From above, the textured landscape can be almost abstract.
High above a meltwater lake in Greenland, 3,000 or so feet from the ground, the plane tipped so that Tom Hegen could shoot straight down. The plane circled the lake to find the right angle and the right light, and then did it again.
“Up in the air, you have to be very quick,” says Hegen, a photographer based in Germany. Shooting aerial photographs from a plane is akin to trying to capture an image of an animal a quarter-mile away, from a car going 100 miles per hour.
But from the air, Hegen can see things that aren't apparent from the ground. In his new series, Two Degrees Celsius, he captures the effects of climate change on the Arctic ice sheet extending over Greenland. In his photographs, blue water and white ice form abstract shapes at the places where the frozen north is melting away.
Hegen’s aerial photography explores the relationships between humans and the natural world, through images of salt ponds, tulip fields, coal mines, and commercial forests. From the ground, these places might give one impression—the forests, for instance, could be mistaken for a natural setting—with their true nature only revealed from above. “Once you change the perspective and get an overview of it, you actually recognize that every single tree is planted on a grid system to make it easier for the cutting machines to go through the aisles,” Hegen says.
Working in Greenland posed particular challenges. Before he takes off, Hegen likes to have an exact idea of what he’ll photograph. But the meltwater lakes and rivers of the ice sheet are fleeting, and could disappear overnight. So he focused his exploration on places on the ice sheet where thawing had increased over the past few years, and he’d be most likely to find certain formations.
Working on the remote ice sheet meant carrying with him everything he’d need to work and survive. He stayed in a tent along ice fjords, and some days waited hours for the weather to clear, only to realize it’d be impossible to fly at all. When the plane did make it into the air, they traveled to areas of the ice sheet where even the experienced pilot had never been. In parts, the ice sheet was so thick that they had to climb to keep a safe distance from the ground. It was then, Hegen says, that he started to understand the truly massive dimensions of this landscape.
Hegen’s work has a element of abstraction to it, and offers a new perspective that might call a viewer’s attention or renew the understanding of a familiar idea or place. But before he could see the ice sheet in that frame, he had to grapple with its enormity. “I felt numb and overwhelmed at first, before I could even start taking the first photos,” he says. “On all sides and up to the horizon—just ice.” In his photos, though, that vast view narrows to an arc of ice or a stream of bright water, a portent of a future landscape where white expanse melts to blue.
An idea imported from Australia, they helped enable the "secret" part of secret ballots.
Voting booths aren’t spaces that voters give much thought: You’re in, you vote, you’re out. That’s how it’s meant to be. They are designed for quick exits; one 19th-century law stipulated an eight-minute limit for booth use, if all were occupied. But their unobtrusive nature is a relic of a major controversy in American democracy. When the United States made the controversial switch to a secret ballot, we needed a place to cast them.
Back in the 19th century, Election Day in America worked differently than it does now—there was even more drama than there is today. There were no official ballots. Political parties printed their own “party tickets.” Some states had standardized printing rules, but in other places voters could write down the names of whomever they wanted to vote for. Kentucky voted by voice almost to the end of the 1800s.
When parties printed up their own tickets, each ballot listed the party’s candidates for all the seats at stake. Most voters accepted the preselected slate, rather than the candidates that most impressed them. There were measures one could take against an undesirable candidate, though, such as physically cutting his name out of the party ticket.
Polling places might be set up in private homes or “sodhouse saloons”—usually there was some separation between the election officials and the crowd of voters, but there was no privacy. Partisans corralled people to the polls to cast their party tickets and keep other parties’ voters away—using fists, knives, guns ... any effective means. Voting could mean risking your life. In the mid-1800s, 89 people died trying to get to the polls.
By the 1880s, ballot reformers were looking for a new way to run elections, one that would wrench some control away from parties and limit vote-buying and other fraudulent practices. They found it in Australia.
Since the 1850s, Australian states had been pioneering a different method of electing leaders—they let people vote in secret. This system used official ballots and provided space for people to vote without anyone knowing who they had chosen. With no way of verifying who a voter had actually cast a ballot for, parties had less power to coerce or bribe people. After a close and contentious American presidential election in 1884, when Grover Cleveland won New York—then allocated the most electoral votes of any state—by just more than 1,000 votes, American states started seeing the appeal. In 1888, Massachusetts was the first state to adopt the “Australian ballot” system, but it was followed quickly by Indiana, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Tennessee, Minnesota, Washington, New York, and other states.
Under these new systems, states had to provide voters with voting booths and figure out what those should look like. One county in Ohio, for instance, considered buying premade iron booths, before settling on cheaper wooden stalls. Often, the ballot reform laws specified in detail what voting booths should look like and how they should be designed and deployed. New York’s law required at least one voting booth, three feet square, with walls six feet high, for every 50 voters in a district. The booths had to have four sides, with the front working as a door, and a shelf “at a convenient height for writing” that was to be stocked with “pens, ink, blotting paper, and pencils.”
Over the next century, states tweaked the design of their voting booths little by little. Sometimes, the changes were meant to accommodate new technologies. In New York, which used giant lever machines, for instance, booths were expansive, and usually installed against the wall. As electronic voting systems were developed, machine manufacturers started designing bespoke booths to fit their particular devices.
Some of the changes in booth design were just meant to make set-up easier and simpler. By the middle of the 20th century, it was more common for booths to be fronted by curtains than by heavy wooden doors. By the 1980s, freestanding metal stations had come into vogue. Each state developed its own quirky requirements. “New Hampshire had an archaic state law that the booths’ curtains had to extend down to the ankle,” says Hollister Bundy, who works at Inclusion Solutions, a company that sells voting booths. Most states were happy to have shorter curtains, reaching down to about a person’s thigh, so for many years there was one curtain for New Hampshire voting booths and another for every other state that wanted it. (The state has since changed the law.)
Today, one of the primary concerns for the designers of voting booths is to make sure there are accessible options that meet the requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Help America Vote Act, passed after the election controversy of 2000. Other than that, there’s no centralized requirement for voting booth design. Each state has its own rules, and often it’s up to county clerks and other election officials to make sure voters have a place to vote—in private.
This story originally ran on November 1, 2016, and was updated on November 5, 2018, with minor edits.
Today, someone wandering all of Central Park’s 840 acres will encounter wooded rambles, rocky outcrops, vast meadows, glassy waters, ornate fountains and arches, and boulevards lined with trees. The notable urban green space is a hodgepodge of different landscapes, each of which was proposed, sketched, and built for visitors.
This particular, familiar mix, though, was far from guaranteed. Before Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won the bid (and a prize of $2,000) to design the park in 1858, more than 30 other proposals were in the running. These reveal dueling 19th-century ideas about what public spaces should look like—and few are starker in contrast to the final design than the one submitted by John J. Rink.
The competition was open to all—and to level the playing field a bit, each entrant was given the same information and criteria. There was a topographic map of the land, and a handful of necessary features, including a parade ground, playgrounds, and at least four transverse roads at regular intervals. (In their winning design, Olmsted and Vaux proposed transverses below grade, to keep traffic moving without impinging on the view or pedestrian safety.) And none could exceed a $1.5 million budget.
One entrant proposed a pyramid, while George Waring Jr., a drainage engineer, went deep into the weeds on the park’s water infrastructure—and little else. The New-York Historical Society, which holds a copy of Waring’s entry, noted that while “the drawing is rich in topographical detail, it is sparing in actual design,” and its “footpaths cut across difficult terrain, with little regard for comfort.”
Then there was Rink’s. He included the requisite elements, but also scores of intricate gardens in the shapes of circles, stars, and labyrinths. While Olmsted and Vaux’s proposal—known as the Greensward plan—emphasized wide-open vistas, Rink’s was big on fussy, specific patterns. Aesthetically, at least, his proposal had more in common with the gardens of Versailles than what we see in Central Park today.
In Rink’s proposal, the Lake and wild Ramble of today would have been an ornate patch of greenery called the Star Ground. Sheep Meadow would have been a leafy roundabout. A parade ground would cover a swath of the park that now surrounds the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Rink was trained as an engineer, but he may not have appreciated how unwieldy his design would have been in practice. The winning design isn’t as “natural” as it looks—Olmstead and Vaux oversaw a team of 3,800 workers toiling up to 18 hours a day digging, blasting, and hauling and heaping soil and manure around the park, and it requires a great deal of upkeep today. But Rink’s winding, swirling islands of mannered greenery would have been costly and time-consuming to prune.
Still, to hear historians Elizabeth Blackmar of Columbia University, and the late Roy Rosenzweig tell it, the decision didn’t boil down to design alone. “Politics as much as artistic merit determined just how the nation's first and most famous landscape park would be designed and built,” they write in The Park and the People: A History of Central Park. Olmsted and Vaux were chummy with the park commissioners, and recognized that the voters would gravitate to pastoral designs that evoked the rural landscapes.
New York City, of course, looks much different today than it did when Olmsted and Vaux were importing sheep to graze the meadows. How would Rink’s design look today, rolling out below blocky apartment towers and sleek skyscrapers?
Insurance company Budget Direct recently commissioned a rendering of Rink’s design, sprung off yellowed paper and plopped into the 21st century. To modern eyes, the patchwork of allées look like something out of a period drama. It’s a stark contrast to Olmsted and Vaux’s bucolic vision—even if their own triumphant submission was a whole lot less effortless than it appears.
How a standoff with Castro knocked a hole in the shrimping village of Thunderbolt.
For the small commercial fishing operations that harvest wild-caught shrimp off America’s coasts, survival depends on circumstances beyond human control: environmental factors, political regulations, hurricanes, brutal winters, and other acts of God. In a bad season, any opportunity for a boat owner to supplement his income could be the difference between covering his expenses—boat payments, maintenance, crew, fuel—and losing his shirt. This is how, in the spring of 1980, the small shrimping village of Thunderbolt, Georgia, got tangled up in a Cold War standoff.
For nearly all of the 20th century, Thunderbolt was the epicenter of American commercial shrimping. Its boat docks, packing houses, and canneries produced fresh shrimp, canned shrimp, the world’s first pan-ready, frozen battered shrimp … Shrimp was so central to the local economy that in 1980, the Miami Herald reported, “When shrimp don’t fill up the nets of the big boats that tie up here, many in this town of 5,000 don’t eat.”
That April, the shrimp season was off to a dismal start. Shrimp prices were down 15 percent, more competing trawlers were on the water, and fewer shrimp were coming in.
Meanwhile, in Cuba, Fidel Castro had just granted dissidents a brief window of freedom. Anyone who didn’t support his Communist regime was permitted to leave, under two conditions: that they exit via the harbor at Mariel, 25 miles west from Havana, and that someone be there to pick them up. Within hours of that decree, a mass exodus had begun. In the shrimping community, word spread quickly that Cuban-American families would pay as much as $1,000 a head to boat captains who would transport their loved ones from Mariel.
In the following weeks, more than 100,000 emigrants poured out of Cuba through the strictly policed floodgates of Mariel Harbor. Upon reaching America, they became known as Marielitos; their egression, the Mariel Boatlift. The boats that arrived to retrieve them—a scrappy, ad-hoc fleet of privately chartered American fishing boats, lobster boats, and shrimping trawlers of varying sizes and degrees of seaworthiness—earned the name the “Freedom Flotilla.”
Among the captains, crew, and boat owners of this fleet were hundreds of Thunderbolt residents, who set a course for Mariel at greater risk than they could have foreseen.
In early May of 1980, on the docks in Key West, volunteers greeted and comforted the Marielitos. They provided medical attention, offered clothing and hot meals, and after helping them with their immigration paperwork, shared cups of Coca-Cola—a treat Cubans had not enjoyed since the start of the embargo in 1962. The warm welcome was in line with President Jimmy Carter’s May 5 pronouncement that America would receive Cuban refugees with “an open heart and open arms.” Georgia shrimpers were ready to take Carter’s words as a call to action.
“The shrimpers were collecting Cubans and bringing them back,” says Glenda “Dink” Weed. Weed’s husband, Joseph Weed Jr., was a shrimper in nearby Richmond Hill. He passed away seven years ago.
Joe Weed, like many of his cohort, was drawn by the promise of financial gain, compounded by goodwill and patriotism. Many Flotilla captains said they thought they were doing a service for the good people of Cuba—they just weren’t able to do it for free.
For others, the boatlift was strictly business: Michael Cesaroni Jr., a commercial shrimp kingpin and then-mayor of Thunderbolt, sent four of his five boats to Cuba, telling the Savannah Morning News, “My boats are down there because it's a dollar a gallon for fuel, the price of shrimp is down $1.25 per pound, there are no shrimp to be caught, and the average boat payment is $4,000 to $5,000 per month. What would you do?"
Whatever their motives, the owners of Thunderbolt’s Daddy’s Lady, the Hal & Drew, the Stacy Lynn, the Nelson Boys, and dozens more were all in the same boat financially. “Georgia Shrimpers Haul Cubans Now,” the Associated Press reported on May 10. New boats were dispatched daily.
But complications quickly arose.
When Joe Weed arrived at Mariel carrying his crew and the Cuban-Americans who had enlisted him, the Cuban customs checkpoint was bedlam. Unable to return until authorities released all the Marielitos they’d come for, they lived on Weed’s boat, the Captain Jeffrey, for a month or maybe more. Surrounding them were other boats doing the same: burning fuel, trading BIC lighters and other coveted American goods for drinking water and food (or paying absurd prices for it), and waiting. At home, Dink Weed struggled to cover bills for her and the children on her nurse’s salary, while boat payments piled up. She had no way to reach Joe and no news of his condition.
While Weed was stranded at Mariel, a tug-of-war developed between Castro and Carter. Due to political pressure, by May 14, President Carter had reversed his stance on welcoming the Marielitos, abruptly declaring missions like Weed’s illegal. Castro, who wanted dissidents out, had emptied Cuba’s jails and mental hospitals onto Flotilla boats’ decks. As they set off for Key West, American vessels were chaotic and overflowing. Not all of them made it back.
This forever left a mark on America’s immigration debate. While the Boatlift increased the Miami workforce by more than seven percent, crime rose too, inspiring political arguments against unrestricted immigration that continue today. Many newspaper articles, comics, and films portrayed all Marielitos as heathens, druglords, and murderers: Think Tony Montana in Scarface.
Before Joe Weed could depart Mariel, Cuban police forced him to take on board, in addition to his expected manifest of 50, 135 additional passengers for an already harrowing 87-mile voyage back across the Florida Straits. By the time he reached Key West, Florida had declared a state of emergency and, under Carter’s new instruction, U.S. Customs was taking legal action against Flotilla boat owners. Refugees were processed at massive, makeshift immigration centers, and the Captain Jeffrey was impounded.
Hundreds of Flotilla boats were seized by the feds upon arrival back in Key West. Dozens of those were from Thunderbolt. As they gradually made it home to Georgia, their owners faced penalties of up to $1,000 per refugee.
It was a dramatic change in fortune: The Hal & Drew crew had been hailed as heroes for bringing nearly 400 refugees to Key West along with 20 more on a smaller boat they had rescued along the way. Later, they were fined hundreds of thousands of dollars. For his efforts, Joe Weed owed the government $185,000. Cesaroni’s fines totaled around $600,000—more than twice the purchase price of a boat.
Joe Weed, luckily, had family ties to the White House. Dink’s aunt had worked on the Carter campaign and gave the Weeds a direct phone number for First Lady Rossalyn Carter. Thanks to help from the Carter administration, Dink recalls, the Captain Jeffrey was home in only a month or two. Then, in a lawsuit filed by 19 shrimpers against the federal government for damages, Weed was able to get his fines relieved. He worked out of the Bryan Fishermans Co-Op for another decade before retiring from shrimping for health reasons.
Others were on a longer, muddier road to recovery. Many shrimpers lost one if not two seasons to litigation and paperwork. More than a million dollars in collective fines weighed on the town’s economy. Boat and dock workers were laid off, while others were stigmatized for their part in the Flotilla. “Customers are calling up saying they won’t buy shrimp from us unless we fumigate all the boats which were carrying Cubans,” one Thunderboltian told the Philadelphia Inquirer.
The aftermath set some of the hardest hit on a different course. In the following years, prominent Thunderbolt shrimpers had their boats impounded for smuggling marijuana from South America. A drug bust in Thunderbolt led to the indictment of dozens of local shrimpers and residents, including the police chief. Cesaroni and others hung up their nets entirely.
The 1980s were a time of recovery for the shrimping industry, but other challenges—from the historic snowstorm of 1989 to the arrival of cheaper, farm-raised shrimp imports from Asia—increasingly ate at the shrimpers’ narrow profit margins.
Earlier this year, after an especially bleak start to the season, the docks in Thunderbolt were all but empty. Shrimpers variously blamed the invasive Asian Tiger Shrimp, the pervasive plague of Black Gill, two hurricanes last fall, and an unexpected freeze this winter. It was one abominable season in an overall downward trend: Statewide, shrimping licenses issued have dropped by 85 percent since the Mariel Boatlift; last year in Chatham County, there were just 32.
For 125,000 Cubans, the shrimping season of 1980 led to a new start. For shrimpers, it marked the beginning of the end. As one Thunderbolt shrimper said to the Tallahassee Democrat, “I tell you, this thing has really knocked a hole in this town. We’re small people, but we’re the backbone of this shrimping industry in Georgia.”
An amateur artist captured now-rare flowers in great detail.
Minna Fernald painted flowers—the yellow blooms of a prickly pear, the purple petals of the savannah meadow beauty, the deep red of the scarlet mallow. Her work was precise and detailed; each painting looks as if it might have illustrated a work of botanical science sometime in the past. In the years she lived in Florida, she made hundreds of these paintings, but sometime in the latter half of the 20th century, her work disappeared.
Not long ago, the botanist Mark Whitten was scavenging through the drawers at the University of Florida Herbarium, looking for archiving materials, when he found Fernald’s paintings.
In the dark and cool drawers of the herbarium, the paintings had kept their bright colors and details. They were a window to “a much more wild and interesting Florida,” as Whitten put it.
Fernald moved to Florida later in her life. Born in 1860, she was living in Maryland when she met a graduate student in zoology, a man fascinated with arthropods, and married him. They lived nine years in Pennsylvania and decades in Massachusetts. In Maryland, Fernald had been trained in watercolor painting, and wherever she went, especially when she traveled, she took her sketchbook with her. She and her husband came to Florida as retirees, and she dedicated herself to painting the flowers she found there. In the 1940s, she donated her collection to the University of Florida, where over time the paintings were forgotten.
Today, many of the flowers Fernald documented are hard to find and live only in preserves. The paintings capture the plants' bright colors and liveliness in a way that botanical samples, dried and drained of color, cannot. The herbarium plans to digitize the paintings and give them a new life online.
In 1955, Deben Bhattacharya traveled from London to Calcutta in a milk van and recorded over 40 hours of music.
It was a cool summer evening in 1955, and three men—a Bengali, a Frenchman, and an Englishman—sat by an Italian roadside enjoying a picnic of bread, cheese, and olives. The garnet-colored Chianti wine helped ease the tension they’d felt while preparing for the trip. It had taken them weeks of planning, but they were finally on the road and heading east.
Over the next six months, they would travel in a battered milk van all the way from London to Calcutta, passing through Greece, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and finally, India. They hauled heavy tape recorders and cameras with them across the desert, where they stayed with Bedouins and recorded their chanting. In Syria, they witnessed an illegal dervish performance, and in Afghanistan they listened as a new acquaintance sang for them of love and loneliness.
At times they would be met by ambassadors and dignitaries. More often, they relied on the hospitality of complete strangers.
The unprecedented expedition was spearheaded by Deben Bhattacharya, a Bengali poet, filmmaker, and amateur ethnomusicologist.
Bhattacharya was born in Benares—also known as Varanasi, the world’s oldest living city—into a family of scholars and Hindu priests. His father practiced Ayurvedic medicine, and the family ran a traditional Sanskrit school. As a child Bhattacharya helped out by performing religious rituals: His head was shaved except for one small tuft of hair, and he was known by everyone as “the little priest.”
In 1949, Bhattacharya left his family and his life in Varanasi and traveled to the U.K. to explore a wider world. “He soon immersed himself in music, and that was to become his source of livelihood,” wrote Jharna Bose-Bhattacharya, his widow, in a new book featuring her husband’s notes.
In London he began working as a radio producer at the BBC and had access to a vast archive of music from all over the world. But he felt that these recordings were stiff and impersonal. The music was far too detached from its context, and there was little trace of the people who had created it, he thought. It lacked a human element.
Bhattacharya decided to travel through the Middle East and capture the music and sounds of its people himself.
There was only one problem, though: He couldn’t drive.
With 12,000 miles ahead of him, he enlisted the help of a young English architecture student by the name of Colin Glennie. Glennie didn’t have much interest in "music from the Eastern World," he would write in a letter to a journalist decades later, but he did love buildings. He accepted the offer to drive the converted milk van on the condition that they visit Chandigarh, the Indian city designed by the modernist architect Le Corbusier. Bhattacharya agreed. For a short time they were also accompanied by Henri Anneville, a French journalist with a thirst for adventure.
During the journey Bhattacharya recorded over 40 hours of music, some of which would be released on the 1956 LP Music on the Desert Road: A Sound Travelogue. He went on to become one of the most renowned ethnomusicologists to ever have lived, and he changed the way people listened to music from around the world. Frank Zappa once cited Music on the Desert Road as one of his biggest influences.
The 1955 journey was a crucial moment for Bhattacharya. He perfected his trade, learning how to record and how to use a camera, all the while getting to know the cultures and traditions whose music he loved. Throughout the trip, he kept a travel diary and wrote about the people he met, the music he heard, and the small acts of kindness that kept his spirits high during the journey.
When he returned to Europe, Bhattacharya typed up his notes, collected all his photos and musical annotations, and wrote an introduction to what he hoped would become a book. Somehow, though, he never got around to publishing it. Maybe he was too busy planning his next adventure, or maybe he thought the recordings told the story well enough on their own. In any case, the manuscript was put away and almost forgotten about for 60 years. When Bhattacharya died in 2001, it seemed unlikely that it would ever be published.
But Jharna, his widow, never gave up on the diary. She knew it was an important piece of work. Although her husband published several literary works, none were quite as personal as his 1955 diary. “It just shows exactly what he was like, so at ease and good with people,” she says.
Like many people with a love of folk and popular music from around the world, Robert Millis, who works with Seattle-based record label Sublime Frequencies, regarded Bhattacharya as a pioneer. Many of the records which ignited his love of Indian, African, and Middle Eastern music contained recordings made by Bhattacharya during his many trips. “He influenced me a lot, but it was a secret influence at first,” says Millis, “because I didn’t know that he had actually put together many of the records I was listening to.”
In 2013 Millis was in Calcutta promoting his book about India’s legendary 78rpm Gramophone industry when he heard that Bhattacharya’s widow lived close by. He jumped at the chance to meet her. The couple’s apartment was just what he’d imagined: Pieces of art, hundreds of books, old photographs, and an eclectic assortment of instruments filled the space. He was amazed when Jharna showed him a wad of onion skin paper filled with Bhattacharya’s neatly typed notes.
“I knew about Music on the Desert Road but I didn't know he had written anything,” Millis says. “Then Jharna pulled out the manuscript and said it was her dream to always have this published.”
Paris to Calcutta: Men and Music on the Desert Road, released on Sublime Recordings on November 2, 2018, brings together Bhattacharya’s original diary, introductions from Millis and Jharna, and all the original recordings from the expedition. You can listen to the beats of Bedouins grinding their coffee in the desert, or to the recitation of an epic poem from Iran; there are hauntingly beautiful love songs from Afghanistan, and devotional songs from India.
“The music on this record represents selected pieces from a collection of over 40 hours of recording made during an overland journey to India. The journey started from London in the middle of August, 1955, and ended in Paris by the following March,” Bhattacharya wrote in his introduction.
“If reasons of ethnology influenced my choice, they did so only incidentally; my own enjoyment was the main criterion.”
And this is perhaps the most striking aspect of this book: Although the purpose of the journey was specifically to record music (he had been sponsored by Argo Records, and been given a sum of money by EMI), for Bhattacharya it seemed to be as much about making connections. His diary is replete with warm, attentive descriptions of the people he met and the small moments they shared.
Some parts of the journey were difficult. Early on, Bhattacharya and Glennie passed through Istanbul, where violent mobs had recently attacked the city’s Greek minority. The atmosphere was tense and unfriendly, and it reminded Bhattacharya of riots he had experienced in India. He was feeling despondent: “I disliked Istanbul as I disliked myself for being so badly affected by it. I forgot that no nation in the world is free from fanaticism.”
The feeling of uneasiness stayed with him all the way to Ankara. But then, Bhattacharya spotted a man carrying a cümbüş, a stringed guitar-like instrument from Turkey. When asked, the man began playing and singing melancholy love songs from Central Anatolia. Bhattacharya described his shabby clothes, his shy smile, and sad eyes. He felt an instant liking for this lonely man.
“Turkey was beginning to get human and interesting,” he wrote. “As soon as I had established this one temporary human contact, I felt more myself again, a modest wanderer in search of music and personal relationships.”
There were to be many more such meetings on the way to Calcutta, and some of the people he met during the journey became lifelong friends.
Bhattacharya “wasn’t always trying to highlight the best performance,” says Millis. “It was more the emotion in the music and his interaction with the musician that mattered. Deben’s work always seemed to have a nice touch of the music fan about them, and somehow it comes out in the way he records.”
Some of the countries through which he traveled—Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan—have become engulfed in a seemingly never-ending cycle of conflict and violence. “The desert today is a scene of bomb craters, people maimed or dead while refugees stream out in a state of misery, chased from country to country, their laughter and music buried in the sands, literally and metaphorically,” writes Jharna in the new book’s introduction. “What would Deben make of today’s world?”
Narratives of destruction and violence appear to dominate public discussion of Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. But of course, there is so much more to them than that. Through his thoughtful musings, his deep appreciation for those who agreed to play for him, and his gratitude to those who helped in any small way, Bhattacharya shows us a different side to these consistently misrepresented countries.
And his recordings play a small, yet incredibly important, part in reconstructing their rich and ancient cultural history.
Sometimes voting feels like a very tough SAT question: None of the choices seem right. What to do when you can't put your heart into any of those empty bubbles? In most states, voters are forced to register dissatisfaction with what's on offer by writing someone in, going for a protest candidate, or simply staying home.
In Nevada, though, malcontents have another option: They can cast an official vote for no one.
The "None of These Candidates" option has appeared on statewide Nevada ballots since 1975, when it was introduced as a convoluted get-out-the-vote tactic. According to the Washington Post, after Watergate, officials wanted to make sure that even people who were totally fed up with politics had a reason to come to the polls—even if it was just to vote against everyone.
Since then, the option has topped four elections—most recently in 2014, when it beat out eight actual human beings in the Democratic gubernatorial primary. As "None of These Candidates" has no body, and thus cannot technically take office, the runner-up was given the slot. In other elections, it has served as a potential spoiler. In the 1996 presidential race, Bill Clinton beat Bob Dole in Nevada by just 4,730 votes, a smaller total than the 5,608 garnered by the "We hate 'em all!" option.
Critics argue that the measure has failed to accomplish its original purpose. "Nevada has experienced a nearly uninterrupted decline in turnout since its creation," writes Dennis Myers of community group Nevada Humanities. Why vote for no one when you could just stay home? It remains to be seen whether the sour tone of American politics will lead more people to choose that option.
This story originally ran on September 9, 2016, and was updated with minor edits on November 6, 2018.
When Matthias Huss started his Ph.D. 12 years ago, he began taking measurements of the small Pizol glacier in eastern Switzerland. Every year for over a decade, he and others have monitored its slow decline. This year, no measurement was needed.
“This is the first year that I saw that it was completely falling to pieces, just little blocks of ice left,” says Huss. “My study object has been lost. It makes me sad.”
Huss is the leader of the Swiss Glacier Monitoring Network and a glaciologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. In October, he reported what many people were suspecting: 2018 was a terrible year for Swiss glaciers.
Swiss glaciers lost over 2.5 percent of their volume this past year—approximately 1.4 billion cubic meters of ice, according to the report from the Swiss Academy of Sciences, authored by Huss. This follows a melting trend that may spell doom for the iconic glaciers that have been part of the landscape for thousands of years.
“Over the last ten years since we’ve been doing these measurements, Swiss glaciers have lost a fifth of their volume,” says Huss. “Losing all of the glaciers in the Alps is not that far away.”
The European Mountain range has seen glaciers come and go for millennia. A recent paper in the journal The Cryosphere, on which Huss was a co-author, modeled over 110,000 years of glacial movements in region. In a stunning two-minute time-lapse animation, they show how dramatic natural climate shifts caused glaciers to form and retreat on the mountain range, covering swaths of Western Europe under layers of ice.
Their study suggests that glaciers in the Alps may have advanced and retreated more than 10 times during the last 120,000 years, more frequently than previously thought. The glaciers’ relatively frequent movements contributed to the carving of valleys, the shaping of mountains, and the forming of the lush Alpine foothills in Europe.
In the animation, around 12,000 years before present, the large white web of glacial ice starts to rapidly shrink. Within 10 seconds, the glaciers that once covered the entire mountain range are only tiny spots on the map.
This massive shift shows the beginning of Holocene geologic era when the Earth pulled out of its last major ice age, making many environments around the world ripe for the spread of human civilization. The small glaciers that survived into this epoch are the ones that researchers like Huss are now worried about losing due to anthropogenic climate change.
“Glaciers have been coming and going,” says Huss, “but we have so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now that glaciers that have been continuing for a million years are no longer going to continue.”
Huss says glaciers are essential to feeding Europe’s freshwater rivers, which provide drinking water to millions, especially in the summer months when there is less rainfall. “The summer is when we need the water in the lowlands.” he says, “If the glaciers are gone, this can have really serious consequences.”
Huss says that while natural variation is present, there is no doubt that humans are mainly responsible for the fact that Europe’s glaciers are slipping away. “It really feels like these extreme years are becoming more of the new normal which is not good for our glaciers,” he says. He predicts they might be entirely gone by the end of the century. “This is a very sad thing for me because I’ve spent years with these glaciers and I’m seeing them go away.”
We want to see the topography of your homemade adventures!
You may not be surprised to learn that many of us here at Atlas Obscura enjoy the occasional game of Dungeons & Dragons. A crucial element of any well-crafted D&D adventure are the homemade maps that players and dungeon masters create to help them navigate their fantastic worlds. Not unlike the maps found in many fantasy novels, DIY D&D maps act as blueprints to imaginary spaces. Usually, once a campaign is complete, these maps get tossed out or put up on a shelf somewhere, but it doesn't have to be this way! We want to help share your dungeon maps with the world.
My own favorite dungeon maps tend to have a few key features in common. They almost always have multiple branching paths that allow adventurers to choose their own doom. There’s also usually a variety of challenges and surprises, whether it's a room full of hidden acid traps, an irresistible piece of totally cursed treasure, or some weird demons that just shouldn’t be found on this plane of existence. And finally, there’s plenty of fantastical proper names, to give the whole map a sense of import and specificity—names like, “Tomb of the Broken Gods,” “Iceclaw’s Seat,” or “The Ooze Fields.” These are just some of my own examples, but whatever your D&D map looks like, we want to see it!
Whether you’ve diagrammed it out on graph paper, or jotted it down freehand; whether it’s a network of underground stone passages or a guide to the only path through a haunted swampland; whether it has a detailed key and spot illustrations or it’s just a bunch of lines, we want to see your original D&D adventure maps. If you’ve ever drawn a dungeon map in the past, send us a picture, and if you haven’t, now’s the time to dream one up. Use your imagination, be detailed, and have fun!
Fill out the form below to tell us a little about your map, and then email a picture of the map to eric@atlasobscura.com, with the subject line, "Greatest Adventure Maps." We’ll share some of our favorites in an upcoming article. Bring to life some of that grand adventure in your head, and show us the way through!
Atlas Obscura readers share their personal favorites.
Recently, we asked Atlas Obscura readers to tell us about their favorite local magic shops. We got hundreds of passionate responses from around the world, the vast majority of which focused on the people behind the shops—the proprietors and staff members—who've performed the truly amazing trick of building real communities around their small businesses.
Like a delightful and surprising sleight of hand reveal, it's clear that it's the wizards behind the counter who bring magic shops to life. We heard about Brian at Big Guy's Magic in Wisconsin, who helped one reader's son enter the world of performance magic. We heard about Larry Kahlow, who has kept the Eagle Magic and Joke Store in Minnesota, one of America's oldest magic shops, running year after year. And we heard about Scotland's Roy Walton, of Tam Shepherds Trick Shop in Glasgow, who personally introduced one of our readers to the wonders of close-up magic.
Read on to learn more secrets of the world's most memorable magic shops—and especially the people and communities that keep them going.
“What a great little shop! Clark is a fantastic guy. The ‘vibe’ of this shop is so cool. Clark did some great magic for me, and even invited me to do one of my favorite tricks behind the counter. The whole experience was fantastic! Can’t wait to go back. All the details, the decor, the cool stuff, and of course, the tricks, make this definitely a must-visit magic shop!” — Rob Signs, Joplin, Missouri
“They hold the annual Abbott’s Magic Get Together every year in August. Often they are asked to make illusions for huge companies such as Disney.” — Joe Bennett, Paw Paw, Michigan
“My grandparents were professional magicians that lived in Colon, Michigan. He also worked at Abbott’s. I have been attending the ever-so-famous Mayberry-meets-Vegas magic convention known as Abbott's Get Together for 37 years! It is a treasure in our very small, one-blinking-light community!” — Kylie Bowen, Colon, Michigan
“Abbott's is an iconic brick-and-mortar magic shop with an amazing heritage and an annual Get Together that draws magicians from around the world and triples the towns population for a week. Abbott's Magic was primarily a mail order enterprise, but developed unique and distinctive props for magicians. Abbott's props have appeared in many movies (The Wizard of Oz, The Prestige), supplied tricks for virtually every famous magician over the last century (Harry Blackstone, Sr. and Jr., Penn & Teller, David Copperfield), and most personally, launched a lifelong love of magic in so many impressionable wizards (myself included).” — Mickey Blashfield, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan
“It's run by world-class card expert Roy Walton, now 86. He has mentored numerous Scottish magicians including Jerry Sadowitz, R. Paul Wilson, and Peter Duffie. Roy introduced me to the wonder and love of close-up magic. He has a beautifully simple and elegant style.” — John Donachie, Scotland
“The people who work there are super knowledgeable about various illusions, extremely helpful, and really go way out of their way to make sure that their customers, beginner or professional, have exactly the resources they need. They encourage beginners and help them connect to the magic community and help them get started in a very solid way. I highly recommend them to anyone interested in the art of magic!” — Kris Johns, California
“We met the Big Guy, Brian, and the gang four years ago when our son showed some interest in magic. They took him under his wing and three years later he won Abbott's magic talent competition and was invited to perform as a star of tomorrow at the International Magicians Society. They treat customers like family and always have fresh tricks to buy.” — Nate London, Sussex, Wisconsin
“Been going there since I was 10. Now I bring my son there. Some of the same props and cabinets and books that the great magicians from a century ago gathered around.” — Timm Vedder, Sartell, Minnesota
“Eagle Magic is like a candy shop is for a kid. Larry most likely has what you need, want, or have any interest in. If you want an experience, not just a cheap trick, visit Larry at Eagle.” — Marty Grah, Minneapolis, Minnesota
“Eagle is a true house of mysteries! Owner Larry Kahlow is a never-ending fountain of magic knowledge. If you're nice, he'll take you to his back room collection of priceless antique magic apparatus. A history lesson in itself!” — Trent Rentsch, Raleigh, North Carolina
“Ash is immortal! As long as I remember, there's always been Ash's Magic Shop and he is always appearing somewhere.” — Karen Johnson, Fort Collins, Colorado
“As a woman in a male-dominated field, the Den has provided me with a space to learn and share magic without feeling like an outsider. The people who run the store are always willing to help, demonstrate tricks, and recommend additional resources for hobbyists and pros alike. I've never experienced another store quite like the Browser's Den.” — Jacqueline Swan, Toronto, Ontario
“Jeff and the staff provide excellent service to magicians at all stages of development, and they go out of their way to be welcoming and encouraging. They are there to help, not just to make a sale. Conventions, special events, auctions, lectures, and club meetings at the shop all contribute to making Browser's Den a very special place for Canadian magicians.” — Robin Dawes, Kingston, Ontario
"The store does so much more then sell magic. It strives to build a community. Brings in top magicians for lectures. Hosts a magic club, helps magicians sell magic tricks they no longer need. Any questions answered. Jeff Pinsky loves magic and it shows." — Jim Byrns, Toronto, Ontario
“The owner is a humdinger of a magician himself. He's a MASTER of sleight of hand, I can stand two feet away and have no idea what he's doing. Also, his magician pals from all over the place come in there and demonstrate tricks, try out new ones, talk about magic, etc. And they're always friendly and helpful to younger people. There's potentially a magic show happening at any time. Plus a really fab inventory. I'm not a magician, but I love going by there. You just never know what you're gonna encounter. They've just got to be up there with the best.” — Ronnie Childs, Richmond, Virginia
“They are a big part of the Littleton community, and they work hard to promote our historic downtown. When my kids were small, we took them there for magic lessons, they also have a haunted house. They just went through a grand reopening after a long process of rebuilding a roof construction mess up.” — Amy Reichardt, Littleton, Colorado
"Family-run magic shop in its second generation. Dedicated to teaching and passing on the art of magic. Frequently hosts seminars and lectures. All in all, just an awesome family!" — Justin Walker, Elk Grove, California
“The shop is extremely personal. It's a small shop, so the two employees can easily help explain tricks and advertise them. They also produce a ton of their own special tricks and decks. They host many shows, and get famous magicians like Xavier Spade to perform. The prices are excellent, and they are all extremely nice people. It's overall an intimate and pleasant experience.” — Joanna Thorman, Cincinnati, Ohio
“Haines is not just a place where you can buy magic. It is also a place where magic is made. They make special decks and cards for magicians. I made the trip there for one of the shows that they put on. The show had some experienced, professional performers as well as giving newbies a place to try out their newfound skills.” — Barry Rice, Fishers, Indiana
“This shop is run by professional magicians who give the best help and advice. It is based in the famous College of Magic and is open six days a week.” — Michael Fenwick, South Africa
“The shop is located on a busy road in Budapest, Hungary, yet often overlooked as a goofy place for the uninitiated. This place is packed with magic from all around the world, and some are of their own making. From amateurs to master magicians, everyone is capable of getting what they need. There is no need left unsatisfied. If you want a goofy trick to fool your friends, they got it, if you are hopping tables in a bar or at a wedding, they got stuff to help you out. If you want to host a night on a stage, Joker Magic can help you there too. The shop is manned by the owner and his family, always able to even just help you if you need a good advice and are not buying a thing. They are helpful and trained in the arcane. Furthermore if you want to dig deeper, they offer training too, from the young to the elderly, one-on-one or in groups. Best thing about the shop, that every two week on Wednesdays, it transforms into a hidey-hole for practitioners of this ancient art, where the young, and the old, the amateur and the master, where the professional and hobbyist can meet and learn from one another. If you are interested in conjuration this is the best place to start to search. This shop, is the gateway to magic.” — Nor, Budapest, Hungary
“This is THE place to find magic! As a young man, any given Saturday there was always a diverse array of magicians. It was here that I met the owner, Ray Goulet, in his own right a very accomplished and well traveled stage magician. Cesareo Pelaez, founder and lead of the Le Grand David magic troupe, would occasionally visit. Not to mention David Cresey, as the man behind the counter, as well as the creator of the Cresey Coil, a staple of magicians around the world. Many more would find their way to Watertown to celebrate magic in all its forms." — Mark Troy, Boston, Massachusetts
“These guys serve magicians of all ages and abilities. From nationally known professionals to the kids from the elementary school across the street from the shop. Their enthusiasm in serving a parent and child looking for the kid’s first trick is rooted in a true affection for all who enjoy magic.” — Judy Hanthorn, Mableton, Georgia
“This is where my 26-year-and-counting magic career started! Their excellent professional staff is always helpful and knowledgeable on all levels of the art. The last thing I’ll say is that Magic Inc. is my family, they have celebrated my best of times and have supported and help carried me through my worst, you can’t say that about many shops.” — Tevell Rose, Chicago, Illinois
“It’s just a family! If you are new to the art or a professional, they treat you just the same (not every magic shop does this.) Even if you just want to hang out and talk shop, they are there for you. I love everyone who works there and the owners are wonderful. They just won't quit. A staple in the magic community.” — Craig J. Newman, Portland, Oregon
"Denny Haney was a full-time pro. A highly respected magician who could pull off a full evening show that was amazing, funny, and unlike any other magician. As such, he knows what a pro wants and needs. Unlike an online store, Denny does not stock the latest thing just because it is new. Unless it could be performed live, to entertain real people, he won't waste his shelf space or your time. Denny constantly reminds his customers of the value in buying (and studying) magic books to help them develop a unique voice. Okay, it smells like cigarettes, and his politics are uncomfortably to the right of mine, but if I want to know if something new is the real deal, there is no better place to turn.” — Mark Phillips, Washington D.C.
“It's a great place to find magic for beginners and professionals alike, with anything from small children's tricks to big illusions.” — Joseph, Arizona
“We have known Rick Fisher for six years. From the very beginning he has supported my son with his magic endeavors. He is truly a kind spirit. I am so thankful that we met him. I consider him a true friend.” — Jennifer Elkowitz, Grand Rapids, Michigan
“If the world of Harry Potter was real, this store would be in Diagon Alley. You can find any magic trick here and Joe is always a savvy and patient teacher.” — Federico Chavez, San Francisco, California
“I’ve been in every magic shop in every major city in America. I was also a professional magician for 22 years. I’d been a working magician for almost ten years when I first walked into Misdirections and asked to see some top shelf magic books. Joe refused to serve me until I could convince him I understood the craft enough to deserve it. He cared more about the ethics of the art than the sale. I respected that so much. I hung out there all day until I could convince him to let me see the book I wanted and kept hanging out there for years as he built a community of great magicians, by guiding and elevating them (and me) through his personalized curation of books, lectures and secrets. Misdirections is proof that a great magic shop can survive in this online economy through curation, community and trust.” — Ryan Majestic, Los Angeles, California
“I have been going here since I was a kid and started my own magic show. The shop is owned by a man named Joe, who learned his first trick at the age of five after watching someone change the color of a handkerchief. He taught himself magic by checking out a book from the library. His shop has been open for more than 20 years. To paraphrase why he told me he thinks people love magic, ‘It's like Santa for adults. As we grow older, we become more set in what we believe to be true. Magic disrupts that. It allows us to tap into that same sense of wonder we felt as kids.'" — Kevin Oliver, Los Angeles, California
“I've spent hours and hours in that shop. Sometimes attending magic workshops that would end when the sun came up. Great selection of magic supplies as well as an amazing amount of knowledge that the owner, Antony, has and shares.” — Tom Kracker, Ohio
“A lot of classic effects, as well as original, exclusive stuff that you can only find at Ronjo. Ron Diamond, the owner, is as friendly and helpful as can be, and everyone that works there is always eager to demo and chat.” — Dave Dodds, Long Island, New York
“This is a beautiful shop with a built-in parlor theater, incredible service, and a place in which I purchased my first floating glass illusion.” — Daniel Eckert, Sykesville, Maryland
“This 80-year-old shop regularly hosts a 24-hour magic marathon to support children’s charities, hosts local magic clubs, jam sessions, lectures, and (of course) supplies various tricks and apparatus. In addition to its longevity, it has survived no less than four competing shops in its tenure. It is central Pennsylvania’s last, best magic shop and a local treasure.” — Vincent Dangolovich, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
“There’s a secret room in the back behind a bookshelf!” — Joe Diamond, Chicago, Illinois
“Best shop owner and really cute too!” — Cheryl Felix, Downers Grove, Illinois
“It's not just a shop, it's a magicians hangout. Countless Saturdays have been spent there with the guys working on tricks and having fun. To boot, Tim, the owner, knows quite a bit of magic history and the shop has virtually one of everything. “ — Royal Jenner, Frankfort, Illinois
“Within a beautiful pier in Naples, there is a small magic space that takes you back to your childhood. The owner who is a magician is usually there to sell everything, from jokes to serious books about the art of magic. Don't forget: only after you pay will the secret be revealed.” — Yali J. Luna, Naples, Florida
"This store also sells wood carvings, and hand-crafted tchotchkes. The owner is a tiny woman who has worked as a clown and showgirl. One whole room of the store (which is their house, and their family kitchen is in plain view), is dedicated to magic tricks, gadgets, books, and paraphernalia.” — Sheridan Roberts, Gatlinburg, Tennessee
Diwali may be a festival of lights, but if often arrives amid an opaque, smoky haze. NASA has captured striking images of the thick smog consuming northern India on the eve of the festival, thanks to the agricultural burning prevalent in the states Punjab and Haryana after the autumn wheat and rice harvest comes to a close.
“Stubble burning,” as the practice is known, became common among farmers in northwest India in the 1980s, after the advent of automated combine machines that made farming easier but also yielded more debris. For independent farmers, the cheapest, most efficient way to get rid of tall leftover stalks is to set them ablaze, quickly clearing the fields for the next round of crops. Each operation may be relatively small, but together, they add up.
Last year, The Hindustan Times estimated that nearly 40 million tons of crops are burnt annually in just the two states—a dangerous part of what makes New Delhi the world’s most polluted megacity. Even measured against more cars and factories, the crop fires are significant. A Harvard University study found that when the fires peak in October and November, they can account for half of Delhi’s air pollution level—up to 20 times what the World Health Organization deems safe.
The practice is now technically illegal, but the ban is hard to enforce. A NASA satellite monitoring the Indo-Gangetic Plain, which runs across most of northern India, watched fires increase by about 300 percent between 2003 and 2017. The NASA images put into harsh perspective just how completely the fires clog the air, concealing vast stretches of the landscape from the satellite. Diwali revelers can only wait until the smoke clears—and wait for next year's burning season.
Let’s go back in time roughly, oh, 20 million years. It’s the Miocene era, which formally began 3.03 million years prior, and India and Asia are just beginning to collide and form the impressive mountain ranges we know today. Kelp forests and brown algae are appearing and diversifying oceans at rapid rates; in Europe and Africa, around 100 different species of early apes are monkeying around.
With this as the backdrop, let’s zoom in on North Africa specifically. Libya, bordered by the Mediterranean Sea on the north and Egypt to the east, is about to experience a geological miracle. Unbeknown to the colliding mountains and swinging apes of the Miocene, the 420,000 square miles that make up the Libyan desert (which is part of the Sahara) would soon be caramelized into shards of foggy green glass. This rare and precious material, known as Libyan Desert Glass, was found in King Tutankhamun’s burial tomb millions of years later.
Libyan Desert Glass’ value comes from the miraculousness of its origin story. As Dr. Jane Cook, chief scientist at The Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, explains, “glass happens when just the right ingredients are heated up and cooled down quickly.” But in the case of Libyan Desert Glass, the series of events was much more elaborate. “About 20 million years ago, either a meteor impact or atmospheric explosion got to the desert part of the lower atmosphere, heated it up and fragmented and exploded,” she says. “It dumped a huge amount of heat, like in thousands of Fahrenheit degrees, into that portion of the desert, which was a relatively pure deposit of quartz sand. And it brought it up hot enough that it was able to liquefy for a short period of time.” When this liquefied quartz cooled down, desert glass was formed. Cook adds: “Because it was almost pure silica it was able to solidify without crystallizing,” making it glass instead of geological crystal structures.
When British archaeologist Howard Carter began searching through King Tut’s treasure chests shortly thereafter, he found a decorative breastplate depicting the Sun God Ra. Housed in the center of this armor sits a chartreuse scarab: a beetle symbol, usually cut from gemstones, that ancient Egyptians held sacred. This particular 18th-Dynasty scarab was carved from the rare and precious Libyan Desert Glass, as confirmed by Italian mineralogist Vincenzo de Michele in 1998.
Though other meteor impact glasses do exist, in contrast to the more common man-made glass, Libyan Desert Glass is widely regarded as being “the most spectacular,” says Cook. Considering glass was formally “invented” in 1500 B.C., it’s no surprise that the 20-million-year-old translucent matter was considered precious enough to be placed at the center of King Tut’s breastplate.
Dr. Katherine Larson, assistant curator of ancient glass at Corning, studies the cultural importance of the material. “We identify Libyan Desert Glass as glass based on the material properties of it, but in the Ancient Egyptian mind, the glass and the stone are really closely linked,” she says. “In fact, the Ancient Egyptian word we have for glass, that’s preserved in hieroglyphic texts of this period, actually means ‘stone that pours.’ ”
At the time King Tut’s breastplate was made, Libyan Desert Glass was probably not seen as that different from other naturally occurring semi-precious stones, like amethyst, lapis lazuli, or quartz. What we now understand to be an impactite (glass formed from impact), would have been a generally beautiful and valuable stone from the ancient point of view—but still with a high prestige factor. “The general index we use for preciousness is that we equate it with rarity, and that’s probably true in the ancient world as well,” Larson says. “So the more resources that it takes to acquire something, the further it comes from, [or] the more exotic it is, those are all things that can contribute to [the material] being considered precious or rare.” Though unidentified at the time, this milky yellow-green glass birthed from the “Great Sand Sea” would have had an even higher value rating because it wasn’t harvested or used as a trade good, whereas most man-made glasses were. Plus, Larson says, “in this case, it is a pretty rare type of stone, and it would’ve come from relatively far away, so that certainly contributed to its preciousness. And then there’s the aesthetic properties of it as well. There’s an attractiveness to it.”
When that fateful meteor crashed into the Libyan desert all those millions of years ago, whatever contaminants dissolved into the silica’s liquid state ended up affecting the color and opacity of the solid Libyan Desert Glass. Specimens range from a cloudy dark brown to a stunningly luminous lemon yellow, and are still being found today. “[The Libyan desert is] a large area, hundreds of square miles perhaps, so that explosion was gigantic,” Cook says. “And it glassified—vitrified would be the technical term—a huge area in a relatively remote and underpopulated part of the [country].” All these years later, people are still digging up fragments of the glass that graced the most famous Egyptian pharaoh’s tomb.
In Xinjiang, the living process dairy the way 4,000-year-old mummies did.
Beginning in 2002, the Xinjiang Cultural Relics and Archaeology Institute began to plumb graves in a tomb complex located in northwestern China's Taklamakan Desert. The site, which the Swedish archaeologist Folke Bergman started excavating in the 1930s, had been forgotten about for decades. Upon revisiting it, modern archaeologists found a woman buried in a boat-shaped coffin. Nicknamed the Beauty of Xiaohe, she had high cheekbones, a dense fringe of eyelashes, and a white felt hat topped with a feather—which suggests that she perhaps had a zippy fashion sense.
While not much is known about her, it's evident that she loved cheese, given that she was buried with chunks of it around her neck and chest around 2000 BC. Archaeologists now consider them the world's oldest extant pieces of cheese—and by almost a thousand years. What's even more remarkable is that this same cheese is still a way of life for the nomads residing in Xinjiang today.
Evidence of cheesemaking exists as far back as 8,000 years ago, in the form of strainers found in Poland. Archaeologists continue to find centuries-old remnants of cheesemaking: Just this year, researchers from Cairo University and the University of Catania found a “solidified whitish mass” in Egypt that turned out to be cheese. But as a 3,200-year-old vintage, it’s relatively fresh compared to the variety found in the Xiaohe tomb, which could be up to 4,000 years old. It's unclear why the buried curds were placed near a phallic-shaped wooden fertility symbol on the Beauty's chest, though it could perhaps mean that the life-giving cheese was comparable to the renewal of life itself.
Back in the day, Xinjiang residents used cow milk (mixed with a bit of sheep and goat milk) to make cheese too, says Yimin Yang. In 2014, Yang was among the scientists at Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics who analyzed the rough cubes of porous matter found around the Beauty’s neck, as well as similar samples from ten different tombs in Xiaohe. “The materials look like dairy products, so the archaeologists guessed it may be cheese before our analysis,” Yang says. They were right.
This cheesemaking tradition continues unabated, particularly for the nomads residing in the Tian Shan Mountains near the autonomous region's capital, Urumqi. Here, cows dot the mountainside, seemingly defying gravity as they teeter on cliff faces. Maryagul Ondasin, 28, a nomad of Kazakh heritage, squats beside her yurt. In front of her, Ondasin holds a bowl filled with a lumpy-looking white substance. It resembles the early stages of an experiment in making bread, yet it's hardly a first-time venture: Ondasin is crafting cheese, known as kurt, practically the same way it was prepared for the Beauty of Xiaohe’s burial.
Part of what makes this cheese special is that the milk isn’t boiled, says Ondasin. Gesturing to the bowl of the yogurt-like mixture in front of her, she explains how she uses it to fill her sack, before allowing its whey to drip from the curds over three days in the summer heat.
Most cheese is coagulated using rennet, which is made from the enzymes found in ruminant animals' stomachs. But with acid-coagulated cheeses such as this one, it’s the milk’s own acid that works to bind the proteins together to make cheese, says University of Vermont food scientist and historian Paul Kindstedt. Combining the curds with sugar produces a taste that resembles a solidified, less-sweet version of yogurt one might find at the grocery store.
Each individual cheese is made with extraordinary care. It takes Ondasin just under a minute to pound out each large, salted round—she does this by using hard slaps that she transfers from palm to palm. This process also ensures that there aren't any air bubbles in these soft globules, similar in texture to chèvre. Everyone has a slightly different technique of doing this, though: Some of Ondasin's neighbors present their cheeses in squiggle shapes that are smaller and easier to carry.
Maynor Slamkhan learned to make this particular cheese from her mother, who took up the skill from her own mother. Cloaked in smoke as she stands over the grill, she turns over skewers loaded up with lamb, and layered with cumin, chile, and sesame. Making kebabs provides part of her income, but a huge chunk of it also comes from the balls of cheese she sells at roadside tables. They're made from the milk of the hundreds of cattle that she owns. “I add sugar to the small ones,” says Slamkhan, through Uyghur translator Ablajan Jilil. “The big ones, I add salt.” The added salt also results in a singularly sour flavor.
During the summertime, many Han Chinese tourists come to the Tian Shan mountains, often for the views. Visiting the nomads and sampling their homemade cheese, dried mushrooms, and local honey variations also provide the opportunity to take a bit of the mountains home. The cheese is visible from the highway, in hanging feed sacks where it's dried. As one group gentlemen tell me, they've already let their yogurt hang for five days and plan to leave it there for another two or three days (though most cheesemakers don’t leave it there as long). Leaving it hanging for more time results in a more pungent flavor, but also means a slurry that may be more dry and less malleable. The wait is shorter for suzme, a softer and more spreadable version of kurt.
Besides selling the cheese to eager tourists, it's ingrained in nomads' lives. “We may carry one or two or three in our pockets,” Slamkhan says. As people get hungry throughout the day, a piece of cheese is an easy source of protein, a sort of ancient Power Bar. Yang says it's entirely possible that it bore the same use in the Beauty’s time. “In the paper, we deduced that cheese is daily food, and the dead could consume [it]," he says. "Of course, it may have some religious meaning."
Slamkhan also dissolves the cheese in hot water to make ayran, a popular drink throughout Central Asia and the Middle East—the same areas where acid-coagulated cheeses find favor. In winter, she and her family drink it warm, in summer, they wait for it to cool. “They're particularly common in nomadic and semi-nomadic cultures, particularly up on the Eurasian steppes,” says Kindstedt. What's more, they have longevity on their side: “They’re essentially indestructible,” he adds. Four thousand years of history can attest to that.
In Xinjiang, the living process dairy the way 4,000-year-old mummies did.
Beginning in 2002, the Xinjiang Cultural Relics and Archaeology Institute began to plumb graves in a tomb complex located in northwestern China's Taklamakan Desert. The site, which the Swedish archaeologist Folke Bergman started excavating in the 1930s, had been forgotten about for decades. Upon revisiting it, modern archaeologists found a woman buried in a boat-shaped coffin. Nicknamed the Beauty of Xiaohe, she had high cheekbones, a dense fringe of eyelashes, and a white felt hat topped with a feather—which suggests that she perhaps had a zippy fashion sense.
While not much is known about her, it's evident that she loved cheese, given that she was buried with chunks of it around her neck and chest around 2000 BC. Archaeologists now consider them some of the world's oldest extant pieces of cheese. What's even more remarkable is that this same cheese is still a way of life for the nomads residing in Xinjiang today.
Evidence of cheesemaking exists as far back as 8,000 years ago, in the form of strainers found in Poland. Archaeologists continue to find centuries-old traces of cheesemaking: Just this year, researchers from Cairo University and the University of Catania found a “solidified whitish mass” in Egypt that turned out to be cheese. But as a 3,200-year-old vintage, it’s relatively fresh compared to the variety found in the Xiaohe tomb, which could be up to 4,000 years old (Recently, the Xinjiang cheese was unseated as the world's oldest, thanks to remnants found on 7,000-year-old pottery fragments in Croatia). It's unclear why the buried curds were placed near a phallic-shaped wooden fertility symbol on the Beauty's chest, though it could perhaps mean that the life-giving cheese was comparable to the renewal of life itself.
Back in the day, Xinjiang residents used cow milk (mixed with a bit of sheep and goat milk) to make cheese too, says Yimin Yang. In 2014, Yang was among the scientists at Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics who analyzed the rough cubes of porous matter found around the Beauty’s neck, as well as similar samples from ten different tombs in Xiaohe. “The materials look like dairy products, so the archaeologists guessed it may be cheese before our analysis,” Yang says. They were right.
This cheesemaking tradition continues unabated, particularly for the nomads residing in the Tian Shan Mountains near the autonomous region's capital, Urumqi. Here, cows dot the mountainside, seemingly defying gravity as they teeter on cliff faces. Maryagul Ondasin, 28, a nomad of Kazakh heritage, squats beside her yurt. In front of her, Ondasin holds a bowl filled with a lumpy-looking white substance. It resembles the early stages of an experiment in making bread, yet it's hardly a first-time venture: Ondasin is crafting cheese, known as kurt, practically the same way it was prepared for the Beauty of Xiaohe’s burial.
Part of what makes this cheese special is that the milk isn’t boiled, says Ondasin. Gesturing to the bowl of the yogurt-like mixture in front of her, she explains how she uses it to fill her sack, before allowing its whey to drip from the curds over three days in the summer heat.
Most cheese is coagulated using rennet, which is made from the enzymes found in ruminant animals' stomachs. But with acid-coagulated cheeses such as this one, it’s the milk’s own acid that works to bind the proteins together to make cheese, says University of Vermont food scientist and historian Paul Kindstedt. Combining the curds with sugar produces a taste that resembles a solidified, less-sweet version of yogurt one might find at the grocery store.
Each individual cheese is made with extraordinary care. It takes Ondasin just under a minute to pound out each large, salted round—she does this by using hard slaps that she transfers from palm to palm. This process also ensures that there aren't any air bubbles in these soft globules, similar in texture to chèvre. Everyone has a slightly different technique of doing this, though: Some of Ondasin's neighbors present their cheeses in squiggle shapes that are smaller and easier to carry.
Maynor Slamkhan learned to make this particular cheese from her mother, who took up the skill from her own mother. Cloaked in smoke as she stands over the grill, she turns over skewers loaded up with lamb, and layered with cumin, chile, and sesame. Making kebabs provides part of her income, but a huge chunk of it also comes from the balls of cheese she sells at roadside tables. They're made from the milk of the hundreds of cattle that she owns. “I add sugar to the small ones,” says Slamkhan, through Uyghur translator Ablajan Jilil. “The big ones, I add salt.” This saltiness also results in a singularly sour flavor.
During the summertime, many Han Chinese tourists come to the Tian Shan mountains, often for the views. Visiting the nomads and sampling their homemade cheese, dried mushrooms, and local honey variations also provide the opportunity to take a bit of the mountains home. The cheese is visible from the highway, in hanging feed sacks where it's dried. As one group gentlemen tell me, they've already let their yogurt hang for five days and plan to leave it there for another two or three days (though most cheesemakers don’t leave it there as long). Leaving it hanging for more time results in a more pungent flavor, but also means a slurry that may be more dry and less malleable. The wait is shorter for suzme, a softer and more spreadable version of kurt.
Besides selling the cheese to eager tourists, it's ingrained in nomads' lives. “We may carry one or two or three in our pockets,” Slamkhan says. As people get hungry throughout the day, a piece of cheese is an easy source of protein, a sort of ancient Power Bar. Yang says it's entirely possible that it bore the same use in the Beauty’s time. “In the paper, we deduced that cheese is daily food, and the dead could consume [it]," he says. "Of course, it may have some religious meaning."
Slamkhan also dissolves the cheese in hot water to make ayran, a popular drink throughout Central Asia and the Middle East—the same areas where acid-coagulated cheeses find favor. In winter, she and her family drink it warm, in summer, they wait for it to cool. “They're particularly common in nomadic and semi-nomadic cultures, particularly up on the Eurasian steppes,” says Kindstedt. What's more, they have longevity on their side: “They’re essentially indestructible,” he adds. Four thousand years of history can attest to that.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that the Xinjiang cheese was the world's oldest. This article has been amended to reflect that traces of an older cheese, thought to be 7,000 years old, were recently found in Croatia.
Touch of the rheumatiz? Try carrying around a purloined spud.
Rheumatism, the historical catch-all term for a number of inflammatory joint and muscle conditions, is a painful diagnosis. Before the advent of painkillers and the specialized field of rheumatology, there was little sufferers could do. So many people turned to magic, superstition, and folks remedies to ease their pain. Many of them turned to potatoes.
According to this British and American tradition, sufferers of joint pain could simply slip uncooked spuds into their pockets. This would ease aches, it was said, so long as the potato remained in place. The Victorian-era cure had a critical caveat, though: The potato had to have been stolen.
Desperate sufferers ill-got their potatoes in myriad ways. In the countryside, people illicitly dug up potatoes from fields. In cities, they distracted greengrocers to slip away a spud. Often, these potatoes were carried in specially made bags or pockets, and people hauled them for years as the tubers “absorbed” the rheumatism. “It was expected that as the potato shrank the pains would diminish,” one chronicler in 1896 noted in the scholarly journal Notes and Queries.
There's little use in modern medicine for magical stolen potatoes, but some of the originals still exist. According to Dan Hicks, who specializes in contemporary archaeology at the University of Oxford, the university's Pitt Rivers Museum has a varied collection of shrunken, withered, therapeutic potatoes as part of its extensive folkloric holdings. Many of the potatoes were acquired at the end of the 19th century, as scholarly interest in both local and global folklore grew. One of them was donated by a Mr. Henry Lister, who had carried it for more than eight years—along with three other potatoes. The practice was an example, Hicks says, of how “people sought to cure themselves of everyday ailments.”
Contemporary observers have been baffled about the origin of the potato charm, but there are theories. Folk tale collector Andrew Lang posited that the potato could be a stand-in for mandrake root, a lauded curative that is also in the nightshade family. Others pointed out that the belief couldn’t be all that old in England, since potatoes were a relatively recent transplant to Europe from the Americas. Accounts exist in the United States as well. One convert to the potato cure, a Commodore Phillips, pilfered a potato from a barrel in Charleston, South Carolina, and defied a doctor who told him it couldn’t possibly bring him any pain relief. An 1897 medical journal quoted him: “I do not believe in it, but I have a potato and I have no rheumatism.”
Trace the history of American laws allowing the impeachment of elected leaders, and the trail leads back to a very different place and time—14th-century England, under the House of Plantagenet. What did it take to get impeached in the 1370s and ‘80s? Offenses included: selling a castle, accepting bribes to release captured ships, and failing to properly guard the sea.
This was well after Richard the Lionheart but well before all the most famous Henrys, the medieval period that was the setting of Shakespeare’s earliest English histories. King Edward III*, whose reign began in 1327, when he was 14, led England through a series of military victories. But toward the end of his life, his court had become so riddled with corruption that the parliament of 1376, which tried to address the problems, became known as the Good Parliament. It was responsible for the first impeachment in English history.
The impeached man, Baron William Latimer, the fourth Baron Latimer, was part of a shady gang of political figures close to the King’s third surviving son, John of Gaunt. Latimer had a long career of military and public service, including acting as governor of Brittany and fighting in the Hundred Years' War. But by the 1370s, he was spending his time with John, a merchant named Richard Lyons, and the king’s mistress, Alice Perrers, who was said to be so unscrupulous that she took the rings from the king’s hand when he died. The Good Parliament wanted to beat back their control over the court, so they used a never-before-exercised power that allowed them to strip him of his various offices.
What exactly did Baron Latimer do to justify impeachment? The list of his misdeeds, according the 1892 Dictionary of National Biography, edited by Sir Leslie Stephen, included:
Oppression in Brittany
The sale of the castle of St. Saveur to the enemy
Releasing enemy ships after taking a bribe
Keeping fines that were meant to be paid to the king
Having the Crown repay loans that never existed in the first place.
Essentially, self-interest, self-enrichment, bending the rules for personal gain—being a jerk. Baron Latimer was impeached, and he lost his seat on the Royal Council and went to prison, where he languished for just a year before the king died and John of Gaunt used his influence to secure Latimer’s release.
Latimer’s impeachment set off a string of them in the 14th- and 15th-century courts of England. Between 1376 and 1450, there were at least 10 documented, according to a 1990 article published in the Justice Systems Journal. Most of those incidents did not have written articles of impeachment or, at least, not any that survive. But in another high profile impeachment, by the Wonderful Parliament of 1386 (presumably even better at life and morality than the Good Parliament), the subject of the controversy, Michael de la Pole, demanded that the articles of impeachment be formally written out. In that case, they included:
Purchasing lands of the king for cheap
Spending tax money for a different purpose than it was originally intended
Failing to guard the sea as it was supposed to be guarded (or, in one formulation, "neglect of keeping of the sea")
Granting pardons for murders when he wasn’t supposed to
Not paying 1,000 marks to save the city of Ghent from its enemies, and therefore losing the city of Ghent.
The king at the time, Richard II, was reportedly upset to hear about de la Pole’s offenses: “Alas, alas, Michael see what thou hast done!" he’s supposed to have said. De la Pole was eventually accused of treason and fled to France where he lived out his days. Sad!
* Correction: The king in question was originally identified as Edward II. It was actually Edward III.
Why astronomers keep putting them in the same places.
In 1963, the astronomer Gerard Kuiper hired a plane and flew above the clouds, to circle the summit of Mauna Kea, in Hawaii. He needed a mountain, and the first one he had seen here, Haleakala, disappointed—too much fog. But Mauna Kea, the tallest mountain in the Pacific, stretched even closer toward space. The air around its cinder cone is dry and chill, the weather calm and constant. Kuiper convinced the governor of the state to help plow a rough road to the summit and then spent months collecting data about the quality of the light that shines there. In the end, he was convinced that Mauna Kea was “probably the best site in the world” for an astronomer, the perfect place to see “the moon, the planets, and the stars." As he said at the dedication of the site—"It is a jewel!" By the end of the 1970s, four sophisticated telescopes would perch on the summit.
There are now 13 telescopes on Mauna Kea, and the international consortium building a new behemoth instrument, the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), plans to add another. The TMT group was convinced, just as Kuiper had been, that this would be the best site in the world for their project. They knew that it has “great cultural and archaeological significance to the local people,” but they went for it anyway. There were legal battles with locals who wanted protect the site’s heritage, but last week, after years of legal challenges and protests, the Hawaii Supreme Court approved the permit for the telescope’s construction.
When the TMT group set out to find a location for this unprecedented combination of optics and technology, it began by considering “all potentially interesting sites on Earth,” and ended up at perhaps the best known and most tested astronomical site on the planet. The same thing happened with another ambitious telescope project: The group building the Giant Magellan Telescope broke ground this summer at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile's Atacama Desert, another of the world’s premiere astronomical sites. Of course, any billion-dollar project will want to choose the best location available. What is it about these select mountaintops that makes them so irresistible to astronomers?
It’s simple, in a way. Astronomers want to capture light, clean and clear, as it streams down to Earth from impossibly distant stars and planets and nebulae, and they want to do that as many nights as they can each year. There are some obvious factors that obstruct that goal. Light pollution from nearby human settlements makes it hard to see the faintest objects. Wind can rattle a telescope and affect its accuracy. Clouds get in the way, especially for telescopes that operate in the visible light spectrum in particular. Site selection begins with the places on Earth with the greatest number of cloudless nights in a year. But even that is not enough.
"Once you have a found a clear enough place, you have to find an area that has little turbulence," explains Marc Sarazin, an applied physicist for the European Southern Observatory, in charge of site monitoring. This thermal turbulence is formed when hot and cold air masses change altitudes. "This creates what you see on a very hot summer day on the asphalt, as you drive down the road," says Sarazin. "Everything is moving; you don't have a sharp view. It's the same for astronomers when they look upwards, if there are layers that have been disturbed. The stars will not be so sharp."
This quality—the sharpness of the stars—is what astronomers call "seeing," and it's one of the most important criteria in selecting a site. But there are other details to consider, as well. Air that’s full of water vapor can fog and frost up instruments and disrupt the view of light in the infrared spectrum. Radio waves and microwave radiation can mess with telescopes, and a place that heats up during the day and cools down at night can be a problem, too.
Some of these parameters change depending on what type of observations astronomers are looking to make. An infrared telescope project might trade more cloudy nights, which are less of a concern for that end of the light spectrum, for a site with less humidity. "It’s all a matter of compromises," says Sarazin.
On top of all that, it helps if the people running and using the telescopes can get there with relative ease, which means roads. Astronomers and support crews need to be able to work comfortably. Mauna Kea is so high that altitude sickness slowed down the construction crews that built the first observatory there in the 1960s.
When, during the same era, Horace Babcock was looking for an observatory site in the southern hemisphere, a place where the Carnegie Institution for Science could lay the foundations for its future ambitions, he worried about the availability of water at one promising location. Las Campanas, he told an interviewer later, “right from the start, had a lot of appeal”—clear nights, excellent seeing—“except it looked as if there might be little available water.”
As basic infrastructure was built at some of these remote sites, they became even more attractive, in part because it can bring down the cost of a project. In its report on potential sites, the TMT group noted that “as a developed site with several observatories, much of the infrastructure required for TMT exists on Mauna Kea.” Las Campanas turned out to have water. And it had room for plenty of telescopes.
These days, site testers like Sarazin have a wealth of data they can use to assess potential sites without trekking up endless mountaintops. As a general rule, a site tester might start with the highest mountains, with the fewest neighbors, and narrow down their choices based on further data collected at a short list of sites. And even in northern Chile, there are still hundreds of summits that could, in theory, provide good astronomical conditions.
Given all the factors and compromises, there are three main types of places in the world that are most suited for telescopes observing visible light. One is Antarctica—the high peaks of arid plateaus have little turbulence and are surrounded by darkness. Conditions are brutal, but, advocates argue, sending a telescope to Antarctica is cheaper than sending one to space. The second is mountainous coastal areas, where the wind comes from the sea, minimizing turbulence whipping over the peaks. Chile fits this description. The third is an isolated mountain on a island, where all other conditions are right. Hawaii has mountains just like that. So does the Canary Islands. And that’s about it.
Astronomers do entertain the possibility that prime sites exist elsewhere. The TMT researchers noted that Uzbekistan has an excellent, unnamed site, and that northern Mexico and northern Africa have potential as well. There's some interest in Mount Kenya, and China may have any number of good sites. But the most obvious and most desirable places to put giant optical telescopes haven’t changed since the 1960s and 1970s.
"No one has ever done a comprehensive survey of the planet," says Sarazin. "We cannot say that we have looked everywhere. We know more or less the areas which could provide sites, but individual mountains have not been all characterized, of course. So there is still work for site testers."
Researchers have recreated the acoustic atmosphere of the ancient Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba.
When a building is slated for an addition or a renovation, preservation-minded architects often look for ways to keep the aesthetics visually consistent. They are less likely to consider the acoustic landscape inside. In many cases, though, sounds are a key part of what makes a place feel like itself.
Recently, Rafael Suárez and collaborators at the Higher Technical School of Architecture at the University of Seville wondered what the Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba would have sounded like thousands of years ago, during the age of Abd al-Rahman I. Construction began on the Moorish structure in the 780s. It was enlarged a few times during its life as a mosque—more naves were added to the prayer hall, and more arches soared. Then, in the Renaissance, it was renovated as a Roman Catholic church.
Unlike fragments of tools or shards of pottery, sounds don’t lodge themselves in the soil. They don’t linger. But archaeologists specializing in acoustics, also known as archaeo-acousticians, can model what particular environments may have sounded like to people who passed through long ago.
To approximate the acoustic environment of past iterations of the Mosque–Cathedral of Córdoba, Suárez and his team worked backwards. They started with a present-day measure of impulse responses around the space. They placed the source of the sound near the mihrab and minbar, where sermons were recited. (To control for other, unrelated sounds, they measured after hours, when the space was empty.) From there, they used software to reconstruct the internal architecture of the mosque during four different phases of construction and renovation. They set up receivers throughout the space, and considered the absorption or scattering effect of various surfaces. Next, they produced auralizations, or sound files replicating what worshippers would have heard.
They describe their findings in a new paper in the journal Applied Acoustics. In the 780s configuration, the researchers found, the sound was easily intelligible from the nave all the way around the prayer room. Subsequent construction added more depth, and also moved the sermon space off-center. That led to reverberations. Later, more construction created what the authors describe as “acoustic shadow zones”—places where little direct sound arrives.
What would these changes have sounded like to worshippers? To find out, the researchers used software to model how the architecture would change the same snippet of a recorded salat, or daily prayer. In the first configuration, the prayer sounds full-bodied and sonorous; in the model that reflects the mosque's last renovation, the same prayer echoes as though it was recited deep inside a cave.
Visually, a lot has stayed the same in Córdoba over the past 1,200 years. Gilt calligraphy and intricate tiles still decorate prayer spaces, and hundreds of columns—made from jasper, onyx, marble, and other stones salvaged from Roman ruins—continue to stand in the hypostyle hall. Sonically, it’s a different story. “The increase in area and, consequently, in the volume of the temple, has generated significant deterioration of the acoustic conditions,” the authors write. “The enlargement interventions failed to take the functional aspect of the mosque and gave the highest priority to mainly the aesthetic aspect.” Identical words, delivered today, wouldn't sound exactly the same.
The syringe was filled with so many mosquitoes that they hardly even looked like insects anymore. Their wings, antennae, and other appendages were pressed so tightly together that the tube seemed to be holding a single substance—maybe even something hard, like a pellet or a puck.
“We were almost positive that almost all of them would die,” says Hae-Na Chung, a technician in the biologist Immo Hansen's Molecular Vascular Physiology Lab at New Mexico State University. “We thought they were completely smashed.”
Chung and her collaborators recently set out to see how many Aedes aegypti mosquitoes they could fit into a 10-milliliter tube, and how those insects would fare inside it. To load their lab-reared insects into the tubes, they first anesthetized the mosquitoes for a few minutes on ice (carbon dioxide works, too), and then used feathers to sweep them into the vessel. The mosquitoes are pliable and sluggish in this state, Chung says. That’s when the researchers depress the plunger and compress them down to one cubic centimeter.
The reason to cram mosquitoes in like sardines? Ultimately, it comes down to limiting populations of insects that can transmit disease. These mosquitoes can be vectors for Zika and other viruses. In places such as Las Cruces and Miami, where mosquito populations are booming, one strategy for getting numbers down is to introduce sterile males.
In the past, this somewhat counterintuitive method of introducing insects to get rid of insects has evicted the tsetse fly from Zanzibar, and the parasitic screw-worm fly from many places across Central America, Mexico, and the southern United States. Researchers nip mosquitoes’ reproductive capacity in many ways, such as tweaking their genetic makeup, blasting them with X-ray radiation, or introducing bacteria, as Miami-Dade County did in January.
But tinkering with the reproductive capacity is only the first step—the next part involves actually getting the doctored males to mate with the females. And that requires turning scores of mosquitoes loose, exactly where researchers want them.
That’s easier said than done. While these swarms of impotent males aren’t voracious biters, they’re not intrepid fliers, either. Most mosquitoes don’t roam beyond 200 meters from where they hatch. That means that mosquitoes designed to be released on a population-control mission have to be ready to flit into action.
While researchers are still trying to get a handle on exactly how many mosquitoes they’d need to release in order to get rid of the existing populations, the general consensus, so far, is that it’s in the hundreds of thousands, even for a small area. Immo Hansen oversees a lab team working in a study area that measures 250 x 250 yards; they release around 5,000 male mosquitoes per week, with a bit of variation according to the season and other factors that affect the overall mosquito population.
What’s clear is that researchers need a reliable way to move massive amounts of mosquitoes. In a new paper in the Journal of Insect Science, lead author Chung, co-author Hansen, and their collaborators describe what happened when they took their insects out of the lab and into a courier plane.
The team sent some of their mosquito-packed tubes from Las Cruces to California in an overnight FedEx plane. The tubes were packed in Styrofoam and kept cool. On the other side, a team at University of California, Davis combed through the groggy mosquitoes under a microscope to see how they’d fared.
It turned out that the densely packed ones—240 mosquitoes compressed into a single cubic centimeter—survived the trip well, with the exception of some missing scales and dinged wings. The researchers’ hypothesis, Hansen says, is that vibrations “shook ‘em to death when they’re not tightly packed.”
Next, the team will assess how the close quarters and bumpy ride affect the mosquitoes’ reproductive fitness. But, for now, it seems there’s something to be said for being snug as a bug.
We may never be able to catalog every single unique or amazing statue out there, but boy did our readers get us off to a good start. Among the many monuments (some of which, to be completely accurate, are made of brass instead of bronze) you told us about, there's Germany's wolf and crane statue, which tells the story of one of Aesop's Fables in the creepiest way possible; the Bewitched statue in Salem, Massachusetts, which commemorates a notably different era of fictional witches; and Pittsburgh's Mr. Rogers statue, which "kind of looks like a pile of ground beef."
We've collected some of our favorite submissions below—and if we've missed one of your own favorites, you can always suggest that we add it to the site!
“It's a beautiful, dynamic sculpture that captures the comedy and relationship between these two performers. The sculpture has a fun sense of action. These two characters are dearly loved by kids who grew up in Washington in the 1970s and '80s.” — Mark Cooper, Seattle, Washington
“The statues contain an electronic device that allows them to turn their hips and lift their male member so that the stream of water writes letters on the surface. One can send a text message to activate the statues!” — Dave Arland, Carmel, Indiana
The Tinker
York, Pennsylvania
“It's a depiction of Jack Haley's Tin Man in the pose of Rodin's The Thinker.” — Peter Henry, York, Pennsylvania
Wisconsin Capitol Badger
Madison, Wisconsin
“The statue was cast in 1899 from bronze cannons captured during the Spanish-American War. It was originally on the bridge of the first USS Wisconsin battleship. Since 1989 the statue has been in the state capitol building. Its nose is rubbed by tourists and politicians to bring good luck.” — Terry Craney, Madison, Wisconsin
"[I like it] because it’s just a bust on a pole in a nondescript sidewalk. Super easy to miss, but an incredible find." — Joe Dissolvo, Baltimore, Maryland
A Day Out
Adelaide, South Australia
“Their names are Horatio, Augusta, Truffles and Oliver. They're so personal and very interactive with everyone in the Rundle Mall. People sit on them, rub their noses, and people even put real food out for Oliver to eat.” — Alastair McCallum, Adelaide, South Australia
“It’s got so many characters. It’s very detailed. Also, it doubles as a jungle gym for kids. Been going my whole life. It’s balanced in every direction. For me growing up, it was a little whimsical and a little creepy.” — Mike, New York City, New York
Ainslie's Sheep
Canberra, Australia
“It’s sooo Australian. It depicts a sheep in a barber’s chair ready to be shorn.” — Catherine, Canberra, Australia
Frank Sidebottom Statue
Timperley, Manchester
“Just look at it!” — Robert Bamlett, Manchester, United Kingdom
Mark Twain On a Bench
Fairfield, Connecticut
“You can take a photo or have a fairly one-sided conversation with him.” — Mark Talling, Fairfield, Connecticut
“It’s a television moment of an iconic character frozen in time and space, pop culture history and women’s history in America. It’s precisely located where Mary Tyler Moore tossed her hat in the show’s opening credits.” — Elliot Finch, Minneapolis/Saint Paul, Minnesota
Lumpy Mr. Rogers
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
“It kind of looks like a pile of ground beef, but it's Mr. Roger's putting on his shoes. An iconic, humble image of an iconic and humble man. Fred Rogers is quite possibly the closest-to-perfect human to have lived. He taught us to look for the good and beauty in everyone and everything, and reassured us that it was there. Pittsburgh may have been his actual neighborhood, but he was everyone's neighbor.” — Anne Bartholomew, Columbus, Ohio
“Phil was an incredible musician, a great human, and a true Dubliner who we are all proud of, and who left us way too soon. It's great to have him commemorated in the city he loved and it's always touching to see the guitar picks that fans from around the world leave tucked in the strings of the statue's guitar.” — Ben Walsh, Dublin, Ireland
Puppenbrunnen (Puppet Fountain)
Aachen, Germany
“Bronze puppets with articulated arms and legs, which passers-by can move as they like. Germany is a great country for creative bronze art.” — Suzanne Assenat, Nimes, France
“The last time I saw it, it was in front of the old department store from the novel. It was in an understated, neglected condition, much like the character it represents.” — Marylee, California
Emily Carr Statue
Victoria, British Columbia
“[It] is an old lady with a dressed capuchin monkey on her shoulder and dog at her feet. It puts off an air of whimsy in a rather Victorian posh area.” — Jesse Letterman, Tacoma, Washington
The Wolf and the Crane
Berlin, Germany
“I spent a lot of time in Berlin in the past and Treptower Park is this weird mix of promenading along a waterfront, picnicking and sunbathing on the grass, drinking beer in a biergarten, and, across the street, walking around a HUGE Soviet memorial. In the midst of all this, in a place that feels out of the way but isn’t, is this seemingly random, whimsical statue/fountain. The times I visited it, it was either dribbling out the side or spraying water in an unintended direction. The stork has a little pair of pince-nez perched on his beak. The wolf has his paws wrapped tenderly around the stork’s legs. But, the moral of the story is, ‘expect no reward for serving the wicked.’ Ugh, I just realized how applicable this should be these days but doesn’t seem to be the case. Anyway, the surprise and unexpected wonderfulness of the statue has stuck with me through the years.” — Kamala Englin,Portland, Oregon
Hamburger Man Statue
Edmonton, Alberta
“Hamburger Man makes me laugh because he looks so, so disappointed to be having a burger alone.” — Robyn, Edmonton, Alberta
“Judge him by his size do you? The diminutive (yet life-size) statue sits on a remarkably grand fountain, and as both a representative of the Light Side and the only marker that a visitor has arrived at Lucasfilm HQ, is a reminder that size matters not.” — Evan Dobson, Seattle, Washington
