Garish costumes, masked clowns, and favela funk.

In the sprawling, landlocked northern and western reaches of greater Rio de Janeiro, far from the beaches, the Sambadrome, and the crowds of tourists that descend on the city just before Lent, there is a parallel Carnival universe.

Here there are no bikini-clad dancers atop fantastical floats. In their place are clowns from a tropical fever dream.

In the stifling heat of the southern summer, crowds jostle along busy streets and public squares in working-class neighborhoods such as Guadalupe, Oswaldo Cruz, and Madureira. There’s a tangible buzz in the air, heightened by the static crackling from enormous sound systems and the giddy chatter of onlookers sipping ice-cold beers bought from street vendors lugging giant coolers.

Then there’s an explosion of sound and color. The speakers come to life with the bombastic sound of funk carioca and a precariously rigged arsenal of fireworks screeches into the air with showers of sparks and plumes of brightly colored smoke.

Metal warehouse doors fling open and everyone dashes to the safety of the sidewalk. The street is quickly taken over by a surge of shouting, swirling clowns, garishly dressed head to toe and topped with eerie masks and plume-like wigs. Delight and terror ensue as they crash down the street, brandishing flags and thrashing balls mounted on sticks against the ground. A few stumble and fall in the confusion. This is the saida, or “exit,” of the groups of bate-bola (“ball-hitters”), Brazil’s secret, seductive, alternative Carnival.

The spectacle of the bate-bola is a dazzling fusion of art, music, and raw energy that puts even Rio’s famously flamboyant samba school parades to shame. Involving thousands, the bate-bola parades are largely ignored by the Brazilian media, and treated with suspicion by Rio’s middle and upper classes. The rainhas da samba (“samba queens”) gyrating a few miles away are replaced by outlandishly beautiful monsters—kings of a Carnival that puts exuberance and violence on equal footing.

Also known as clovis (thought to be a mutation of the English “clown”) the bate-bola began to emerge as a part of Rio’s Carnival festivities around the beginning of the 20th century, with the influence of Portuguese settlers. Nearly a century later, in 2012, Rio’s City Hall declared the bate-bola part of the city’s official cultural heritage, and though the final acts of the festival take place in the city itself, the tradition remains largely isolated from wider society.

The practice has its roots in the eerily beautiful caretos tradition of northern Portugal, in which groups of men dressed in devilish masks and colorful hooded jumpsuits maraud through the cobbled streets of rural towns such as Lazarim and Podence. In these otherwise quiet locales, the custom dates back to pre-Celtic times, and sees the masked “monsters” shaking rattles in the direction of young, single girls—a sinister spin on seduction. In Rio the tradition has evolved over the decades to become a flashy, tropical version. The rattle was replaced by an inflated animal bladder and, today, a heavy-duty rubber ball or balloon. The costumes have become cartoonish, lurid, yet delicately detailed exaggerations of grand ball gowns, and the music is thumping electronic funk rather than traditional Portuguese folk.

The bate-bola are ubiquitous in suburban Rio during Carnival. Although there are no official statistics, there are thought to be up to 400 turmas, or bate-bola groups, spread out throughout metropolitan area.

Each turma spends the better part of the year—and a huge amount of money—on creating what they hope will be the most terrifyingly beautiful costumes, known as fantasias, of that year’s Carnival. Each group’s aim is to be acknowledged by their communities as the best in the region—slaying the competition with creative themes, killer sound systems, dramatic saidas, and outrageous outfits (usually designed around a theme drawn from the world of sport, politics, or popular culture, such as a big-budget movie, the World Cup, or Disney).

To keep the chaos to a minimum, each group is a allotted day and time during Carnival to make their saida. Smaller groups of 10 to 20 bate-bolistas hurtle down the streets during the early afternoons, while larger, more established groups crash out after dark, when the festivities are at their most frenzied.

As the big moment approaches, the participants pull on delicate gloves, patterned knee-socks, and garish wigs, and spray themselves in sickly-sweet fruit scents—which are bought by the liter and are as overpowering as the costumes themselves. Finally, they pull down their masks and dive in.

Post-saida, the clowns ride on the back of motorbikes, pack into buses, and sweep down the streets in groups to show off their costumes and stake their claim to being “o mais bonito,” “the most beautiful.”

Jefferson Cardoso has been part of a turma from the municipality of Queimados, in northern Rio, for over 10 years. “There are hundreds of groups, generally formed from groups of friends or childhood schoolmates,” he says. “The whole year is spent planning the details of the theme, the costume, and the saida, which is prescheduled for a specific day and time within the four days of carnival.

“There is a lot behind the costume,” he says. “Today much of it is about fame and status. There is a huge amount of competition, people spend huge amounts on their fantasias, on finding the most expensive sports shoes to wear with them. During carnival, the bate-bolas are celebrities.”

The fantasias and accessories have come to stand in for affluence and influence, and the cost of a single outfit can run around three times the monthly Brazilian minimum wage. “I love Carnival, but I’m not taking part in the saida this year,” Cardoso says. “The cost of the fantasias is really high and I am paying for improvements to my house.”

Like the city of Rio de Janeiro itself, bate-bola is visually spectacular and steeped in tradition, but with a certain reputation among outsiders. The alternative parades only seem to draw media attention when the posturing overflows into sometimes violent clashes between rival groups.

Neirin Jones, a British cinematographer based in Rio captured the energy of the scene for an award-winning 2018 short film, This Is Bate Bola, codirected by Ben Holman. “When I was introduced to bate-bola, I couldn't believe mainstream middle-class Brazil knew next to nothing about it,” Jones says. “If someone had heard about it, they associated it with violence. Media reports were extremely difficult to find. It was something that was only reported on when there was a violent act to make it 'newsworthy.'”

In response, today some groups hold aloft colorful sombrinhas, or sun umbrellas, instead of flags and mounted balloons. It’s a visual nod toward their peaceful nature, and a way of distancing themselves from suggestions of violence. But whatever conflicts do take place, they’re less a reflection of on bate-bola culture than representations of existing tensions between communities.

“Unfortunately there are some groups that wear the masks and the costume just to cause fights and violent scenes with other groups,” Cardoso says. “Usually this happens in areas that are occupied by rival drug factions. This is a tiny minority though, for the most part it is all Carnival fun and games.”

But he admits that the overall impression of the event can be frightening to those who can’t tell one group from another: “There are groups of peace and groups of war. If you don’t know the groups well, you won’t be able to tell one from the other. Generally the groups with umbrellas are more peaceful, but not all the groups with the ball are violent.”

Jones and Holman, in the course of making their film, immersed themselves in the bate-bola culture and found its collaborative side. “We spent time with the bate-bola turmas and very quickly learned it was about celebration, brotherhood, camaraderie, tradition, history, and love,” Jones says. “It was a family thing, it was something people dedicated their lives to. Like football, violence and aggressive minorities were inevitable because of the environment that surrounds the origins of the culture, but bate-bola itself and the groups we met very much aspired to a peaceful bate-bola saida, and rejected any gang or violent influence on their groups.”

The otherworldly beauty and energy of the groups also caught the eye of French photographer Vincent Rosenblatt, who has experience documenting the city’s funk carioca music scene. In 2007 a DJ introduced him to bate-bola, and he’s spent years photographing groups from across the suburbs, such as Mangueira, Oswaldo Cruz, and Realengo. (The photographs in this story are his.) “The world of bate-bola is fascinating and ambiguous,” he says. “Here we have men in pink dresses, they wear perfume that has the scent of fruit, it’s almost unbearably sweet. They aim to seduce and also to scare people. It’s ambiguous, beautiful, but at the same time frightening.”

Rosenblatt grew fascinated with how the music scene and bate-bola culture influence and grow off of each other, under the radar of mainstream Brazilian culture. “They both represent something that is a little bit out of control, something that is between seduction and violence. But both are ways for marginalized youth to express themselves artistically.”

At the helm of each bate-bola group is a cabeça (literally, “head”) who assumes the role of creative director, funds manager, and peacekeeper. “Sometimes the groups taunt each other, it is incredibly competitive,” Rosenblatt says. “It is part of the role of the cabeça to make sure nothing violent happens.”

The tradition remains vibrant and is always changing. “The bate-bola groups multiply like cells,” Rosenblatt says. Members of groups that have been around for decades might decide they have learned enough from the cabeça to start their own group. A big turma might spawn dozens of smaller ones, each with its own costumes, theme, and approach to artistic chaos. “They are rooted in the tradition,” he adds, “but because they are very competitive, the groups are always adding new twists to their costumes and their techniques.”

Like Rio de Janeiro itself, the bate-bolistas are ever primping, preening, and preparing to shine—not in the spotlight, but in the shadows cast by the greatest Pre-Lenten party on the planet. After that, ball-hitters and samba queens alike will return to their regular lives. Another saida is just a year away.

His chestnut forest is home to thousands of hens.

Chickens as we know them are a human invention. The most common chicken species, Gallus gallus domesticus, owes its existence to the domestication of four species of wild jungle fowls, a group of colorful birds that once roamed the tropical forests of Southeast Asia. As early as 10,000 years ago, people began to keep these jungle-roaming creatures for everything from egg-laying to bird-fighting. Today, poultry is the second most common type of meat around the world after pork. But most contemporary chickens no longer enjoy the freedom of their distant cousins.

Massimo Rapella, a 48-year-old chicken farmer from northern Italy, is helping chickens rediscover their wild side. Since 2009, Rapella and his wife Elisabetta have been keeping an estimated 2,100 hens in a patch of pristine Alpine forest near Sondrio, in the heart of the Valtellina valley. Visiting their farm feels like stepping into an enchanted mountain kingdom, albeit one ruled by fluffy birds.

From Milan, it takes a little more than an hour to drive up to Rapella’s estate, along a scenic route that offers dramatic views of Lake Como. His farm could be mistaken for one of the many pasture huts kept by cow farmers in this part of the Alps. But the sound of clucking and a “Chicken Crossing” sign reveal the farm’s true purpose: producing Alpine eggs.

Rapella, though from the area, hasn’t always been into animal husbandry. “I became a chicken farmer by accident,” he says. He used to run an education NGO with his wife in the nearby town of Sondrio. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, the Italian government cut funding for social enterprises and the couple decided to move to the mountains. Shortly after relocating, Rapella and his wife started keeping a few chickens to provide eggs for their own consumption. But soon enough they noticed some unexpected behavior from their flock. “Our chickens liked roaming around the nearby woods,” Rapella explains. “So I encouraged them to venture out and lay eggs in the wild.”

A few months later, Rapella saw that the birds looked healthier—with shiny feathers and bright-colored wattles—and that their eggs had a fuller taste. “I started wondering if I could take on more chickens and create an 'Alpine egg' to sell in local markets,” he says. Today, he sells his uovo di selva, or egg of the woods, to about 400 direct consumers and 40 restaurants.

Though he’s far from the steamy jungle, Rapella’s success may be rooted in the genetic heritage of the common chicken. “The main ancestor of the chicken, the red jungle fowl, was a wild-roaming bird,” says Phillip J. Clauer, an assistant teaching professor of animal science at Penn State University. “It would ward off predators and forage for food in the wild.”

Red jungle fowls, like most wild birds, only lay eggs twice a year. But domestic chickens can lay eggs nearly every day. That’s because humans adapted them to do so. The first evidence of human-induced egg production goes back to ancient Egypt, with “incubation ovens” built to hatch chicks, freeing up hens to produce more eggs. Other techniques included record keeping and genetic selection. “Humans started to keep records of which birds lay eggs more frequently, and would selectively incubate eggs of those birds only," Clauer explains. Selection for meat production worked in a similar fashion.

But their food use was not the only reason that led to the domestication of wild fowls. Religion also played a role. Roosters were considered a sacred bird in many ancient cultures, from China to the Roman Empire. Priests used chicken sacrifices to quell demons, and watched them feed to predict the outcomes of war. Another use for chickens was fairly unholy: cockfighting, the practice of watching two roosters battle each other. Many species of European chickens were developed out of “fighting birds” transported from Asia.

But with human domestication came the loss of crucial survival skills. Most domestic chickens today would not find themselves at home in a forest: at least, not immediately. “The first large batch of chickens I took in looked very lost,” Rapella says. “They had never seen a tree nor a bug in their life, and they were scared of snow.” Initially, the hens lingered just outside their coops. But after a few weeks, one intrepid hen ventured out into the depths of the woods and showed the way for the rest of the flock. One month later, they were all trekking through the chestnut forest at their disposal.

Soon, they started to display some of the behaviors of their ancestors. Red jungle fowls are omnivorous foragers. They feast on leaves and bugs they find in the forest. So do Rapella’s chickens. “They eat whatever they find in the undergrowth,” he explains. “Mostly chestnuts, leaves, worms, and ants.” Dust baths are a common grooming technique practiced by wild and domesticated fowl alike. When chickens roll in the dust, they’re cleaning off parasites, Rapella notes as we pass by a group of hens rubbing their feathers onto the ice-covered ground.

But some pre-domestication traits can’t be recreated. While wild jungle fowl can “lightly coast from branch to branch,” Clauer says, domestic chickens bred by humans to bear more meat are too heavy. Even their plumage can prove a problem. Humans had no interest in breeding predator-resistant birds. “White birds really stand out to predators,” Clauer says. Rapella keeps two different breeds of chicken: Hy-Line brown hens and the easy-to-spot white Leghorns. While he once lost the occasional chicken, now he relies on a double fence and two trained Maremma sheepdogs to keep badgers, martens (a weasel-like carnivore), foxes, and buzzards at bay.

Rapella’s chickens lay eggs almost every day, like any domesticated chicken, but they do so in the woods. “They like natural nests offered by tree roots or branches,” he says. “Usually when you spot a cranny with some leaves, you know there could be eggs.” Once a hen finds her favorite nesting spot, she goes back to it for each subsequent laying, making Rapella’s egg-hunting easier. Together with two employees, he gathers an estimated 1,000 eggs every morning.

His uovo di selva tastes like egg, but concentrated. There’s more flavor to it, and also more protein, due to the bug-filled diet of the chickens. As a result, when chefs whip the whites from Rapella’s protein-rich eggs, they get three times the volume. The egg yolk can even change with the seasons. In autumn, when chickens feast on tannin-rich chestnuts fallen from the trees, it takes on a darker color and richer taste. The difference is perhaps best appreciated when tasting Rapella’s homemade egg pasta. The flavor is so rich, it almost can be eaten plain. The idyllic, active life that Rapella’s chickens enjoy might have something to do with it.

Indeed, Rapella’s birds are spared from the stressful situations that can arise from being cooped up. According to Cauer, chicken farmers often have to deal with aggression issues amongst their flocks, even to extremes such as cannibalism. But Rapella hardly ever sees hostile behavior in his own flock. “Chickens are social creatures, so they tend to form groups of 15, 20 hens,” Rapella says. “Each gang finds its spot in the forest and sticks to it.” His Leghorns seem to be more individualistic. He often finds them perched on tree branches by themselves.

According to Paul Wheaton, a permaculture expert who runs a popular blog on farming, keeping chickens in a setting that recreates their original forest habitat is best for both animal welfare and feeding costs. Yet most of the 50 billion domesticated chickens around the world live in enclosed environments. Wheaton notes that this goes against the natural predisposition of chickens. “I see people build massive, elaborate stuff for raising chickens that deprive them of fresh foods or bugs even in the summer,” he writes.

The only issue he identifies with Rapella’s approach is the erosion of ground nutrients caused by chicken excrement. According to Rapella, though, his Alpine location spares him this problem. “We are on a slope so whenever it rains, it washes everything down.” Plus, chestnut trees thrive on highly acidic terrain, so acidic chicken excrement acts as manure. A few years ago, a damaging insect infestation hit the surrounding area. While it killed off many chestnut trees, Rapella’s forest was spared. He thinks it’s thanks to chicken poop. “It’s really an ecosystem between plants and birds,” he says.

In Rapella’s forest, chickens are kept in far more humane conditions than most chicken farms and enjoy better living conditions than many feral chickens out in the wild. While his product has proved popular, Rapella refuses to replicate his model. Free-range farmers from around Italy have asked him to set up wild chicken farms in other parts of the country. “But I always say no.” The secret to his success, he thinks, is this very land. “My eggs were born out of this forest here in Valtellina,” he says. “It would never be the same elsewhere.”

In Asmara, Eritrea, preservationists are grappling with the tricky task of celebrating Futurism.

Walking down Harnet Avenue in Asmara, Eritrea, you'll pass a distinctly angular building, and then another whose facade undulates more like a wave. The exteriors within view, though faded, are painted with noteworthy colors: pistachio, peach, a deep persimmon. Windows are often round and curious, like a submarine’s. At once nostalgic and neglected, the overall feel is as if the city of Asmara has been frozen in time.

Futurism, the cultural and artistic movement birthed in 20th-century Italy, espoused a detachment from the past. By championing virtues such as speed, technology, youth, and flight, the Futurists worked to cement Italy’s status as highly advanced and, thus, superior. Though Futurism flourished in many forms, architecture and urban design were arguably the most visible displays of this imagined Italian dominance. The buildings and public plazas constructed according to Futurist ideals were more than just experiments with dynamic design. In Asmara, the handsome structures built between 1935 and 1941 became multi-faceted tools of oppression.

Eight decades later, these Italian-designed edifices are still standing, albeit in need of rehabilitation. But preserving Asmara's Futurist architecture necessarily preserves the fascist agenda that erected them in the first place, which prompts several, complex questions: What are the ethics of stabilizing public spaces that were intended to destabilize an entire people? And is it possible to reinforce the beauty of these buildings without romanticizing their politics?

In July 2017, Asmara received UNESCO’s World Heritage Site designation for its modernist architectural marvels. Now that the dazzling gems of Asmara’s streets—from the Cinema Impero movie palace to the Fiat Tagliero service station—have been established as essential parts of Eritrean heritage, taking an honest look at the country’s past will hopefully propel it forward into a brighter future.

The Asmara Heritage Project, created in 2014, is working toward just that. Edward Denison is an associate professor at the University College London’s Bartlett School of Architecture and a principal consultant to the AHP, which prepared the UNESCO nomination. In the short year and a half since Asmara’s official designation, the title’s effects on the city is already evident, according to Denison. “It seems to be having an impact on international perceptions of Asmara, which could translate into tourist numbers,” he says, though tourism is not the priority. The main reason AHP sought out World Heritage status “was to overhaul the outdated building regulations and related legislation.” But a potential upside of tourist dollars, coupled with a large-scale reinvention of the local construction industry, is that Asmara would be able to more properly invest in itself. And that's an advantage whose benefits may outweigh its costs.

When Benito Mussolini declared the joint-region of Somalia, Ethiopia, and Eritrea “Italian East Africa” in 1936, he was aware that Italians back home were watching his expansionist plan unfold from afar. So Mussolini used architecture as a vehicle to influence the public, to prove to his country that his far-right ideals were sound. To this end, Italian architects were encouraged to settle in Asmara and override its established environment in the name of Futurist experimentation. Mussolini’s hope was that Italians in Italy would be seduced by the beauty of the buildings he commissioned in Asmara, which symbolized the spirited momentum of his fascist politics. If Mussolini’s countrymen believed in skillful Italian architects, surely they’d believe in his obsession with radical ultranationalism, too.

Medhanie T. Mariam, director of the AHP, says Futurism’s role in Mussolini’s fascist regime cannot be underestimated. “The connection between Italian Futurism and fascism is well known, but we can say that the two shared many ideals and that the relationship between them was direct,” he says. “Futurism and fascism had some common aspects: the blind activism, the irrationalism, idolization of the mechanization and war. But also remarkable differences: the state-worship and fascist hierarchy compared with the general anarchy of Futurism.”

The presence of Italian industry was impossible to miss in Asmara during this period. Italians established factories dedicated to the production of pasta, buttons, cooking oil, and tobacco. According to the 1939 census, 53,000 of Asmara’s 98,000 residents were Italian. Fast forward to today, and the city’s streets are still lined with coffee bars, pizzerias, and gelato parlors.

Asmara’s Harnet Avenue (formerly Viale Mussolini), Sematat Avenue (formerly Viale de Bono), and Mai Jah Jah fountain (formerly La Fontana) were all designed as public spaces where the masses could celebrate Italy’s triumph through marches and ceremonial events. “Viale Mussolini [was] the city’s principal thoroughfare and parading ground—literally, for the people but symbolically, for the fascist regime,” Mariam says. Many buildings in the city center were once inscribed with Mussolini’s name, and boasted fascist political motifs (later removed during the British administration).

In spite of this dark history, today the people of Eritrea take great pride in the buildings designed by Italian settlers, and understandably so: not only is Asmara’s architecture beautiful, it is the most comprehensive collection of modernist architecture in the world. And though the Italians imagined it this way, it was the native Eritreans who actually brought it to life.

“The number of Eritrean laborers in the 1940s was 39,300, compared with 8,380 Italians,” Mariam notes. “Eritrean laborers were the predominant workforce on buildings sites, carrying out manual, semi-skilled, and skilled tasks from digging trenches to laying infrastructure and erecting buildings.” Asmara’s prized buildings were all built in a six-year period; without the labor of the native people, Italy alone could not have achieved this pace of urban development. Today’s Eritreans remember their fathers and grandfathers’ roles in the building of Asmara.

Rather than allow these historic buildings, neglected but untouched, to fall into greater disrepair, most Eritreans feel it is better to preserve them, and ultimately reframe what they represent. “Eritreans distinguish the political motivation from the built environment,” Mariam says. “We feel that these buildings and infrastructure were built by our fathers and forefathers, and have no negative attitude towards the buildings.”

Still, Asmara’s layout is decidedly not neutral. The labor—and displacement—of native Eritreans lies buried in the blueprint of the city. Fassil Demissie, an associate professor of public policy at DePaul University, argues that it’s important to remember that colonial powers conquered places not only through physical control of people, but through urban planning too. “Colonialism requires highly rigorous planning,” Demissie says. “[Asmara’s architecture] was never meant for the entire population.” The Italian government intentionally designed the city based on racially segregated zones; today’s Aba Shawl district was known as the indigenous quarter during the Italian colonial era, and was deprived of proper infrastructure and amenities. Unsurprisingly, most of the stunningly modernist architecture Asmara is celebrated for is found in the city center (read: the European zone).

“Eritrea is the first African state to petition UNESCO to have the city designated as a World Heritage Site for fascist architecture,” Demissie says. “No country in the world today has designated fascist architecture for a World Heritage Site. Not even the Italian government in Italy.” This selective memory, which prioritizes the beauty of the buildings over the ugliness of colonialism, is in line with how Italian people remember this mid-20th century occupation. “Italians are very fond of Eritrea,” Demissie says. “They don’t want to remember the fascist part—even with Italians today there’s not a lot of sentiment. But there is a special place in their heart for Eritrea.”

Rebranding Asmara is a complicated pursuit, one that depends on eschewing stories of conflict in favor of ones that present Asmara as precious, albeit challenged. The truth hangs somewhere in the balance. In a recent paper, Demissie argues that this UNESCO-approved framing of Asmara is “geared to reshaping and manipulating history consistent with the official story of the ruling party... the complex and contested nature of its history, its subjugated people and their narrative has been homogenized and standardized in favor of the official narrative of the state.”

To the Asmara Heritage Project’s credit, the Aba Shawl zone is included in the UNESCO World Heritage Site distinction. Another element of AHP’s master plan is to conserve Asmara’s relatively healthy buildings while also developing underserved, indigenous areas like Aba Shawl. Including the spaces originally intended for those with indigenous heritage is essential. Without them, what would UNESCO be preserving? European history… in Africa?

Admittedly, the agenda behind UNESCO’s decision to name Asmara a World Heritage Site comes with an interest in making the city attractive to tourists, but the addition of a modernist site in Africa to the World Heritage List is clearly significant. As Mariam points out, it “challenges some the fundamental principles underpinning the heritage industry and calls for a decentering of modernist history to more fairly reflect and better understand global encounters with modernity.”

UNESCO itself acknowledges this broadened definition of modernism, calling Asmara “an exceptional example of early modernist urbanism at the beginning of the 20th century and its application in an African context.” For this reason, among others, allowing the Futurist architecture of Asmara to waste away seems misguided.

Eritrea’s history as a country once under the boot of Italian fascism is not one to be romanticized, but preserving the architecture that this occupation spawned is a conscious choice to hold onto the very best part. Part of responsible restoration, then, becomes about rewriting the city’s story from the perspective of the oppressed. Asmara’s buildings, built in the fascist imagination, will be restored and tourism may spike, but at least the conversation will not overlook the Eritrean people who built Asmara and sustained its culture.

The only way to responsibly think about the future of Asmara is to take the past into account. So, fittingly, Eritreans and Italians are now working together. To prepare the Conservation Master Plan (which includes conservation guidelines and regulations), the AHP is collaborating with a team of Italian experts. Eritreans and Italians involved in the project have been able to exchange knowledge, skills, and technology. This collaboration illustrates the tremendous change Asmara has undergone since Eritrea officially achieved independence in 1991. Streets have been repaved, the water supply system improved, and a sense of hope has been reinstated. Says Mariam, “Asmara will have a bright future by safeguarding its rich urban heritage and using that as leverage for fostering economic and social development.”

If you're endangered, it helps to be famous and cute.

Pity the Illinois cave amphipod, living a quiet life in one of a handful of cavities in two counties in southwestern Illinois. The little crustacean—roughly an inch long, and lightish gray—is endemic to the region, speckled across a landscape sometimes called the Illinois Sinkhole Plain.

The cave-dweller is also pretty anonymous. “If ever there were a creature that could be erased from creation without being missed it is Gammarus acherondytes, the Illinois cave amphipod,” the Chicago Tribune’s Peter Kendall reported in 1997.

Only a year later, the little crustacean landed on the federal roster of endangered species. More recently, its precarious position also earned it a spot in a new visual guide highlighting the less-known wildlife that could disappear from each U. S. state.

Facing the double-whammy of vulnerability and anonymity, the Illinois cave amphipod faced a climb that charismatic species—like the megafauna whose faces land on postage stamps, or in magazines and PSAs—or ones with obvious ecological or economic benefits don’t. But unfamiliar species matter, too, to conservationists who believe in casting a wide net of protections, and to people who view any struggling organism as a kind of canary, signaling problems that could ripple elsewhere.

These illustrations—made by NetCredit, with information drawn from the U. S. Fish & Wildlife Service—shed light, and a bit of love, on those less-famous species. Meet a few struggling creatures who don’t get much time in the spotlight:

San Juan Mountains: Uncompahgre Fritillary Butterfly

If you’re out to spot this ochre-hued butterfly, named for the Colorado mountain where it was first reported, you better be looking at one of 11 clusters of snow willow growing above 12,000 feet.

Etowah River Basin: Etowah Darter

This fish, designated as endangered in 1994, has been found upstream and downstream on this Georgia river, and in tributaries and nearby creeks.

Salt Creek: Salt Creek Tiger Beetle

This small, burrowing beetle has spindly legs, but a lot of hustle: According to the FWS, it seizes “smaller or similar-sized arthropods in a ‘tiger-like’ manner by grasping prey with its mandibles.” It stalks eastern Nebraska—specifically the northern third of Lancaster County, the FWS reports. There, it lives in the saline wetlands, streams, and tributaries of the Salt Creek.

Researchers are teaming up to save chikanda.

When relatives visited Brighton Kaoma’s childhood home in the Copperbelt Province of central Zambia, they'd come bearing gifts: oblong brown chikanda, freshly dug from the earth of the family’s ancestral village. The tubers weren’t from yams or potatoes. Instead, they were foraged from the wild orchids that dot the dambos, or grasslands, of northern Zambia, their ornate blossoms shocks of color in the marshy knolls

Kaoma’s family, who belong to the Bemba people of Zambia’s Northern and North-Western Provinces, would grind the tubers with peanuts and chiles, then boil them with water and soda to form a cake. Also called chikanda, this brown-speckled, earthy loaf—sometimes referred to as “African polony” for its bologna-like texture—bears the unique flavor of each wild tuber species used in its creation.

Chikanda was a traditional food for lean times, when Bemba women and girls combed the dambos for the tubers they considered a god-given resource. But for Bemba people like Kaoma, who grew up in cities, chikanda is a special occasion food, served at weddings and to honor guests. It’s so integral to Bemba tradition, new brides often make the dish for their husbands’ families to show respect—and to show off their cooking. When family members prepared chikanda for him growing up, Kaoma says, “I would feel highly respected."

Today, though, vendors hawk slices of chikanda to hungry shoppers on the bustling streets of Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, and to bleary beer-drinkers in bars. In the rapidly growing city’s glossy new supermarkets, chikanda is on the shelves. At large restaurants, it’s on the menu. In the past decade or so, says Kaoma, cofounder and executive director of the Lusaka-based youth nonprofit Agents of Change, this food of rural scarcity has become an urban trend.

“People are going back to the traditional food,” says Royd Vinya, Dean of the School of Natural Resources at Zambia’s Copperbelt University, who oversees the university’s chikanda sustainability project. At a time when indigenous diets across Africa are increasingly challenged by corporate agriculture and fast food chains, Vinya says, “Everybody wants to get connected back to where they came from.”

But there’s a catch. While the craving for chikanda may represent a yearning for rural roots, skyrocketing demand for the snack has depleted Zambia’s wild orchid population. Since the flowers are notoriously difficult to cultivate in captivity, conservationists fear the craze may wipe wild orchids off Zambia’s map.

Orchid overharvesting isn’t just a Zambian problem. A booming illegal orchid trade threatens many of the world’s more than 20,000 known orchid species. The growing popularity of tuber-based Turkish salep, a warm, wintertime drink, has decimated orchid populations in the Middle East. Meanwhile, increasing demand for chikanda in urban Zambia has led to the import of the tubers from nearby Tanzania, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of Congo—a trade that is exporting the risk of overharvesting abroad.

This isn’t just bad news for orchids. Rural women in Zambia’s northern regions rely on chikanda for subsistence and, increasingly, for income. Due to dwindling wild supply, it now takes hours to gather the tubers they could previously collect in minutes. While chikanda is more lucrative than the subsistence agriculture communities are accustomed to, collectors lack direct access to urban markets, and often don’t know how much their wares are truly worth. “They are being taken advantage of by people who are coming from the city,” Vinya says.

Meanwhile, market pressures have pushed collectors to abandon traditional sustainability practices. While in the past, foragers would only harvest tubers after the plants had spread their seed, and would replant the stalk in hopes that the chikanda would regenerate from it, locals have largely abandoned these practices. “What we are seeing is massive exploitation of the plant,” says Paul Mumba, a plant breeding specialist at Copperbelt University.

For Kaoma, chikanda's exploitation is part of Zambia’s broader struggle to develop sustainably. He grew up in Copperbelt Province, where mines made the air so thick with toxic sulphur dioxide he often couldn’t see through the haze. “I was 14 when I realized that my community was dying slowly,” he says. Kaoma co-founded Agents of Change in response. He sees the creation of a sustainable chikanda trade as vital for environmental and economic justice.

Kaoma isn't alone. Agents of Change Foundation is part of a coalition, alongside researchers from Copperbelt University, Sweden’s Uppsala University, Zambian NGO Sanga Research and Development, and the U.K.’s Royal Garden at Kew, that has collaborated since 2016 to create a more sustainable chikanda trade. Funded in part by the U.K.’s Darwin Initiative, the partners share a common goal: to develop a chikanda cultivar that communities can farm for profit.

To determine which chikanda species are under the greatest threat, researchers began with the basics. Because chikanda are wild and their trade unregulated, scientists don’t actually know which orchid species are most severely impacted. By the time chikanda arrive into Lusaka’s bustling markets, the irregular brown tubers are indistinguishable by species. So building on work begun in 2014, project partners from the de Boer lab at Sweden’s Uppsala University used DNA barcoding to catalog the wild orchid tubers by species.

Travelling the marshy grasslands and bustling markets of Zambia and neighboring Tanzania, researchers collected tissue samples from chikanda tubers and even the spicy, savory cakes themselves. By comparing the material with the genetic profiles of known varieties, researchers found 16 distinct orchid species used in the trade. If chikanda producers continue harvesting wild orchids, this diversity will be lost.

Researchers are using the results of the DNA survey to target conservation efforts toward the most vulnerable species. But they also hope to eliminate the need to gather wild orchids at all, by developing a chikanda cultivar that local communities can farm. In the labs and greenhouses of Copperbelt University, chikanda seedlings sprout in plastic bins and unfurl dainty white blossoms from grey pots. But developing a commercially viable chikanda strain is no easy task.

Orchids are exquisitely adapted to the climate they evolved in, says Jonathan Kendon, lab technician at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew. But that means they’re notoriously finicky outside it. They’re agonizingly slow-growing, with Zambian orchids taking 18 months to two years to mature into full-grown plants—speedy compared to the 10-year maturation period of some species. And while other tubers, like potatoes kept too long in your cupboard, can grow multiple new plants from the dimpled “eyes” on their surface, chikanda tubers only have one eye, meaning that most of them can only produce one offspring. Meanwhile, chikanda seeds are tiny, dust-like, and delicate, dependent on a symbiotic relationship with a local fungus to sprout. “It’s one complicated seed that gives you a lot of hell,” says Mumba.

Because of these challenges, researchers estimate that it will take up to 10 years to create commercially viable chikanda strains. In the meantime, Vinya’s team is working with local communities to ensure the chikanda boom benefits the people who traditionally gather and prepare the tubers. The challenge, says Kaoma, lies in regulating the market to meet conservation goals while also respecting indigenous people’s right to the land.

To address this tension, Vinya’s team is working with chikanda producers in three Northwestern Province villages to create community conservation plans, written in their local language and accessible across literacy levels. In these plans, chikanda gatherers envision better collective management of dambos and more direct market access for the women whose labor powers the industry.

Guni Kokwe, co-founder of Sanga Research and Development, says that communities have yet to hit on a surefire sustainability plan. But, Kokwe says, one thing is for certain: “If there’s going to be a solution for this, it’s going to be a local solution.”

Conditions there are ripe for trying out new techniques.

The wine scene in Washington state has exploded in recent years. The number of active wineries operating in the state has increased from just 19 in 1981 to more than 900 today. Among these is a new generation of experimental winemakers who take unconventional approaches at every stage in the process, from the growing techniques to bottling practices and the winemaking itself.

“People are doing things that have never been done before. There’s definitely a pioneering spirit out here,” says Kelly Johnson, the owner and head winemaker at Tetrahedron Wines in Lyle, Washington. At Tetrahedon, traditional winemaking practices blend with modern, science-based techniques. Johnson is one of dozens of Washington State winemakers who are searching for ways to innovate, with delicious results. Plenty of these blends will be available to try during Taste Washington: an annual event in Seattle that features some of the state’s most notable talent in both food and wine.

"This is our first year at Taste Washington," says Johnson. "This will be the largest and most diverse group of industry tasters and consumers to try our wines thus far. I am excited to see their response."

“We are not your typical wine industry people,” says Rachael Horn of AniChe Cellars in Underwood, Washington. Instead of tweaking grapes in a lab to achieve high marks on a 100–point scale, AniChe’s wines are focused on showcasing what wines should show as agricultural products: a sense of when and where their grapes were grown. That means letting grapes be grapes, not imposing a certain flavor profile on them or modifying them based on wine scoring criteria.

“In our hippie–dippie way, we ask the fruit what it wants to be, then we don’t manipulate it with chemistry to force it to meet a certain style—we guide it into wine without an agenda,” Horn says. The result is a series of blends that “taste” like the area they came from. With cheeky names like “Goat Boy” and “Three Witches,” Horn acknowledges that her customers aren’t traditional. “Our target market is not someone looking for your standard wine; they want something more adventurous,” she says.

Many Washington winemakers are taking an active role in the growing process, turning to unconventional techniques that are similarly focused on creating wines with a distinct sense of place. Syncline Winery, also in Lyle, farms all of its estate fruit in accordance with biodynamic principles, a holistic approach that positions the vineyard as a solid, self-sustaining entity.

“Biodynamic for me isn’t about making the best kind of wine—it’s about making wine that’s truly expressive of where it’s grown,” says winemaker James Mantone. From his point of view, biodynamics are a means to an end: a way to bring vitality and energy back to the farm, and to make it a cleaner, safer, and more sustainable environment to work in. “Hopefully, that comes through in the energy of the wines,” he says.

Mantone also cites Syncline’s unique climate and topography as an inspiration for taking risks. The winery is located in the middle of the Cascade Mountains, but the craggy landscape is bisected by the Columbia River, creating an unusually dynamic environment that can support less-common varietals. Mantone looks to similarly mountainous regions in Austria, Hungary, eastern France, and northern Italy for inspiration on what to plant, landing on grapes such as Mondeuse noire (which Syncline was the first in Washington to plant commercially), Furmint, and Lemberger. But he is perhaps most excited about growers and winemakers pushing vineyard developments into newer, more challenging-to-grow-in areas such as hillsides and rocky regions. “People are willing to take risks to develop harder areas, which leads to more unique expressions of the grapes we already grow, and new varieties too,” he says.

Johnson is a prime example. Armed with a biology degree from Washington State University and 13 years of experience working in the labs for Trinchero (one of the biggest winemaking estates in Napa), she now spends her time experimenting with varieties and techniques at her own winery. Currently, she’s testing planting Charbono, a northern Italian varietal that’s rarely seen in Washington. “We’ll see what happens,” she says with a laugh.

In the meantime, she puts her science background to good use in the winemaking process. Johnson employs a sur lie aging process for her white wines. This method, which keeps wine in contact with spent yeast cells without filtering them, yields a more robust mouthfeel.

“It’s a technique that requires more monitoring, because you have to keep smelling and tasting the wines to make sure they’re going in the right direction,” she says. “Since my background is in the lab, I can run my own analysis and course-correct if things start looking off.” The result of not having to follow industrial-grade rules and regulations, she says, are wines that are “more complex, more interesting, and more fun.”

Johnson also runs lab analyses for her neighboring winemakers, embodying the kind of collaborative and creative spirit that several Washington winemakers say is part of what makes the industry here unique.

“There’s a lot of young people bringing new energy,” says Mantone. “I’ve been making wine here for 25 years, and when I came in as a kid, I had all sorts of crazy ideas.” Now, he says, there are even more crazy kids with crazy ideas. “And I think that’s great,” he adds.

Experience the new breed of Washington wines at one of six different events during Taste Washington, March 28-31. See a calendar of events and get your tickets here.

Our readers shared some of their favorite collections of greenery in the world.

Botanical gardens are the kind of special green spaces that you might have in your own backyard, but rarely take the time to explore. They can be self-contained little wonderlands, home to all kinds of rare flowers and plants collected from around the world and cultivated with tender care, along winding paths or in steamy greenhouses. Over in Atlas Obscura’s Community forums, one of our most active readers, Monsieur_Mictlan, recently asked people to post about their favorite botanical gardens from around the world, and the replies just burst into bloom.

From university gardens to green spaces at the top of the world, our users shared some amazing places, and we wish we could get to each and every one. Take a look at some of our favorite responses below, and head over to the forums to share your own finds, near home or around the world!

University of Ferrara Botanic Garden

Ferrara, Italy

“One of my favorite-ever places that I’ve stumbled upon accidentally was Orto Botanico ed Erbario di Ferrara, the botanical gardens in Ferrara in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy. By chance I passed by, saw that there were free gardens and thought, ‘Yeah, why not?’ I was surprised and delighted to find a small paradise of plants from all over the world and a pond of outstandingly cute turtles. I came to Ferrara for the castle, but I left having fallen in love with the the lush, diverse gardens, and its shell-backed denizens.” — JamazingClayton

Phipps Conservatory

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

“They have rooms dedicated to several different climates. The rain forest is probably my favorite, including waterfalls, and the butterfly room is absolutely charming, too. They had an installation of Chihuly glass a few years ago and bought a few pieces.” — anodyne33

Longwood Gardens

Kennett Square, Pennsylvania

“The grounds and indoor displays are immense. There are numerous programs and changing indoor exhibits, in addition to nighttime fountain displays and theater productions using some of the fountains as curtains.” — tlubaroff

Butchart Gardens

Victoria, British Columbia

“It is in an abandoned rock quarry outside of the city. Displays change seasonally, so any time of year is a great time to visit. The gardens can be visited at night as well to get a whole different perspective. My suggestion is to visit late in the afternoon, pause for a lovely dinner in the garden restaurant, and then walk around the garden to enjoy the way the lights affect the view. Sometimes fireworks shows are added in the evening.” — mary_e8a60360

Akureyri Botanical Garden

Akureyri, Iceland

“Located just 50 km [30 miles] from the Arctic Circle, it’s one of the northernmost botanical gardens. We spent an afternoon walking through the lovely trails to see all of the different flowers and plants. There’s also a nice ‘hygge’ cafe located near the entrance and close to the nursery, which you can also visit.” — From_the_Backwoods

Atlanta Botanical Garden

Atlanta, Georgia

“The Atlanta Botanical Garden here in town is great. Huge hothouse area, lots of outdoor space, an orangerie, concerts, art, and if you like orchids, that’s their specialty.” — DeepFriedDuck

Jardín Etnobotánico de Oaxaca

Oaxaca, Mexico

“An especially cool detail, ‘During the excavation and building of the Jardín Etnobotánico, archaeologists uncovered 400-year-old structures, in some cases dating back to the construction of Santo Domingo.’ They incorporated the structures into the plantings! ‘A bathing-washing pit once used by Dominican novices is now shaded by soapberry, agave, and other plants used to make soap; near the monastery’s library, along the western wall enclosing the garden, de Ávila planted a fig tree—the particular species was a source for the finest indigenous paper in pre-Columbian times.’” — natashafrost

ABQ BioPark

Albuquerque, New Mexico

“I loved the botanical gardens in Albuquerque, New Mexico, when I saw them 10 years ago. I can’t find my old photos, and it was long enough ago that I only remember snippets, but I remember a dragon in the fairy-tale garden, long swaths of camellias, and some very sweet cows in the farming section. I think the aquarium was adjacent, too.” — Ssshannon

Nevis Botanical Gardens

Montpelier Estate, Saint Kitts and Nevis

“Nevis Botanical Gardens will always hold a special place in my heart.” — rachelmahmoud

Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden

Cape Town, South Africa

“Kirstenbosch Garden in Cape Town is high on my list. I’ve been to Butchart Gardens in British Columbia, but even in winter that South African beauty took my breath away with the myriad protea species!" — kumalavula

Riverbanks Botanical Garden

West Columbia, South Carolina

“I just wanted to shout my hometown’s botanical gardens, mainly because you wouldn’t expect such a vast collection to be in little ol’ Columbia, South Carolina. The photos on their website do not do it justice.” — alexaharrison

United States Botanic Garden

Washington, D.C.

“The U.S. Botanic Garden is a little oasis in the National Mall area in D.C. There’s an annual holiday collection of D.C. landmarks made out of plant materials called ‘Season’s Greenings,’ and a model train runs through a collection of buildings that are also made of plant materials.” — AnyaPH

University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley

Berkeley, California

“I visit botanical gardens everywhere I go, but University of California, Berkeley’s garden is my favorite. It’s like a mini-botanical trip around the world, with great views of the San Francisco Bay at the same time, while providing more information about the plants than I usually see in gardens. If I were planning a wedding, I’d have it there… but not when the notoriously stinky corpse flower [titan arum] comes into its rare bloom.” — onoma

Much of the cargo is still missing, but for different reasons.

One hundred and sixty-two years ago, these gold ingots exacerbated a financial crisis. But now they’re about to bring in some serious cash.

Next week, Heritage Auctions in Dallas, Texas, will sell three gold blocks that sank on board the SS Central America in September 1857, along with 425 people and the rest of the 10-ton golden cargo. At press time, the largest of the three blocks was going for a bid of $220,000.

The SS Central America was on a mission to help relieve the United States from the deepening "Panic of 1857," which had begun on August 24, 1857, when the New York branch of the Ohio Life Insurance and Trust Company folded. The gold was en route to New York, where it was desperately needed in order to restock the banks that had been emptied out by scores of panicked withdrawals. According to JustCollecting News, the ship was carrying eight million dollars’ worth of gold—that would be about 300 million dollars in today’s terms.

Fate, of course, had something else in mind. The ship—which had originally departed from Colón, Panama, on September 3, 1857, and had made an additional stop in Havana, Cuba—went down in a hurricane on the coast of the Carolinas. One hundred and fifty-three passengers survived by escaping in lifeboats, but the loss of life was disastrous, and the financial implications massive. The sunken SS Central America came to be known as “The Ship of Gold,” the lost and final resting place of 425 unfortunate souls and a monumental, consequential fortune.

It took more than a century—until 1988—before the Columbus-America Discovery Group recovered the wreck, achieving what JustCollecting calls “the greatest treasure discovery in American history” and netting the group’s leader, Tommy Gregory Thompson, 52 million dollars in sales from the findings. Among them was “Eureka,” an ingot that weighed 80 pounds and sold for eight million dollars, which was then a world record price for sold pieces of currency.

But the saga didn’t end there: Thompson absconded in 2012 after being summoned to court, accused of depriving the expedition’s investors of their share of the profits. It took years to track him down—and though he was ultimately caught in January 2015, the rest of the treasures in his possession remain missing.

Luckily, for numismatic enthusiasts with a few hundred thousand dollars on hand, these three ingots are safe and sound on the auction block. They weigh, respectively, 13.35, 17.48, and 185.21 ounces, and were originally prospected during the California Gold Rush, along with the rest of the gold on board the SS Central America.

They were baked into cakes and dropped into baths.

They abound on Etsy and eBay: Tiny dolls, usually with dark-painted hair and red lips, and skin as white as snow. Made of white bisque, a type of porcelain, they lie frozen in place without any joints. During the Victorian era in the United States, these little dolls were baked into cakes, associated with a famous dessert, and sought after by young girls, just as they are sought after by collectors today. But it wasn't a little girl that gave the doll her name: Frozen Charlotte.

The doll's origins—as a German bath-time novelty, meant to float in a tub—were innocent, but its arrival in the United States, in the mid 1800s, coincided with the popularity of a morbid song. The story goes that Maine writer Seba Smith stumbled upon a newspaper story that recounted how a young woman froze to death in her carriage on the way to a ball. Hit with inspiration, Smith, who is also known as the first to record the word scrumptious, scribbled a poem on the theme. Published in 1843, A Corpse Going to a Ball described how on a frosty night, a young lady named Charlotte refused to wear a blanket over her fine clothes. When they arrived, her more-bundled-up beau found her frozen to death in the sleigh.

The poem was a hit, as it touched on the dangers of vanity and not listening to your parents. Set to music, it became a popular ballad. When Americans first saw the hard, white bisque dolls, the association with the unfortunate Charlotte must have seemed obvious. They began referring to them as Frozen Charlottes. Sometimes sold for as little as a penny, Frozen Charlottes (and the occasional male Charlie) were made by the million.

The doll's small shape made it ideal for another purpose. Hiding coins or figurines in cakes is a tradition with ancient roots. A tiny doll in a Mardi Gras king cake, for example, is meant to bring prosperity to the finder (or to decide who will provide next year's cake. ) While a baby figurine is usually placed inside cakes, the small, inexpensive Frozen Charlotte was also well suited for the purpose.

The dolls were sold well into the 20th century, and surviving examples are easy to find online. But there's another way to enjoy the doll's culinary legacy, because Frozen Charlotte also took on another association. During the doll's heyday, the ladyfinger-and-Bavarian cream dessert Charlotte Russe was also popular. Gradually, a frozen version of the dessert came to be called, of course, "Frozen Charlotte": an appropriately sweet, if chilly, name.

When the infamously cloudy continent got a February reprieve, satellites got a clear view.

Europe is busy and bustling, of course, packed with people and plants, cities and farmland. All that action down below, though, is often obscured from the sky.

Normally, Europe is cloudy this time of year, NASA reports, “when the jet stream often steers storm systems directly toward Western Europe.” But cloud cover is common a lot of other times, too. One longitudinal study of satellite data found that more than two-thirds of the planet’s surface was generally cloaked by clouds, and this soupy shroud was especially pronounced right near the equator and then in wider bands 60 degrees north and south of it, including one that belts Europe. There, two of the planet’s large air circulation features—the Ferrel cell and the polar cell—collide and thrust air upward, according to NASA.

But at the end of February, a high-pressure system moved through. The temperatures were warm, and the skies were uncommonly clear. That allowed satellite images to capture bright city lights and multi-colored landscapes in Eastern and central Europe that are usually engulfed by white wisps.

Two images from the last week in February were recently shared by NASA’s Earth Observatory. The daytime image, captured with the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Terra satellite, shows a patchwork of greens, browns, and beige. The areas that appear the deepest green are the ones with the thickest forest cover; farmland registers as more brown or khaki. Things are greener in Belgium, the Netherlands, and parts of the U.K. and France than they are in central and Eastern Europe, NASA notes, where the dry cold can be lethal for plants. A nighttime image of the same region—taken aboard the Suomi NPP satellite—shows cities sparkling far below. (The gauzy glow around Central Europe is a thin layer of scattered cloud cover, NASA reports.) The satellite image highlights how—from a distance, and when the clouds give way—lit-up cities can look a bit like the cosmos.

Or at least until you want to do something else.

In 2025, applications will be accepted for the job of a lifetime—literally. A fair starting salary, with annual wage increases that match those for Swedish government workers, vacation time, even a pension, and the job is yours for as long as you do it. So what’s the job? Anything you want.

Each morning, the chosen employee will punch a clock in Korsvägen train station, currently under construction in Gothenburg, Sweden, which will turn on a bank of bright fluorescent lights. Other than that, “the position holds no duties or responsibilities besides the fact that the work should be carried out at Korsvägen. Whatever the employee chooses to do constitutes the work,” reads the job description. The employee can also choose how publicly visible or anonymous they would like to be while on the clock.

Eternal Employment is the brainchild of Swedish artistic duo Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby, who often spin real-world economics into giddy, strange new forms. For this project they are investing a prize from from Public Art Agency Sweden in conjunction with the Swedish Transport Administration—about $650,000. This forms the Eternal Employment foundation, which will grow the initial sum and form a board to select and pay the forever employee. Anyone in the world can apply, and “the foundation will be an equal opportunity employer,” Goldin and Senneby say over email. And when the employee retires or chooses to leave, the board will select another.

Korsvägen is one of three new underground stations being constructed to alleviate traffic pressure and create jobs in Gothenburg. Already Sweden’s second-largest city, its population is to projected to grow by at least 150,000 by 2035. Goldin and Senneby hope that the job will make the station more than a stopover between one place and another. Eternal Employment is also a response to the way Gothenburg is changing. The home of Volvo, it was once a major industrial and shipping center. In recent decades, it has developed into an arts and entertainment hub, boasting museums, concert venues, and a super-sized shrimp sandwich supposedly inspired by American portion sizes. As Gothenburg’s working class finds itself marginalized, Goldin and Senneby see a job that gives total control to the worker as an act of economic imagination.

A mock-up of the job description, composed by Lina Ekdahl, a Gothenburg-based poet, concludes: “We can’t take it anymore. Apply. Take over. Thank you.” The official application isn’t actually up yet, but will be posted a few months before the inauguration of Korsvägen station in 2026.

In this world, as you might expect, an “eternity” isn’t really forever. It is actually about 120 years. “That was the time span for which the station is planned on a physical/architectural scale,” the artists explain over email. Goldin and Senneby hope that, even when this particular version of eternity is over, the position will leave a lasting impression. While they don’t see this kind of undefined job as a vision of the future, they imagine a “point of reference for the future.” Working “as though you were at Korsvägen” might become the stuff of urban legend, they propose, an idiomatic expression in praise of idleness. As for what that means exactly? Who knows, you may get the chance to answer that question yourself.

For centuries, herdswomen have lured cows with haunting melodies.

When Jonna Jinton was twelve, she heard a song that would change the course of her life. During a school field trip to a music museum in her home country of Sweden, Jinton and her classmates were instructed to clasp their hands over their ears. The tour guide then let out a cry—a haunting, high-pitched song that rattled the room. Some students might have clamped their hands over their pulsing ears even harder, but Jinton, taken by the sound, wanted to hear it.“I didn't want to keep my hands over my ears,” she recalls. “It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. It was so strong."

Having now mastered this Scandinavian vocal technique known as kulning, Jinton performs and posts her own songs for hundreds of thousands of captivated YouTube subscribers and Instagram followers. For most viewers, her videos are an introduction to kulning. But the practice is far from new. Kulning is an ancient herding call that Swedish women have practiced for hundreds of years. But in recent decades, Jinton says, it’s been largely forgotten.

Less than a century ago, Sweden’s remote forests and mountain pastures swelled with women’s voices each summer. As dusk approached, the haunting calls of kulning echoed through the trees in short, cascading, lyricless phrases. Though often quite melodic, these weren’t simply musical expressions. They were messages intended for a responsive audience: wayfaring cattle. Kulning was a surefire way to hurry the herds home at the end of the day.

According to Susanne Rosenberg, professor and head of the folk music department at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and kulning expert, the vocal technique likely dates back to at least the medieval era. In the spring, farmers sent their livestock to a small fäbod, or remote, temporary settlement in the mountains, so cows and goats could graze freely. Women, young and old, accompanied the herds, living in relative isolation from late May until early October. Far from the village, they tended to the animals, knitted, crafted whisks and brooms, milked the cows, and made cheese—often working sixteen hour days. Life on the fäbod was arduous work, but it was freeing, too. “It was only women, and they had all this free space to make a lot of noise,” says Jinton. “They had their own paradise.”

The herds grazed during the daytime, wandering far from the cottages, and thus needed to be called in each night. Women developed kulning to amplify the power of their voices across the mountainous landscape, resulting in an eerie cry loud enough to lure livestock from their grazing grounds.

One should always take caution when hanging out with someone kulning, as it can't be done quietly. Rosenberg, who’s researched the volume of kulning, says it can reach up to 125 decibels—which, she warns, is dangerously loud for someone standing next to the source. Comparable to the pitch and volume of a dramatic soprano singing forte, kulning can be heard by an errant cow over five kilometers away. This explains how the song might reach a distant herd, but what prompts animals to trot over remains a bit of a mystery. “That we have to ask the cows!” says Rosenberg. “But it’s really no stranger than calling a dog.”

Much like trained pets, cows feel loyalty to the humans who care for them. According to Rosenberg, it only takes one solid affinity between a cow and a woman to bring the whole herd home. “There's always at least one cow that is the smart cow, in a herd,” she says. “She's like the leader cow.” Once this particularly enlightened cow hears the call, Rosenberg suspects, she heads toward the source, encouraging the rest of the herd to follow suit.

To do this at such great volume, requires learning the proper technique, which, it turns out, is a far cry from that of classical or popular singing. “It's more like calling,” says Rosenberg. “Like if you see somebody on the other end of the street, it’s the way you would use your voice naturally to try to get their attention.” Kulning was taught orally. Young women learned from the old, imitating the songs of their elders and slowly adding individual flair and vocal ornamentation. Rosenberg, who now teaches kulning in a classroom setting, says the key to the call is improvisation. “You have to have variation, because you never know how long you're going to be calling for.” In other words, you have to keep singing until the cows come home.

Cows, however, weren’t the only ones on the receiving end of kulning. The call could ward off predators in the woods, and served as a form of communication between women who were otherwise isolated from one another. If a cow went missing, for instance, a woman on one farm might cry out using a particular melody to pass the message to those within earshot. Once the cow had been located, her far-off neighbor would convey the news back to her in song.

Rosenberg discovered something else during her research. While interviewing herdswomen from the last generation to regularly practice kulning in the context of the fäbod, she became aware of the call’s effect on the women. “There’s a pride in it,” she says. “This a skill that they cherish by themselves, too.” It became obvious to Rosenberg that kulning wasn’t simply a tool, but also a form of individual musical expression. “Many researchers and ethnomusicologists try to separate the function and the art,” she says. “But I found that with kulning, function and art are actually just two sides of the same thing.” This was apparent in the joy it brought the herdswomen she spoke to, the pleasure it brought those in earshot who would stop their work to listen, and the shivers the sound can send down the spine today, even through tinny laptop speakers.

Perhaps it’s the intangible thrill of kulning that has allowed it to survive into the modern day, even as the fäbod milieu slowly receded from Swedish society. From the 1960s to the 1980s, remote summertime herding faded from practice, and kulning was approaching obsoletion. Luckily, a few historians and musicians, including Rosenberg, were intent on weaving it into Swedish culture in new contexts, using new platforms.

With the help of people like Rosenberg, traditional music saw a revival—finding new life in theater, contemporary folk music, university classrooms, feminist organizations, and beyond. A few decades later, an inspired Jinton would go on to learn the technique by studying one of Rosenberg’s books. Now, she’s intent upon sharing kulning with the public through social media.

When Jinton turned 21, she decided to quit her studies to move from the city of Gothenburg to a cottage in Grundtjärn, the remote village where her mother was born. She began practicing kulning more regularly—in the forest, to prevent unexpected bear encounters, or to serenade her cow, Stjärna. She began a blog, and when she posted her first video of kulning, it instantly went viral. “Before I started sharing my videos, I thought I was alone feeling this way about these sounds,” says Jinton. “But so many people were feeling something special, almost as if they were being reminded of something.” Kulning can entrance creatures of all kinds—from loyal cows to enraptured Instagrammers. Jinton intends to spread that feeling to others by performing a vanishing art.

But Rosenberg has a different take. Maybe, she says, kulning never disappeared. Instead, it’s simply resurfaced in new ways. If you listen closely, she says, you can find kulning everywhere in Sweden today. You can hear it on stage at a folk show, or in someone’s backyard when a mother calls her children in for dinner. Some women have even learned the far-carrying cries as a form of self-defense, says Rosenberg. It has survived, she says, by shifting as it slips into new contexts. “I do not see it as a revival,” she says. “It's really a continuation of an expression that is so strong, it will always find a way to persist.”

An introduction to cetacean forensics.

By the time vultures began circling, the young humpback whale was lying in a sea of brown and green, not blue. Beached and bloating in a mangrove forest on the Brazilian island of Marajó, near the mouth of the Amazon River, the 10-ton, year-old whale was surrounded by a tangle of leaves, branches, and roots.

The animal was dead, that much was obvious to the team that approached it, as they tripped over brush and flushed birds into the sky. Determining how, when, and where it died—and how it had ended up more than 50 feet from the shore, far from where one might expect—was a bit harder to puzzle out.

It’s not especially unusual for dead whales to turn up on land. When they do, their bodies hold mysteries for scientists to solve. Ancient remains might lead to insights into historical climate and changes in the ocean. (In 2014, for instance, a team of researchers led by paleobiologists from the Smithsonian Institution found more than 40 individual cetaceans, including some representing long-extinct species, in what amounted to a mass grave in Chile’s Atacama Desert, where they concluded that the animals had probably all died in different algal blooms.) When scientists come across more recently dead animals, the investigation is more or less forensic, which means that there's a set of clues for every unknown.

When whales die, they either sink to the seafloor or wash up on land, eventually. Those ones that reach the bottom of the ocean become what’s known as whale fall—essentially, a heaping buffet that can support entire ecosystems—while wind, currents, and waves bring others ashore. When they show up farther inland, like the one in Brazil, it’s usually safe to assume that they were put there by storms or by humans, who might have wanted to give the creature a ceremonial burial or clean its bones for a museum or university, harvest the flesh for food, invite scavengers to pick the bones bare, or just stash a smelly carcass away. (If interred somewhere between the high and low tide marks—which vary by place and season—a whale carcass is likely to resurface “like Brigadoon above the sand,” says Joy Reidenberg, a comparative anatomist and professor at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, who specializes in the anatomy of whales and other large aquatic animals.) In this case, researchers from the marine conservation group Bicho D’Água, who inspected the whale, told The Independent that they suspect that it had been cast inland by high tides under a full moon.

Wherever it’s found, a whale carcass also holds clues about the cause and time of death. The Independent reported that researchers from Bicho D’Água have already given the animal a once-over and sent samples to a lab for analysis. Those results haven’t yet been reported, and the organization has not responded to Atlas Obscura’s requests for comment. But “there’s lots of forensics stuff before you even open it up,” says Reidenberg, who did not examine this whale, but looked at photographs. “It becomes a medical examiner case.”

First, the whale’s body position can indicate whether it was dead or alive when it washed ashore. Sick, weary whales seek solace in shallow, protected areas, “to basically rest, the way you’d want to stay in bed if you have the flu,” Reidenberg says. If they die there, they will land on shore belly-down. Waves or bloat may rock a carcass onto its side or back, but usually a fresh, belly-up carcass will already have been dead when it reaches the shore, Reidenberg says. Floating baleen whale carcasses tend to turn that way because methane and other gases from decomposition accumulate in their long, expandable, pleated throats. On dead humpbacks, these pleats—which stretch from below the mouth to the navel—function something like “a giant life-preserver,” Reidenberg says. Because this young whale was found with its belly turned skyward, Reidenberg suspects that it was already dead by the time it reached the mangroves, where its body may have snagged on roots.

The animal’s flesh might also yield hints about cause of death, Reidenberg says. Humpbacks’ lifespan may be up to 80 years, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). When whales die young, it’s often because they fall victim to nets or other fishing gear. This is known as bycatch, and it’s thought to be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of cetaceans each year, according to the International Whaling Commission (IWC). Ship strikes can also be fatal, and are likely underreported because they may go unnoticed on very large vessels such as cruise liners or cargo ships, says the IWC, which is managing an ongoing project to map “hotspots” where whale populations overlap with shipping corridors. A whale’s flesh might show bruising, rust stains, or paint from such an incident, or bite marks from a shark, maybe, or deep slices carved by a propeller, or grooves from being ensnared in a rope. Bicho D’Água told the local news site G1 that they would examine the body for any signs that it had been entangled or struck.

The skin is an indicator that can point to the time of death. In the case of the humpback in Brazil, the animal’s characteristically inky skin had peeled off, leaving behind a grayish white, the color of a scuffed rubber sole. That indicates that the carcass wasn't fresh when it was found, Reidenberg says, noting that the temperature of the water can impact the rate of sloughing. And just like human remains, the presence, size, and development of maggots can help further refine the timeline of when a whale began to decompose on land. (Maggots aren’t likely to appear out to sea, but birds could begin working away at a carcass while it is still in the water, Reidenberg says.)

Scientists may also make an incision and look inside for a necropsy—the animal equivalent of a human autopsy. Researchers might find an enlarged organ or tumor, pus or other signs of a bacterial infection, or cracked vertebrae that could suggest a traumatic accident not otherwise visible on the surface. An empty stomach could indicate that the animal had been sick and forgoing food (or milk, in the case of a calf). A visible parasite load—such as worms that look like “giant spaghetti strands,” as thick as a human pinky finger—might lead researchers to wonder if an organ had been obstructed, or at least indicate that the animal wasn’t in great overall health before it died, Reidenberg adds. There’s also evidence to suggest that animals fleeing loud sonar by bolting up in the water column might end up with dangerous nitrogen bubbles in their vessels and tissues—just like a human diver with the bends, or decompression sickness. This may be an issue for pods of deep-diving toothed whales, such as sperm whales, Reidenberg says, which dive to more than 3,200 feet, but less of a concern for filter feeders that stay near the surface.

A dead whale in a forest may seem like a locked-room mystery, but it’s not all that surprising, except for the fact that it is unusual for a humpback to be found in the waters around Brazil at this time of year. Milton Marcondes, a research coordinator at the Humpback Whale Institute in Brazil, told LiveScience that the number of whales in local waters has recently increased, and local tides can fluctuate by more 23 feet, more than enough to move a whale carcass inland.

With a little forensic work, cracking this case might prove to be easier than actually moving the body. Brazilian officials have concluded that bulldozers or other heavy-duty vehicles that could move the whale carcass for dissection or burial won’t be able to navigate the terrain around it, The Independent reported. The hope, according to local news outlets, is that when the bones are picked clean by vultures, other scavengers, and insects, the skeleton will be able to be moved to a nearby museum.

Farmers in Madhya Pradesh are struggling to combat the avian theft.

In the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, the parrots are in a frenzy, one fueled by a seemingly unexpected source: opium.

Madhya Pradesh is part of what is known as the Malwa-Mewar belt, home to about 75 percent of India’s legal opium trade. As first reported by NDTV, this year has been a difficult one for poppy farmers across the region. Not only are they dealing with inadequate rainfall, but farmers are also facing off against hordes of fluorescent parrots with their sights set on plundering the opium-rich milk from poppy pods.

According to researchers, opium has a similar effect on parrots as caffeine does on humans, generating a similar addiction. These hyper bird bandits have become so adept at stealing opium that they’ve learned to wait for ill-fated farmers to crack open the poppy pods before they raid the stash. Splitting the poppy pods helps the plants ripen faster, but also provides the parrots with an easy score.

Poppy farmers in the Neemuch district told NDTV that groups of parrots can feed in the fields anywhere from 30 to 40 times a day, resulting in substantial crop loss. The Indian government requires growers to pre-commit to cultivating a certain amount of opium each year, which, if devoured by parrots, significantly hurts the farmers’ profits.

Farmers have asked the government for assistance with the parrot problem, but help hasn’t arrived. So the farmers have devised their own management techniques, including what LiveScience refers to as “sonic warfare”: setting off fireworks and using loudspeakers to deter the birds.

The sender returned it, confessed, and paid up.

It’s never too late to do the right thing. Recently, the Cuyahoga County Public Library, which serves the greater Cleveland, Ohio, area, got a surprising, 51-year-old gift. The library’s Parma branch, one of 27 tributaries, received a mysterious bubble mailer via the U.S. Postal Service. Inside, the librarians found a vintage Life magazine from September 1968, featuring The Beatles on the cover.

The Parma staff, tickled (and flummoxed) by the belated return, took a picture of the iconic issue and shared it with their fellow library branches. After making the rounds on social media, the unique journey of this 1968 magazine has become something of a suburban Ohio sensation. Robert Rua, of the Parma branch, says the copy of the magazine is undeniably theirs, though they don’t have records of periodicals from that long ago.

“It has our ownership stickers on it, the ones the library puts on our materials to make sure the items end up back with us,” he says. “So it clearly was one of our magazines … there’s a sticker in the upper left corner that is similar to the ones on our current magazines.” The return of a magazine from five decades ago is significant, as the library currently has no other magazines from this era. (They tend to not keep them quite so long.) Luckily, Rua says, the item was returned in fair shape—not mint condition, but there are no missing pages or egregiously frayed edges.

The sender, a basically anonymous “Brian,” also included a brief note, along with a money order for $100 to cover outstanding late fees. “It came with a very brief letter, and the letter said: ‘Hello, I stole this magazine from the Parma Ridge Road Library when I was a kid. I’m sorry I took it. I’ve enclosed a check for the late fee,’” Rua says. The branch processed the money order as they would any other late fee, although, by this point, the librarians had simply cut their losses and declared the special Beatles Life issue a “missing item.” Technically, Brian hadn’t actually accumulated the late fees, though—as he said, it was stolen, not checked out.

“The money order is signed but the last name is virtually impossible to make out, and the envelope just says Brian and claims to have been sent from an Air Force base,” says Rua. “So we don’t know who Brian is, he’s a mystery person. We don’t know why he sent this back to us after so many years.” In 1968, the branch building (which has since been remodeled) was walking distance from nearby schools, so it’s assumed that Brian was a student at the time, and probably just enamored with the biggest celebrities in the world.

Inside this highly collectible issue of Life, there’s an article on Richard Nixon, and a significant feature story on The Beatles. It was a significant moment in American and music history. “September 1968 was just two months before they released the White Album,” Rua says. “And inside the magazine, the feature on The Beatles is the first of a two-part story that is an excerpt from the first official biography of The Beatles written by Hunter Davies, which I believe was the only authorized biography of The Beatles that was ever written.” Davies’s history of the group was published in full that month as well—just two years before their earthshaking breakup.

The issue, because of its unique past, is going to have an interesting future. Says Rua: “We do have plans to put the magazine on display along with [Brian’s] letter, and a plaque that says: ‘It’s never too late to return your library items.’”

Innovation and originality weren't yet in vogue.

In 1872, a visitor to one part of the sprawling Palais de l’Industrie, on Paris’s Champs-Élysées, could climb a grand staircase decorated with tapestries and porcelain vases from the finest French ateliers, before coming face to face with the majesty of Raphael’s Disputation of the Sacrament.

Well, not the real thing—that fresco was and is irrevocably fixed on a wall of the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace—but a rather well-executed copy by one Monsieur Tiersonnie. The painting, depicting the Holy Trinity overseeing the sacrament of transfiguration, was surrounded by other replicas of the Italian Renaissance master’s work.

“Entering the vast salon,” wrote Louis Auvray, correspondent for Le Moniteur des Architectes, in 1873, “you could believe yourself to be in the Vatican.”

The Musée des Copies (Museum of Copies) was created in 1872, and opened to the general public the following year. Located in the since-destroyed grand exhibition hall built for the 1855 World Fair, it united around 150 reproductions of the finest paintings in Europe. Charles Blanc, director of fine arts for the French government, had personally championed the project, and commissioned copies executed by both well-known and lesser-known artists.

At the time, a museum of knock-offs would have seemed less strange than it does today. Replicating famous paintings had an important place in 19th-century France. There were days designated for copying at the Louvre, and the halls of the museum filled with men and women alike, behind their easels. “The whole formation of artists,” says historian Sevérine Sofio of the French National Center for Scientific Research, “was based on the copy, right up through the mid-19th century.”

Students were expected to master the style of artists who had come before—the Old Masters—and learned by replicating their work. At the time, the French art world had a particular reverence for classical art and Italian Renaissance painting.

The luckiest or best art students received the Prix de Rome to study in Italy for five years, which usually involved sketching their way through countless monuments, churches, and museums. The fourth year of study was explicitly dedicated to producing a copy of a masterwork suitable to be sent back to France to decorate Versailles or hang in the École des Beaux-Arts (the national school of fine arts). Such works comprised a study collection for students who could not go to Italy—and no one had high-resolution photographs to consult.

Practicing and respected painters also continued to make copies as a sort of continuing education. Some of the painters who would go on to form the Impressionist movement had trained in this traditional way. Édouard Manet first met Berthe Morisot (who married his brother, Eugène) while she was copying a Rubens in the Louvre in the late 1850s.

Expert copying was a valued skill. Some artists produced copies for a living, for the private market and for the state, including portraits to hang in embassies and in public buildings. Occasionally, copies of original works made it into the prestigious annual exhibition, the Salon de Paris.

The idea of a public museum dedicated to copies had been floated from time to time, and not just as a learning tool. Napoleon had assembled a grand collection of looted original masterpieces from conquered nations. Many were reclaimed after his defeat, but the memory of having the finest art in Europe all in one place—in Paris, specifically—whetted the French appetite for such a collection, even if it was a simulacrum. The arts community also began to understand the need to preserve works, or at least document them somehow.

However, even as the museum finally gained a champion in Blanc, tastes were beginning to change and the form was becoming passé.

“The 1860s and 1870s were a progressive time,” says Sofio. “There were a lot of artists who had a new vision of art which was based more on innovation.”

The École des Beaux-Arts underwent a major curriculum reform in 1863, and beginning that year students were judged less on their ability to ape the Old Masters and more on the basis of the originality of their compositions. The same year, the Salon des Refusés (literally, “exhibition of the rejects”) had drawn large crowds to see work by artists left out of the Salon de Paris—including the avant-garde painters who sought to capture the feel of their subjects rather than literal likenesses. We know them today as the Impressionists.

Rather than discourage Blanc, these changes pushed him to a greater urgency to assemble a sort of reference library of classical painting. “It’s necessary for our young painters to be in proximity to the imposing and formidable, if not the great masters, at least in their image,” he wrote in the daily newspaper Le Temps in 1847. He believed what he called his "universal museum" would reinforce the “correct” style for young artists, and that paying them to make the copies would further reinforce their commitment.

To fill his museum, Blanc took some of the paintings from the École des Beaux-Arts. Amid no little controversy, he also directed large sums from the state’s arts budget to the commissioning of yet more copies—eventually spending more on this than he did on supporting new work.

Critics received the finished museum with some ambivalence. A reviewer for the newspaper L'Univers illustré judged that of the replicas, “one quarter are excellent, one half mediocre and a quarter horrible … as imperfect as they are, they have the merit of familiarizing the originals with those who have not seen them.”

“Velasquez would tear out his hair,” wrote Albert Wolff in Le Figaro in 1873 “Raphael would let forth groans that would attract the attention of passers-by.”

In the end, it was politics, not critics, that ended the brief life of the Musée des Copies after less than two years. A new government relieved Blanc of his post in December 1873. His replacement, the Marquis de Chennevières, convened a committee to plan the dismantling of the museum his very first week in office.

To Blanc’s lasting bitterness, the replica paintings were unceremoniously dispersed, most back to the École des Beaux-Arts, others to regional museums around France.

Multicolor engravings and increasingly sophisticated and accessible photography further contributed to the declining importance of the copy in France’s art world. Blanc’s museum—which he expected to be a timeless monument to posterity—faded to no more than a curious footnote in Paris’s long artistic history.

Ales and lagers have ancestry in both Europe and Asia.

Beer is typically packaged in highly local terms. Menus tell you where their beers were brewed; breweries compete internationally for distinction; and Germany upholds its 500-year-old beer purity regulations and even has a word—“bierernst”—to characterize its national attitude toward the beverage—it means “deadly serious,” but comprises the words for “beer” and “serious.”

But new research, published yesterday in the journal PLOS Biology, reveals that even the smallest microbreweries might depend on genes from around the world for their beer yeast. The researchers found that Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the species of yeast that has been used to brew certain beers for thousands of years, is in fact a mixture of yeast strains found in both European grape wines and Asian rice wines. And so, they write, there would be no ales or lagers if not for the cultural exchange of fermentation technologies between Asia and Europe, possibly on the Silk Road.

Because we’ve been brewing beer since before we even discovered microbes—indeed, possibly since before we developed agriculture to domesticate cereal grains—and because we don’t exactly have a stockpile of ancient beers lying around for study, it’s been a challenge for scientists to investigate the history of S. cerevisiae. Many domesticated organisms, regardless of whether they leave traces, have complicated histories involving much movement and mixing, which can muddy up even the most agreeable samples.

Luckily for these researchers, many strains of beer yeast are polyploid, meaning that their cells contain more than two copies of their genome and, crucially, that they are reproductively isolated from their parental populations. This isolation, says the lead author Justin Fay of the University of Rochester, makes it far less likely for the strains’ origins to be “obscured by mixing and mating and things like that,” and allows researchers to take a clearer look back in time.

Fay and his colleagues gathered four beer strains currently commercially available in the United States, though Fay says that the American distributors might have acquired their strains from Europe. The researchers sequenced the genomes of these strains—two ale, one lager, and one that contained both beer and baking strains—and compared them to a panel of every publicly available yeast genome from around the world, plus those from additional strains in their lab. They found that the ale strains, baking strains, and the portions of lager strains consisting of S. cerevisiae “have ancestry that is a mixture of European grape wine strains and Asian rice wine strains and that they carry novel alleles from an extinct or uncharacterized population.” (Lager yeast, Fay explains, combines S. cerevisiae with another strain.)

So don’t be fooled the next time you encounter an “authentic” English ale or German lager—it’s actually the product of traditions spanning across continents.

The island of Vieques is still struggling after the hurricanes of 2017, but its most famous tree offers hope.

It’s been a year and a half since hurricanes Irma and Maria pummeled Vieques, a tiny island of off Puerto Rico’s eastern coast, and still many homes lay in rubble, electric wires hang precariously from poles, and a crippled cargo ferry system causes shortages of groceries.

The flora, too, bear the scars of the most destructive storms in modern American history.

Patches of leafless gray splotch mangroves that once covered nearly half the 52-square-mile island in greenery. Wind-resistant palms, their trunks snapped by fierce gusts, remain permanently hunched.

Yet an ancient ceiba tree Viequenses consider sacred is staging a remarkable comeback, one that symbolizes the resilience of the island itself for some residents.

Ceiba trees, sometimes called kapok trees in English, dot the island, but there’s only one known as the ceiba. It’s the island’s oldest tree, estimated to be upward of 400 years old, and stands as Vieques’s third-most popular tourist attraction after a 174-year-old Spanish fort and a bioluminescent bay that boasts the brightest glowing dinoflagellates in the world.

Photographs taken after Hurricane Maria show the tree leafless and badly damaged, with knobby limbs laying broken around its thick trunk. But today, new growth sprouts from its gnarled branches. And in February 2019, pompoms of pink blossoms unfurled for the first time since the hurricanes.

“It’s pretty amazing,” Edgar Oscar Ruiz, a 34-year-old local clean-energy activist living on Vieques, said staring up the tree’s trunk.

Only a few of the flowers remained during a visit to the island in late February. Dried, brown husks of expired blooms littered the ground below, blending with the scattered piles of wild horse dung to create an earthy potpourri. The flowers burst open at dusk, drawing swarms of bees, spiders, and hummingbirds to what Ardelle Ferrer Negretti, the founder of a local community project to protect the ceiba, calls “the nectar feast.” When the sunlight fades into blackness, bats join the banquet.

The fact that the ceiba blossomed at all this year demonstrates the kind of speedy recovery that’s evaded so much else on this island.

Ceiba trees don’t bloom consistently. The pink, lily-like blossoms appear only under the right conditions after the tree absorbs and stores enough energy to produce the bright, sugary flowers.

“That this tree is blooming now tells me is it was able to bud leaves after Maria and still get enough energy, and probably had some stored from before,” Fabián Michelangeli, a curator at the New York Botanical Garden’s Institute of Systematic Botany, said by phone. “But that means it’s healthy enough to go for more blooming.”

The ceiba is the national tree of Puerto Rico. There is at least one other park venerating a roughly 500-year-old specimen in Ponce, a city on the central southern coast of Puerto Rico’s main island. But, on Vieques, the famed ceiba’s centuries of survival encapsulates the island’s fraught history.

The Spanish colonized the island as the English, Danish, and other European powers began encroaching westward from their own settlements on the archipelago to the east. While the Puerto Rican mainland developed a peasant farmer economy alongside sugar plantations worked by slaves, Vieques became a giant plantation. When the Spanish finally abolished slavery in the 1870s, the former slaves and newcomers from neighboring islands became sharecroppers, called agregados, who continued to grow and harvest sugar cane.

That system remained for decades after the United States conquered Puerto Rico following the 1898 Spanish-American War. In the 1940s, the U.S. Navy decided to build a base on Vieques, evicting agregados from the land they lived on for generations and demolishing their homes, crowding much of the population onto an area in the center of the island. The bulldozers spared the ceiba tree, which sat next to the first checkpoint erected to gate locals off from the third of the island the military now claimed.

“Even the Navy understood there was something special about it,” Ruiz said.

A protest movement, known among locals as “the struggle,” finally ousted the Navy in 2003. Four years later, Ferrer and others started La Ceiba Community Project to remove trash and debris from the grassy area around the ancient tree.

“She brought us all together to restore that space, which is now used by the locals all the time,” Ferrer said. “It’s a symbol of hope that we can continue, that things may get hard but if we stand strong we can make it.”

Today, the ceiba is the centerpiece of a 51-acre coastal park where endangered manatees, green turtles, and brown pelicans live. On rainy days, water pools in the bowl-shaped crannies between the tree’s twisted limbs, attracting tiny crabs and wild horse, who drink the rainwater.

It’s easy to see why ceibas like this one occupy such a unique place in indigenous mythology. In Maya culture, ceiba trees marked the center of the Earth, and the young branches—covered in spikes like sharpened chainmail—were believed to serve as a ladder allowing the spirits of the dead to ascend to the afterlife.

“It connected multiple worlds in the Maya universe,” said Wayne Elisens, a recently retired botany professor at the University of Oklahoma. “It connected the worlds so souls could climb from this world up to the heavens.”

In the religion of the Taíno, Puerto Rico’s indigenous people, the ceiba tree is considered the daughter of YaYa, the all-powerful goddess, Ferrer said. That’s partly why locals ascribe the feminine “la” to the ceiba even though the Spanish word for tree—“el arbol”—is masculine.

“She’s like the ceiba mother that we all feed from, even the humans, because we feed peace and respect and lightness of the soul,” Ferrer said.

“The ceiba has become a source of well-being, good mental health, good family-oriented space that enriches not only people but their families,” she added. “The reflection of all that is how healthy she is, and that she has bloomed again.”

Knowledge transcends borders.

An exciting link between medieval Ireland and the Islamic world has been discovered on two sheets of calfskin vellum lodged into the binding of a book from the 1500s. The sheets hold a rare 15th-century Irish translation of an 11th-century Persian medical encyclopedia. For 500 years, they sat in a family home in Cornwall with no one the wiser to their origins.

“I suppose [the owners] just took a notion to photograph it with their phone and they sent the photograph to one of the universities in England, who sent it to another university, and eventually it got to me,” says Pádraig Ó Macháin, who has spent his life with medieval Gaelic manuscripts and leads the modern Irish department at University College Cork. For him, identifying it as a medieval Irish medical text was a cinch, but he needed a little help to determine its source.

Ó Macháin, founder of Irish Script on Screen, Ireland’s first deep digitization project, where the manuscript and many more old Irish texts can be seen, shared the fragment with Aoibheann Nic Dhonnchadha, a specialist in Irish medical texts at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. She identified it as a passage from the first book of the seminal five-volume The Canon of Medicine. Written by 11th-century Persian physician and polymath Ibn Sina, also known as Avicenna, the work is considered the foundational textbook of early modern medicine. While many references to Ibn Sina and his work pop up in old Irish medical texts, this is the only known evidence of a full translation of his encyclopedia. He originally wrote in Arabic, and the Irish rendition is likely translated from a 13th-century Latin version by the prolific Gerard of Cremona. “This is one of the most influential medical books ever written,” says Nic Dhonnchadha. “So the fact that it was being studied in Ireland in the 15th century was certainly a link to the Islamic world.”

The heading at the top right of the page is Ibn Sina’s preface to his Canon, in Latin. It gives thanks to god and explains that one of his friends asked him to write a book about medicine (quite the favor!). The rest of the text is in Irish, peppered with transliterated Latin terminology. One sheet runs through the encyclopedia’s contents, while the other details the anatomy of the jaw, teeth, nose, and throat.

Using scraps of old manuscripts to bind newer books was a common practice as the world transitioned from handwritten to printed words, but it would have been unusual for such a precious text to have been taken apart on purpose. “These kinds of manuscripts would have been very valuable to the people who owned them,” says Nic Dhonnchadha. “Anyone who owned it would have been unlikely to part with it.” Many manuscripts were destroyed during England’s encroachment upon Ireland, and the scholars believe that the Canon manuscript suffered such a fate. It’s just a stroke of luck that this fragment was salvaged and used to bind a much-less-interesting administrative text.

Ó Macháin hopes the find can help overturn some misconceptions about Ireland at that time in history. “Ireland was very much pre-urban, and we remained pre-urban until the 17th century,” he says, “but what people don’t understand is that there were great schools of learning here, including medical schools.” In these Irish medical schools, unlike those in England or continental Europe, students studied in Irish rather than Latin, creating a unique repository of medical knowledge in a vernacular language. Nic Dhonnchadha’s upcoming full translation of the manuscript will reveal some key differences between the Latin version and its Irish counterpart.

“This is an example of learning in its purest form, it transcends all boundaries, it transcends cultures and religions, it unites us all in a way that other things divide us,” Ó Macháin says. “That’s very personally important to me because I think learning is without borders and that this is maybe an opportunity to express that and make people understand it.”

Pillsbury designed Space Food Sticks for astronauts before launching them in grocery stores.

Before the energy bar took over the snack aisle, before it appeared in gym bags and in the hands of marathoners, and before it became a $5 billion global market, the energy bar went to space.

In 1959, the Quartermaster Food and Container Institute of the United States Armed Forces asked Pillsbury to develop food for astronauts. Thus commenced a series of collaborations that would feed men on the moon and launch pioneering developments in American food technology. In partnership with U.S. aerospace and military programs, Pillsbury created a variety of cubed and “compressed foods.” One of these was a tubular contingency food meant to sustain astronauts should they remain confined within their pressure suits in an emergency. This rod-shaped food, designed to be attached to the suits and consumed through a port in the helmet, would, in 1969, become known as Space Food Sticks, when Pillsbury placed them in grocery aisles as the first mass-produced, commercially released energy bars.

Protein bars such as Tiger’s Milk were already being sold in specialty health food stores, but Space Food Sticks took the concept to new heights. A modified version of the Sticks, each eight inches long, went to the moon on Apollo 11, Apollo 12, and Apollo 15, velcroed onto the astronauts’ helmets for easy reach and enjoyment. In different records of the Apollo 15 mission, they were variously referred to as food sticks, fruit bars, Caramel Sticks, and Nutrient-Defined Food Sticks. In 1973, another modified version of the Sticks appeared on the menu on Skylab 3, the second manned mission to the first American space station, Skylab. For two months, the flight crew chewed on the bars every third day, in a meticulously designed meal plan.

Their association with idolized astronauts helped make Space Food Sticks a popular American snack. (Tang experienced a similar sales bump after John Glenn drank it in orbit.) Pillsbury marketed them as a nutritionally balanced food, and earthlings seemed to appreciate the convenience as much as astronauts. But most of all, that the bars were attached to astronauts’ suits made them cosmic culinary wonders to legions of young, aspiring astronauts. It helped that they tasted a bit like Tootsie Rolls and came in a variety of candy flavors, such as chocolate, caramel, and peanut butter.

That popularity waned as NASA moved beyond Space Food Sticks, and Pillsbury, in a dubious marketing move, dropped “Space” from the name. (Imagine having to sell a product named “Food Sticks.”) They were discontinued in the 1980s, although they lived on as a cult favorite in Australia, sold by Nestlé until 2014, and named by Australian Olympic swimmer Ian Thorpe as one of his favorite snacks.

But Space Food Sticks left a legacy that goes beyond snacks. To ensure the Sticks were safe space food, the scientists at Pillsbury, NASA, and the U.S. Army Laboratories, led by Pillsbury microbiologist Howard Bauman, developed pioneering hazard-analysis measures. This led to the creation of the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) system of quality control, which Pillsbury adopted company-wide. Eventually, they helped train Food and Drug Administration inspectors. That the FDA now requires preemptive analysis of how food could get contaminated, rather than only looking at final products, owes a debt to space food sticks and NASA’s need for certainty that their astronauts’ meals would be uncontaminated.

These tubular treats might have remained relegated to space lore had it not been for Eric Lefcowitz, preservationist of pop culture from the golden years of space travel and an author of books on The Monkees.

In 1999, Lefcowitz, 58, who lives in Port Washington, New York, was working on a series of articles called “Countdown to the Millennium,” which revisited futuristic ideas such as flying cars and household robots. His piece on Space Food Sticks generated so much commentary that he set up a website called the Space Food Sticks Preservation Society in homage. Thousands of people submitted memories. “The day they took Space Food Sticks off the market was the day my childhood was over,” wrote one reader. They tasted “a little bit like chocolate laced with rubber bands,” recalled another.

Lefcowitz sensed a market for relaunch. He imported a few boxes from Australia to test and, with the help of a food scientist and a candymaker, re-engineered the snack and released chocolate and peanut butter versions in 2006. “A truck would drop off 6,000 pounds of Space Food Sticks,” says Lefcowitz. “I would think, ‘Oh my goodness, how am I going to sell these?’ And eventually they would be sold.” For eight years, Lefcowitz sold his Space Food Sticks in candy stores and gift shops at the Kennedy Space Center, Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, Disney World, and the American Museum of Natural History, among others. But then the candy manufacturer, Richardson Brands, was bought out and his contract with them fell through.

In 2016, Vice interviewed Lefcowitz about the bars. There were no Food Sticks in production, but, Lefcowitz says, “I just improvised on the spot that I was going to make Space Food Sticks into a cannabis edible.” The Vice journalist took the idea seriously, which, unexpectedly, began to turn his joke into reality. Immediately Lefcowitz heard from interested representatives in the cannabis industry.

Since then, the author and retro candy entrepreneur says he has toured cannabis facilities in Colorado and California, and created a cannabinoid model of the Sticks. In partnership with a cannabis-edibles-focused magazine, he hopes to launch cannabinoid-infused Space Food Sticks for the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in July.

From the astronaut dreams of ‘70s children, hiding in their blanket space stations, drinking Tang, and snacking on Space Food Sticks, to the quirky motivations of an irreverent Willy Wonka, these retro snacks have come a long way.