the mortar and pestle. This scent immediately transports me to the kitchen of my youth and reminds me of the special bond I had with my grandmother.” — Ellen Ashton, New Hampshire

Hot milk

“The smell of milk cooking immediately transports me to my paternal grandmother’s kitchen in Nürnberg, Franconia, Bavaria. Spending time there as a child in the 1960s and 1970s I would watch her heat milk for her coffee. More than once it foamed over the lip of the pot, if she didn’t watch it closely.” — Brigitte Mor, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Garlic

"I grew up in a small town off of Highway 152. If you've ever driven through a California truck stop that reeked of garlic on a dusty August afternoon, you've been through my hometown. [...] I lived in that town most of my life. I remember walking in the hills in June, my first kiss, funerals, birthday parties, births, broken hearts. Hell, it seems like my whole life is tainted with the sweet stench of that bulb. Garlic and I have a history, an understanding. There's an almost sorrowful romance to garlic. An entire town's nostalgia wrapped up in a pizza topping. No vampires, though." — A.V. Eichenbaum, Seattle

Freshly ground coffee

“Sunday mornings with parents and sisters and the sun is shining in our kitchen while the radio plays Zwischen Hamburg und Haiti on Radio Bremen.” — Christian Hlasek, Oldenburg, Germany

Leftover Thanksgiving turkey, mixed with motor oil

“We always had thanksgiving at my grandma's house in northern Wisconsin. There wasn't enough room in the refrigerator but it was cold enough that we used the attached garage as an extended refrigerator, placing most of the Thanksgiving leftovers out there. The smell of turkey mixed with garage smells is one of my most enduring smell memories. A few years ago we had dinner with friends the day after Thanksgiving and they have a fridge in their garage. When I opened it and smelled the turkey mixed with garage, I was right back at grandma's!” — Kerri, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Celery and onions frying in butter

“My mother making stuffing on Thanksgiving.” — Gloria, Alexandria, Virginia

Skittles

“Green skittles remind me of when I lived in a small Reno apartment, two beds and one bath, and my mother was a single mom. The memory reminds of my 4th or 5th birthday, my mom was sick and she told me to go in her closet and I saw a small black guitar that I lost years ago. Her room smelled like lime Skittles. That’s why I’m upset that Skittles replaced lime with green apple.” — Trevor Schoefer, Fallon, Nevada

Freshly shucked corn

“Every summer, us kids would have to shuck corn cobs and the musky soil and sweet corn smell still makes my head spin with wonderful flashbacks.” — Kris Weaver, Los Angeles, California

Cheese fondue

“Gran had lived in Switzerland for a while and worked in Davos at a sanatorium for children, I think sometime during the ‘50s. There she had learned how to make kaasfondue, cheese fondue, without alcohol (because of the children she cared for). Mostly we ate it during the holiday season, in her nice Scandinavian-like kitchen on the big and chunky round table, special linen on it. I have her recipe and always when I make it, I know it will taste great when my kitchen smells the same as hers!” — Attie Vrijhof, Rotterdam, Netherlands

Parmesan cheese

“I grew up not far from a Kraft parmesan cheese factory in Wausau, Wisconsin. When the wind was right, the whole neighborhood would smell like parmesan cheese. It takes me back to our middle-class neighborhood of 1950s ranch homes, narrow streets, and playing with childhood friends. The smell itself was nothing fantastic, but the memories certainly are!” — Eric Brinkmann, Kimberly, Wisconsin

Fried hamburgers, covered in mustard

“They were less like hamburgers and more like hockey pucks. Walking in the door from school on lunch break and having the salty, greasy, mustardy smell smack me right in the face. There are a couple of diners in the city that have the same fragrance. Whenever I experience it, I'm instantly eight years old and back in our kitchen.” — Yolanda Brantley, Minneapolis, Minnesota

Garlic, onions, meats, etc., simmering for hours

“The distinct aromas of old-school Puerto Rican recipes, which you only occasionally smell nowadays because few people have the time, patience, or inclination to make those intricate recipes come to life anymore.” — Catherine Ortiz, New York City, New York

Perfume

Rose

“To be more specific my mom’s signature tea rose perfume she’s worn for decades now. We live over 2,000 miles apart sadly, but any package she sends manages to smell like her and makes me miss her so much more. Also the smell of her poundcake when I make it. Man I miss her. The plan is she’ll be living near soon *fingers crossed*.” — Michelle Stepp, Olympia, Washington

Chanel No. 5 and Tide laundry detergent

“My mother and spending the day away at the local laundromat washing load after load of clothes. Makes me very happy and peaceful.” — Cora Fields, Iowa

A waft of Joy perfume

“My mother always wore it and it followed her on a gentle cloud. She died years ago but I still have her last bottle on my dresser. When I mentioned it to my daughter some time ago, she said, ‘Oh, I know! I go sniff it sometimes when I need to feel Dee around me.’ I had been doing the same thing since we lost her.” — Peg, Virginia

Chanel No. 5 and leather

“Whenever my mother went somewhere special, she wore soft leather gloves. She had been given some Chanel No. 5 as a gift that she used it sparingly on her wrists as it was very expensive. The scent of the perfume lingered in the gloves. I liked to smell her gloves when I was small. The combination of the leather and perfume evoked a sense of mystery because I was never quite sure of where she was going (or had where she had been). My world was small—home, school, and the woods where I played with my friends. But my mother's gloves awakened a need within me to see the world for myself. And I did. But nowadays, when I think of that combination of smells, my world shrinks to the kitchen table in the house where I first picked up her gloves and felt the softness of the leather. The smell still lingers.” — Dawn Upham, Prince Edward Island, Canada

Plants

Sagebrush after a summer rain in Eastern Montana

“The clean air, after the rain settled the dust on the farm.” — Jeff Cramer, Ely, Nevada

Hot sun on fallen pine needles

“In 1932, my great grandfather built a rough hewn cabin in Cedar Pines Park, near Crestline in the San Bernardino mountains. No indoor plumbing, wood stove, river rock fireplace. Every summer our extended family would spend two weeks living in the woods, sleeping out on the open porch under the trees and stars. Each night before bed we would leave birdseed and peanuts along the porch rail and awaken to watch the blue jays and chickadees and squirrels feasting on their breakfast. Any time I smell the scent of the sun-warmed pine needles, I am transported, in my olfactory lizard brain, back to those summers at the cabin.” — Joni, Gold Country, California

Dry earth and sun-scorched oregano and thyme plants, jasmine blossom, and petrichor

"I associate these smells with Greek summers, my childhood holidays. For better or for worse, these things never change and can instill a sense of home, of belonging and identity. I also think of home when I smell decomposing carcasses of roadkill, sadly a frequent feature of summer road trips in Greece." — Angie Athanassiades, Athens, Greece

Gardenias and honeysuckle

“When I was a child in Mississippi (I'm 55), our house had a hedge of gardenias under my bedroom window, and every fence was covered in honeysuckle. In the humid evening, it was almost, but not quite overpowering. It has stuck with me all my life, even though we moved from that house when I was in 4th grade. Every time I smell gardenias and/or honeysuckle, it's a time machine back to a wonderful childhood spent in a small Mississippi town, where we played outside all day long, returning home at dinner and no one worried. A place where we collected bottles on the side of the road to buy penny candy, where I went to Woolworths counter with my gramma for BLTs. Thanks for the memories :).” — Lisa Gonzales, Rio Rancho, New Mexico

Pleasantly Unpleasant

Dumpsters

“It's that particular odor that (usually empty) garbage dumpsters can take on—a vaguely sweet musky smell. It reminds me of pre-adolescence, living in New Orleans. My family would frequently go to the French Quarter Flea Market to sell craft items and household stuff we didn't want. Sometimes I'd get to wander around the streets near the French Market a bit and I'd smell those dumpsters in the alleys. If I encounter that smell now it takes me right back there.” — Stephen Posey, Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Mildewed canvas

“We moved houses quite often when I was young but every summer we always camped out in the same, big mildewed tent. It smelled best—I mean worse—in the morning dew. Camping was always a relaxed and happy time for us, in the woods, by a lake or at the seaside. I guess you could say that I am fonder of mildew than most people I know.” — Andrea Ipaktchi, Iran

Musty cardboard

“We keep our holiday decorations in cardboard boxes in a basement that is not the driest place on Earth. Over countless years, the boxes have absorbed that unmistakable funky dampness. Whenever I smell musty cardboard, it's Christmas.” — Joseph Ditta, Brooklyn, New York

Cigar smoke

“It meant dad was home from the sea. He was a merchant seaman who would be gone for long periods.” — T. Gallegan, Delaware

'Mussel mud'

“I grew up on the east coast of Canada (Prince Edward Island) and whenever the tide was out and the sun was shining, the flats that the mussels were on would start to smell and it's not a great smell, like rotten seaweed, but I love it. Whenever I'm back home I hope for the perfect day for the smell but I know the locals that live there don't. It reminds me of summers at the beach and sunny, salty days by the ocean.” — Jodi, Ottawa, Ontario

Hay bales mingled with manure, leather, and old wood

“I don't think I'll ever find it in a scented candle, but one can hope. Hard work, love for animals, and sexual awakening. I had my first tryst in that hayloft.” — Kelly Tabor, Columbia, South Carolina

Machinery

Small gas engines

“Our family has a summer cabin on a lake. The smell of engine fumes reminds me of many happy childhood weekends spent boating, swimming, jet-skiing, four-wheeling, mowing the lawn, etc. Ahhh…” — Anne Laverty, Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Oil on railroad tracks

“I am from Russia, so when I smell this oil I feel transported to Russia. There are a lot of railroad tracks in Russia and our dacha was close to railroad tracks (you could take a 20 minute train ride to get form the town to the dacha), so in the summer when we came in my dad's car, the smell of the oil on railroad tracks when we were passing through was very strong. It is crazy but I love this smell because it takes me back in time to my childhood.” — Anastassia, East Moline, Illinois

The vacuum when it's running

“It's the combination of the mustiness of the carpet from a week's worth of dirt and the smell of the vacuum's plastic parts and bristles working. [...] Cleaning the house on Saturday mornings while my dad plays his Motown CDs through his floor speakers, windows open.” — Amanda, Cleveland, Ohio

Huh!

The Pirates of the Caribbean attraction at Disneyland

“The ride's musty smell reminds me of my grandmother’s basement in Northern Wisconsin!” — Kathe B., Southern California

Subzero air, caught in the fur of cats

“Our ‘cat door’ was a kitchen window. The cats would sit on the the top of a wooden ladder propped against the outside house wall. On very cold nights we had to be quick: open the window, scoop up the cat, close the window. I'd bury my nose in their fur as I welcomed them home, inhaling the cold night air. Now in Mexico, I still have cats but no frigid nights.” — Constance Stoner, Oaxaca, Mexico

Wicker

“Rocking my baby sister in a wicker bassinet and my mom’s bizarre and undying love for wicker furniture.” — Kristen, St. Louis, Missouri

The Church and anti-witch propaganda may have contributed to beermaking becoming a boys' club.

Beer has been an essential aspect of human existence for at least 4,000 years—and women have always played a central role in its production. But as beer gradually moved from a cottage industry into a money-making one, women were phased out through a process of demonization and character assassination.

It’s telling that the oldest-known beer recipe comes from a Sumerian hymn to the goddess of beer, Ninkasi. It also includes a description of how the fermented beverage was made in ancient times:

[...]It is you who bake the beerbread in the big oven, and put in order the piles of hulled grain. Ninkasi, it is you who bake the beerbread in the big oven, and put in order the piles of hulled grain.
It is you who soak the malt in a jar; the waves rise, the waves fall. Ninkasi, it is you who soak the malt in a jar; the waves rise, the waves fall.
It is you who spread the cooked mash on large reed mats; coolness overcomes. Ninkasi, it is you who spread the cooked mash on large reed mats; coolness overcomes [....]

Sumerian women brewed low-alcohol beer for religious ceremonies (including ones dedicated to Ninkasi) as well as for daily food rations. Ancient Egyptians worshipped a beer goddess named Tenenet, and hieroglyphics have been found depicting women brewing and drinking beer. Baltic and Slavic mythology both include a goddess, named Raugutiene, who provided protection over beer. And the Finnish told of a legendary woman named Kalevatar who invented beer by mixing honey with bear saliva.

The image of the woman as ale-maker persisted well into the Middle Ages, moving from a sacred role to an everyday necessity of homemaking, historically typified as “women’s work.” Water in cities was unsanitary, at times bringing with it deadly diseases. But the process of fermentation created a sterile drink, so beer was considered a safer option. Most ale was very low-alcohol level, while more potent ales were reserved for special occasions such as holidays and weddings. So even before the year 1500, nearly all women in England knew how to brew.

Making beer is difficult and time-consuming in any age. But given that a typical medieval family of five might have needed roughly 9 gallons of beer to subsist per week, and said beer spoiled quickly, women had to get creative. They then began sharing the workload with friends and neighbors, a system that often involved one woman making extra each week to sell to other households. As this culture of shared work evolved, some women in England began making ale more professionally, with some providing a constant flow of it for sale. Occasionally, these women might open makeshift bars located in their own homes, where people could sit together and drink. And so the term “alewife” (or “brewster”) emerged, referring to a woman who brewed beer for a small profit.

Professional brewsters and alewives had several means of identifying themselves and promoting their businesses. They wore tall hats to stand out on crowded streets. To signify that their homes or taverns sold ale, they would place broomsticks—a symbol of domestic trade—outside of the door. Cats often scurried around the brewsters’ bubbling cauldrons, killing the mice that liked to feast on the grains used for ale.

If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because this is all iconography that we now associate with witches. While there’s no definitive historical proof that modern depictions of witches were modeled after alewives, some historians see uncanny similarities between brewsters and anti-witch propaganda. One such example exists in a 17th-century woodcut of a popular alewife, Mother Louise, who was well-known in her time for making excellent beer.

While the relationship between alewives and witch imagery has still yet to be proven, we do know for sure that alewives and brewsters had a bad reputation from the jump. Beyond the cheating that some of their counterparts engaged in, brewsters also had to deal with the bad rap their entire gender suffered because of original sin. “The ale trade was (and is) filled with trickery—poor ale substituted for good, pint measures that were just a bit too small, inflated prices, and of course, inebriated customers who found they’d been robbed or cheated,” explains Dr. Judith Bennet, author of Ale, Brewsters, and Beer in England: Women's Work in a Changing World 1300-1600. “For medieval people, it was easy to link these deceptions with women. Were not women, as daughters of Eve, naturally more deceptive and wicked than men? By such logic, any alewife, no matter how friendly and open, was suspected of being a secret swindler.”

The medieval Church was also not a fan of brewsters. They saw these early female entrepreneurs as temptresses who used their wiles to get pious men drunk and spend money. The Church also saw alehouses as playgrounds for the devil, where the cardinal sins of gluttony and lust ruled supreme.

Furthermore, as Bennet notes, one of the most iconic images of feminine evil in the Middle Ages was that of the alewife in hell: The Church specifically taught that alewives would be the only people left in hell after Christ freed all the damned. “Enacted in plays, drawn on the walls of parish churches, and carved into wood, it was a fate that medieval people imagined with resentful glee,” Bennet details.

Brewsters’ bad reputation didn’t help their case when wealthier, more socially-connected men started taking up the trade. After the devastation of the Black Plague, people began drinking a lot more ale, doing so in public alehouses instead of at home. This also marked a shift in people’s relationship with beer, which moved from being just a necessity and occasional indulgence to something closer to what we have today. Men suddenly saw they could make a real profit off of what was once seen as a semi-lucrative side gig for women. So they built taverns that were bigger and cleaner than the makeshift ones that alewives provided, and people flocked to them to revel and conduct business alike. Over time, alewives grew to be seen not only as tricky, but also dirty and their beer unsanitary.

Women continued to make low-alcohol ale for their family’s daily consumption after the Industrial Revolution increased production methods, which made buying beer cheaper and easier than making it at home. But that died in the 1950s and 1960s, when marketing campaigns branded beer as a “manly drink.” Companies such as Schlitz, Heineken, and Budweiser depicted beer as a means of unwinding after a long day of work, often featuring women serving their suited-up husbands cold bottles of brew.

That’s been a factor in why the contemporary brewing industry is a notorious boy’s club, but the craft beer industry has helped moved the needle a bit: A 2014 Auburn University study found that women represented 29% of all brewery workers. It seems that the brewing industry has taken a circuitous route, moving away from small homebrewing methods to large-scale production, and back again. These days, the sky’s the limit for brewsters. They don’t even have to ride broomsticks to get there.

In Middle Age Europe, animals were popular storytellers.

In the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, amid a vast collection of medieval texts, there is a manuscript known as The Ashmole Bestiary. It’s a particularly lavish example of one of the most popular kinds of texts in the European Middle Ages: a book of beasts, describing animals—real and imagined—and their meanings within the time's Christian belief system.

In one of the illustrations, a fox pretends to be dead in order to attract birds; once they are close enough, it leaps to life to devour them. In another, a spotted panther attacks its only enemy—the dragon. In yet another, a lion breathes life into its dead, three-day-old cubs. These were more than mere illustrations; they were Christian allegories. According to the new edition of The Grand Medieval Bestiary—a 620-page behemoth by Christian Heck and Rémy Cordonnier, devoted to medieval creatures great and small—the fox was commonly portrayed as untrustworthy, and ensnared birds the way the devil traps sinners. The panther symbolized Christ, with the ultimate serpent—the dragon—as the devil. The life-giving lion was, of course, related to the resurrection.

The blueprint for medieval bestiaries arose long before the Middle Ages. The Greek text Physiologus, written in Alexandria sometime between the second and fourth centuries, linked particular animals to Christian morals and stories. In the seventh century, Isidore of Seville produced his 20-volume Etymologies, an encyclopedic tome on a range of subjects, from mathematics to agriculture to furnishings. Book 12 related to animals, but without the Christian moralizing. Instead, it focused on how the etymology of animals' names related to their characteristics.

By the 12th and 13th centuries, when The Ashmole Bestiary is believed to have been written, bestiaries had become particularly popular in England. They also had broad appeal because even the illiterate could understand the stories behind the illustrations.

Animals appeared in medieval texts beyond bestiaries as well. Marginalia, the doodles and drawings on the edges of manuscripts of all sorts, commonly featured animals. (These drawings are not the only embellishments in medieval manuscripts, either. Some texts contain delicate embroidered patches in the parchment, itself made from animal skin.) Animals also featured in art, tapestries, heraldry, and jewelry, and continued to carry the meaning and symbolism that had long been ascribed to them.

As The Grand Medieval Bestiary points out, “Whether they are faithful servants and benevolent companions, subjects of a humorous fable or parody, wild animals that represent danger or evil, or strange creatures from afar, real or imaginary, their place on these pages is as important as the place accorded to them in the life and culture of the period.”

Atlas Obscura has a selection of images of medieval beasties from the compendium.

In 1907, a championship squad changed what it meant to eat meat-free.

As Coach Amos Alonzo Stagg limped out onto the University of Chicago’s Marshall Field for the first day of fall football training in 1907, he had no shortage of strategies to carry his Maroons to the championship. For summer reading, he had required every player to memorize the new rulebook (football was a fast-evolving sport). He’d planned an exhausting circus of novel drills. And tight under his arm, he held a notebook bursting with top-secret new plays.

Fans across the nation, having watched in awe as the Maroons clinched a perfect-record Western Conference victory in 1905, expected nothing less of the renowned coach. But one of Stagg’s strategies took everyone by surprise: For the 1907 season, he was putting his team on an all-vegetarian diet, the same one he himself had followed for nearly two years.

“Vegetarians Only,” sneered the Boston Globe. “Vegetable Football,” quipped a wire story carried in smaller rags. Most hometown newspapers offered a fuller menu: The Chicago Inter-Ocean wrote, “Dried Apples, Prunes, Nuts, and Water for Maroon Team,” while the Tribune declared “Kickers to Train on Squash.”

No newsman mined the story for mirth more than the Tribune’s new sportswriter, a former Maroon himself. Walter “Eckie” Eckersall, the bad-boy superstar quarterback who had been extravagantly mourned during his final season in 1906 (then quietly expelled) gave the Maroons their mocking new moniker: the Vegetarians.

The “training table” (a mandatory diet and dining regimen) had recently been banned, over Stagg’s vocal objection, for most teams in the Maroons’ conference. So officially speaking, vegetarianism was only a “suggestion.” But Stagg, who had long insisted on abstinence from smoking, drinking, and cursing, enjoyed fierce loyalty from his squad, which meant, as one paper put it, “his suggestions are law.”

Captain Leo DeTray, an eager halfback whose on-field injury in 1905 had left him half-blind in one eye, had already followed Stagg’s lead by going partially vegetarian to treat indigestion, and was busy converting teammates. He insisted that red meat, the traditional football training diet, was the cause of rough play, and reminded the scholars that Plato and Pythagoras had abstained from flesh before them. Whether eagerly or begrudgingly, players and assistant coaches went on record to embrace “squirrel food.” The only naysayer, who groused that he didn’t “see the use of having teeth if we can’t eat meat,” failed to make the final roster.

When they became the Vegetarians, the Maroons also became standard-bearers for a fledgling (Chicago-based) meat-free philosophy. “It has been proved very conclusively that under certain types of muscular strain, the non-flesh-eater shows far greater endurance than the athlete who eats flesh,” Stagg told one newspaper. For vegetarians everywhere, and the meat-eaters who mocked them as listless and weak, this was a throw-down: Chicago’s upcoming season would prove—or not—the superiority of a non-meat diet.

Some insiders suggested that, since none of the Maroons’ four Western Conference games were against archrivals Wisconsin and Michigan, Stagg’s challenge might prove too easy. A few skeptics noted that a mere two-month change in diet was unlikely to make any measurable physical difference, which meant the challenge was a folly. But most simply wondered why Stagg had issued it at all. What was a football coach doing giving up meat?

In the Staggs’ poor West Orange, New Jersey, household, the autumnal slaughter of two fattened hogs made most family members drool for hams and sausages, but not young Lonnie. It wasn’t that he had ethical or dietary objections; rather, he was focused on a more immediate joy: the animals’ bladders, which, once blown up with a hollow quill, could be tossed, kicked, and run around with as long as they held air. Pigskins, he would later write, “were the only footballs we knew.”

While on scholarship and a penny-stretching starvation diet at Yale’s divinity school, Stagg’s love and mastery of sports steadily tugged him away from theology, until he gave up the cloth altogether. Nonetheless, asceticism and a strict moral code remained forever central to his approach. As Director of Physical Culture at University of Chicago (where he also coached baseball and track), he was credited not just for bringing professionalism to coaching and major innovations to the play of football, but also for his commitment to athletics as an integral element of character-building and moral uplift.

A decade into his stint at Chicago, though, Stagg’s sports zeal caught up with him. Rebounding too soon from a football-induced bout of pneumonia in the winter of 1904, he slipped on a patch of ice after track practice, dislocating vertebrae and pinching his sciatic nerve. “Arrogant in my strength,” he recalled, Stagg ignored the pain and coached a full season of track and baseball, before hobbling away for treatment. From Colorado to Indiana to Miami, Stagg spent the next two decades of vacation-time—and all of the family savings—at a succession of sanitariums (health and wellness resorts) trying to heal. During football season, when walking was too painful, he used a bike to race up and down the sidelines; later, he rode in a motorcycle sidecar and then a car. By 1907, at age 45, he had grown used to his players’ affectionate nickname: “the old man.”

That September, a month before football training, Stagg checked into Michigan’s world-famous Battle Creek Sanitarium. Owned by the staunchly vegetarian Seventh Day Adventists and run by health-activist J.H. Kellogg, Battle Creek was more than just a spa; it was the hub of an international, meat-free, wellness-and-nutrition empire.

The “Battle Creek Idea,” as evinced in the booklets and menus that Stagg marked up and brought home, was a hodgepodge of turn-of-the-century physical therapy and dietetics, common sense wisdom gussied up as science, and technological gimmickry. After his daily full massage, it was on to “Swedish movements” and arm exercises, 90 seconds on the slow-shaking machine, two minutes at the foot drum, and a whole lot of vibrator action on the spine and abdomen. Also on the agenda: “rational hydrotherapy” (plunges, douches, and wet-wraps) and the “out-of-door method” (fresh air).

As for food, since Stagg’s physical ailments had been attributed to “super-acidity” (the sciatica diagnosis came later), he stuck to Battle Creek’s “anti-toxic” diet. For breakfasts, he ate grapefruit, blueberries, toasted corn or rice, and a biscuit of “granose” (pressed wheat). For one dinner, he chose cream of corn and nut and rice croquettes. But nuttolene with mint sauce and chipped protose in cream—Kellogg’s early experiments in fake meat—were apparently too exotic for Stagg’s palate.

What really impressed Stagg at Battle Creek, though, was a record-breaking show of meatless strength. One afternoon, as he and other guests watched in awe, a vegetarian medical student named John Granger performed 5,002 squats in 139 minutes. Just three weeks earlier, Granger had out-squatted a meat-eater in a match-up organized by Irving Fisher, a Yale economist-cum-vegetarian activist who orchestrated these demonstrations for years. “I saw [Granger] do it 2,000 times,” Stagg gushed, “then I had to exercise myself while he did it 3,000 times more.” The old man was sold.

On the eve of their first game, the Maroons hosted an on-campus “purity banquet” for the visiting Indiana team, a tradition inaugurated by Stagg to encourage gentlemanly fellowship between opponents. With the coach’s post-Battle Creek mantra echoing in their ears (“A man’s food should be one-tenth [proteins], four-tenths fats, and the rest carbohydrates”), the Vegetarians suffered through their cream of tomato soup, celery, creamed spinach, and potatoes, and drooled across the table as the Hoosiers wolfed down beef and trout. Though “a craving for a slice of beef is sometimes evident,” Eckie wrote in the Tribune, “the Maroon leader crushes such desires.”

The next day, on the field, the meat-free diet spawned a new cheer:

“Sweet potatoes, rutabagas, sauerkraut, squash!

Run your legs off, Cap’n De Tray!

Sure, our milk fed men, by gosh!

Will lick ’em bad today!”

Despite their gleeful chants, Maroons fans had no idea what to expect, and not just because their team had gone meatless—they were playing a brand new game. Major rules changes in 1906 decisively severed the sport from its roots in rugby, turning the game into a perpetual scramble for ball possession and short yardage gains. This style of play looks familiar to today’s fans of American football, but at the time, confounded critics denounced it as utter chaos.

From the start of play, it was clear that Stagg’s team was anything but confused. They made liberal use of the novel forward pass, and quarterback Wallie Steffens (Eckersall’s replacement) bobbed, weaved, and sprinted to touchdown after touchdown. The Vegetarians played a far nimbler and smarter game than the Hoosiers in a 27-6 victory.

A week later, at Illinois, their game only got better. They were now, as the Inter-Urban put it, a “machine,” led by “fleet and agile Steffen” and “plugging, dodging DeTray,” who “played one of the best games of his great career.” With a 42-6 victory, the only obstacle standing between the Vegarians and a championship (awarded simply to the team with the best record) was the Minnesota Gophers.

Teased the Tribune later in the month: “When the herbivorous Maroons meet the carnivorous Gophers next week, will it be a case of rolled oats or mince meat?” That question mattered most of all for one very particular group of Chicago fans.

At the turn of the century, Chicago was the nation’s unrivaled capital of industrialized meat production. Its epicenter was a sprawl of stockyards, slaughterhouses, and packing plants known as the Yards, which “processed” over 400,000 animals a day. In 1906, Upton Sinclair had exposed the horrors of the Yards in The Jungle, which he intended as a rallying cry against dangerous working conditions, but instead sparked federal legislation to clean up the nation’s meat supply. "I aimed for the public's heart," he later recalled, "and by accident hit it in the stomach."

But the Yards had already been hitting Chicagoans—particularly South Siders—in the nose for decades. When the winds blew just right, not even leafy Hyde Park and the University of Chicago, a few miles southeast, were safe from the stench: a seismic olfactory assault of waste, chemicals, and rotting flesh. Unsurprisingly, Chicago was simultaneously home to the fastest-growing meat-free community in the nation.

Earlier in the 1800s, as historian Adam Shprintzen chronicles in The Vegetarian Crusade, America’s meatless movement had sought to link a flesh-free diet with abolition, suffrage, and pacifism into a campaign for broad social reform. But vegetarianism posed a threat to what was fast becoming an engrained American value: the production and consumption of red meat. Siding with flesh-eaters, the popular press mocked vegetarians as sickly, cowardly, girly, degenerate, dull-minded fad-chasers. And the scientific-medical establishment was no better, calling vegetarianism unnatural, unsafe, and the likely cause of unfortunate conditions ranging from gout and tuberculosis to the uncontrollable spewing of sperm and breast milk.

If the meatless movement were to survive, it needed a makeover. At the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, the First Vegetarian Congress and speakers such as Kellogg presented meat-abstinence not as a socio-political movement, but an individual diet that would bring physical betterment and prosperity. As Shprintzen observes, the Congress “mixed the language of American triumphalism with that of economic development to place the movement among the great social changes in the modern world.” That messaging struck a chord with Chicago’s upper-crust donor class (the Battle Creek demographic), who went on to nurture a growing industry of meatless businesses: groceries, clubs, magazines, cookbooks, and restaurants, including two eateries less than two blocks from Stagg’s Marshall Field.

In issue after issue, The Vegetarian magazine (published in Chicago) and Physical Culture (inspired by the 1893 World’s Fair Congress) explicitly linked vegetarianism with superior physical prowess. Breathlessly reporting Irving Fisher’s strength tests and gushing over athletes who credited their success to meat-free diets, the magazines worked overtime to combat the stereotype of vegetarian weakness. Physical Culture even published beefcake shots to celebrate the meatless male physique. More than mere strength, they wanted to assert vegetarian masculinity.

It was inevitable, then, that they would root for Stagg and his Maroons. What was more masculine than football?

As Chicago racked up its early wins, vegetarian and meat-eating onlookers publicly grappled with the implications. One commentator wryly linked the Maroons’ vegetarianism with their unique mastery of what everyone was calling “the new football”: “It is less a game of beef than ever, and speed and tricks are the main ingredients for success.”

But not everyone was so eager to banish football’s brawnier side to history. In a gossipy, unnamed, late October editorial, one newsman claimed, without substantiation, that the Maroons were not going flesh-free at all and the whole “Vegetarians” story must have been some kind of scam. The game at Minnesota would be a “contest of beefeaters,” he ranted, “with plenty of red corpuscles in their blood supply.” Was he, as a Maroons fan, trying to scare Minnesota? Or was he, as a meat fan, scared of the Maroons’ success?

On the contest’s eve, Minnesota’s preparation for their own “purity banquet” made for comic relief in the Inter-Urban, which speculated that in lieu of “that horrible packing house beef,” stewed prunes might be served to the visiting Maroons instead. In the end, the chef went out of his way to go nearly all-vegetarian, succumbing only minimally to the hosting team’s hankering for flesh.

The next day, the Gophers started strong, battering the Maroons’ defense and scoring first via drop kick. But midway through the first half, Chicago made its strength known, turning the game around with an unrelenting series of long, graceful forward passes. Each time the Maroons used this new “trick,” Minnesota was left flat-footed. Following a terrifying collapse of some bleachers early in the second half, the rest of the game belonged to Chicago, who triumphed 18-12.

All agreed: It was a victory of the whole team, led by the wily genius Stagg, who had mastered the new game like none other. No longer an Eckersall machine, Chicago was now a Maroons machine. Even “Eckie” dropped his “Vegetarians” schtick to give his former team and coach heartfelt praise.

In next week’s Purdue game, the only surprise was the sheer size of the blowout: The Maroons won 56-0. And no matter that the Maroons later lost to the Carlisle Indians, an out-of-conference game that Stagg groused had been terribly refereed. The Vegetarians were 1907’s Western Conference champions.

Stagg didn’t stay meatless for much longer. In his memoir, he recalls going flesh-free entirely for only two years, as part of a (failed) effort to eliminate the source of his chronic sciatic pain. Though for the remainder of his 102 years, he continued to forego alcohol, coffee, cigarettes, and swearing.

But what of the Maroons? The vegetarian experiment was not repeated by any of Stagg’s other teams that school year, and when fall football rolled around the next year, the coach made the news with another training gimmick: stimulation by oxygen. Though he continued to encourage a vegetarian-ish diet over red meat, by his own account, he gave up his strict devotion to a training table in just a few years, concluding that it was “not all essential in the training of the athletes.” Today, Stagg is remembered as a pioneer of college football (Marshall Field is now Stagg Field, the NCAA’s Division III Championship game is called the Stagg Bowl, and developments ranging from the tackling dummy to laterals are credited to him), but the 1907 meat-free championship is only a footnote to his storied career.

While no other football teams appear to have followed the Maroons’ lead, the vegetarian publicity machine continued to highlight the latest feats of meatless might, battling persistent mockery and criticism. By the mid-1910s, vegetarianism had gained a substantial new level of mainstream American acceptance. According to polls, 2.8 million Americans identified as vegetarian in 1943, and by 2008, that number had risen to 7.3 million, with almost 23 million eating mostly meat-free.

Among those millions are a growing number of professional athletes, including tennis legend Venus Williams, a host of NBA players, and “the 300-pound vegan,” David Carter, a former Chicago Bear. They point to a wealth of both anecdotal and scientific evidence that vegetarianism and veganism can not only reduce pain, blood pressure, and inflammation, but also boost energy, dexterity, and performance—largely the same claims evinced by Stagg, Kellogg, and vegetarian activists back in 1907.

In 2016, in the clearest echo of the Maroons’ experiment yet, eleven members of the Tennessee Titans football team adopted a meat-free, plant-based diet. At first, linebacker Wesley Woodyard was skeptical: “Y'all crazy with this vegan thing,” he recalls thinking. "I'm from LaGrange, Georgia. I'm going to eat my pork." But soon enough, Woodyard, too, had converted. A hundred years after Stagg and his Vegetarians, meat-free muscularity has its spotlight again.

Listen in as they swat away mosquitoes and brave a dark forest to eavesdrop on echolocation.

We crunched into the woods just after sunset on an early-August evening. The sky was still sherbet-orange over Rondeau Provincial Park, a swath of Carolinian forest near the shore of Lake Erie in Ontario, Canada. Soon after, everything was washed the color of charcoal. It was the prime hour for mosquito bites—and for bat-spotting.

Catching a glimpse of a darting bat is no easy feat, even though the 12.5-square-mile park is home to six species of them. The little brown bat and the hoary bat—Canada’s largest—among others, are speedy, silent, and easy to miss, even when they fly right overhead. This is partly because the sounds they make to echolocate—to find prey and dodge trees—are at a frequency that's beyond us. Across species, echolocation clicks can vary from roughly 20 to 200 kilohertz (kHz); adult humans generally cannot hear anything above the bottom of this range.

So, to find bats, we had to decipher their code. I tagged along with Laura Penner and Olivia Pomajba, two naturalists wielding a kind of universal translator for bats. The device picked up and recorded the frequencies bats use to echolocate, and then converted them into sounds that we can wrap our ears around.

Listen to our trip into the bats' domain above.

Inside the environmental protest sweeping Wyoming.

On the morning of Thursday, July 26, around 7,000 people logged in to the website of the Wyoming Game & Fish Department, their fingers crossed. All had entered a lottery that would allow them to hunt a grizzly bear in the continental United States for the first time in decades.

One of these people was Kelly Mayor—a 56-year-old resident of Jackson, Wyoming. She had entered the lottery at the very last minute, just hours before it closed, and didn't think to check the results until she got a reminder email. When she clicked through, she was greeted by a screen that said "#2." She'd won the second spot in the hunt. "I was dumbfounded," she says.

Mayor doesn't actually want to kill a grizzly. She, like thousands of others across the country, entered the bear tag lottery as an act of protest. All these people are part of "Shoot 'Em With a Camera, Not a Gun," a movement spearheaded by a group of Wyoming women who are hoping to change how their state thinks about wildlife management—and maybe save some grizzlies in the process.

Huge and shaggy-coated, the grizzly bear is an icon of the American west. About 700 of them live in and around Yellowstone National Park, the beneficiaries of conservation efforts that have brought their numbers up fivefold since the mid-1970s, when they were first added to the endangered species list and began receiving federal protection. Last summer, Yellowstone-area grizzlies were removed from the list, and management of the bears was turned over to the states of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming.

Montana decided not to have a hunt this year, and Idaho is raffling off a single license. But this past spring, the Wyoming Game & Fish Commission—the policy arm of the Game & Fish Department—voted unanimously to allow up to 22 bears to be killed. Commissioners argue that hunting a limited number of bears will reduce human-wildlife conflict, and that provisions in place—including mandatory training for tag winners and a prohibition on killing female bears with dependent young—will prevent the hunt from affecting the species's recovery.

Others disagree with the decision. The American Society of Mammalogists has called the delisting "premature," pointing out that although their population numbers have gone up, grizzlies are still not prevalent enough to guarantee a robust and genetically diverse population. Thanks to a campaign from the Center for Biological Diversity, several billboards in the West now depict a grizzly with the legend "I am not a trophy."

One of the hunt's opponents is Deidre Bainbridge, a lawyer who also lives in Jackson. Bainbridge is passionate about wildlife, and for years, she and others have been advocating for a category of nature enthusiast she calls "the non-consumptive advocate." As opposed to a hunter, fisher, or trapper, Bainbridge explains, a non-consumptive advocate "cares about wildlife simply because it's there"—although people may want to see it, or take a picture, they aren't looking to kill it.

Because the Game & Fish department is funded by hunting and fishing licenses, along with firearm, ammunition, and fishing tackle sales, "that kind of person doesn't have a voice" in management decisions, she says. (Game and Fish spokesman Renny MacKay says that the department "takes in significant amounts of public comment" through meetings and online, and that there are "definitely some ways that we [accounted for] some perspectives from people who aren’t hunters," including prohibiting hunting within a quarter mile of a road.)

But what if non-consumptive advocates started buying hunting licenses, too? Late this spring, after a Game & Fish meeting she found particularly frustrating, Bainbridge got together with Lisa Robertson—the founder of Wyoming Untrapped, a local trapping reform advocacy group—and started combing through regulations for the grizzly hunt. "I couldn't see where [we would be] interfering with a lawful hunt by buying a tag," Bainbridge says. After all, she points out, people with hunting tags often choose not to pull the trigger, for all kinds of reasons. "We decided to do it."

The more of them who entered the lottery, they figured, the better their odds of actually winning. Bainbridge and Robertson put their heads together with a few other concerned local women, each of whom brought their own particular skills: one is a well-connected philanthropist, one is a film producer with a lot of high-profile contacts, and one is an animal rights activist with a long history in the community.

Together, they began spreading the word, via a Facebook group and an ad in a local paper. They also started a GoFundMe campaign, so that if anyone actually did win a tag, the group could cover the associated costs, which begin at $600 for a Wyoming resident and $6,000 for an out-of-stater. "I would never have put in for a tag if I didn't know that it could be reimbursed," says Mayor, who found the campaign when a friend shared it on Facebook. She joined due to what she calls a "visceral" opposition to hunting animals just for sport. "I'm not opposed to hunting—my husband hunts, and we usually have game meat in the freezer," he says. "But trophy hunting has always just hit me at my core."

Many others felt similarly. "We had momentum within 48 hours," Bainbridge says. "Women all over the country got involved." It drew some big names: Jane Goodall applied for a grizzly tag, as did legendary elephant conservationist Cynthia Moss. As of press time, the GoFundMe has raised over $40,000, and Robertson told the Associated Press that of the 7,000 or so people who entered the lottery, at least 1,000 were "Shoot 'Em With a Camera" participants.

Some of these entrants, like Bainbridge, are playing the long game, intending that this will help Wyoming photographers and sightseers have a voice in wildlife management. "Others did it to simply stop the [gun-based] hunt for 10 days," Bainbridge says—the length of time each tag-holder can spend in the field before they have to cede their ground to the next person. (The group focused their efforts on the lottery for Areas 1-6, where up to 10 grizzlies can be killed over the course of 60 days.)

In late July, the group learned that they had successfully won two tags, out of the 10 available. Mayor got #2, and the other, #8, went to Thomas Mangelsen—a wildlife photographer well-known for his images of Grizzly Bear 399, who is herself famous for mothering many cubs. "It's almost uncanny," says Bainbridge. "We couldn't have planned it [this way]." If it takes the other winners more than a few days each to complete their hunts, it might be possible to run out the clock and save some bears.

In general, Shoot 'Em With a Camera participants would prefer the hunt didn't happen at all. On August 30, there will be a hearing in Missoula, Montana, during which opponents of the grizzly bear's new status will try to get it returned to the endangered species list. "Our bigger quest is to prevent the trophy hunting in Wyoming [altogether], because we don't believe that the delisting is appropriate at this time," says Bainbridge.

But if it comes down to it, Mayor is ready to go. When she first learned she had won, she figured she would sit the actual "hunt" out. "I thought … I'd pay the tag money and walk away," she says. But getting to know the Shoot 'Em With a Camera crew has changed her mind. "The ladies have made it into such an amazing thing," Mayor says. They're going to send videographers and photographers with her, and take turns spending time out there themselves. If the hunt goes through, and her number gets called, she says, "I plan on being up there for 10 days."

She's looking forward to it. "I'm sort of an armchair activist," she says. "I don't really speak up about issues, but I definitely have feelings about things like this. This is really different for me, to have a voice."

Logatham North Pillar Site is upending old assumptions about why people make monuments.

About five millennia ago, between 3000 and 2000 B.C., a man died somewhere near the shores of Lake Turkana in what is now Kenya. He had lived during what we, with the benefit of hindsight, can characterize as a time of turmoil. In the centuries before, his community of sheep, goat, and cow herders had moved to the Turkana area from the Sahara, driven southwest as their former home turned from a lush, green landscape into the desert we know today. There, they might have met a group of foragers and fishers—themselves likely stressed out because their lake was shrinking. All would have somehow had to learn to live together, changing as their environment changed.

We may not know the specifics of his life, but from what we know of his community’s burial practices, we can reconstruct what happened after. When this man died, his community members likely arranged his body into a specific position, and bound it tightly in cloth. They carried it up a winding trail to the top of a hill. There, they laid it alongside the bodies of hundreds of other community members who had passed away: men, women and children, all buried next to each other in a giant cavity dug into the sand and bedrock. They left this particular man with what archaeologists assume was one of his prized possessions: an intricate headpiece made out of 405 gerbil teeth, plucked from at least 113 individual gerbils.

The man was buried at what is now known as Lothagam North Pillar Site, the largest monumental cemetery in Eastern Africa. In a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of researchers describes what they've discovered about the site over the course of a decade of excavation and study. Their findings shed light on the memorializing practices of this particular society, and are helping to revise ideas about why people make monuments at all.

Lothagam North Pillar Site is located on the southwest edge of the lake, a little over four miles from its shore. After they stopped burying people in the cavity, the community filled it in with rubble and topped it with round basalt pebbles. They then ornamented the surrounding area with stone circles, pillars, and cairns, all highly visible against a background of red sandstone and black basalt. Five thousand years ago, "it would have been on the very edge of Lake Turkana," says Elizabeth Sawchuk, the project's lead bioarchaeologist and one of the paper's authors. "It would have been jutting into the lake, almost like a peninsula. It would have been absolutely spectacular to look at."

The Turkana people, who came to live around the lake within the past millennium, have stories about the monumental site: they say that the pillars were once dancers, and were turned to stone by a vengeful god after he came to a party in disguise and they made fun of his clothes. "When Turkana people pass these sites, they'll often leave a pebble on the pillars as a memento," says Sawchuk. "They regard themselves as the guardian communities of these sites." But since Western archaeologists first began investigating the site a few decades ago, they’ve been looking for their own explanations of how and why the pillars got there.

As Sawchuk explains, for many years, prevailing scholarship held that only certain types of societies engaged in monument-making. First, it was assumed that any group who wanted to take the time and energy to build something so large would be sedentary—that is, spend most of their lives in one place. "People want to put a big monument where they live, in their own backyard," she says. Second, they needed the ability to produce enough food that people could play different roles within the society: some people could farm, while others could be scribes, priests, or kings.

This leads to the last supposed prerequisite for monument-building societies: social stratification. "Somebody amasses enough resources and power and status that they're able to command a bunch of labor," says Sawchuk. Take the Great Pyramid of Giza, for example: the pharaoh Khufu conscripted thousands of lower-status workers to build it in his honor.

Lothagam North is certainly a monumental site: it has large architectural structures, and a specific memorial function. But the society that built it doesn't meet any of these criteria. "You don't have people who are settled down and living in one place," says Sawchuk—instead, you have nomadic pastoralists, who led their flocks from grazing land to grazing land, often moving every few days. "You're not going to have a whole bunch of food surpluses," because no one was farming. And, as the cemetery itself demonstrates, "there's not one pharaoh-type person in the middle," she continues. Instead, "we see men and women, we see babies, we see the very elderly … it looks like it was really important for this community to make sure that everybody was buried together."

Indeed, in excavating the cemetery, they found egalitarianism and individuality were represented in equal measure. The people are buried so closely together and so carefully, Sawchuk found it "staggering." "It's a complex mortuary cavity which is totally unlike Western cemeteries, where everyone is neatly arranged in rows," she says. "It's something to marvel at, how they created this and made sure that everybody had a place there." Researchers think between 580 and 1,000 people were buried in the cemetery, over the course of about 700 years.

Meanwhile, even as individuals shared this space, they seem to have brought along their own belongings. Many people were buried with stone beads, ground down carefully from local minerals: bright blue amazonite; orange carnelian; sky-colored chalcedony. Others had clay animal figurines, or rings made of hippo ivory. Some children were buried with beads, "but we would also find really ugly pots, almost like a kid made them," says Sawchuk. "It's really profound, when you stand at the site and you realize it's the sum total of hundreds of people's stories."

The team is still trying to puzzle out the overarching story: In the absence of stability, stratification, and hierarchy—all the things we thought such monuments required—why did this community decide to start building? Sawchuk thinks it is change itself that drove them. As part of their research, a subset of the team, including Sawchuk, spent time going through ethnographic studies of other East African pastoralist groups, trying to figure out under what conditions they create cemeteries. (This research was also published recently, in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology.)

They found that while collective burial isn't a common part of herding culture, stressful events often inspire groups to "elaborate their mortuary processes, to try to help heal the community and bring the community closer together," Sawchuk says. In the face of a shrinking lake and shifting lifestyles, building a large monument might have helped this group of people feel more connected to each other. "Once your ancestors are buried together, you're kind of locked for life, right?" says Sawchuk. The site also probably served as a meeting place for swapping stories, resources, and information, as well as a visible, comforting presence—"a constant reminder that you're part of this group," says Sawchuk.

The site "is not people saying 'Hey, I have a bunch of wealth and power, look at me,'" says Sawchuk. "It's a group saying, 'Hey, we're here, it is important for us to be together ... and these are places where we can help each other out, and reaffirm that we're one and the same.'" As we stand in the desert of the present, scanning the landscape of history, perhaps it can do the same for us.

Step one: acquire magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles.

Nearly 500 years after sinking, the celebrated Mary Rose warship has wind in its sails once more. Scientists from the University of Glasgow, the University of Warwick, and the Mary Rose Trust have devised a method for removing agents of rot from the ship’s body, offering shipwrecks everywhere a brighter future. Their research was presented today at an American Chemical Society conference in Boston.

Mary Rose served Henry VIII in three wars against France over a period of more than 30 years. The precise reason for its sinking in the Solent strait is disputed, but the sole eyewitness account maintains that a strong wind blew while the ship was mid-turn. On July 19, 1545, hundreds of men drowned aboard this oaken icon of Tudor naval culture, while approximately 34 survived. In the following weeks, a hired crew of Venetian salvagers endeavored to recover the ship, but to no avail. The best that divers could do, a few years later, was to scoop up some of the anchors and weapons on board. (The guns on the ship were valued at over £1 million in modern money, and the kingdom couldn’t let that kind of cash go to waste.)

The wreck then lay submerged and undiscovered until 1836, when a group of fishermen caught their nets on bits and pieces. To much fanfare, divers brought up artifacts such as guns, jugs, and even the mast until 1843, when the loot was thought to be exhausted and Mary Rose was scheduled for demolition. Though that demolition never took place, concurrent demolitions of other wrecks led many to believe the ship had been destroyed, and Mary Rose faded once more from divers’ eyes. It wasn’t until 1971 that the ship was rediscovered and proper excavations were undertaken.

As it turns out, four centuries of submersion isn’t so great for wood. During that time, bacteria lodged in the ship and produced hydrogen sulfide, which then reacted with iron ions—from cannons, for example—to produce iron sulfide. When the ship was pulled from the depths, these sulfides reacted with oxygen to form destructive acids.

Arduous conservation efforts have been ongoing since the ship was lifted out of the water in 1982. For years, preservationists countered the harmful sulfides by applying a supplement known as polyethylene glycol (PEG) to the hull, which prevented the wood from shrinking and cracking. But while PEG proved effective enough to keep Mary Rose on display, it was just a band-aid—it failed to do away with the catalyst driving the ship’s deterioration.

A team of researchers has developed a new treatment for the wood, one that removes those pesky iron ions without even damaging the wood. It goes like this: Magnetic iron oxide nanoparticles are laid down on the wood, protected by an adhesive polymer that can then be peeled safely off the surface with the dislodged iron ions clinging to it. Though this doesn’t reverse the damage of over four sunken centuries, it does strip the wood of the iron’s rusty, oxidized reddish hue—making it look more like it did when it sailed the high seas.

The researchers have begun applying the treatment to wood from Mary Rose, explained lead researcher Serena Corr from the University of Glasgow, but they first tried it out on the next best thing: oak soaked in iron solution. The team, Corr added, is currently developing versions of this treatment that can be safely applied to other materials found in the wreck, such as leather and rope. Until then, you can still see the ship and its artifacts in all their oxidized glory at the Mary Rose Museum on the Portsmouth Dockyards.

The ritual of leaving the house to rent a movie has all but disappeared, but we can still rewind our memories.

Like many a modern media consumer, I spend an embarrassing amount of time scrolling through my various streaming options on Netflix or Hulu or whatever. But I'm also old enough to remember a time when that same indecision played out across hour-and-a-half long trips to the video store.

With former video rental titan Blockbuster down to one final U.S. store in Bend, Oregon, physically strolling a rental library is quickly becoming a thing of the past. Smaller, specialty video stores do still operate in some places, but the once-ubiquitous experience of regular trips to rent physical videos is nearly obsolete. Before it fades from the cultural consciousness completely, we want to hear your favorite video store memories.

From the ages of about 7 to 15, one of the most important questions I was regularly faced with was whether to rent a new release or a trusted film I’d seen a million times. I’d often find myself in the video store, inhaling that pleasantly antiseptic scent of fresh plastic and magnetic tape, three or four titles in my hands, crippled with indecision. Eventually I’d begin slowly wandering the aisles, trying to avoid eye contact with my increasingly apoplectic mom, who just wanted me to pick something so we could leave. Usually I could hold out until she let me rent a new one and an old one (score!), and if I was extra lucky, she’d be so frustrated by my hemming and hawing, she wouldn’t even notice that one of them was rated R. My mom is the best, and I’m pretty sure I saw Hellraiser when I was about 10.

For many, visiting the video store was (or, depending on where you live in the world, still is) as much of an outing as actually watching the movies or playing the video games you pick up there. Fill out the form below to tell us about your personal favorite video store moment. We’ll collect our favorite submissions and publish them in an upcoming article. Also, if you have any relevant, original pictures of your favorite store, we’d love to see those too, so please send any you want to share to eric@atlasobscura.com, with the subject line, "Video Store Images." We can’t rewind the past, but we can still preserve video store culture by sharing our memories about it.

Japanese sweets, turkey dinners, and produce alike are immortalized in fabric.

By day, Ontario, Canada resident Tania Denyer is a legal assistant and a mother of two. But in her spare time, she makes quilts (and smaller "quiltlets") that riff on food and what's in her kitchen cabinets. She's always been a "maker," with a passion for illustration. But 22 years ago, when she was 27, a co-worker brought in a quilt block with a tea-cup design to work. Denyer, who calls herself "a hipster before hipsters were cool," was entranced. That same co-worker, seeing her interest, signed her up for a quilting class. Denyer remembers thinking, "How hard can it be?"

While Denyer had done a little sewing before, quilting was an entirely different world. The only thing that kept her going, Denyer says, was experimentation. At first, she depended on other quilters' patterns before she began to make her own. Then, instead of using patterned fabrics, she switched to solid colors, using them "in the same way as a painter would use paints." She cites Henri Matisse's cut-outs with colored paper as an inspiration, and often cuts her fabric free-form before constructing her quilts and quiltlets.

In the end, it all comes down to art, though. "I do get frustrated by the perception that quilts are not art, that they are merely craft," she says. "If a sculptor uses marble, a painter paint, why can't a quilter use fabric as her medium and be considered an artist too?" Her focus on food as a primary subject ties into expanding the definition of art as well. Especially because women textile artists and cooks have been long overlooked. "To my mind women have been making art from their homes forever," Denyer says. "Food is a key part of women's art."

With that in mind, many of her smaller quilts are designed to hang on the wall rather than drape over a bed. Fittingly, she was recently the artist-in-residence at the Cotton Factory in Hamilton, Ontario, a former cotton mill that's now a co-working space for creatives.

These days, she's especially interested in certain foods. One recent quiltlet featured a vintage spice bottle (Denyer has always been fascinated by food packaging) and another, larger quilt displayed an arrangement of Japanese sweets, with designs made by herself and fellow Canadian artist Geri Coady. While showing a quilt at QuiltCon ("Yes, there is a QuiltCon"), she took a photo of a diner breakfast that she now will recreate in fabric. "Even simple diner food is art too."

Denyer is currently planning to render a series of vintage spice bottles in fabric, all while pondering the concept of abstract food art quilts. But she's kept up her illustration work, too. (One recent series of drawings highlighted food packaging, especially Canadian stalwarts such as Five Rose Flour and Windsor Salt.) The goal, she says, is to combine her two passions into one, and someday become a fabric designer.

Launched in the 1950s, the Risograph has been repurposed.

At a New York storage space some time in 2010, printmaker Pan Terzis was left alone with a friend’s Risograph machine. The friend “told me he got this machine that was like a screen printing machine, but automated,” Terzis says. “I see this weird old copy machine and was like: ‘Where’s the Riso?’ And he said, ‘This is the Riso!’”

Within 24 hours, Terzis had used the machine to print a 50-page book, joining the ranks of 21st-century artists and publishers who are using old technology to make new creations.

The Risograph, a machine that duplicates like a mimeograph but dispels ink like a screen printer, has come a long way from its humble 1958 beginnings in a small home in Tokyo. Originally intended as more of a courtesy to Japanese businesses than a printmaking phenomenon, this ordinary, grey machine’s bulky exterior belies the innovation within. Around the world, the Risograph is now used by independent artists and publishers to create unique, high-quality zines and art prints. Aside from the vibrant ink it uses and the relatively low overhead costs it demands, it insists on the use of both digital and analog printing methods (it prints computer-generated designs but the ink drums must be handled manually), which makes for an equally modern and nostalgic experience.

The Risograph’s automated efficiency is what made it a hit amongst Japanese offices initially, to be sure. But the speed with which it can spit out prints is only a small part of why the machine is having its renaissance.

On the School of Visual Art’s campus in New York City, there’s a printing lab dedicated exclusively to the Risograph; an interdisciplinary space for printing, publishing and the production of Risograph-based printed works. The walls are lined with posters, whose faded ink could be mischaracterized as “vintage” if not for the mechanical murmur of the two machines shooting them out in real time. Some of the students are designing their prints on surprisingly smudge-free computer screens, while their counterparts wield industrial-size staplers around the room, waiting for their zines to dry before binding. In a smaller room that sits just off the larger one, the oldest (yet fully functional) Risograph is occupied by a student soaking up her last minutes of scheduled time with it, watching patiently as the “warm red” ink drum presses her design into life.

The Risograph machine operates by burning a stencil of an image into a fiber-based master, which is then wrapped around a color drum that pushes the ink onto the paper, thus creating a print. Similar to silk-screening, the stencil duplicator only prints one color at a time; to create a duotone image, the paper is run through the machine again, this time against a different color drum. The RisoLab recently got its third, and most modern, Risograph which allows for two color drums to run at the same time. Terzis says the most common color combination is pink and blue. The ink brings vivid saturation to the page, and is just unwieldy enough to give indie publications an imperfect, handmade feel.

Before the Risograph was an artist’s printmaking tool, it was a machine born out of necessity. Following the end of World War II, emulsion ink was only available in Japan through an expensive importing process that relied on unreliable trading channels. This was a direct result of Japan’s strategy to use high tariffs on American and European industrial products, thus limiting money spent on outside materials as a way to recover from their period of economic depression. On a quest to bring a cheaper alternative to the market, Noboru Hayama devised “Riso,” a soy-based ink ideal for high-quality color printing at an affordable price.

The Risograph machine Hayama developed in tandem with his new ink promised to be a more efficient and environmentally friendly duplicator than its competitor, the photocopier. When this offset-laser-screen-printer hybrid finally entered the American marketplace as the company’s first overseas sales subsidiary in 1986, it revolutionized short-run prints for places like schools, churches, and businesses; for anyone looking to print duplicates between 50 to 10,000 copies, the Risograph was their answer.

Matt Davis, the owner and operator of Chicago’s Perfectly Acceptable publishing house, thinks the relatively short lifespan of Risographs is what allowed them to move from utilitarian quasi-photocopier to a tool for artists. “As far as photocopying technology, [Risographs] don’t age very well,” he says. “So they ended up on the aftermarket for very cheap, which was great for artists who snapped them all up.”

Davis, who got his first Riso for free from a post office in Ohio, says the underground Riso world felt like “the Wild West” when he started his print studio in 2013. As Nichole Shinn, one-fourth of Brooklyn-based publishing collective TXTbooks, notes, the Risograph “was never intended to function as an artistic exploration, but that's what makes it so interesting to a lot of people … trying to navigate different ways the printer can be used creatively.”

Independent publishing houses like Perfectly Acceptable and TXTbooks are helping turn the grainy likability of Risograph printing into a global aesthetic. The myriad color combinations that are possible (Davis’ favorite being “mint and sunflower, 100 percent,” and Terzis celebrating the mix of “any of the complementary colors, because when you put them together they really vibrate”) makes it seem like the Risograph was destined for artistic flourish all along. But Issue Press founder George Weitor challenges the idea of the Riso’s “look” overshadowing its intended purpose: “The simplicity of the Riso brings a specific kind of arts publishing within reach and allows me to work with ink and paper in a way that I would otherwise have difficulty achieving,” he says, “but I am (only very mildly) concerned about elevating the Riso to something more than it is or, I believe, should be—which is a means of production rather than a specific style.”

Today, you can buy a Riso on eBay for just under $1,500. But the much-beloved machine is not without its limitations. Uncoated paper absorbs the nontoxic inks best, so printing on luxe, glossy paper is generally discouraged. And ink color choice is limited, though several, Venn diagram-style overlapping print runs can create colors (albeit occasionally muddy) outside of the traditional CMYK color spectrum we’re used to.

“My fear has been that artists using Riso in this way is an unsustainable fad,” says Terzis, “but I think [the Riso] needs to become less precious so that we notice that something is Riso printed, and that’s great, but what did [that person] do with this medium? Because at the end of the day the medium is neutral.”

There’s a whole atlas, organized by country, dedicated to Risograph publishers, print shops, and design studios using the duplicators. Created by Wietor, this directory is just one part of a larger Risography database and illustrates how widespread this printing machine’s impact has become, particularly in the United States, Canada, and Europe. “The Atlas of Modern Risography … actually came out of a kind of loneliness,” says Weitor. “When I first started I only knew of a handful of friendly presses in Europe, so I started the Atlas as a method of learning about other presses with the thought that we couldn’t have a community if we didn’t know that each other existed.”

It’s clear that community is at the center of the RisoLab’s mission.“It’s a beautiful thing, publishing and printing is all about communication and community,” says Terzis. “You can’t just work in isolation, we’re all in a social context. We can’t survive alone, we need other people. I think printmaking reminds you of that, especially Riso printing.”

Crafting skin and flesh from the sweet and tasty.

Spectators have long had a grotesque affinity for the fictional villain, Sweeney Todd, whose victims are ingeniously baked into human meat pies and sold by his baker accomplice, Ms. Lovett. But what happens when this Victorian “penny dreadful” serial takes a contemporary turn?

Two oddities-loving artists have created their own “people pot pies” using very different media. Special effects artist Ashley Newman was the first to try her hand at making gory, decidedly inedible pies. Made of perfectly skin-toned latex stretched over a foam base, Newman’s pies stare up blankly from their sunken, bruised eye sockets. Meanwhile, browning on the raised cheek bones and nostrils, which ooze sanguineous fluids, give the impression of a juicy, fleshy face pulled straight from the oven. Newman sells her prop pies with mix-and-match facial features such as a protruding ruby tongue, three crooked and eerily opalescent teeth, and a small tuft of hair.

Once Newman posted her pies online, cake artist Andrew Fuller received an onslaught of tags and emails. As the grandson of a barber, a straight-razor aficionado, and a lover of the grotesque, Fuller fits the Sweeney Todd profile. Over the years, the artist had grown increasingly obsessed with creepy cakes, including an anatomically correct heart cake that, when sliced, bled a goopy raspberry coulis (he sold out over Valentine’s Day). So Fuller couldn’t resist taking inspiration from Newman, with whom he has a mutually admiring relationship.

But making edible versions was a very different project. “You have to be strategic with size and proportions when you make them, because they are dough,” says Fuller. “You have to consider how much certain details may expand or warp during baking.” As pie makers know, crust is a fickle friend: It thirsts for liquid to become supple, like human skin, yet threatens to become tough and leathery, and shrink away from the pie plate’s edge if too much is added. One pie maker’s trick that Fuller uses is substituting some of the water for vodka, which, at 40 percent alcohol, evaporates during cooking and helps mitigate the overproduction of gluten in the crust.

In addition to the artistry atop the pie, Fuller gets creative with the people pot pie innards. Cherry seemed an appropriately juicy filling, but Fuller freshens the flavor with mint. His variation on Newman’s pies include skin-like pieces laid in a patchwork, some sutured together, and an added, third, swollen eye that is crusted shut. A fruity goo thickened with cornstarch oozes from the pie’s nostrils, while demonic-looking cherry orbs stare from beneath the open eye sockets (which also function as pie vents). The crowning glory, a secret Andrew will take to the grave from which he draws his ideas, is a tuft of gnarly, fried-looking, yet fully edible hair.

What draws the two oddities-obsessed artists towards the edible? Newman, who also sells a line of realistic, body-part jewelry, explains that: “It’s grotesque yes, but also completely ridiculous. You see it and you think, ‘Why would someone do this?’ That makes you laugh and starts you thinking.”

Fuller, meanwhile, brings up his fascination with Ed Gein, also known as “The Butcher of Plainfield.” Gein was notorious for using human skin—from the bodies of women he murdered and corpses retrieved from fresh graves—to make lampshades, waste baskets, and clothing. Though films such as Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Silence of the Lambs have also taken inspiration from Gein, Fuller is perhaps the only to do so in fondant. Still, conscious of the subject’s sensitivity, Fuller says, “Listen, don’t kill people. I don’t condone it. But he was creative and that left quite the impression. Dark though it may be, I would’ve made a beautiful lampshade.”

Sometimes marimo float, and sometimes they sink. But why?

Marimo might be the cutest plant on Earth. It's round, bright green, and fuzzy. It even dances, albeit slowly: In the morning, marimo balls float to the top of lakes, and at night, they sink back down again.

It's tempting to raise the plant up to your cheek and ask, "Why do you do that, little buddy?" (Do not do this: In many areas, marimo is a protected species.) But it took new research from the University of Bristol to actually figure it out.

Marimo balls may look like autonomous mini-muppets. But they're actually made up of a green macroalga called Aegagropila linnaei. In many environments, A. linnaei acts like more typical algae, growing on top of rocks and shells or floating around in the water in small pieces. But sometimes, scraps of the algae meet and get tangled up in clumps. Under certain conditions, these clumps grow large and sink to the bottom, and the motion of the water pushes them back and forth over the sand like a kid with a snowball, sculpting them into spheres.

The balls make an impression wherever they show up, which is generally in shallow, sandy lakes in the Northern hemisphere. Lake Svityaz in Ukraine has them, as does Lake Mývatn in Iceland, where fishermen named them Kúluskítur, or "round shit," because they'd get tangled in their nets.

There are so many of them floating in Japan's Lake Akan that they're the subject of an annual Marimo Festival, which has been held since 1950. They are also popular among aquarium aficionados—so much so that people sell fake ones, made of styrofoam wrapped in java fern.

For this new study, which was published in Current Biology, the researchers brought some aquarium-grown marimo balls into the lab. First, they wanted to test a theory about why they float: namely, that when the algae photosynthesize, they exhale tiny bubbles of oxygen, which catch on the ball's tendrils and pull it up to the water's surface. The researchers coated a group of marimo with DCMU, a chemical that stops photosynthesis, and put them inside graduated cylinders. When they exposed these balls to light, they didn't blow bubbles or float. Instead, they stayed stuck at the bottom of their tubes.

With that settled, the researchers went on to test whether the marimo balls float more readily at certain times of the day. They first got them on a particular "sleep" schedule, exposing them to 12 hours of light followed by 12 hours of darkness. Then they put them in dim red light for a while, to try to throw them off. But it didn't work: When the researchers flicked a bright light on in the morning, the balls popped up much more quickly than they did in the afternoon. (Many plants have circadian rhythms like this, which help them know the best times to grow, flower, and photosynthesize.)

Natural marimo balls are rare, and getting rarer—a 2010 study found that their populations are declining worldwide. Those researchers pinned the problem mostly on eutrophication, or an excess of nutrients that other plants and algae feed on, crowding the water.

University of Bristol researchers hope that figuring out these balls' behavior might help save them: "By understanding the responses to environmental cues and how the circadian clock controls floating, we hope to contribute to its conservation and reintroduction in other countries," lead author Dora Cano-Ramirez said in a press release. In the meantime, keep dancing, little cuties.

More sustainable food production may call for plopping cows on the water.

The waters of the Nieuwe Maas snake through the city of Rotterdam, giving way to sandy beaches, bustling harbors, and, soon, a small herd of floating cows. It may sound like science fiction, but the world’s first floating dairy farm, the brainchild of Dutch property development company Beladon, is well on its way to becoming a reality.

Though the project has been in the works for years, the farm only recently got the green light for construction. Earlier in the summer, a giant, 900-ton concrete platform was lugged by barge from the north of the Netherlands to its current post in Rotterdam’s Merwehaven harbor. It might not look like much yet, but, according to Peter and Minke van Wingerden, co-owners of Beladon, it will soon be a multi-level, hi-tech home to 40 Meuse Rhine Issel cows—and perhaps the best bovine real estate on the river.

According to Peter, animal welfare was a top priority when designing the farm, so the team enlisted the help of a full-time farmer to determine cow-friendly materials, temperatures, feed, and major elements of the design. The finished farm will feature a “cow garden” on the top floor of the building, boasting artificial leafy trees, lush bushes, and sprawling ivy to offer some shade for the cattle. Meanwhile, a soft floor will mimic a natural environment and allow urine to soak through (to mitigate ammonia emissions). To allow the cows more freedom in their milking schedule, a team of robots will be on dairy duty, collecting an estimated 800 liters per day. The milk will then be processed on the floor below and sold locally.

In its leisure time, a cow aboard the floating farm might plod around on the 1,200-square-foot platform, graze on locally sourced fodder, or feast its beady bovine eyes upon the harbor. “This cow will have a beautiful view of the port of Rotterdam,” says Minke. “The farm has three layers ... and the cow is standing on top.” However, she points out, a heifer who's tired of watching the waves can always trot down a ramp to access a small pasture on solid ground.

The building soon to be bobbing up and down in the harbor will certainly have ample curb (or dock) appeal for cows and humans alike, but the real focus of this project is food sustainability. According to Peter and Minke, getting cows on the water might just be a critical step towards creating more resilient, healthy cities.

In a world with a rapidly growing and urbanizing population, Peter points out, there’s an increasing need for more space, more fresh food, and, in turn, more space to grow more fresh food. But when it comes to urban centers, where does that land come from? According to Peter, you have to create it.

“Coming from the Netherlands, it’s an obvious thought to look to the water,” he says. He points out that water spaces across the globe are both plentiful and underutilized—from ports to rivers to large reservoirs. “There’s plenty of space close to the city where we can expand housing or food production. So this is to showcase to the world that it can be done in a very sustainable way in and around our cities.”

The idea first came to Peter and Minke in 2012, while they were working on another project in New York City. When Hurricane Sandy hit, they watched the city’s transportation come to a screeching halt as Manhattan’s roads, subways, and tunnels filled with water. Hunts Point, the Bronx neighborhood housing one of the city’s largest food distribution facilities, had flooded, too. “The trucks could not go in or come out anymore,” says Minke. “After two days, there was no fresh food on the shelves.” For the couple, seeing how quickly an entire city’s access to food could vanish called into question the current systems urban areas rely on to feed their populations.

Amidst the chaotic aftermath, they had a thought: To create a more climate-adaptive method of producing fresh, local food, why not harvest right on the water? “You’re going up and down with the tide, and you don’t need the transport,” Minke points out. Increasingly, floatable buildings are being built to withstand severe hurricanes. Because of their buoyancy, such buildings can simply ride out the tide when water levels rise, bobbing along at the water's surface. According to Peter, Beladon is involved with several floating building projects in hurricane-sensitive areas, so creating storm-resilient farms is right in their wheelhouse.

But keeping food afloat when storms strike isn’t the only aspect of sustainability the floating farm hopes to tackle. The operation also aims to reduce waste on a citywide scale. “In the past, it was quite normal to dump all your waste far outside the city, so nobody was actually aware about the value of waste,” says Peter. “What you try to do is use and reuse—so your waste is being cycled into new materials, new functions.”

To achieve this, the floating farm’s cow chow will be sourced from local breweries' spent grain, cut grass from city stadiums and golf courses, and even leftover potato skins that might otherwise be sent to the landfill. The cows will chomp away on tasty waste, in turn providing the city with fresh dairy—and fresh cow pies. According to Peter, the team plans to collect and process cow manure to be used as fertilizer on the farm and throughout Rotterdam. “This is what we call a circular city,” says Peter, “to maintain all nutrients inside the city to use and reuse.”

Though it's just one small farm, the van Wingerdens see their project as a prototype—a "living lab"—that can be picked up by cities across the globe. "Building on the water is extremely scalable," says Peter. "And it’s transportable, so you can move it from place to place if necessary."

Not everyone is fully on board, however. Along with permit issues and potentially pungent farm fragrances, one of the greatest challenges will be getting the public to understand the urgency of the matter. “People do not fear climate change because it’s going in small steps,” says Peter. “We see floods every day on the television screen, and often it’s far away. But we are designing the future in ten, twenty years over here. We feel responsibility for the world after us—for our children, for our grandchildren.”

For this reason, Peter and Minke hope to use the floating farm as an education center, opening it up to Rotterdam residents and curious visitors. In doing so, they aim to raise awareness about the importance of fresh, sustainably grown food and to help people connect with food production in a new, perhaps literal, way. “The cows are very friendly and they like to look in the eyes of the visitors,” Minke offers. “Perhaps they will be cuddled by the visitors!”

We finally have first-generation evidence that our ancestors interbred.

In 2008, scientists found a finger bone fragment in a cave that changed our understanding of human ancestry. The bone’s mitochondrial DNA (mDNA) did not match up to the genetic material of Neanderthals or other early humans. It belonged to what we now call Denisovans, a recently defined subspecies of archaic humans named for Siberia’s Denisova Cave. Though they separated from the Neanderthals more than 390,000 years ago, we know that the groups periodically interbred. For the first time, however, scientists have identified remains of an individual with one parent from each group. They published their findings today in the journal Nature.

The finding comes by way of another fateful fragment, found in Denisova Cave in 2012 by Russian archaeologists. Years passed before the bone underwent any kind of testing, eventually arriving in 2015 at the University of Oxford for collagen fingerprinting which established that the bone had belonged to a hominin, a group of bipeds that includes modern humans and our immediate ancestors.

In 2016, the fragment fell under the auspices of Viviane Slon at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, who pulled from it some highly unexpected results: 38.6 percent of the DNA fragments corresponded with the Neanderthal genome, while 42.3 percent lined up with the Denisovan genome. This roughly even split was “too good,” said Bence Viola, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toronto and an author on the study. “You think that somebody screwed up something in the lab.” Nope—Slon repeated the tests after drilling a new sample from the bone, and confirmed her original results.

This first-time first-generation evidence, however, is not the only reason for anthropologists to get excited about this finding. This individual’s Neanderthal mother, the researchers found, had more in common genetically with Neanderthals living in western Europe than with an older Neanderthal who had lived in Denisova Cave, providing new insights into Neanderthal migration.

The team was able to establish the sex of each parent thanks to the specimen’s mDNA, which can only be inherited from the mother and was, in this case, Neanderthal-like. The chromosomal makeup revealed the individual to have been female, and the thickness of her bone fragment suggests that she lived to be at least 13 years old.

We’ve got a long way to go on our Denisovan details. Because we only have part of a finger and a handful of teeth, we don’t even know what they looked like. But if they’re anything like their Neanderthal counterparts, they were actually probably pretty smart.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and Best Products is having a sale.

In 1974, the American home goods retailer Best Products opened a new location in Houston, Texas. Crowds gathered for the event, and local news trucks filmed the scene.

But people weren’t there to shop. Everyone was in the parking lot, waiting for two helicopters to lift a massive black shroud off of the building, like a giant magic trick. When they finally pulled it away, the crowd burst into applause.

From 1972 to 1984, Best Products collaborated with the design firm SITE to transform many of its stores into stunning and bizarre works of art. These special showrooms, as they were called, generated fanfare, admiration, and controversy across the United States. They were hotly debated in architecture circles, and ultimately became textbook examples of of postmodern architecture—playful and critical, providing mass appeal while challenging assumptions about how “serious” art should look, and where it should be found.

By the mid-1990s, they had all disappeared.

SITE was founded in 1970 by a multidisciplinary group of New York artists, and led by James Wines, a sculptor steeped in the downtown New York arts scene. Prior to founding the firm Wines often took public-art commissions, which at the time usually meant making large sculptures in urban public spaces. With abstract, monumental pieces like Three Bronze Discs (1967), Wines was finding the kind of success that many sculptors dreamed of. And he was sick of it.

“I was designing turds in a plaza,” Wines describes. Wines wanted to break free of the form, which felt like it promoted work that could be found in any plaza or skyscraper lobby in the world—from Lower Manhattan to Louisville to Luxembourg. “Plop Art,” Wines likes to say.

Two of Wines’s patrons in this period were Sydney and Francis Lewis. They owned Best Products, a catalogue retailer that sold discounted goods in hybrid showroom/warehouses (sort of like Ikea). Selling everything from hair dryers to toaster ovens to doll-houses, they were proto-big box stores—“medium box stores,” as their son and former Best president Andy Lewis puts it.

The Lewises were avid art collectors, and as the company grew they became interested in bringing public art in their their showrooms. They turned to Wines, who by the late 1960s had become not only one of their favorite young artists, but also a good friend.

Wines is in his 80s today, but still has the excitable temperament of a young artist looking to surprise. He smiles when he talks about those first discussions with the Lewises.

“I think, at first, they imagined I would just put a sculpture in front of the store,’ Wines says. But that wasn’t the kind of proposal he gave them.

Their first collaboration, for a new showroom in Richmond, Virginia, was ingeniously simple. It featured a brick facade layered in front of a generic box store, bound with a special mortar that let the bricks seemingly defy gravity. The facade curled away from the building at its edges, like drying paper. It was called the “Peeling Building.”

According to Andy Lewis, when the store opened in 1971 people visited just to see the facade in person. One neighbor even called the Lewises to tell them their new showroom was severely damaged. The “Peeling Building” soon became their best performing showroom. The Lewises decided to collaborate with Wines and SITE on another.

For the “Indeterminate Facade Building” in Houston, the opening of the store was turned into a major event. When helicopters finally lifted the black shroud off the building, what was revealed looked pretty mundane—until the top. The white facade rose two stories above the building and ended at a jagged, crooked line of bricks. A large V appeared punched out of it, with a pile of brick rubble below.

At the opening, a local whom Wines had never met walked straight up to him, with an intensity that put him on edge.

“I thought he was gonna try and fight me,” Wines says. “‘Did you do that?’ He asked. I told him I did. ‘I love it! That’s what I always have wanted to do, kick the shit out of one of those buildings.’”

Some architects, though, didn’t view the showrooms so kindly. The May 1977 issue of Architectural Record contains several scathing letters to the editor, including one from a California-based reader who called the buildings “an affront to human dignity, an insult to architectural innovativeness and stooping to the lowest on the altar of gimmickry.” A construction company owner in New York suggested SITE, Inc. be given the architectural award for “Sheer Lunacy.” For some designers and critics, there was just no room for playful suburban shopping centers in the world of fine architecture.

Wines was too busy to debate the point though; Best Products was growing fast in the 70s and 80s, and there were more showrooms to design. Over the next few years came seven more. There was the “Notch Building” in Sacramento, a solid concrete box with one corner that would slide out to create an entrance when it opened each day, and slide back in at night.

In Richmond, Virginia, the “Forest Building” was designed to look like a big box store that had been sitting for decades in a vacant lot.

The “Inside/Out Building” in Milwaukee had a cutaway section that appeared to expose the interior to the outside, like a real-life architectural cross-section.“They cost more than regular buildings, but they added such PR value. Often they were our best-performing stores,” Andy Lewis explains.

By the late '80s though, a creeping consolidation of big-box retailers had begun, and Best Products started to struggle. After two bankruptcies in 1991 and 1996, the company closed for good.

Unlike more monumental architecture of the era, no one seems to have thought to preserve these big-box stores. Describing the fate of the Houston showroom in a 2003 Metropolis article, architectural historian Stephen Fox put it this way: “there’s not much sentiment here for preserving suburban landmarks.” Over the years the showrooms were bought and sold, remodeled and torn down.

There is still one place, though, where admirers can catch a glimpse of what once was. On a strip-mall-lined stretch of Quioccasin Road in Richmond, Virginia sits the West End Presbyterian Church. It has a brick facade with a courtyard just behind it. It was once the “Forest Building.”

When it opened as a Best showroom in 1978, the building was covered in weeds, with trees seeming to burst out from its interior. In 2000, when The West End Church converted the building to a house of worship, they hired very responsible architects to civilize the space.

The church’s website mentions the building’s unique history, and architecture students have begun making trips there to see it themselves. To Wines though, it’s not really worth visiting—the tasteful and orderly renovation almost felt like a defacement. “It was like they surgically removed all the art from the building,” he says.

Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown, icons of ‘70s and ‘80s postmodern architecture, were fans of SITE’s special showrooms. (In 1978, as Best Products was rapidly expanding, they actually designed one themselves.) Once, when discussing the special showrooms with Wines, Venturi said something to him that would prove prophetic: “Make sure to take lots of pictures. In about 15 minutes they’ll start to change it.”

A rare "hybrid zone" of interbreeding flowers is luring curious biologists year after year.

At a lodge high in the Spanish Pyrenees, a stone’s throw from France, biologist Nick Barton and his field crew huddled around a small printout of a Google satellite map. The map showed a hybrid zone, a small patch of land just over a mile wide, where magenta snapdragon flowers meet yellow snapdragon flowers, and interbreed into an explosion of color—every combination of white, pink, and orange. It’s a natural experiment that’s been running for thousands of years, and Barton and his crew are here to collect the data.

“Were there many flowers on Rainbow Road?” asked graduate student Lenka Matejovicova, referring to one of two roads that runs through the hybrid zone.

“One,” answered Barton. “It’s very sad. They seem to be quite behind this year.”

Barton would know. He’s been here for nine consecutive summers, directing field crews in a long-term study of the hybrid zone. He’s British, but works in Austria at the Institute of Science and Technology as a theoretical biologist—which means that he’s interested in uncovering the broad rules that govern biology. Snapdragons are the perfect model organism, because they express their genetic characteristics so visually. That’s why they were studied by Gregor Mendel, the father of plant genetics. But snapdragons are not the only species with hybrid zones. In the past, Barton has studied grasshoppers, toads, and butterflies.

“Most of the species you look at, whether they’re birds, or mammals, or whatever, you often find that there are subspecies, or distinct populations, that meet each other and form these narrow hybrid zones,” explains Barton. “It’s a very common phenomenon. One of the reasons for studying them is that it’s visually very striking. I want to know, why is there such a sharp separation? Suddenly, it changed from one to the other. What’s doing that?”

To figure out why the color divide exists, Barton and his collaborators are attempting to do something that’s rare in nature: Create a hybrid family tree. Their goal is to trace each individual flower back to its parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on, for generations and generations, with data that would turn human genealogists green with envy. The family tree will help biologists understand why some traits are passed on while others die out, and ultimately, how plants become separate species.

By mapping out the relationships of the wacky offspring between magenta and yellow snapdragons, scientists can tease out the mechanics and patterns of biology. They can make connections between the genes of individuals that have lots of offspring, and those that don’t. They can study the behavior of pollinators, and climate, and all kinds of variation in the environment, year after year. They can test their theories about how nature works, across hundreds of thousands of data points.

Essentially, this stretch of roadside in the Pyrenees is the perfect natural laboratory. “Nature has done the crossing for you,” Barton says. There’s no need for long days spent breeding new specimens. “It makes it possible to do all sorts of things you couldn’t do artificially.” In other words, the snapdragons are running the experiment. But collecting the data is still a lot of human work.

Once the morning’s route was decided, the all-female field crew of eight piled into a van and set off down a two-lane road. They donned reflective yellow vests and carried grocery bags loaded with labeled tags, plastic bottles for sampling, and satellite-connected surveying instruments called Trimbles. To the motorists, they looked like a highly specialized cleanup crew. But they were hunting for snapdragons.

It was mid-June—peak snapdragon season. Usually the hybrid zone was ablaze with the snapdragon’s popcorn-shaped blooms at that time. But that day, it took a trained eye to spot them. It was Carina Baskett’s first day. She walked along the thin shoulder of the mountain road with grad student Louise Arathoon, scanning the green landscape. After a few minutes, they spotted a lone white snapdragon on the downward slope towards the river. They climbed over the guardrail and carefully made their way down to the plant. Upon close inspection, the snapdragon’s’ popcorn-sized flowers were marked by dainty yellow and pink accents. A true hybrid.

Baskett held the bag of tags and bottles, while Louise readied the Trimble. “This will start searching for GPS coordinates,” Louise explained. Baskett read off the code on the tag and looped it around the base of the plant. This is what would create new pins on the satellite map, and forever tie the plant to its data. Then began the data collection process, including counting the number of flowers on each stem and measuring the flower’s height.

It wasn’t hard to understand why Barton refers to collection as “the ritual.” Baskett kept finding old tags around dead stems, a remnant of the flowers, and the scientists, who’d occupied the hybrid zone in previous years.

The ritual has already yielded some high-profile discoveries in plant genetics. Enrico Coen of the John Innes Centre in Norwich, England, the biologist who first discovered the hybrid zone, published a paper in the journal Science last November explaining what maintains the sharp distinction between magenta and yellow snapdragons. He found that the gene that controls the yellow coloration uses a tool called small RNA to express itself, which the other subspecies doesn’t have. It pointed to how subspecies find different solutions to the same goal—becoming common enough to attract pollinators. It appears that the hybrids are not as successful, because they simply look strange to the bees they need to appeal to.

By the time every snapdragon in that morning’s section of hybrid zone had been spotted, tagged, and sampled that morning, it was time for lunch. The van headed back up to the lodge with samples from 20 snapdragons.

Over a typically Spanish spread of cheese, meat, and bread at an outdoor table overlooking the mountains, Barton told the story of a field crew member from a few years back, who showed up to work without knowing what a snapdragon looked like. He had thought he would be searching for lizards.

“Did he stay the whole season?” someone asked.

“He did,” Barton answered proudly.

The work of tagging and measuring may get mundane, even boring, and last for years. But when the snapdragon hybrid family tree is complete, it will mean that some of the most interesting questions about biology, evolution, and nature can be answered. Not a bad way to spend a summer, when you think about it.

Nuclear tragedy created opportunity a world away.

Catastrophe swept over the small city of Pripyat, in Northern Ukraine, in April of 1986. At the nearby Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, a botched safety test resulted in an earth-shaking steam explosion at Reactor 4—the facility, with its bio-hazardous contents, was violently cracked open.

Soon after the accident, gigantic plumes of fission products were expelled into the atmosphere. Dozens of townspeople began to taste something metallic in their mouths, and people got headaches; eventually there were uncontrollable fits of vomiting. More than 24 hours after the initial blast, the town was evacuated due to radiation concerns. Underneath a strange cloud, lively Pripyat withered.

Likewise, the hearts of people across Europe sank as it became clear that radioactive particles were being carried westward by the winds. Indeed, as far as Sweden, radiation levels set off alarms at the Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant. The exact impact of the fallout on crops was unknown.

As the effects rippled across the world, it disrupted the wine world too. Scandinavians, wary of the situation, began to forego purchasing wine from France and looked for an “uncontaminated” substitute. Soon enough, a nuclear disaster in Eastern Europe had the unexpected consequence of helping American wines from Washington find their way onto the international market.

“Concern about Old World wines that might have been tainted by atomic pollution,” says Mike Veseth, editor of The Wine Economist, “drove buyers in Sweden to look for Bordeaux-style wines from the New World.”

The first person to take advantage of this opening had not actually worked in wine for very long. At the time, Tom Hedges had recently been canned from his job as CEO of a Canadian produce company. “I was just sitting there looking around, slightly depressed, and I remember hearing about Chernobyl, but I didn’t frankly give a damn at that time,” says Hedges, who was the father of two young children. “I was looking for work.”

He found himself entering a new industry through a friend of a friend: spirits. “We loaded up and drove from New Brunswick, Canada, to Tri-Cities, Washington,” he says. In the Evergreen State, Hedges sold wines to companies in Taiwan. Soon, the blossoming wine seller was shipping West Coast wine to a supermarket in Tahiti.

With these business dealings, Hedges was entering virgin territory. Although wines from Washington State were beginning to earn acclaim, most commercial-scale wineries dated back less than 20 years, a blink by wine standards. The industry was still developing an international reputation, and across the world, French wines dominated the market.

Still, Hedges was successful enough at selling Washington wine in Tahiti to ruffle French feathers. Despite the fact that Hedges didn’t actually own a winery, he acted as a sort of middleman—a négociant, as they’re called in the wine industry—and began buying surplus wine from Washington sources to sell to someone he’d met: a Swedish distributor of alcoholic beverages.

“Mind you, we have no money, no winery, no vineyards,” says Hedges. But the Swedish distributor accepted his samples, and Hedges and his French-born wife, Anne-Marie, began to toy with potential names for their new wine label. “Issaquah Ridge” and “Columbia Valley Vineyards” were the main contenders, with the latter being shipped to Scandinavia initially. It was only through the advice of a friend and wine bottler, who said they couldn’t defend those other names, that the modest couple began to consider naming the brand after themselves. Thus, Hedges Columbia Valley Cabernet-Merlot was born.

For the first year, the Hedges shipped bulk wine that they had blended and bottled in recycled containers. Considering the radioactive circumstances, Swedish customers, across hundreds of liquor outlets, were willing to try the foreign wine. They liked it.

“Our brand took off with A++ rating from a wine journalist, Mats Hanzon, whom I later met, and we took on as partner in 1989,” says Hedges with a laugh. “Still with us today.”

With some quick thinking, a few good connections, and lots of elbow grease, the Hedges were able to tap into heightened demand for uncontaminated spirits. After just three years, Hedges says, the sales quadrupled to about 200,000 litres per year. Other Washington State wines also found a footing in the global market, as international visibility for the region’s product swelled.

“Tom Hedges answered the call and created Hedges Cellars wines specifically for the Swedish market,” says Veseth, the Wine Economist, of Hedges’s post-Chernobyl business. “The wines were an instant success, opening the door for more Hedges wines and more Washington State wines in the Old World.”

Among Washington wineries, Hedges singles out L'Ecole N° 41 as a maker and exporter of great wine, and the state’s largest winery, Ste. Michelle Wine Estates, a significant international exporter. Each Washington label has, over the years, continuously helped reinforce the worldwide reputation of the West Coast’s non-Californian wines.

Eventually, success allowed Hedges to create his own winery. More than 30 years since the nuclear plant disaster, Hedges Family Estate Wine is now a 130-acre vineyard, in the heart of Red Mountain, where their family chateau is laden with wisteria bushes and green pastures. On a summer day, Hedges recounts how a catastrophe on the other side of the world changed his family’s destiny.

“Within about six months we were famous in Sweden—all thanks to Chernobyl,” says Hedges, with a long sigh. “Funny how life works.”

Help us discover the best-kept secrets on the bargain shelves.

When it comes to buying food, it's not easy being cheap. Grocery store shelves are filled with nearly identical versions of the same food—often one with a widely recognized brand name, plus several others with substantially smaller marketing budgets. But the world of off-brand food has its fans and defenders. Lesser known, often bargain-priced packaged foods can be just as good as their more recognizable counterparts. Many even have their own unique flavors or quirks. Is there an off-brand food you always go to bat for?

Perhaps the most iconic example of a food brand rivalry is that of Oreo vs. Hydrox. Both are round sandwich cookies with a creamy center, and while Hydrox cookies were around before Oreos, they are still seen as the perpetual underdog. Recently Hydrox even accused Oreo of trying to hide their products on store shelves. Still, Hydrox has some staunch defenders who continue to keep the cookie alive.

We want to hear about the underdog food brands you love the most. Maybe it’s a small local brand that you can’t find anywhere else, or a specific generic brand that you swear tastes better than the big names. Whatever your off-brand taste is, let us know via the form below. Tell us why you love a particular off-brand food, and we’ll share some of our favorite responses in an upcoming article. Let’s shine a spotlight on the everyday wonder of foods from the lower shelves!

Distinctive designs from the "Golden Age" of roller-skating.

In the early 1940s, at the dawn of what's sometimes referred to as the “Golden Age” of roller-skating, rink operators struck upon a simple means of promotion: stickers. Designed in a range of shapes and colors, each sticker acted as a kind of calling card for a particular rink. Skaters would plaster them on their roller skate cases, collect them when they traveled, and even swap them with fellow enthusiasts.

One such collector was Genevieve Pittner, a young homemaker living in Monroe, Michigan. Between 1941 and 1942, Pittner pasted over 500 stickers in a red album, along with 46 loose stickers, some photographs, and some of her correspondence with fellow collectors. (Evidently an avid skater, the album also included 112 issues of various skate magazines). Pittner’s collection is now part of the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, Delaware, and her stickers show off the variety of graphics and motifs employed by rink operators of the era.

From America on Wheels, a chain of rinks across New York and New Jersey, Pittner collected an orange fan-shaped sticker, with segments touting the appeal of each rink: “New York’s Most Lavish Rink,” or “The Skater’s Dream.” For the Bay Ridge Roller Rink—“Brooklyn’s Largest Roller Skating Rink!”—a skater glides on one leg, framed by red ribbon. The sticker for the Strathcona Palace Pier rink in Toronto was shaped like a winged roller skate; underneath the name, in pencil, someone had scribbled “CANADA.” (Pittner's collection includes stickers from across North America; stickers from international rinks were highly desirable).

When trading stickers, collectors would sometimes add their details to the back before sending them onto someone new. In Pittner’s correspondence, world events seep in: one collector writes that he has to stop trading because he was drafted into the military. Roller rinks participated in the war effort, too, as a place to buy war bonds. In 1943, the Skateland Roller Rink in Santa Cruz, California, advertised its new operating hours in keeping with the war-time curfew alongside the message, “For victory buy war bonds and stamps and then skate.”

Pittner may have been an early adopter. In 1948, a group of skating enthusiasts met in New York to form the Universal Roller Skating Sticker Exchange, according to one of the co-founders in a later interview. Five years later, a newspaper article profiled URSSE members Sam and Barbara Zerbe, who had amassed 3,400 roller rink stickers for their collection. (The couple had met, of course, at a roller rink). And in 1964, a newspaper reported that the URSSE convention took place over three days, citing the availability of approximately 8,000 different stickers available to collectors from around the world.

Yet in the same article, a URSSE co-founder lamented the decline of roller skating, blaming the popularity of drive-in movies and bowling. By this time, the "Golden Age"—which was between 1937 and 1959, according to Lou Brooks, the author of Skate Crazy: Amazing Graphics From the Golden Age of Roller Skating—was over.

The URSSE held its last convention in 1989. Today, of course, many if not most of the rinks featured in Pittner's collection are gone. Skate-Haven in Palo Alto is now the site of a yoga center. The operators of Strathcona Palace Pier at one point converted the rink into a dance hall, which has long since burned down (the site is now home to condos). Circus Gardens rink in Philadelphia was, in 2017, a shuttered Family Dollar store. But the roller rink world of the 1940s lives on in this selection of stickers from the Hagley archive.