The life and death of the physical prototype of the kilogram.

Nothing was supposed to change, not ever. The little cylinder, made of platinum and iridium, was supposed to stay the same, locked as it was inside a vault, and sealed within nested bell jars. That isolated life below the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, near Sèvres, France, was meant to keep the cylinder stable forever.

That steadiness was crucial, because the thing itself was crucial. Its mass was exactly, precisely one kilogram, not because that what it registered on a scale, but by fiat—it was the kilogram, and the kilogram was it. In 1889, the General Conference on Weights and Measures had anointed it as the supreme kilogram, the International Prototype of the Kilogram, the one against which all others were measured. And that was that, for a while. It slumbered in its vault, and was only trotted out once every few decades, to be compared to more than a dozen copies stashed around the world—for good measure.

The prototype and its cousins were all treated gingerly. Cleaning might involve nothing more than a gentle massage with a piece of chamois leather dampened with ethanol and ether. Two of the duplicates of Le Grand K, as the cylinder is known, are safe and sound under bell jars in a climate-controlled lab at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Maryland. “We don't even try to touch them with gloved hands,” NIST scientist Zeina Kubarych recently explained to NPR. “You may rub some atoms off or something,” lead NIST scientist Stephan Schlamminger told National Geographic back in 2015.

Those concerns—not about cleaning exactly, but about the official kilogram changing—were well founded. Despite these precautions, the standard had become, well, not so standardized. Over the years, the prototype and its duplicates no longer match. The difference isn’t much—50 micrograms over a century, far less than the mass of a single grain of rice—but in the world of measurement and standardization, 50 micrograms is everything. It isn’t clear whether Le Grand K was somehow slimming down, or whether the other ones were putting on the atoms. Either way, the bureau decided that any degree of error was too much.

So, this week, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures voted to green light a new standard—one based more on physics than physicality. The cylinder will likely be supplanted by a sophisticated and sensitive machine, known as the Kibble Balance, which relies on Planck's Constant and a magnetic field.

The change won’t come into effect for a few months. But when it does, the once-revered cylinder will join the ranks of other little objects that have outlived their use as standards of measurement. One ghost of meters past is an iron bar that also lived in France; U.S. President William Henry Harrison accepted a copy in 1890. An even earlier meter—this one standardized after the French Revolution and based on the distance from the North Pole to the Equator, through a Paris meridian—is mounted on a wall across from Palais du Luxembourg. A metal handle outside the city hall of Leiden, in the Netherlands, references the Rhenish foot, a unit of length that preceded the meter. Across the Channel, plaques against which Brits could stack up their measuring sticks are embedded into the ground at London's Trafalgar Square and a wall at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.

As for the cylinder, speculation has abounded about its fate for years. Writer Maya Wei-Haas mused about its future back in 2015, asking in National Geographic what would become of it when it was no longer mustered into service as a definitive measurement. “Anybody need a paperweight?” she quipped. In fact, Le Grand K will stay exactly where it is. "It is an historic artifact that has been under study for 140 years and will retain a bit of metrological interest," noted its custodians, in a statement. Its cousins will remain cloistered in their bell jars, too.

But the shiny metal will have lost its symbolic luster. Relieved of duty, it will retire into a life as a smooth little cylinder—albeit one with a weighty history.

They're not even really pepper.

In order to add some color to their spice cabinets, people have been turning to pink peppercorns for decades. But in the 1980s, they were culinary newcomers, a colorful emblem of French nouvelle cuisine that took the food world by storm. Dishes at the time needed to be fresh, light, and colorful. The pink peppercorn was perfect. Prized by French chefs, their vibrant, intriguing color led American cooks to add it to pepper grinders as a rainbow accompaniment or as a rosy take on steak au poivre. As restauranteur Gordon Smith declared to the Chicago Tribune: "Pink peppercorns are the spice of the '80s."

But even six months into the 1980s, food journalist Nao Hauser spied a less-than-rosy future for the pretty spice. For one thing, it's not actually pepper. Rather, it's the near-identical berry of two types of South American plants. The flavor is only slightly peppery, and its flaky texture means it needs to be crushed instead of ground up. Since actual pepper fruits do ripen to red during their growing process, the confusion is understandable. But Hauser likened the in-demand pink peppercorn to a "princess with faked credentials."

For a time, no one looked too closely at the pink peppercorn's past. Until, that is, two plant researchers told the world they were potentially toxic.

Sandra Hicks, an herb consultant for the University of Michigan, came across the chic spice at a restaurant. Curious as to its origins, her research led her to University of Miami botanist Julia Morton's research on the schinus terebinthifolius, or the Brazilian peppertree: the source of pink peppercorns. In a paper, Morton had determined that the peppertree was cousin to poison ivy, and that the fruit of the peppertrees flourishing across Florida were better avoided, much less eaten. The New York Times published a laundry list of potential effects: “symptoms similar to those caused by poison ivy, as well as violent headaches, swollen eyelids, shortness of breath, chest pains, sore throat, hoarseness, upset stomach, diarrhea, and hemorrhoids.”

The Food and Drug Administration responded. The agency banned pink peppercorns from importation in 1982, resulting in a drop-off of their use, which had been significant. “They are ubiquitous in fancy food shops, appearing in freeze-dried form, in vinegars, in mustards, and in combination with black, white, and green peppercorns,” the Times wrote. The French government protested. After all, many peppercorns were grown in French territory: the island of Réunion, near Madagascar.

What followed was a brief media furor. Importers insisted that soil and climate differences meant the peppercorns from Réunion were non-toxic, and that small quantities couldn’t be harmful. Morton warily countered that birds who ate the fruit of schinus terebinthifolius, especially in Florida, where it grew wildly, often suffered from intoxication-like effects. A sprinkling of people reported headaches and stomachaches, which they attributed to a sprinkling of pink pepper. "Here people are importing these things from France, and we'd pay people to take them out of the state," Morton told the Wall Street Journal.

Some shops stopped selling pink peppercorns, but another threat was equally devastating: They became untrendy. During the furor, Barry Wine, the chef who claimed to have introduced pink peppercorns to the United States, called them “a cliche—like kiwis,” in the Wall Street Journal. (Kiwis were the pumpkin spice of the 1970s.) By 1983, the Baltimore Sun reported that the pink peppercorn had fallen from its lofty pedestal, a combination of chefs wary of poisoning their clientele and trends simply moving on.

But the pink peppercorn has persisted. The French submitted research to the FDA showing that their pink peppercorns were non-toxic, and the FDA eventually dropped the import ban. Rainbow peppercorn blends are once more to be had at Trader Joe’s, and the colorful fruits are still added to everything from pasta to ice cream. There might even be a simple explanation for the spate of rashes and headaches briefly associated with the pink peppercorn: Recent reports of allergic reactions to them are limited to a patient with a tree nut allergy. Robert L. Wolke, a Washington Post food columnist, chemist, and author, mused in 2002 that the problem was not the peppercorns, but the limits of nutritional science. In response to a question on pepper blends, he wrote, “About 20 years ago, I might have advised you to pour them all out onto a sheet of paper and, with a pair of tweezers, pick out all the pink ones and throw them away because they're poisonous.”

Pink peppercorns do contain traces of irritating compounds, Wolke writes, that caused rashes and respiratory issues for people handling them in bulk. While eating or processing large quantities of schinus terebinthifolius could cause a reaction, few people are likely to chew them by the spoonful. Which is almost too bad—in Florida, the trees are now considered an invasive species.

These 28 footprints were made 310 million years ago.

Eons ago, somewhere on Earth, a prehistoric lizard-like creature crept across a wet sandy dune next to a shallow continental sea. Around 310 million years later, a photo of the lizard’s fossilized footsteps was on the paleontologist Steve Rowland’s desk in Nevada.

The footsteps were preserved in a piece of sandstone along the south rim of the Grand Canyon. In the spring of 2016, a colleague of Rowland’s was walking along the Bright Angel Trail when he saw a rock beside the path with 28 strange indentations on it. He gave his friend a call.

“I have a kind of a network of hikers and geologic colleagues who know what I'm interested in,” says Rowland, who works at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In this case, Rowland’s interest is fossilized footsteps, also known as “trackways”: the preserved memory of animals’ movements across the land. “It's a sequence of unlikely events that happened to preserve this particular animal on a particular day in just the right conditions,” says Rowland.

It goes like this: An animal walks on a wet sand dune, dry sand fills in the indentations, millions of years of geologic forces turn the sand into rock, continents shift, the Grand Canyon forms, a rock falls off a cliff and cracks open in just the right way alongside one of the most popular hiking trails in America, a paleontologist happens to notice it and calls Rowland.

After examining the fossil, Rowland was surprised to discover he was looking at the oldest vertebrate fossil ever found in the Grand Canyon. The long skinny toes with little claws at the end suggested the footprints were left by a reptile, which was also unexpected.

“I don't absolutely know that it was a reptile, but I think it was,” says Rowland. He says if he’s right, this could be one of the oldest records of reptiles in the world. This fossil is from a time when Pangea, the supercontinent, was forming—over 60 million years before the first dinosaurs. “Reptiles were just first evolving and appearing on Earth,” says Roland. “There probably aren't reptiles much older than this.”

Another strange detail about the footprints: They’re diagonal. When Rowland first saw them, he thought it might be two animals walking side by side, but that didn’t make sense. “You wouldn't expect lizard-like animals to be walking in lockstep,” he says. He reverse-engineered the footsteps to determine the animal was walking at a 40 degree angle—walking toward the right even though it was headed forward. “It was sort of sliding sideways, like it was doing some kind of line dance,” says Rowland.

There is no obvious reason for the sideways walking, says Rowland. Maybe the animal was being blown by wind or scrabbling up a steep slope. Maybe it was doing some sort of dance move to intimidate a predator or impress a mate. It’s impossible to know.

This type of guessing is exactly what trackway paleontologists are all about. While many fossil experts study bones or body parts to investigate anatomy, diet, or evolutionary history, paleontologists like Rowland who study “trace” fossils, the fossil remains of what animal left behind, are curious about how animals move and interact with the landscape. “We’re actually examining the behavior of the animal,” he says. “We can see evidence of an animal moving sideways, and you're never going to see that in the bone record.”

By studying these footprints, Rowland is forced to imagine the motivations of a creature whose 28 steps literally stood the test of time.

“There is an animal that lived 310 million years ago and left some footprints,” he says, “and I am the person who has the privilege and responsibility of studying them and trying to interpret what they mean to the rest of the world.”

It took almost three decades.

The idea for the Chicken Church, also known as Gereja Ayam, first came to Daniel Alamsjah in 1988, when he had a vision following his evening prayers. In the vision, he saw a snow-white dove resting atop a hill, and a disembodied voice instructed him to build a house of worship for all people.

Alamsjah didn't pay much attention to the dream, until he went on a work-related trip to the Javanese city of Magelang. There, he visited Bukit Rhema (Rhema Hill) to watch the sunrise. When he saw Bukit Rhema, he believed it was the hill from his vision and started making plans to turn his dream into a reality. He bought the land for Rp. 3,500,000 (or about $2,000 at the time) two weeks later.

Construction began in 1992, but halted in 2000 due to a lack of funds. The structure was abandoned for nearly 15 years. Rumors of cults, ghosts, and demons spread. Graffiti and natural overgrowth began to take over the building.

But in 2015, the existence of Gereja Ayam spread across the internet, transforming it into a popular tourist attraction. In the video above, Atlas Obscura delves into the full story behind the Chicken Church. For more about Daniel Alamsjah and his journey to build this bird-shaped behemoth, read our recent feature by Theodora Sarah Abigail.

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Photographer Peter Steinhauer has captured striking images of cocooned skyscrapers.

Amid the skyscrapers that comprise Hong Kong’s dense skyline, one might spot a few structures shrouded in vibrantly colored mesh and encased in grids of bamboo. These spectral scaffolds have been used for construction, renovation, and demolition in China for thousands of years, and they’re also objects of enduring fascination for scholars and artists.

One of the first photographs of this distinct, dynamic process is an image created by John Thomson in Hong Kong in 1871. It shows a man climbing up an intricate network of bamboo surrounding a building. The scene, rendered in black and white, reveals the apparent durability of a seemingly delicate support system.

Bamboo scaffolding is one of the strongest, lightest, and most sustainable construction techniques practiced today. The bamboo and nylon mesh are recycled and reused for other developments, and the plants themselves are some of the fastest growing in the world.

It’s easy to imagine why, when he visited Hong Kong in 1994, photographer Peter Steinhauer was immediately captivated by a building swathed in a bright yellow covering. It was a vision that he couldn’t quite shake, and the extraordinary scaffolds would become the subject of an artistic project that lasted over two decades, as well as a new, robustly sized monograph titled Cocoons.

Within its pages are images of fantastical bamboo scaffolds around the city. Close-ups focus on the tight geometric forms within the bamboo frameworks. Photos with broader perspectives juxtapose the urban landscape with these undulating blue, green, and yellow outcrops.

“It reminded me of seeing giant, colored, wrapped packages in the middle of a monochromatic setting,” Steinhauer says. “They’re all different shapes, sizes, colors. And the design was completely different on every single building.”

Steinhauer went to great lengths to capture the scaffolds from various angles, heights, and distances. Though the natural peaks of the city were useful for his purposes, he sometimes slinked into structures with particularly auspicious vantage points. In one instance, a doorman denied him entry into a residential building, but, by a stroke of luck, he managed to access a fire escape stairwell on its side. After climbing some 28 floors and waiting out a rainstorm once he reached the roof, he captured Cherry Street Cocoon, a rather dramatic photo featured in the book.

“The clouds were great, and there was color in the sky afterwards. It's a very Hong Kong-esque type of photograph. It shows the life of Hong Kong,” he says.

The photographer acknowledged that his long-lasting interest in construction sites might baffle some viewers. (“That’s kind of the crazy side of an artist,” he told me.) Steinhauer explained that the complex configurations of lines that make up the scaffolds have held his attention since he first encountered them many years ago.

“There’s actually a structure of the way the bamboo has to be put up so it’s sound and strong,” he says. “When you look at that structure, there’s complete design to the whole thing.”

Moreover, Steinhauer was enamored of the process wherein the cocoons transform after being exposed to debris and air pollution and, ultimately, give way to something new. Often, he photographed the scaffolds at both the beginning and end of the endeavor.

These days, Steinhauer—who’s represented by Hong Kong-based gallery Contemporary by Angela Li—is working through a new phase of the project: photographing the scaffolds in black and white. He’s returning to the roots of the whole undertaking, in a way, since his very first snapshots of them were taken in that same colorless format. While this new variable is “resonating” with him, the artist said that his love for the subject matter remains constant and unflagging.

“It’s beautiful. For me, it’s a complete art form.”

The Paradise institution honored the town's mining days.

In the wake of California’s Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in the state’s history, the entire town of Paradise succumbed to the flames. Paradise, a forested community that boasted a population of nearly 30,000, historically attracted loggers and prospectors searching for new frontiers and opportunity. The Gold Nugget Museum summarized Paradise’s rich history in a quaint cottage filled with precious metals, scenic replicas, and a blacksmith shop—the very things on which the town built its humble, yet enduring reputation.

The Gold Nugget Museum, located in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, was a community-funded and volunteer-run repository of Gold Rush and local mining history. The Camp Fire originated in Northern California’s Butte County at sunrise on November 8, the same day Southern California’s Woolsey Fire began. Within those first 24 hours, the fast-acting flames rendered Paradise unrecognizable. Video footage showing the burnt remains of the Gold Nugget Museum appeared on the museum’s Facebook page the very next day.

Against the backdrop of the mineral-rich Sierra Nevadas, the Gold Nugget Museum offered daily free admission and reenactments of gold miners’ lives. The opportunity for full immersion into 19th-century California, shiny with precious soil, was a high point: the museum held a small mine exhibit that visitors could walk through to simulate the experience of feeling one’s way through darkness to golden glory. Now darkness has manifested differently in the town; the Camp Fire has reportedly charred 140,000 acres and claimed at least 10,321 structures in Paradise. Even more tragically, the death toll has risen to 63 in the past week—and counting.

On the first day of the fatal fire, Scott McLean, spokesman for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, told reporters in Butte County: "Pretty much the community of Paradise is destroyed. It's that kind of devastation. The wind that was predicted came and just wiped it out." Extreme fire danger is an annual threat to the Golden State, due to the ferocity of the Santa Ana winds and California’s troubling lack of rain. The dryness of low brush, coupled with hot air traveling quickly down the state’s mountain ranges, essentially makes the land in places like Paradise kindling.

The town’s beloved Gold Nugget Museum stood as a beacon of small-town pride. In 1859, a 54-pound gold nugget was discovered in Butte County. The museum served as a tribute to the significance of Paradise during the Gold Rush, and displayed many of the tools and supplies used to dig up the coveted treasures. With respect to the indigenous Maidu community that originally inhabited Paradise, the Gold Nugget Museum installed several native artifacts into permanent exhibits. These have now been lost.

With the fires in both halves of California still ongoing, though largely contained, rebuilding efforts have not yet been organized. However, several opportunities to donate and help victims of the Camp Fire have been publicized, some of which can be found here.

A North Carolina beach had secrets from the 1940s buried deep in the sand.

The first clue that Hurricane Florence had swept decades worth of sand from the beach was the coins, which dated back to the 1940s and '50s. They weren’t sand-blasted, like coins washed in from the ocean; they were still encrusted with a greening corrosion. “I realized that the sand from the dunes had just been washed away, and had left a beautiful layer, a snapshot of what the beach would have looked like in the 1940s and 50s,” says Bradley Dixon.

Dixon, 32, had come down to Topsail Island, on the North Carolina coast, to volunteer after the hurricane, cleaning up debris, working on roof-tarp jobs, helping out a local campground. “We have a little place down there,” he says. “That’s our beach. That’s the place we love.” In the mornings, he would pick up trash, washed in from as far away as Haiti, from the island’s shoreline, where he noticed the coins and decided to search the area with his metal detector.

Among the first military artifacts he found were bullets for a Browning machine gun and shrapnel. But soon he was turning up much larger projectiles, 40mm and 90mm caliber—the largest so heavy they weighed 27 pounds each. He eventually found four of those heavy, anti-tank projectiles.*

“It’s basically a big old, heavy steel chunk that was flying through the air,” Dixon says.

Usually, when metal detecting, Dixon focuses on an area where he’s likely to find pre-Civil War artifacts, when anything metal was likely lost rather than thrown away, he says. But Topsail Beach has an unusual history. During World War II, it was used as a training ground for fighter pilots, including Women Airforce Service Pilots; pilots would use the island for target practice and train to avoid anti-aircraft assaults. After the war, Topsail Island was used as a test base for guided missiles. Observation towers built as part of the project, named Operation Bumblebee, still stand today.

Dixon hopes the artifacts he discovered will go to a local museum; for now, he’s keeping them in a freshwater bath, to flush out the salt water and remove the rust so they’ll last for years to come.

“I think they’re awesome!” he says. “I’m glad I was able to recover them from the sand. In another 100 years, there might not be anything left of them.”

*Correction: This post originally called these objects missiles and has been updated.

The soaring cones cover a landscape nearly the size of Great Britain.

A swarm of termites went to work. They darted in and out of tunnels, scuttling between narrow darkness and the hot Brazilian sun. Each time they emerged out into the thick and thorny Caatinga forest, on the country’s northeast edge, it was with a heap of earth. The termites added each load to the pile, which grew higher and higher into the shape of a cone.

Over millennia—there amid locusts and snakes and tangles of short, scrubby shrubs—the Syntermes dirus termites built an array of these mounds. Most cones stand at least eight feet tall and nearly 30 feet wide. And the termites are still at it.

The array is evenly spaced, and big—really, really big. The insects have engineered roughly 200 million mounds in all, across more than 88,800 square miles. Soil dating suggests that the oldest could have gone up roughly 4,000 years ago.

“They are massive and they are everywhere, they are just part of that landscape,” says Stephen Martin, an entomologist at the University of Salford, in England.

For years, though, they went largely unnoticed. "The mounds were always well 'hidden' in the regional Caatinga dryland vegetation, and not usually easily visible at all," says Roy Funch, of the State University of Feira de Santana. Researchers were hard pressed to navigate through the Caatinga's dense vegetation, which "sort of goes on forever," Funch says. "It's not a stroll in an open forest at all," he adds. "It's not hiking country."

In a new paper in Current Biology, Martin, Funch, and and their collaborators report that the mounds came into view when forests were cleared to make way for roads or pastures, where cattle can graze on the hardscrabble land. When bulldozers come to topple the mounds, Funch gets a close-up look. “Roy is often there to see what is inside, [which is] a happy accident as it is impossible to dig into the mounds manually,” Martin says.

So what’s the inside scoop? In the hundreds of older mounds gashed open by construction, "you get good cross-sections of them, but there is never any internal structure," Funch says. Ones in progress are shot through with a large central tunnel and branching, narrow corridors containing bits of dead leaves. These mounds aren’t nests, the authors suggest: They’re more like towering trash heaps, the product of the debris that termites excavate in order to open up arteries that give them easy access to leaf-litter across the forest floor.

As builders, the termites punched way above their weight. In all, the insects moved more than 10 cubic kilometers—the volumetric equivalent, the authors write, of 4,000 Great Pyramids of Giza.

Meanwhile, the termites keep on boring through the earth and stacking the debris. They're a resilient bunch, and razing the mounds won't trouble them much. "The real problem is when forest is removed," Martin says, "since this removes the dead leaves, which is their food." The World Wildlife Fund classifies the forest—which is home to hundreds of endemic species—as "vulnerable," and reports that 50 percent of the terrain has been changed through agriculture or development. Less than one percent of the land falls inside protected areas, according to the WWF.

For now, at least, the mounds are reminders that humans certainly aren’t the only members of the kingdom Animalia with a knack for construction. There are examples on land, sky, and sea: The aptly named mason bee (Osmia avosetta) swaddles itself in a multi-layer cloak made from soil and flower petals; octopuses feather their underwater nests by arranging piles of shells. But the little termites undertook a mighty big project, Funch said in a release: “This is apparently the world's most extensive bioengineering effort by a single insect species.”

The giant wooden sculpture was astonishingly popular.

Three months ago, the small Colorado town of Breckenridge commissioned the Danish artist Thomas Dambo to build a larger-than-life wooden troll for its summer arts festival. The artwork was placed along a trail in an abandoned quarry behind a residential neighborhood.

And then, as trolls are wont to do, it almost tore the town apart.

The main problem with the troll was its astonishing popularity. Named Isak Heartstone by the artist, the 15-foot sculpture was masterfully constructed out of pallets and recycled wood. He had soulful eyes and a kindly face. The sculpture rapidly gained a social media following and attracted thousands of visitors to an otherwise quiet corner of Breckenridge.

After months of debate and impassioned online battles, the town decided to remove the troll. But once a town has a troll, it never truly goes away.

Leigh Girvin has lived in Breckenridge for 46 years. She could see the sculpture from her window and visited it every day. “I knew Isak since he was a pile of pallets,” she says. “I was absolutely enchanted with him from the second he arrived. It was delightful to see people walking in the woods, open for discovery, excited to find the troll.”

But living with Isak had its downsides. The thousands of tourists flocking to catch a glimpse of the wooden creature inundated a neighborhood not set up for their arrival. “Imagine 10,000 people knocking on your door, asking you directions,” says Girvin, who is a member of the town’s Creative Arts Council, which commissioned the artwork for $40,000.

The town reported that the use of one of their free shuttle buses, called the Purple Route (nicknamed the “Troll Trolley”), exploded after the installation in August, jumping from 7,500 riders in October 2017 to 16,500 riders in the same month of 2018. The increase is entirely attributed to the charismatic creature. “It is really hard to live with a troll,” sighs Girvin. “None of us was prepared for this mess.”

To deal with the deluge of people, Breckenridge took some measures. The town built a fence around the neighborhood to prevent people from taking shortcuts, closed a trail, installed trash cans, put up signs, and sent police officers to help control the crowds. But for a lot of residents, it wasn’t enough.

The debates were heated. Girvin says a popular online forum the town uses was full of vitriolic and hateful comments from both Isak supporters and detractors.

“[Isak’s] a troll. He’s caused us conflict and strife and inflamed emotions,” she says. “This has been an incredibly emotional experience for our community.”

After a 5-2 vote in the Breckenridge Town Council last week, the town decided to dismantle the artwork. Piece by piece, Isak came down early in the morning on November 15.

Recognizing the obvious magnetism of Isak, the town has said it plans on commissioning Dambo next summer to reinstall the artwork in an area better suited for hordes of visitors. “We are very sensitive to those who were affected by the location of the piece and we're also very sensitive to those who felt so passionately and loved it so much,” says the town spokesperson Haley Littleton. “We're really hoping that by having a town committee and working with artists, we can really find the best possible location for Isak to go.”

Littleton says the town is astounded by the apparent power of public art. “There's certainly a lot of things to be learned from this situation, but we feel a kind of pride and amazement at what creative arts was able to do,” she says.

Isak got his last name in August when a group of neighborhood girls brought Dambo a heart-shaped stone from the quarry to include in the sculpture. Delighted, Dambo built a platform for the stone inside Isak’s chest and dubbed him “Isak Heartstone.”

“This is what trolls do. They bring out our best and our worst,” says Girvin.

In a mournful editorial in her local paper, Girvin wrote that she believes the town has a lot to learn from the experience.

“I think Isak was holding up a mirror to us, causing us to realize our own troll-like behavior,” she says. “He was supposed to be a good troll, but he was a troll nonetheless.”

A neighborhood famous for its achaar linked migrants to home.

The walls of the Chutkharey House in Karachi, Pakistan, are lined floor-to-ceiling with pickle jars in an autumnal palette of crimson, mustard, and olive green. Situated at the edge of achaar gali, a street devoted to vendors selling pickled mango, pickled carrots, and more than 50 additional varieties of Hyderabadi achaar, the pungent aroma in the 60-year-old establishment is discernible from a distance. Achaar is prepared by fermenting raw fruits and vegetables in oils along with spices such as fennel, turmeric, mustard seeds, and fenugreek. If achaar production and consumption were a competitive sport, the Hyderabadis would undoubtedly win gold.

The proprietor, Mashood Shah Faheem, prepares small batches of achaar on the premises each day. He makes one of his shop’s unusual combinations, ambade ka achaar, by fermenting red sorrel leaves with tamarind, fenugreek, and curry leaves. He also offers hard-to-find, meat-based varieties that are distinctly Hyderabadi: mutton achaar, shrimp achaar, chicken achaar. Perched atop a plastic stool behind a glass counter encasing a menu printed only in Urdu, Faheem beams proudly: “We have been in the food business for generations.” The recipes originate from his grandfather, and his mother prepared the achaar at home for sale in the shop until she passed away a few years ago.

Chutkharey House is an institution in Karachi, but it serves food from Hyderabad, an Indian city a thousand miles away, on the other side of a militarized border. Faheem’s father set up the business in 1954 after migrating to Karachi. He was one of many immigrants who made the neighborhood now known as Hyderabad Colony a food destination. Due to restrictive visa policies between Pakistan and India, the pickle shops of achaar gali have been a rare taste of home for many Hyderabadis.

The origins of Hyderabad Colony can be traced back to the Partition of India in August 1947. After the British left—following 300 years of colonial rule—the Indian subcontinent was divided into two independent nation states: Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. This religious split unleashed one of the largest migrations in human history. Muslims traveled to West and East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh), and Hindus and Sikhs from Sindh and Punjab headed in the opposite direction.

The division was both dramatic and violent. According to recent estimates, within four years after the Partition, 14.5 million people had migrated into India and Pakistan while a further 3.4 million people were reported missing or unaccounted for. Massacres, forced religious conversions, mass abductions, and sexual violence were rampant. In the words of Ayesha Jalal, a Pakistani historian, Partition “continues to influence how the peoples and states of postcolonial South Asia envisage their past, present, and future.”

During Partition, many Muslims who lived in towns and cities that became part of India moved to Karachi, the new country’s largest city and prosperous capital. One such group came from Hyderabad Deccan, a wealthy princely state in Southern India that was autonomous under British colonial rule, and whose efforts to remain independent led to police action and communal violence in 1948. These migrants settled in a working class neighborhood in Karachi, which became known as Hyderabad Colony, and the site of new food businesses catering to both struggling migrants and renowned Hyderabadi academics and literary figures living in more affluent areas of the city.

These migrant families brought over a particularly rich culinary tradition. “The Nizam princes were inveterate epicures,” writes travel journalist Sarah Khan, “and with the refined ingredients of the north (such as saffron) and the fiery spices of the south at their chefs’ disposal, palace kitchens became de facto culinary innovation labs.” These royal experiments fused the courtly cooking traditions of the Mughals with the sour notes of native Telugu cuisine. The Hyderabadi penchant for achaar derives from the centrality of vegetarian achaar in Telugu cuisine, where it is not just a condiment, but often the star dish in a meal.

Hyderabad Colony quickly became a place to find traditional delicacies such as mirchi ka salan (curried green chilli with peanuts and sesame seeds), baghaare baingan (tangy baby eggplants cooked with tamarind, roasted peanuts, grated coconut, and dry spices), and the decadent double ka meetha (fried bread slices soaked in hot milk infused with saffron and cardamom).

For the Hyderabadi community living in Pakistan, cuisine served as a sensory vehicle for recreating memories of a homeland they left behind and rarely visited. “We now live in Karachi, and for all practical purposes are Pakistani. But how can we forget that we are also Hyderabadi?” says Faheem. “Continuing the culinary traditions passed down by our parents reminds us of our dual identity.”

But when I visited Hyderabad Colony in September, the once bustling streets were quiet, and only a handful of food businesses were open. Ethnic strife and the deteriorating law and order situation in Karachi in the 1990s prompted many Hyderabadis to sell their homes and businesses and relocate. The disappearance of Hyderabadi chefs and cooking knowledge—as the older generation of migrants passed away—also seems to have contributed to the decline. Faheem claims that several shops closed down because they didn’t have the capacity to produce their own achaar. They bought from him instead, but this made their profit margins too thin to survive.

Mrs. Hashmi, a longtime customer who was born in Hyderabad, chimes in to complain that other shops are diluting classic recipes by incorporating regional Pakistani cuisine. “Now you have versions [of biryani] being sold here with the addition of potatoes,” she says. “That is not Hyderabadi.” Still, she thinks food quality has improved among the few remaining vendors.

“This street has given Hyderabadis an unmistakable identity,” says Faheem from his seat in front of a wall of pickled, multi-colored fruits, vegetables, and meats. “Ask any rickshawwallah in Karachi to bring you to achaar gali, and he will know the directions.”

For Faheem’s father, running the achaar business helped alleviate a sense of alienation caused by displacement. Since his passing, it has become a personal mission for Faheem to keep alive the royal cuisine that his forefathers mastered in another country. As is customary with family businesses in South Asia, fathers groom their sons to succeed them. However, Faheem’s two sons, who are studying business management and chartered accountancy, will likely opt for more lucrative office jobs.

“I cannot predict what the fate of this business will be in 10 to 15 years,” Faheem says with a hint of regret. “We found our lost territory in the kitchens and dining tables of this city. I can only hope our future generations remember that.”

A new catalogue attempts to figure out what we're telling the rest of the universe about ourselves.

There are two main ways to send information out into space—as a transmission or by blasting up a physical object. Through both methods, humans have sent off all sorts of intriguing data about life on Earth. In 1995, for instance, the National Science Development Agency of Japan transmitted, among other images, one of an alien and an earthling holding hands, in the direction of the Libra constellation. We’ve sent a copy of War of the Worlds to Mars, and models of Lego figures (of the Greek gods Juno and Jupiter, as well as Galileo Galilei) to orbit the planet Jupiter. The sculptor Forrest Myers reported that he sent, without permission, a tiny ceramic tile with miniature artworks by Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, and three other artists to the Moon with Apollo 12. This month, a golden urn honoring astronaut Robert Henry Lawrence Jr. will be sent into orbit.

Until recently, no one had really put together a full picture of what humans have sent off-Earth with intent of communicating something about life on this planet. So Paul Quast, director of the Beyond the Earth Foundation, set out to catalogue every cultural artifact and intentional message humans have launched or beamed into space. Published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, his accounting is (as far as he knows) the first attempt at simply documenting what we’re sending out there—a first step toward piecing together a complete sense of what we’re signaling about our world.

“At the very least, we should know what we’ve sent out,” says Quast.

Quast, an artist and SETI researcher, has a background in heritage and the preservation of cultural information, and he thinks of this collection of information as a “fluctuating, artificial field of intelligent design that emanates outwards from our planet,” or “the celestial legacy of our civilization beyond Earth’s borders.” And when you look at the totality of it, it makes us seem pretty weird.

The most famous of all endeavors to explain humanity to an extraterrestrial intelligence are the Golden Records, gold-plated copper disks filled with images and sounds of Earth and currently heading out of the solar system on Voyager 1 and 2. But a small selection of the other objects and transmissions we've sent to space includes:

• A 15-minute concert performed on a theremin
• A version of "Across the Universe," plus a message from Paul McCartney—“Send my love to the aliens”
• An invitation, in Klingon, to attend a performance (on Earth) of a Klingon opera
• A video compilation of Romanian gymnasts from 2006
• An advertisement for Doritos
• DNA from Stephen Colbert, encoded on a microchip
• A picture of rice dumplings and tea
• A copy of Rukhnama, a book written by a former president of Turkmenistan
• Diamonds

Quast’s aim was simply to inventory everything we’d sent out, excluding scientific instruments, which are well accounted for. (He also excluded the noise of broadcasts meant only for other Earthlings, some of which unintentionally escapes the planet.) His list covers “eternal libraries” that store information about our planet off-world, art, official acts of cultural outreach, attempts to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligences, and symbolic gestures. Everything that makes the list must have been accessible in space for a “moderate to extended period of time.”

At their most serious, these messages, particularly the signal transmissions, can be strong enough to cross the space between stars and contain carefully selected content. They can include everything from numbers, chemicals, DNA formulas, and a diagram of our solar system, to text messages and images of celebrities.

One physical category in the catalogue covers time capsules and archives meant to last into the distant future. One capsule sent to deep space includes the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1,500 languages. The Mars Phoenix Lander carried H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds and Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles on a silica glass DVD. The Golden Records are part of that cultural signal as well. These all appear to be serious efforts to communicate humankind's values and beliefs.

But Quast’s catalogue also documents the messages we’ve sent just for fun. The words MIR, LENIN, and USSR, in Morse code. Thousands of Twitter messages. Poetry. A six-minute excerpt of a speech by Stephen Hawking. A slightly different category includes transmissions we send in service of commerce or art. One French broadcast, called Cosmic Connexion, included nude animated figures, as well as cartoons of aliens. Another transmission was just the logo of Zhitomir, a city of about 270,000 people in Ukraine. From the 1970s onward, there have been intermittent invitations to “send your name to space,” which millions of people have participated in. Those names now grace silicon chips, more of those glass DVDs, CD-ROM discs, and aluminum sheets, all currently speeding through space.

There are also short-range commercial transmissions that only go about 1 to 3 light-years from Earth. They have little chance of being deciphered, even if they’re intercepted. These included a film documenting 35 years in the life of a man named Sam Klemke, tweets, text messages, an internet talk show about space exploration, the 2008 edition of the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, a photo of an Audi engine, 138,000 message from Craigslist forums, as well as a message from Craig Newmark himself, and encoded whale songs.

Sending these messages out into the universe does come with risk. There’s an active debate over the wisdom of trying to signal our existence to an extraterrestrial society. Making contact with an alien civilization could throw our own into chaos, or the aliens could try to kill us. But whatever another form of life might think of us after seeing part or the whole of what we’ve thrown into space, this collection also holds up a mirror to our own collective identity and self-image.

“It’s reflective of how we judge ourselves and our perceived position throughout the universe,” says Quast. “It’s quite inward reflecting.” For instance, he notes that much of what we’ve sent into space is about people. But if we’re trying to tell aliens about Earth, perhaps we should try to tell them about our whole planet.

The other potential audience for the items in this collection is future humans. The items we’ve sent into space will last for generations to come. If an extraterrestrial intelligence ever does reply to one of our transmissions or intercept one of our artifacts, it could be thousands of years in the future. It would be nice if the future humans who receive the response know what we’d said to begin with. But even today, that’s not entirely clear.

“There are a lot of messages that exist as rumors,” says Quast. “I keep finding new signals, as well, which is quite unnerving to say the least.”

Apep has the right conditions for the biggest known explosion in the universe.

Eight thousand light-years from Earth, two stars are engaged in a cosmic dance that is generating winds of 7.5 million miles per hour and sending dust swirling in brilliant, crimson trails. The astronomers who discovered this star system have named it Apep, after the ancient Egyptian snake god and emissary of chaos. Based on the image and the science, it's a fitting name.

The researchers, who published their findings today in the journal Nature Astronomy, first started tracking this unidentified, very bright object in 2012, and spent years pursuing a better view in order to classify it. After seeing it clearly for the first time using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in Chile, “I just gasped,” says Benjamin Pope, a NASA Sagan Fellow at New York University and one of the study’s authors. “Nothing looks like this.” He’s not exaggerating: If the astronomers’ measurements are correct, this is the first-known star system of its kind in the entire Milky Way. It's beautiful and, despite being incomprehensibly distant, could actually pose a remote threat to Earth.

The extremely hot, extremely massive, extremely bright stars—known as Wolf-Rayets—that compose the system are rotating far more rapidly than they’ve been known to do in our galaxy, where various conditions tend to slow them down. Stranger still is that the dust, which is expanding outward at the relative snail’s pace of around a million miles per hour, seems to be immune to the solar wind being generated by the stars. “It was like finding a feather caught in a hurricane just drifting along at a walking pace,” said coauthor Peter Tuthill, of the University of Sydney, in a release.

The likeliest explanation for this discrepancy, writes Pope in an email, is a countervailing slow wind from the star system’s equator. These slow winds are actually signs of stress from the rapid rotation—and this means conditions are ripe for an explosion on a mind-boggling scale. In the case of rapidly rotating Wolf-Rayets, we’re talking about long-duration gamma-ray bursts (two seconds or more)—“the most powerful known explosions in the universe,” writes Pope, capable of peeling back ozone and wreaking havoc on the Earth’s climate, when the burst reaches us. Apep, the first local (in stellar terms) candidate for such a burst, he adds, could go off “tomorrow or in fifty thousand years.” Technically, it could have gone off already. Luckily, the snake god appears to be pointing away from us.

So there's no immediate cause for worry, though you'd be forgiven for wondering what else is hidden out there, after bright Apep kept its explosive secret from us for so long.

The name "New England" was like a colonial real estate ad.

In the mythology of the Americas, the English soldier John Smith is most famous for his association with Pocahontas, the Powhatan woman known for her interactions with Jamestown settlers. But he made another indelible contribution to what’s now the United States—he named the area of the country that stretches from Cape Cod up the coast of Maine. The region would later become a key part of the American narrative, the site of the first Thanksgiving. He called it “New England,” and the name stuck.

The map above, first published in 1616, marks the first time anyone called New England “New England.” Two years before, after being shut out of the leadership of Jamestown, and looking for a new foothold in the Americas, Smith joined an expedition that sailed up the coast of what was then called “North Virginia.” What he saw there sparked his colonial imagination. He could envision British settlements scattered along rivers, surviving on the rich fisheries, ample hunting, and potential farmland.

So Smith raised money to bring a party of settlers across the ocean, and in 1615 they set out, only to be quickly captured by pirates. After his release, Smith struggled to find further financing. When Pocahontas—who by then went by the name Rebecca Rolfe—planned a trip to London, Smith rushed to publish an account of his American experience, which included the New England map. “I would rather live here than anywhere,” he wrote.

It was an advertisement, a real estate brochure, of sorts. “The map conveys settlement as a sure bet,” writes historian Susan Schulten, in her book A History of America, in 100 Maps, published in fall 2018. But in 1616 the villages that dotted the map didn’t really exist. Smith let the then–Prince Charles (who would become king in 1626) swap in whatever he wanted for the indigenous names of places marked on the map. We still use a few of those names today—Cape Ann, the River Charles, Plymouth.

Before they set out across the Atlantic, the Pilgrims bought a copy of Smith’s map, although it’s unclear if they brought it with them, since they had intended to sail farther south. But they were blown to the area that Charles had called “Plimouth,” and they stayed there.

The New England that Smith imagined took form over the following decades, and in 1677 William Hubbard and John Foster published a homegrown map of the region (above). The settlers had just fought a war against the Wampanoag leader Metacomet (also known as King Philip), and the map is “the first that was ever here cut,” the creators note. It shows British settlements spreading through the Massachusetts Bay colony to the Connecticut River. It’s one of the only images left that New Englanders made in that era.

Smith’s map had left native tribes out altogether. The later map had to include them, as it was meant to show, in part, the conflicts settlers encountered. But Schulten points out that the native settlements are marked by trees, as if they’re part of the natural landscape. Whatever stories British settlers told about the “pristine” landscapes of “New England,” their maps reflected. To some extent, we still indulge in those myths today. The story of Thanksgiving, in its typical form, is about cooperation between settlers and the tribes who lived here already. But as these early maps indicate, colonists never saw the residents of this land as an important part of the story. They saw the land they wanted to make their own.

This Thanksgiving, why not feast on insects?

I had made a pact with two dining companions—we’d all eat our cockroaches at the same time. The insects had been served atop a bright-pink cranberry relish. There were 18 of them, most on their backs with their six legs akimbo, looking not dissimilar to the city cockroaches you might find dead behind a fridge. The association was a little off-putting, but since we’d already eaten 11 insect-laden dishes that evening, my fellow diners and I each speared a roach with a fork, raised it to our lips, and crunched into the chitin without fear.

The Thursday before Thanksgiving is, of course, Bugsgiving. Well, it is according to Joseph Yoon and David George Gordon, two chefs who specialize in edible insects. Bugsgiving, a ten-course banquet in which insects serve as the primary protein, took place in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, during the Brooklyn Bugs Festival. The three-day event, dreamed up by Yoon, debuted over Labor Day in 2017. This year, it was closer to Thanksgiving, hence the Bugsgiving banquet. The 2018 festival also featured bug-centric cooking demonstrations, a cocktail party, and a “Late Night Bugout” for the 21-plus crowd.

Before Bugsgiving, nary an insect had passed my lips—to my knowledge. Not a tequila worm nor a deep-fried tarantula, nor even an ant as part of a schoolyard dare. That said, I consider myself an adventurous eater. The only foods I cannot abide are licorice and raw celery. (Cooked celery, integrated within a soup or similar, is fine.) I have long believed I would rather eat literal ants on a log than “ants on a log.” Thankfully, Bugsgiving gave me the opportunity to prove this theory alongside 40 other diners, who ranged from entomologists eating their study subjects to curious chefs new to the world of insect-eating.

Tiny shards of ice pelted my eyeballs as I walked from the subway to Brooklyn Kitchen, a self-described “radical cooking school” standing in the shadow of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. After shedding my layers of coats—like a caterpillar shedding its skin, I thought, not that cleverly—I encountered an insect display manned by Louis Sorkin, an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History. Sorkin placed a peppered roach (native to Central and northern South America; non-hissing) in one of my palms and a dazzlingly aquamarine-hued tobacco hornworm in the other. I would later eat one of these worms, blanched, torched, oven-roasted, and drizzled in hot sauce.

After a cocktail garnished with desiccated crickets, it was time for the banquet to begin.

Most current residents of the West are not sold on the idea of eating insects. But the same cannot be said for the rest of the world. From the witchetty grubs traditionally eaten by Aboriginal Australians to the maguey worms of Mexico, to the steamed silkworm pupae sold as street food in South Korea, to the termite ugali served with a Kenyan version of porridge, bug-based grub is no big deal. Yet Americans and Europeans are squeamish. (Pre-colonization, America was a different story. Up to 50 percent of Native communities incorporated insects into their diet in a range of dishes, from katydid fruitcake to cicadas fried in hog fat.)

In “Edible insects: Future prospects for food and feed security,” a 200-page report published in 2013, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) noted that “Western societies require tailored media communication strategies and educational programmes that address the disgust factor” of eating insects. Bug banquets such as Bugsgiving offer one such educational opportunity. Yoon, who considers himself an “Edible Insect Ambassador,” focused on creating a family-style menu of dishes. “Instead of just serving crickets in a bowl or a chip, I want to serve black ants and shrimp, composed dishes—cricket gougères,” he says. “Things that represent a dish that [will make people] go, ‘Oh, that looks like food to me.’” Research cited by the UN proves that this strategy works: “Years of experimental experience in the Netherlands and the United States have confirmed the effectiveness of bug banquets in overcoming the disgust factor,” reads the 2013 FAO report.

Bugsgiving’s global and Native American-influenced menu made the evening less a tribute to pilgrims and colonizers, and more of an homage to the estimated two billion people around the world who eat insects as part of their traditional diet. Tradition, culture, and what we saw on the dinner table as kids generally determine what we are willing to eat as adults. To Gordon, eating chicken eggs is “about as weird as it gets. But we grew up with that, so it’s normal.”

The banquet was served in an open kitchen where diners could stand two feet from working chefs. Yoon happily chatted with onlookers while blowtorching Manchurian scorpions. Gordon wore a toque festooned with homemade antennae.

The appetizers each contained worms or caterpillars: mealworm fritters, skewered hornworms, and spoons of elote corn salad with maguey worms. Mealworms are the larval form of the mealworm beetle, whereas hornworms and maguey worms are, despite the terminology, edible caterpillars.

In all three cases, the insects were thoughtfully integrated into the appetizer. And the elote corn salad mixed many cultures in one bite, combining Mexican jalapenos with a Native American emphasis on corn, sumac from the Middle East, and a trip to East Asia via yuzu. Sure, it was a little jarring to see the occasional small worm embedded in the batter of the fritters, but it wasn’t as though I were scooping up caterpillars by the handful.

Next up was a pre-dinner sit-down course of “chimp sticks with black ants,” cricket gougères, and pear salad with Changbai ants. The chimp sticks are so named because they resemble the sticks chimpanzees use as tools to dig into ant nests. (The idea of creating a human-food homage came from the insect enthusiasts at the Nordic Food Lab.) For Bugsgiving, the chefs used raw sugar cane swizzle sticks, which, Gordon noted, you can buy on Amazon. The chefs coated the sticks with lerp, a crystallized honeydew secreted by plant lice in their larval stage, then sprinkled them with queen weaver ants and fennel seeds. Once my dining companions and I had eaten the ants, we instinctively chewed on the sticks like mischievous baby chimps to get at the liquid sugar inside.

A surprise discovery among many that evening: taste-wise, black ants are remarkably citrus-adjacent. They spray formic acid at predators, and formic acid tastes vaguely of sour orange.

The cricket gougères—button mushroom-sized choux pastries—commanded less attention, as they were made with mere cricket powder, and not topped with insects. They tasted good, but not distinctively insect-like.

Yoon refers to crickets as the “gateway bug.” They have “the most scientific research behind them, and are the most normalized insect in America,” he says. They also have the highest number of farms and the widest range of products in the United States. Those who are intrigued by insect eating but reluctant to eat recognizable bugs can opt for cricket chips, cricket protein bars, or use cricket flour to make cricket-battered fried chicken.

Worms, beetles, and locusts are more culturally enshrined as creepy pests in America, and less likely to be eaten. But the situation is improving, however slowly. Twenty years ago, when Gordon released the first edition of his Eat-a-Bug Cookbook, “I was kind of like the weirdo in the room,” he says. The release of the 2013 UN report, and its focus on sustainability, has shifted the conversation. An oft-quoted analogy among proponents is that eating a steak is like driving an SUV, and eating a bug is like riding a bicycle. According to Gordon, raising a turkey requires 468 gallons of water per pound, whereas raising a pound of crickets takes a single gallon.

The dinner course consisted of grasshopper kebabs, orzo with five-week-old crickets, garlic smashed potatoes with superworms, haricots verts with roasted beets and chapulines (small grasshoppers found in Mexico), and, the most challenging dish of the evening, cockroach-and-cranberry relish.

I did not particularly enjoy the relish. Visually, it was tricky. A Pepto-Bismol pink substance with the viscosity of hummus was topped with 18 or so Dubia roaches, their striped brown exoskeletons contrasting somewhat alarmingly with the pastel of the relish. The flavors clashed, too. The innards of a cockroach—or, at least, the Dubia roach, a species endemic to Central and South America—taste like blue cheese. And although blue cheese and cranberry can go together, the particular flavor of the cockroach didn’t complement the vibrant tartness of the cranberry. It’s a dish I wouldn’t be in a hurry to try again. But it was still better than raw celery.

Part of the challenge of marketing edible insects is the terminology. “Cockroach-and-cranberry relish” doesn’t quite have the fine-dining allure of a côte de boeuf or even a steak tartare. Thus far, there are few euphemistic terms for insects, but both Yoon and Gordon are hopeful that such words will come. People would much rather eat Chilean sea bass than Antarctic toothfish, points out Gordon. They’re the same animal.

No Thanksgiving is complete without a round of desserts. Instead of pumpkin pie, Bugsgiving served up worm-salt marshmallows with mezcal and orange, ice cream with cricket granola and berries, and figs with gorgonzola, honey, and wasps. The gorgonzola echoed the cockroaches of the previous course, which was a little unfortunate, but the salty marshmallows and powdery cricket granola proved more toothsome.

All up, it was a mind-expanding meal that I need to continue thinking about for approximately a week before making a more definitive ruling. But I’d eat insects again. In fact, I had a chocolate-flavored cricket protein bar the next morning.

And now, dear reader, a final piece of information for you. If you eat figs, then you’ve eaten bugs. Figs are pollinated by fig wasps, which lay their eggs inside the fruit. Then the eggs hatch. The young wasps make their way out and find other figs to burrow into, but the mother wasp remains. And dies. In the fig you eat. You’re most likely already an insect eater. Why not explore a wider range of edible bugs?

Go on, let it out.

Some of my most indelible memories are of crying, but that doesn’t mean they’re all sad. There have been times and places in my life that have produced such heightened states of emotional intensity that they can only be described as moments of pure feeling—which is just a fancy way of saying that I’ve seen places that have made me weep with joy.

It’s admittedly a bit cliché, but the last place that made me cry was a bleak, black sand beach in Iceland. While hiking to an abandoned plane wreck near the shoreline, I found myself standing in a driving rain, looking out across a landscape unlike anything I’d ever seen. In every direction, the craggy beach stretched on into the mist. It felt, momentarily, like I was no longer on Earth. The landscape had a kind of peaceful emptiness that truly touched me. Unexpectedly, it felt so lonely and so beautiful—all at once—that I began to tear up while taking it all in. What I’m trying to say is that I think that was the moment I finally understood the music of Sigur Rós. Sigh.

Have you, too, had an experience like this? We want to hear about the places that made you weep (even a little)! Fill out the form below to tell us about the last place you visited that made you cry. And if you have pictures from the spot, please email those to eric@atlasobscura.com, with the subject line, “The Crying Places.” We’ll share some of our favorite submissions in an upcoming article. Don’t be shy. Tell us where you (happily) cried.

It is a subtle art and an even subtler science.

Although it might look simple, cooking fried rice with a wok is a subtle art and an even subtler science. Rice grains need to be in constant motion, moving up and sideways, flying through the air without leaving the bowl. The Mandarin word is chǎo, where ingredients are tossed in hot oil, cooking but never burning.

“You can’t eat at a Chinese restaurant, at least a good one, without eating some kind of stir fry, usually made in a wok” says David Hu, a fluid dynamics scientist at Georgia Tech. “It’s been around for thousands of years and we still don’t know how they got it to work so well.”

Hu and his graduate student Hungtang Ko have been spending the past year trying to understand the science of the wok. Their expertise in fluid dynamics allows them to examine the liquid-like nature of thousands of rice grains circling the wok surface in constant motion. “It’s like a wave,” says Ko. “With certain movements you can control the trajectory of many rice grains at the same time.”

Before starting his Ph.D., Ko spent a year in rural Taiwan teaching English. He grew curious about the mechanics of the sizzling, churning woks being tossed in local restaurants, and Hu, his future Ph.D. advisor, encouraged him to take some videos that they could later examine in the lab.

Ko focused on two local chefs who learned how to cook at a Taiwanese culinary school and had been professionally tossing woks for 30-plus years. Their restaurants, popular hang-out spots in Taitung County, specialize in stir-fry. Ko befriended them and watched them handle their heavy iron woks for hours at a time.

After examining footage in the lab, Ko and Hu were able to identify a continuously repeating cycle which keeps a wok’s contents in constant motion. The cycle, lasting about a third of a second, contains two distinct motions: one “translational,” in which the chef moves the wok forwards and backwards, and one “rotational,” in which the chef tilts the wok back and forth like a see-saw. The result? Perfect stir-fry.

“The food has to do this dance where rice grains are basically charred and then spun up in the air, so they don’t get too charred,” says Hu. “It only touches the wok for a short period of time and then the motion is kind of like a ski jump, because it allows the food to sort of fly off the edge of the wok.”

Hu and Ko also observed that the two motions are out of phase, which allows the rice to move in a circular pattern. “It’s really a matter of timing,” says Hu.

For Hu, this study fits perfectly with his research agenda, which is all about demystifying the wonders of everyday life. “I really like it when I can get people to pay attention,” he says. “There’s so much interesting science going on, and these chefs make it look easy, but if you try it, it’s quite hard.”

Hu’s other every-day wonders include rafting ants, cat tongues, and animal urination. (That last one earned him an Ig Nobel Prize).

The ultimate goal of this wok research is to create a robot that can cook fried rice as well as the pros. Ko says this work is arduous, and many chef’s develop arm injuries after years of wok tossing.

But, Ko adds, even the perfect robot could never replicate the experience of homemade stir-fry.

“The mechanics of tossing woks can potentially be replaced by robotics,” Ko says, “but the atmosphere, relationships and culture that chefs bring to restaurants? That’s not replaceable.”

Digging into the science of three cities' sewer-clogging blobs.

Wherever they’re found, fatbergs—giant mounds of fats, oils, and debris that accumulate in sewers—have many things in common. Stinky, sprawling, subterranean, they start small, then get bigger and bigger, and sometimes grow to gargantuan proportions, occasionally surpassing a double-decker bus or even an airliner in size. They tend to lurk, unnoticed, until they claim so much of a pipe that wastewater can hardly flow past them. Then, they’re investigated and hauled to the surface bit by bit, where they elicit fascination and no small measure of nausea.

They also usually form in the same ways. “Saponified solids are the major pathways to these hardened deposits,” says Joel Ducoste, an environmental engineer at North Carolina State University who studies underground accumulations of fats, oils, and grease (otherwise known as “FOG”). “You’ve got reactions with calcium that can come from the background wastewater, or from corrosion of concrete-like materials that releases calcium and reacts with fat and grease that has broken down to release saturated and unsaturated fatty acids,” Ducoste says. These deposits build up on the sides of the pipes, like plaque narrowing an artery.

The clogs appear all over the world, wherever fats and oils go down the drain, wherever people bathe, wherever we flush things that ought to go in the trash. Cities have been battling gunked-up pipes ever since they began to snake beneath the streets. In the United States, the first patent for a grease trap to intercept sewer-clogging slurries was issued in 1884. More recently, Melbourne, Belfast, and Tokyo have all battled fatbergs, and many metropolitan areas have devoted substantial funds to the fight. Fort Wayne, Indiana, has spent up to half a million dollars annually in the war against fatbergs; in New York City, it was $18 million over five years, Smithsonian has reported.

Left alone, most fatbergs will simply grow and grow, but they’re not all the same. Each wet mass of grease and garbage is putrid in its own way. “The size, the color, and the amount of debris intertwined into it might vary from place to place,” Ducoste says. Atlas Obscura dug into the composition of three recent examples around the globe, and what they say about the cities and people that created them.

London

For most onlookers, the Whitechapel fatberg—a 140-ton tangle plugging up London’s sewers in 2017—probably didn’t evoke a calm bath. But when Rafaella Villa, an applied microbiologist at England’s Cranfield University, laid eyes on it, the mass reminded her of the gummy mess that builds up around the edge of a tub when her son takes a nice long soak. “When you drain the water out, you find what we call scum, which is basically your soluble soap turning into insoluble soap,” says Villa, who has studied fatbergs for a decade. When she and her collaborators analyzed a 2.2-pound sample of the fatberg for the Museum of London, which recently displayed a desiccated, beige slab from the behemoth, Villa discovered that a similar process was taking place inside the sewer. In London’s case, she found, the saponification was helped along by the city’s calcium-rich hard water.

A quick glance at the chunk reveals candy wrappers, wet wipes, and pieces of plastic ensnared in its sticky matrix, along with few little flies and worms. Though the experience was unsavory, Villa was almost pleasantly surprised. She had expected to find even more trash, though, she says, “I was very shocked about the number of wipes.”

To learn more, Villa’s team dried their chunk of the fatberg at 105°C (221°F) to determine the water content. It then went into a furnace cranked up to 550°C (1022°F) so the team could measure the ash and grit in it. Then researchers used gas chromatography to look for the specific fatty acids that mingled in the blob.

They found that 53 percent of the fatty acids were palmitic acids—a type of unsaturated fat found in palm oil and olive oil, plus dairy products such as butter, milk, and cheese. These acids also show up in dishwashing liquids and cosmetics. Villa’s team also observed oleic acid, found in olive oil and almond oil, as well as soaps and plasticizers, plus myristic acid (found in coconut oil, nutmeg, soaps, and cosmetics), stearic acid (a component of cocoa butter and shea butter, plus laundry and dishwashing liquids), palmitoleic acid (commonly found in macadamia oil and lubricants), and linoleic acid, which is used much like oleic acid.

Heavy metals from car exhaust and petroleum showed up in the sample, too. “Our sewers are combined sewers, so you’ve got anything coming from roads, not just materials or wastewater coming from kitchens,” Villa explains.

She suspects that the Whitechapel fatberg probably accumulated over the course of 10 years or so, but it’s hard to say for sure—and it’s difficult to determine what built up when. Unlike packed sediment or the rings of a tree, fatbergs don’t seem to accumulate as a time series—at least they really don't appear so once they’re removed. They actually begin on the sides of the pipes, Villa says, not on the bottom, where water courses through. “When it’s removed and cleaned, you lose that information because of the combination of hand-shoveling and jet cleaning,” she adds. There’s little spatial organization by the end.

Other teams of researchers are doing more in-depth work on the invertebrates that occupied the sample, as well as the bacterial colonies that bloom on fatbergs. The hope is that researchers can isolate these microbes, then strategically harness them to break down stubborn clogs, in a process called bioaddition or bioremediation. Meanwhile, teams studying the numerous other fatbergs that have blockaded London’s underground guts recently detected traces of cocaine, MDMA, and acids found in anti-acne creams.

Charleston, South Carolina

In mid-October, workers at a wastewater treatment plant near Charleston began to notice that the water levels were rising fast. They suspected a blockage, and expected the culprit to be a mass of waterlogged wipes. To be sure—and to get it out—they dispatched a team of divers.

A three-person crew pulled on steel-toe boots, three pairs of gloves, and full-body suits (including metal helmets with sealed oxygen hoses), and rode a cage 80 feet down into the wet well, or holding tank. There, they felt their way through raw sewage. “You can’t send a camera down, because there’s zero visibility no matter how much light you bring down; it’s filled with particulate matter,” says Mike Saia, communications manager at the Charleston Water System. This diving company has been inspecting the area’s pipes for at least two decades. Saia says the divers know the topography by touch. They stuffed the cage full of the fetid stuff, and then returned to the surface. “Those people really are heroes,” he says.

Over the course of three dives, the team extracted a mass roughly three feet wide, 12 feet long, and weighing several thousand pounds. Up on solid ground, it looked like a shaggy, waterlogged puppet, or a bloated ghillie suit. The beast was dark gray, almost black. “People assume it would be brown, for obvious reasons,” Saia says, “but only a small amount of this water comes from the toilet.” The rest comes from showers, sinks, and washing machines, whose discharges are a subtler gray.

The blob included plastic shopping bags, potato chip bags, tampons, and paper, as well as dental floss—which is “a wonderful binding agent,” Saia points out. The team also found a slew of the wipes they were expecting. “Fat definitely binds to wipes, because that’s what wipes were designed to do,” Saia says.

Sewers are acidic places. Over time, that acid begins to corrode the concrete of the pipes—and many things can then catch on the rough surfaces this creates. “We believe that a wipe mass began to snag on something, and grew and grew in size until it was ultimately pushed through like a slug through the system,” Saia says.

The pipes choked by this fatberg are a half-century old, Saia says, and slated for replacement in 2019. In the meantime, the team won’t glean any more information about the beast that they slayed—it’s been dried out and buried in a landfill.

Singapore

Singapore’s clogs are numerous—the national water agency, PUB, told Channel News Asia that they respond to 36 “choke” cases a month—but they’re also smaller and easier to vanquish. Often, high-power water jets or a single rod and fishing net are enough to dislodge them. Sometimes, the pipes are also scoured with a kind of a squeegee.

The agency estimated that between January 2015 and June 2017, nearly three quarters of the clogs occurred because people were introducing grease and rags into sinks and gutters. “We always try to educate the public not to treat the sewage system like a dustbin although it may seem convenient,” Chiew Choon Peng, senior principal engineer from the water reclamation department, told Channel News Asia.

The message is often ignored. In October 2017, the agency cleared hardened grease from beneath a street lined with restaurants. In addition to the grease, the workers removed packs of cigarettes, condoms, menstrual pads, plastic cutlery, mop heads, and mounds of paper towels from a phlegm-colored mass.

Overall, Singapore’s sewers are in the midst of a renovation. Since 1996, inspectors have been peering into the agency’s 2,175 miles of public sewers to improve flow and repair components that contribute to “chokes, leaks, and structural failure.” Instead of hacking up sidewalks, the agency is trying out less-invasive tactics, including threading slick new pipes inside of old ones. The nearly 30-year project is expected to wrap in 2024.

Fatberg ingredients vary from city to city, and perhaps even from street to street. “The composition might differ if I sample in Chinatown versus another place,” Villa says, “maybe because the food is different, and the diet is different.” One kind of cooking oil would leave behind a different signature than another, and the grease from chicken is different than the grease from beef. But anything that is flushed or dumped might glom on to the fatberg. “Whatever gets caught in that solid matrix becomes part of it if it doesn’t get washed away,” Ducoste says.

All across the world, the recipe for preventing fatbergs is the same. “Everybody has to work hard on the three pillars—maintenance, technology, and education—in order to combat this in a meaningful way,” Ducoste says. This entails upkeep on grease interceptors, and maybe even replacing existing sewer pipes with ones made from different materials that are less likely to leach calcium and provide snag points. And, of course, it requires residents to curb the habit of putting things down the pipes—no grease, no wipes, no floss. Nothing that feeds the fatberg.

These unusual runways put the wonder back in flying.

The day before Thanksgiving is a notoriously exasperating travel day. It’s the final hurdle Americans must face before indulging in their annual feasts among friends and family, and some airports become the stage for a hellish scene. Security lines creep forward at a sluggish pace. Snarls of impatient travelers clog the boarding gates in their rush to be among the first on the plane.

Instead of letting the madness make you spiral into an existential crisis about whether you really do need to spend the holiday with your new partner’s distant cousins, let your thoughts drift to these wondrous and weird airports.

For some lucky travelers, airports can still render a travel experience worth remembering. Whether it's charming Art Deco features, innovative design, or truly amazing runways, these airports make the hassles that typically accompany a brief stint in the sky worth the trouble.

Barra Airport

Barra, United Kingdom

At the Barra Airport in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, the tide determines the landing time. It’s one of the only commercial airports in the world where the planes land on the beach. When high tide isn’t hiding the runway beneath a layer of water, passengers can depart the aircraft and stretch their legs on the golden-white ground, often to the applause of curious spectators who’ve stopped to watch takeoffs and landings.

Alton Bay Seaplane Base

Alton, New Hampshire

Pilots landing at New Hampshire’s Alton Bay Seaplane Base have to lay off the brakes to avoid skidding across this frictionless runway. The landing strip, which is no more than a thick layer of ice, is the only one of its kind the Federal Aviation Administration of the United States recognizes within the lower 48 states. Naturally, it’s only open during the winter, but this doesn’t stop locals and tourists alike from stopping by to witness the icy spectacle.

Juancho E. Yrausquin Airport

Zion’s Hill, Caribbean Netherlands

A small airport on the Dutch Caribbean island of Saba has a harrowing claim to fame. It houses the shortest commercial landing strip in the world. According to some pilots, it’s also the most dangerous. Planes must slide to a halt before reaching the end of a 1,312-foot runway flanked by cliffs to avoid plunging into the ocean below.

Queen Tamar Airport

Mestia, Georgia

The Queen Tamar Airport looks like it belongs on the set of a sci-fi movie rather than beside a rural, mountainous town in the Republic of Georgia. Its J-shaped structure links the control tower and terminal with one smooth curve. The architecturally ingenious airport was built to draw people to the historic region of Tbilisi and was modeled after Mestia’s famous watch-towers.

Sky Harbor Airport

Anchorage, Alaska

Residents around the Cange Street on the outskirts of Anchorage can head to the airport without leaving the comfort of their own homes. A cooperatively owned runway slices right down the middle of the small settlement, which is exclusively for the people who live in the neighborhood. Each house even has its own small airplane hangar, making it easy for residents to soar skyward.

Brighton City Airport

Shoreham-by-Sea, United Kingdom

This charming airport, which boasts picturesque views of the South Downs National Park, is one of the oldest commercial airports in the world. Its geometric exterior and modern interior contain original and restored Art Deco ceilings. Today, the airport is mainly a hub for independent aircraft and aviation schools, but tours are offered for anyone curious enough to inquire.

Atyrau Airport

Atyrau, Kazakhstan

Though airports are typically associated with great heights, this one stands out for a different reason. The international airport, located 72 feet below sea level, is the lowest commercial airport in the world. It’s located on the grassy, flat stretches of land that surround the city of Atyrau. It plays a vital role in the local economy because it’s close to some of the country’s major sites for oil exploration. An oil company called KazMunayGas primarily uses the airport, though it still serves commercial traffic.

Paro Airport

Paro, Bhutan

Landing at Bhutan’s only international airport is so hairy, there are only eight pilots who are certified to complete the daunting feat. The 6,500-foot-long airstrip is shorter than the Himalayan valley is high. Pilots must fight through vicious winds to land within the mountains—which boast some of the world’s tallest peaks—that pierce the horizon. Planes can only take off and land during daylight hours, so passengers are guaranteed spectacular views of the landscape.

Wellington International Airport

Wellington, New Zealand

Arriving at Wellington International Airport is a hair-raising adventure, as it sometimes takes pilots a few attempts to nail the bumpy landing. A wind tunnel funnels the air across the Cook Strait, battering the planes as they aim for the thin ribbon of asphalt that serves as the landing strip. It’s no picnic for passengers either: The runway is flanked by water and cuts through steep terrain, so it often looks like the plane will either soar into the sea or crash into a hill.

This article originally ran on November 22, 2017, and was updated with the addition of the Paro and Wellington airports.

There's pumpkin pie, but also multiple banana dishes.

Norfolk Island is tiny, both in size and population. An Australian territory hundreds of miles from the mainland, it's home to fewer than 2,000 inhabitants. It has sparkling blue waters, unique flora (the famed Norfolk pine is displayed on their flag), and a stranger-than-fiction origin story: The island was populated by the descendants of mutineers from the British ship HMS Bounty. The British mutineers and several captive Tahitians had fled to nearby Pitcairn Island in 1790, and by 1856, their descendants moved to the larger Norfolk Island.

The islanders have long history of cultural melange, with many speaking a combination of Tahitian and 18th-century English, called Norfuk. They also celebrate unique holidays, such as Bounty Day, and, strangely enough, an American-inspired Thanksgiving.

While various harvest festivals and days of thanks fill fall calendars around the world, Norfolk Island's Thanksgiving is actually based on the American tradition. Norfolk Island has always been a stop for seafarers, from the island's first Polynesian inhabitants to 19th-century American whalers. In 1887, one Norfolk Island resident, Isaac Robinson, even became the American consul, making him a diplomatic representative of the United States. One year, the story goes, Robinson wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving. He observed the holiday by decorating the pews of the All Saints Church with palm leaves and lemons. When Robinson died at sea, the islanders kept up the practice, which was shored up by American sailors in later decades.

These days, the tradition continues much in the same vein, although Norfolk Island celebrates on the last Wednesday of the month rather than on a Thursday. The island's churches hold Thanksgiving services (the day is a public holiday). At All Saints Church, the pews are decorated with tall stalks of corn. Norfolk and church attendees place fresh fruit and vegetables along the aisles, a testament to the local practice of almost complete agricultural self-sufficiency. Despite the harvest symbolism, though, November is springtime on Norfolk Island.

After the service, all the bounty is loaded onto tables and sold as a church fundraiser. Then, it's time for feasting, whether with family or the community. The TASTE Norfolk Island Food Festival takes place annually during the week of Thanksgiving, and includes the holiday's unique feast on the program.

The Thanksgiving meal is a fusion of traditional Thanksgiving foods and Norfolk Island cuisine. Turkey is generally not on the menu, but cornbread is. There's pumpkin pie, but also multiple banana dishes. As Tom Lloyd, one Norfolk Islander, told NPR, there's banana pilaf, "green bananas cooked in cream, and dried bananas." Past celebrations have included a TASTE Norfolk Island banquet of "roast meats, traditional Tahitian fish salad, corn, coconut bread, and salads." This year, festival guests will attend Thanksgiving Day church services before going to a local home for a feast.

It took the power of the internet to crack it.

It was one of those hundreds of nondescript iron bollards—the sturdy cylindrical poles that are designed to stop cars from getting in pedestrian areas—stationed across the city of Madrid. To the common observer, there was nothing special about it. But for Joseángel Murcia, there was something different about this particular bollard. And Murcia is not a common observer.

“I was surprised one day driving in my car when I saw a pattern that wasn’t symmetric,” says Murcia, a mathematician and educator. “When I travel, one of the things that I do is to look for geometrical patterns... It’s a little OCD.”

On the top of the bollard in question, Murcia noticed an unusual pattern comprised of 40 lines that would soon be all over Spanish Twitter and featured by dozens of Spanish news outlets. The lines extended from close to the center of the bollard to the border of the circumference. And they were grouped in a strange way: first one line, then a space. Then 12, and another space. Then 2, 13, 3, and 9.

Murcia had long made a habit of taking photos of the geometric patterns he notices, sharing them on his Instagram account, but on this occasion he was driving, so he couldn’t. A few months later he came back to capture it. After taking the picture and counting the lines, he put the numbers in the OEIS sequence database, a site where you can search known mathematical sequences. Nothing matched. Stumped, he turned to social media.

Ayuda, please, ¿alguna hipótesis de por qué los bolardos de la zona del puente de Segovia tienen este patrón: 1, 12, 2, 13, 3, 9?
¿Un RT? pic.twitter.com/Jq2bq16KJ1

— Joseángel Murcia (@tocamates) July 26, 2018

“Help, please, any hypothesis about why the bollards in the area of the Segovia bridge have this pattern: 1, 12, 2, 13, 3, 9?,” his tweet read. To date, the message has accumulated almost 2,000 retweets and more than 600 replies. All kinds of theories arrived. Someone suggested it might have something to do with the arcs of the nearby Segovia Bridge. Or could the answer be related to the spaces between the lines? “60 segments, 60 seconds? Some active, some not,” Rubén Holguera wrote. “Could it be the pattern of repetition of a lighthouse, for example?” Another Twitter user found in the pattern’s shape a hexagon that he related to the Landau–Ramanujan constant, a famous theorem.

Mi hijo dice que está claro, que es así para que no pasen los coches 😜
Pero si quitamos los "diámetros" del hexágono a partir del 1... quedan 5,6,1,7,6,3,3,5... https://t.co/yOHAB8KPqa

Y aparece... Landau-Ramanujan pa flipar ¿o no?

Lástima el 5 final...
Gracias Joseángel pic.twitter.com/2f5Bx8tZ8X

— Miguel Ángel Miguel (@El_de_gafas) July 27, 2018

This being Twitter, there were plenty of jokes, including the theory that it must be related to crop circles. Others just gave up, mystified. “Two hours looking at a bollard like it was a matter of life and death,” said @LizTravel1. “My vote is that is just a decorative design.” One person made a 3D printed replica. Another person wrote a song based on the pattern.

Mira, ni idea. Pero por códigos que no quede: si supones que lo números designan semitonos y lo inviertes, queda una melodía chula xD pic.twitter.com/NsnCwFLrVj

— Almudena M. Castro (@puratura) July 27, 2018

A journalist from Gizmodo en Español put forward a theory that the pattern might be a code from the company that designed the bollard. In a post on their website, that company, Forjas Estilo, explained that the bollard was a model called “Río Bajo” and that “the most extended” explanation would be that the lines have to do with the Fibonacci numbers, a sequence in which every number after the first two is the sum of the two preceding numbers. That explanation didn’t convinced many, including Murcia. The pattern didn’t quite match the Fibonacci sequence. “There was a lot of confusion,” he says.

Finally, a week after the company published its first explanation, they posted a follow-up with a big revelation: they had located the designer of the bollard. The 36-year-old Spanish architect Víctor Muñoz Sanz had worked on it 10 years ago, when the Madrid Río park was built alongside the Manzanares river.

“At first, the design just had lines on its sides, something that I designed too, but when I presented it, my bosses told me that the top was too empty,” Muñoz Sanz tells Atlas Obscura, from the Netherlands, where he lives and works as a researcher. “We needed to add something.”

He says he started thinking about the material of the bollard, iron. “Maybe I could do a reference to places where this metal is extracted, I thought. And from there I got to the idea of cities [that are] built for extracting resources, or to be factory-cities,” says Muñoz Sanz.

Using Madrid as the center, Muñoz Sanz drew straight lines pointing to the locations of several such cities. He pointed to Fordlandia, a currently abandoned town in Brazil built by the Ford Motor Company in 1928. He marked the spot of Ivrea, the Italian city where Olivetti is headquartered. And he pointed towards to Zlín, in Czechia, a place that would become a new obsession for him.

“I would eventually write my thesis about the Bata Shoe Company, which started in Zlín,” Muñoz Sanz says.

It was a pretty design and it made for a nice effect in sunlight. It was quickly approved and no one involved gave it another thought until 10 years later, when Muñoz Sanz’s former boss messaged him about the Twitter debate and subsequent media coverage.

“It was kind of mind-blowing to discover what had happened. I was surprised by the imagination of the people. I loved that a woman wrote a piano composition,” the architect says. “We designed these bollards so that they would be something nice, something that wouldn’t go out of fashion, something that remained in the city, but at the same time wouldn’t draw attention.”

Thanks to Joseángel Murcia’s eye (and Twitter), the opposite happened, and a humble bollard had its five minutes of fame. Now the mystery is gone. The mathematician and his daughters from time to time wear t-shirts they had printed with the design from the bollard.

Still, a question does remain, one that might never be answered. “There’s actually only one bollard that correctly points to those cities,” Muñoz Sainz says. The rest were installed without regard to the direction in which the pattern was positioned. At the time, no one cared too much. The bollard’s creator never told anyone the logic behind his design, until now. “And today even I don’t know where the correct one is... It’s been a long time."