Sing a simple song and sprinkle some sacred dust.

Babies cry. It’s just what they do. And while parents have been trying to get their children to pipe down since time immemorial, the arsenal of tactics they employ has changed over the years.

The well-preserved Late Babylonian cuneiform tablet pictured above records a combination of songs and rituals that Mesopotamians used to hush their little ones. In these lullabies, parents entreated their babies to be calm as well water, to “be given sleep like a sleepy gazelle buck” calf, and to doze like a shepherd nodding mid-watch. Along with songs, the text suggests parents rub dust from a significant street, doorway, or even a grave—perhaps representing an ominous, ultimate silence—on a wailing baby.

“It asks for peace and quiet, just like a modern lullaby would,” says Eckart Frahm, a professor of Near Eastern languages and civilizations at Yale University. The tablet, which scholars believe originated in Nippur (about 100 miles south of present-day Baghdad, Iraq) and is currently on display in the exhibit Ancient Mesopotamia Speaks at the Peabody Museum of Natural History in New Haven, Connecticut, is one of only two known collections of cuneiform lullabies. Scholars believe these words likely originated in folk poetry that had been transmitted orally for years before being written down sometime between 500 and 300 B.C.

There are some key differences from modern lullabies, though. The child “disturbed its father and brought tears to its mother’s eyes, upon whose noise–the noise of its crying–the Kusarikku absconded,” reads the tablet. It’s not just for exhausted mom and pop’s sake that the baby must be consoled. They fear that the Kusarikku–a hairy, bison-shaped house ghost–will be frightened away by the noise. House ghosts were fickle supernatural beings. If angered, they could “do terrible things to you that gods would not do,” according to Frahm. Alternatively, they could offer protection from malevolent forces like demons if they were home. One much-feared demon was Lamashtu, who was believed to snatch away babies and kill pregnant mothers. She is featured on amulets as a formidable figure: part bird, part donkey, part human being, with suckling pups and pigs dangling from her breasts. So placating a child was about more than tired parents getting some tranquil shut-eye: it was integral to keeping everyone in the house out of harm’s way.

For Mesopotamians, “there was not a clear-cut border between magic and science,” says Frahm. Texts recording incantations like these lullabies, rituals like spreading dust, or offerings to various deities would have existed alongside more firmly scientific texts and literature in a library collection at a temple, palace, or private home.

“We do not know exactly why the baby cried—and it would be overly speculative to insist on one specific medical explanation over another,” cautions John Wee, an Assyriologist at the University of Chicago. “The historian’s job is to put himself into ancient shoes and—in this case—appreciate how indigenous Mesopotamian culture and beliefs supplied an important enough reason to fear the threat of excessive human noise.” House ghosts like Kusarikku and demons like Lamashtu may have been vivid representations of well-founded parental fears during a period when infant mortality rates were high and crying could signal a dire risk to an infant’s life. Although we can’t know for certain why a baby was crying millennia ago, a soothing song and a sprinkle of dust couldn’t hurt.

Luther Burbank dreamed of deserts filled with cow food.

In the early-20th century, Luther Burbank was a botanical superstar. Tourists, foreign envoys, and celebrities flocked to his Santa Rosa, California, home, clamoring to see the marvels the “plant wizard” developed in his garden. For years, they watched in awe as Burbank rubbed his face on large, fleshy cacti pads that were seemingly smooth as silk. It was a demonstration of one of his proudest achievements: breeding cacti to have no spines.

Burbank seemed to possess “the uncanny ability to bend nature to his will,” writes Jane S. Smith, author of The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants. For the man who had created a stoneless plum and bred the progenitor of the world’s most popular potato, making a spineless cactus must have seemed a matter of course. The Opuntia prickly-pear, which bears fruit and has edible pads, had long been a Central American food source. Burbank, though, dreamed of using it to produce cattle feed in the world’s deserts. If cows could munch on his thorn-free cacti, it would free up rich agricultural lands for human use.

But due to his massive fame, his unfortunate tendency towards showmanship, and wild speculation, Burbank ended up selling not-so-spineless cacti, tarring his reputation until the end of his days.

Rachel Spaeth, curator at the Luther Burbank Home & Gardens, calls it “the cactus folly.” Burbank, she notes, had a special affinity for cacti even as a child in Massachusetts. “When he was a kid, maybe five or six years old, he had a pet cactus,” Spaeth says. It was a relatively spineless, night-blooming cereus.

A hard worker and keen observer, Burbank experimented as a young man with cross-breeding plants, developing the slapdash methods that would later drive other botanists wild as they tried to unravel his work. The fruits of his labor literally bore fruit, though. At age 26, he sold the rights to the Burbank potato for $150 dollars. (A future mutation of this potato, the Russet Burbank, is now the world’s most-grown spud.) With the money, he moved to the perfect plant-growing region of Santa Rosa. His love of cacti followed.

There, Burbank bred wonders, from a white raspberry to a red California poppy. His fame surged, largely due to the many admirers, journalists, seed companies, and California boosters who upheld him as a botanical star. But he struggled to profit from his work. At the time, which was something of a golden age for American horticulture, the unscrupulous stole and sold seeds and cuttings with impunity. Creators such as Burbank never saw much of the money. He considered this bitterly unfair, and after his death, Thomas Edison testified in Congress to encourage a bill that would allow for the patenting of plants.

Burbank’s challenge, then, was to simultaneously release new plant varieties and promote them. Breeding a spineless cactus for the enormous cattle industry must have seemed like the perfect solution. In the late-19th century, ranchers in arid areas sometimes fed cacti to their cattle, especially during droughts. When cows ate spiky cacti, they typically ended up with painful wounds on their gums and mouths. According to Smith, in Luther Burbank’s Spineless Cactus: Boom Times in the California Desert, ranchers had to burn off spikes with gasoline torches.

So Burbank and his supporters imported cacti from around the world for experiments. Crossbreeding cacti is fairly straightforward, Spaeth says, often simply requiring transfer of pollen from one flower to another. But Burbank devoted more effort to breeding cacti than to any other crop, and his experiments spanned 20 years. By working mainly with the Opuntia ficus indica and the Opuntia robusta, which have reduced spines to begin with, Burbank released dozens of new prickly-pears varieties.

Excitement simmered for years, even in places nowhere near the desert. One 1904 New York Tribune article rhapsodized about the food possibilities for both humans and cattle, stating that Burbank’s cacti were “capable of growing on the [driest] desert” and “may mean to some districts more than the introduction of the potato meant to Europe.” The next year, the Los Angeles Times dreamily wrote that “this wonderful man” was paving the way for “big cactus farms.” The cactus, Burbank imagined, would be harvested and then fed to cattle, to keep them from chewing the plants to the ground. But others envisioned cattle grazing on cactus in formerly wasted deserts, eating straight from the source.

In 1907, writes Smith, Burbank released a catalog announcing his “improved” spineless Opuntias to a public primed for wonder. But there was a problem. Burbank’s spineless Opuntias didn’t really like the desert. To grow at the promised rate, the cacti needed water, which meant irrigation. In too-harsh conditions, they could even regrow their spikes as a defense mechanism. Worst of all, both cows and wild animals devoured them eagerly, not minding any of the tiny glochid prickles still present.

That last part might not seem like a problem, but the cacti simply could not grow quickly enough. (Ironically, in one pamphlet advertising his spineless cacti, Burbank lyrically mused that the Opuntia, with its “rich stores of nutriment and water,” must have developed fearsome spikes to protect itself from hungry critters.) Putting up fences in the desert and providing irrigation wasn’t the plant-it-and-forget-it solution to cattle feed that American farmers wanted, Spaeth says. Burbank even noted several of these limitations himself, yet both he and the press continued to market the spineless Opuntias as something of a miracle. Orders came in from around the world, and developers sold arid land with the promise that it could be planted with green gold.

There was some pushback. Government publications pointedly noted that spineless cacti existed before Burbank, which spurred him in 1910 to cable the New York Times and protest that he had never claimed to have invented it. Yet he also planted a relatively spineless Opuntia ficus indica amidst a thicket of extremely spiny cacti at his home, a visual suggestion for visitors that one botanist called “misleading to the uncritical.” For his face-rubbing demonstrations, he used a pad that had been worn to smoothness by repeated use. Sometimes, Spaeth suspects, he had to shave glochids off his face.

But Burbank’s most foolish decision was whom he entrusted with his reputation. He never had a head for business. Often, Burbank left marketing and distribution up to others, and “that came back to bite him,” says Spaeth. In 1913, Smith writes, some enterprising businessmen “who knew nothing about plants” paid Burbank $30,000 and an annual fee for the right to sell his creations under his name.

Disaster ensued. Any order that came in, the Luther Burbank Company filled, even when there was no supply. Using blow torches, they seared the spines off normal Opuntias and shipped them. But even this deceit couldn’t save the company. It went out of business in 1916, and Burbank’s reputation, writes Smith, “among growers and [in] academic circles, never fully recovered.” When he died in 1926, Spaeth says, his cacti plants were “an incredible mess for his widow to clean up.” In the end, Elizabeth Burbank saved and replanted only seven cultivars.

“Time and again,” Burbank wrote in 1914, “I have declared from the bottom of my heart that I wished I had never touched the cactus to attempt to remove its spines.” This sentiment was inspired by Burbank’s frustration with tiny, painful glochids. Yet it also seems prescient of his looming stumble.

These days, many of Burbank’s cacti are referred to as “mostly” spineless. Spaeth, who prunes the two-story-tall Burbank cacti still growing at the Home and Gardens, notes dryly that they’re definitely not completely spineless. But one kind, Florida White, has peachy, nearly spineless fruits, while another, Pyramid, makes for excellent fodder. Despite a brutal freeze that nearly killed them off in 1996, they’ve proven remarkably resilient. It’s probably because there are no cows around, who would likely devour them, glochids and all.

Meet the most metal of the North African snakes.

As you might expect, the horned desert viper, or Cerastes cerastes, has two little “horns” shooting up out of its head. When it buries most of its body in the desert sand across North Africa and portions of the Middle East, those sharp-looking nubs and the piercing eyes below them are all that you can see.

That’s either thrilling or terrifying, depending on who you ask, and how close to the snake you happen to be. The snakes are venomous, which isn’t great news for you if it’s threatened, lashes out, and sinks its teeth in. From the comfortable distance of YouTube, though, commenters have lovingly likened the snake’s visage to a demon, a dragon, and “cute little horned Satan.”

It’s easy to see why, but the snakes’ posture isn’t designed to freak you out—it’s a way of adapting to the heat and sun. Burrowing in the sand allows the snake to avoid the onslaught of the light. Since its sandy coloring looks a whole lot like sediment, the burrowing also allows the snake to prepare to pounce on unsuspecting rodents, lizards, and other prey, which are none the wiser.

Our horned pal also stays cool while on the move. The snake travels across the desert by way of sidewinding, or coiling part of its body into a loop and propelling that forward while the rest of it trails. This prevents its whole belly from resting on the scorching sand. In service of staying sufficiently cool, C. cerastes ends up looking totally metal.

In the wake of the massive Kīlauea eruption in 2018, staff have worked assiduously to repair the park's infrastructure.

In the summer of 2018, Hawaiʻi’s Kīlauea volcano leaked lava for an unprecedented four months straight. This event was so significant (it reconfigured the state’s coastline, after all) that a geologist deemed it the most destructive U.S. volcano since Washington’s Mount St. Helens erupted in 1980. Beyond the more than 700 homes it destroyed and the new island it created, the powerful eruption also forced the closure of Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park. Now, just in time for National Park Week, the park has reopened one of its most popular trails, the Kīlauea Iki Trail.

This national park is located on Hawaiʻi's Big Island, and surrounds two active volcanoes: Kīlauea itself and Mauna Loa. The latter’s summit is currently 56,000 feet above the sea floor, making it 27,000 feet taller than Mount Everest. Kīlauea’s volcanic activity last year eroded buildings and roads in Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, including the Kīlauea Iki Trail, an important park pathway.

While staff has worked assiduously over the past year to restore the park’s infrastructure, they are still monitoring the fickle Kīlauea closely. As of March 26, the volcano has been marked normal, which means it is in a non-eruptive state. According to the national park’s site, visitors can now “park at Kīlauea Iki Overlook, and hike Crater Rim Trail towards the closed lava tube parking lot to pick up the trail.” This newly-repaired trail is a 2.4-mile journey—and that’s just one-way.

Those checking out the park are encouraged to visit the steam vents, sulphur banks, the Kīpukapuaulu (Bird Park), tree molds, and an ancient lava tube. Though the park reopened, partially, back in September, now is your chance to see the changed terrain of two volcanoes’ natural habitat.

Atlas Obscura readers recommend their favorites.

There are few things in this world more breathtaking than a grand, lovely library. Whether it's a sprawling monument to modern architecture or a baroque, historic institution that looks like it would fit right in at Hogwarts, libraries continue to stand out as sites of jaw-dropping beauty and undeniable atmosphere. There are so many beautiful libraries in the world, in fact, that we're not entirely confident we'll ever be able to catalog them all. Recently we asked Atlas Obscura readers over in our Community forums to tell us which are their favorites, and we nearly got lost among all of the incredible suggestions.

From a private library in North Carolina to a law library in Zurich, our readers gushed about a wide variety of charming reading rooms and lending institutions. And yes, we read these places by their covers.

Check out some of our favorite submissions below, and if you have a favorite beautiful library of your own that you'd like to rep, tell us about it in the forums, and keep the conversation going! Libraries are essential to the preservation of human knowledge, and they're pretty to look at, too.

Biblioteca Joanina

Coimbra, Portugal

“The most beautiful library I have ever seen was in Coimbra, Portugal. Biblioteca Joanina, constructed in 1717, is located in the University of Coimbra. This baroque library was made with teak which maintains a healthy humidity level and temperature inside the library. Teak is also a natural insect repellent.” — jbrown351

Biltmore House

Asheville, North Carolina

“The library in the Biltmore House in Asheville, North Carolina, is magnificent.” — Woodlaw

University of Illinois Math Library

Urbana, Illinois

“It was a real steampunk-y treat to visit the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s mathematics library at 216 Altgeld Hall 11, featuring glass floors, narrow stairs and intricate iron shelving. The building was constructed in the late-1800s and feels castle-like.” — onoma

Marin County Civic Center Library

San Rafael, California

“Close to home for me is Frank Lloyd Wright’s breathtaking Marin County Civic Center. The Civic Center Library within is one of the more humble parts of the building, perhaps so you can pay good attention to your reading, but—true to form—the round, gently domed room still provides the feeling you’re inside of a flying saucer’s library rather than properly tethered to the ground. As already pointed out in an AO article, this is also a great place to visit if you’re a Star Wars fan, or if you’ve enjoyed the movie Gattaca.” — onoma

Benjamin Hooks Central Library

Memphis, Tennessee

“Photos of the Benjamin Hooks Central Library in Memphis don’t do it justice. I take all my first-time out-of-town guests there, though, because the sculptural elements at the entrance are so very unusual and, I think, pretty exciting. On the huge pillars and into the granite flooring are carved quotations from great literary works, maps, hieroglyphs and petroglyphs, and really everything you can imagine that has to do with literacy. You could spend hours just reading outside the library! When you finally get inside, don’t miss the children’s area, whether you have kids with you or not. It begins with a brilliantly colored forest and continues with a variety of art—and oh yeah, tons of books.” — korenni

Sainte-Geneviève Library

Paris, France

“I would name Henri Labrouste’s Sainte-Geneviève Library in Paris.” — ale2x72

Wren Library

Cambridge, United Kingdom

“The Wren Library of Trinity College Cambridge.” — jjlancaster88

University of Zurich Law Library

Zürich, Switzerland

“Santiago Calatrava’s Law Library at the University of Zurich. The louvered roof responds to the changing sun creating dancing shadows and light beams throughout the space. I have visited only once, but remember the experience very fondly!” — rivera8n

Bibliotheca Alexandrina

Alexandria, Egypt

“I was fortunate to see the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in 2006 when traveling in Egypt. The library was designed by a Norwegian architectural firm and construction began in 1995 and opened in 2002. The cost was U.S. $220 million, which also included a conference center, a special library for maps, multimedia, children, visually impaired along with four museums and art galleries and a planetarium. The library collection is trilingual, containing books in Arabic, French, and English and it was designed to hold up to eight million books. The main building was designed in the shape of a tilted sundial, and the outside walls have 120 different human scripts carved into the granite walls. It was quite an amazing place to see and experience.” — deniseishere

Seattle Central Library

Seattle, Washington

“The Seattle Central Library by Rem Koolhaas. Surprises around every corner and in every nook and cranny!” — Philip_Shane

Suzzallo Library

Seattle, Washington

“I am so fortunate to be able to visit this library whenever the spirit moves me.” — taymac_3c79f14b

Iowa State Capitol Law Library

Des Moines, Iowa

“In the Des Moines, Iowa, state capitol, there is the State Law Library. It has four levels and a beautiful art deco design.” — DellaRose

Strahov Library

Prague, Czech Republic

“This is the Strahov Library in Prague. Amazing space, the kind of library you dream of. Full of science and art, and yummy looking volumes that we couldn’t touch! And whatta ceiling! Rococo all the way.” — cgralapp

Manchester Central Library

Manchester, England

“So many stunning libraries, and now I just want to sit down in some of 'em with a giant hardback or 15… I’m fortunate in that my hometown has several glorious libraries. A few are already on AO, including the John Rylands Library and the Portico Library. The library I go to, though, is Manchester Central Library. It’s a beautiful building modeled on the Pantheon in Rome, pride of place in St. Peter’s Square next to the gothic town hall. The reading room beneath the dome is breathtaking and I liked looking at the Shakespeare stained glass window above the entrance when I walk out…” — JamazingClayton

It all comes down to something scientists call "ground truth."

Along the border between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, a fleet of rusted ships sits trapped. This was once the world’s fourth largest inland body of water, but today it’s more dry than wet—a barren, salt-scoured wasteland. What was once known as the Aral Sea is now the Aralkum Desert, or Aral Sands. It’s currently the world’s youngest desert, and acts as a key engine for Central Asian dust storms.

The Aral was once fed by the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, and sustained both a thriving economy and rich ecosystem. Around 1960, the rivers were diverted by the former Soviet Union to feed irrigation networks for cotton production. Over the following six decades, the sea underwent a process never before seen on Earth. Waters retreated from the southern basin, concentrating the sea’s salt. Agricultural runoff brought in both herbicides and pesticides, poisoning the lakebed. Eventually, an empty, salty, toxic desert was all that remained.

“This is the perfect source for dust storms,” says Ralph Kahn, a senior research scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, via email. More than 100 million tons of salt dust is blown out of the Aralkum and across Asia each year, creating a serious public health issue across a vast area.

Dust storms in the Aralkum are almost weekly occurrences and can last for days. For those who reside nearby, food and water sources can become contaminated after just one of these storms. Karakalpakstan, an autonomous republic within Uzbekistan, experiences abnormally high rates of tuberculosis, anemia, cancers, liver ailments, birth and genetic defects—all likely in some way caused or exacerbated by the dust. And traces of that same dust have been found as far away as Greenland and Norway.

To understand dust storms, scientists have long relied on remote sensing technology—satellites that can actually see the full scope of such storms and observe their spread. But information obtained via remote sensing only goes so far, and it must be combined with fieldwork in order to ensure findings are correctly interpreted. This is commonly referred to as “ground truth,” explains Gill Thomas, who studies wind and geology at the University of Texas at El Paso. Ground truth provides critical context for calibrating and correlating large-scale data sets obtained from satellites and provides researchers with details that can’t be observed from space. And according to Thomas, it’s a lack of ground truth-type knowledge that is preventing a fuller understanding of Aralkum’s dust storms. “To the best of my knowledge, we don’t have a good set of data of what the conditions are actually like there on the ground to cross-check, double-check, and confirm what the satellite is telling us,” Thomas says.

This is largely due to the inhospitable and toxic environment of the Aralkum itself, a reality that is already decades-old. Thomas recalls a story from his time researching Owens Dry Lake in Central California. It was around 1990 or ‘91, and Thomas was accompanied by a group of then-Soviet scientists interested in the Aral Sea, which was still in the process of drying out. When Thomas asked the team why they weren’t conducting fieldwork at the Aral Sea, they responded: "Are you crazy? No way! It's too remote and dangerous there, you can't really collect any data, and it's so treacherous if you go there you could die!" The situation has only worsened since then, and according to Khan, very few surface data stations exist on the ground in Central Asia.

In the face of such obstacles, researchers must continue to rely heavily on satellite data. But capturing an Aralkum dust storm from space, Thomas explains, is like trying to take a picture of a polar bear in a snowstorm. When dust storms rage elsewhere on Earth—like in the Sahara Desert—they eventually blow out over the dark ocean, making them easy to see. But in the landlocked Aralkum, the contrast between the surface and airborne dust is minimal. Plus, clouds often get in the way. Satellites also struggle with quantifying the amount of dust in dust storms, or providing a sense of their contents. “It is not easy to derive the optical properties of non-spherical particles theoretically,” says Khan, “and it is also difficult to collect adequate samples.” The result is an incomplete understanding of a major ecological and public health problem.

Filling in that understanding, experts say, will require a combination of old and new technologies, to supplement satellites and their limitations. Drones have enormous potential—they’re hard to control in dust storms, but they’re getting better and more robust, says Thomas. There are also hybrid systems that bring together a range of data sources. Thomas also cites the growing field of chemical sensing, using detectors that can acquire the chemical signature of dust particles in the field. “The Aralkum can be seen as the world’s newest desert,” he says, “and maybe there are some real unusual things going on there, due to the fact that it’s so extreme, so new, so weird, and so unusual.”

Susie Johnson sparked America's obsession with erotic cake dancing.

On May 20, 1895, 16-year-old Susie Johnson, wearing nothing but gauze and haloed by a flock of live canaries, burst through the crust of a giant pie. It was polo player John Ellliot Cowdin’s 10th wedding anniversary, and the dinner was lavish: 16 courses from clams to coffee, each punctuated by champagne. Two models entertained the male guests. There was a later rumor—likely apocryphal—that their hair color was coordinated with the wine, the brunettes pouring red, the blondes pouring white. Susie Johnson, dancing out of double-crust pastry, served herself.

In the 1890s, New York was a city with a fever. The slip of island between the Hudson and East River was plush with cash. It poured in from shipyards, freight trains, and factories. It flooded the Manhattan streets. Carriages bounced, crowds pressed, electricity glittered. From Pittsburgh and Omaha, Secaucus and Cincinnati, young women flocked to the city, hoping to make it under the newly electrified lights of the Broadway stage. They ended up modeling for the burgeoning print advertisement industry or working in the chorus line, the factory line, or the line of sex workers on the streets.

Susie Johnson was one such woman. As reported by Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, a pioneering yellow newspaper, she had grown up in a working-class family on the West Side. Her career as an artist’s model had begun innocently enough: a portrait here and there. But soon she was taking off her clothes, and then there she was, flesh gleaming in the smoky air, singing “Four and Twenty Blackbirds” for the who’s who of New York playboys. Illustrator Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the Gibson girl, was there; so was inventor Nicola Tesla. (Cowdin’s wife, the ostensible object of the anniversary celebration, wasn’t on the guest list.) Architect Stanford White, whose firm McKim, Mead, and White designed New York City landmarks from the Brooklyn Museum to Columbia University, also attended. According to The New York World, he was the one who cooked up the idea for Johnson's performance.

It wasn’t the first time in Western history a person—or a live bird, for that matter—had emerged from a large baked good for the entertainment of a feasting elite. Medieval Europeans stuffed pies with live frogs just to watch them hop out. By 1474, an Italian cookbook included instructions on how to fill a large pie with birds, which burst into flight upon the pie’s slicing. In England, this practice is the likely origin of the “Sing a Song of Sixpence” nursery rhyme. People emerged from pies, too: In 1626, the Duke and Duchess of Buckingham gifted Charles I a pie containing the live Sir Jeffrey Hudson, a famous dwarf who would go on to serve in the court.

For the posh set of late-19th century New York City—a coterie as obsessed with public prudery as with private adultery—the “Pie-Girl” dinner was a sensation. “The ‘Girl in the Pie’ at the Three Thousand Five Hundred Dollar Dinner in Artist Breese’s New York Studio,” declared the New York World, above an illustration of Johnson thronged by besuited men, spread like a Venus in pastry. The picture was as scandalous as the dinner’s cost: more than 2,300 times the daily wage of a day laborer.

In the New York World illustration, architect Stanford White stands to Susie Johnson’s left, wielding a large kitchen knife as though about to carve her. According to the article, shortly after the party, Susie Johnson posed “by electric light” at an artist’s studio, a euphemism for sex work, and went missing soon after. “Poor Susie Johnson, dazzled by the lavish compliments and surprised by the liberality of her distinguished patrons,” reported the World. “Perhaps this article will bring Susie Johnson home to her parents and put a stop to the midnight revels in New York’s fashionable studios.”

It didn’t. In 1907, another New York World article revisited the Pie-Girl Dinner, this time as an unheeded warning against the dangers of sexual excess. Susie Johnson, the article said, had faded into anonymity; but Stanford White was dominating the headlines. He had been murdered by the husband of another young woman, Evelyn Nesbit, who said White had raped her. Splashed across yellow newspapers, detailed in a pulp novel, dramatized in Hollywood, and told in popular histories to this day, Stanford White’s rape of Evelyn Nesbit, and his eventual murder, embodied the Gilded glamor of the turn of the century City—and the violence done to working class women such as Nesbit and Johnson.

White offered to make Nesbit’s career, to care for her, and to pay her and her mother’s expenses. He was 47 and married; she was 16 and a chorus girl. The first time White invited Nesbit to his 24th Street apartment, one of many he owned in the city, he brought her to the top floor, where he had rigged a velvet swing to hang from the ceiling. White sat Nesbit on the swing and pushed her: his hands on her back, her legs straining. One night shortly thereafter, White brought the teenager to his bedroom, gave her a glass of spiked champagne, and raped her. Nesbit woke naked to her blood on the sheets. “Now you belong to me,” White had told her, holding her afterwards.

Nesbit told no one about the rape until a few years later, when she confided in her soon-to-be-husband Harry Thaw. But Thaw also had a reputation. It was rumored he beat working class girls with dog whips and soaked them with boiling water until they scalded. He couldn’t stand that Stanford White had “ruined” his wife, so on June 25, 1906, at an opening performance in the very Madison Square Garden theater that Stanford White had designed, Harry Thaw shot and killed him. “He ruined your life, dear,” he told Nesbit as a fireman marched him out of the theater, his gun still hot from the kill. “That’s why I did it.”

The ensuing courtroom drama was declared the trial of the still-young century. Unlike so many women of the era, Evelyn Nesbit had a chance to tell her story, narrating her rape to the courtroom and answering accusatory questions with dignity. Afterward, Thaw was sent to a mental asylum. Nesbit struggled with addiction, yet continued to perform and teach until her death in the ‘60s.

Stanford White, meanwhile, was buried in a Long Island cemetery. But the real monuments to his memory lie all over New York City, in the soaring columns of the Brooklyn Museum and the shadow of the white marble arch in Washington Square. Nesbit was never a very good actress, says Simon Baatz, a City University of New York historian who wrote a book on the case. She’s most remembered not for her work, but for her rape. Stanford White, meanwhile, is remembered not only for the violence he did or the violence done to him, but for what he created.

According to newspapers, even White’s high-profile murder didn’t do much to dampen the reputations of other elite men who may have been guilty of similar crimes. “Stanford White is dead,” The New York World reported in its 1907 retrospective, printed during the height of Harry Thaw’s murder trial. “But most of the guests of that dinner are alive and are holding positions of honor or at the head of their craft.”

What about Susie Johnson? She is also remembered for her work, at least tangentially. Partly in response to the notoriety of the pie-girl incident, women dancing out of cakes became a popular erotic trope. Debbie Reynolds did it in Singin' in the Rain; Mad Men-era executives hired women to do it for corporate parties; Bachelor contenders do it to this day. As for Johnson’s life, the archives don’t tell us much. The 1907 retrospective reported that she eventually married, but also that when her husband discovered that she was the girl from the pie incident, he left her. She died young and a pauper.

Baatz says there’s no evidence to certify this. Yellow papers, after all, regularly made things up. For all we know, Johnson lived a long, happy life. But as far as the official record is concerned, Susie Johnson jumped from a giant pie into history, and then—like so many women remembered as side dishes to someone else’s story—promptly jumped back out.

It's not just a recreational hotspot—it's also an ecosystem.

A surefire indicator of the Texas desert’s unrelenting severity awaits when you turn south after taking the exit for Balmorhea. There, on the side of the road, an abandoned tan hatchback sinks into a pebble-covered bed of sand and dirt. The car might be a Volvo. Or used to be a Volvo. It’s difficult to say with the front bumper detached and hanging on the ground and the hood smashed up against a windshield that’s sporting a crater the size of a basketball.

Life in the Texas desert is tough. There’s really not even cactus, certainly nothing like the grand saguaro variety in Arizona—just a never-ending landscape of sand, dust, and mountain, whipped by the scorching sun.

But there is a swimming pool.

Highway 3078, the road off the interstate where the hatchback is decomposing, bends and veers past gated ranches and hills until, at the outskirts of Balmorhea, the monotonous beige on the side of the road transforms into a crystalline blue. In the middle of Southwest Texas, at the eastern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, 15 million gallons of water see the light of day after waiting underground for thousands of years. The water then springs into a 1.75-acre basin home to endangered pupfish and gambusia, a velvety surface of chara algae—and three diving boards and a high dive.

If the measuring stick for the size of any small town is number of stoplights, then Balmorhea ranks off the scale. Here, residents didn’t even get sidewalks on Main Street until 1999. But Balmorhea, a town of 500 located about 200 miles east of El Paso, 50 miles north of the art town of Marfa, and 100 miles north of the border, has always had the springs.

In ancient history, fault lines in southwest Texas shifted just so, creating breaks in the ground that trace through the Davis Mountains to the west, toward an aquifer 400 miles to the northwest. The breaks act like pipes, and the water rushes through, mixing with another source of water from the Davis Mountains in the south. The water then ends up gushing from the ground in Balmorhea as the San Solomon Springs.

Before the pool, the water first attracted animals and hunters. By at least the 19th century, Native Americans were developing permanent residences out of adobe nearby. Some 100 years later, Mexican-American and white settlers had turned Balmorhea into a farming community (alfalfa, cotton, corn, watermelon), using the plentiful springs for irrigation. It became an official city in the early 1900s.

In 1934, the Texas parks board found swimming to be its residents’ preferred recreational activity and began a building spree all over the state. The timing coincided with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. The Civilian Conservation Corps Program was putting thousands of young, unmarried men to work at state and national parks. According to a 1937 report in The Shiner Gazette, 162 men had enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps and worked in Balmorhea. They carved a circular ditch 214 feet in diameter into the marshy land from which the water sprung and filled the surface and the sides with white and red rock donated by a local cattle rancher. The pool extends diagonally on both sides of the center with arms measuring 240 feet in length and 70 feet in width. The design is meant to resemble an eagle with outspread wings.

The pool opened on June 7, 1936. A few weeks later, the town celebrated with dancing, an orchestra, and speeches from civic leaders. The road that now wraps around Balmorhea was back then part of Highway 290, a well-traveled thoroughfare that extended to San Antonio. Buoyed by passersby and tourism, the town’s population reached upwards of 1,000 people in those days. There were six gas stations, seven grocery stores, six cafes, three barber shops, a drug store, a movie theater, and a dance hall. After the first year, one newspaper article reported that visitors had already come from foreign countries and nearly every state in the Union.

On my visit in early April 2019, a French couple, Mennonites, and a dozen local teenagers listening to music are among the few visitors. One of the teenagers yells to his friends he just spotted a roadrunner outside the fence. They don’t believe him.

The water temperature always ranges from 72 to 76 degrees. Bypassing a set of stairs, I plunge directly into the pool, and the chilled water steals the breath from my lungs. When I dive below to feel the algae, the Comanche Springs Pupfish and gambusia swim directly across my face before dispersing. This type of pupfish lives nowhere else in the world. The Balmorhea pool is an ecosystem.

Despite a remote location, its charms are no longer a secret. For the last several years, annual attendance at the pool has steadily increased from about 71,000 in 2008 to 153,000 in 2017. On July 4, 2017, 2,700 people packed into the park at the same time, leading staff to cap the current maximum number of visitors at 900. On summer weekends, cars line up for a half mile outside the park, waiting their turn.

But in the summer of 2018, attendance was zero. Balmorhea State Park closed for repairs. During a routine maintenance session that May, says Mark Lockwood, regional director for Texas Parks and Wildlife, workers discovered erosion under the diving well. The millions of gallons of water swirling into the pool proved too strong for the rock hauled by the Depression-era men.

Though the problem stemmed from the water being too powerful, the closure provided a reminder of the fragility of San Solomon Springs. The San Solomon flow has decreased from about 25 million gallons daily in the 1930s to 15 million today.

The forces of nature that lead Solomon Springs to daily produce enough water for 22 Olympic-size swimming pools are partially a mystery. Nobody knows precisely how to ensure their continued flow—or whether it’s even possible.

The Southwest Texas desert once had another spring-fed pool. In Fort Stockton, not far from Balmorhea, 35 million gallons flowed daily from the Comanche Springs into a basin next to a park where people picnicked and played softball. Then, in 1951, the water stopped flowing.

A farmer who lived 10 miles outside of town was responsible. He likely drilled into the breaks in the ground that carried the water from the mountains into Fort Stockton and pumped the Comanche Springs dry with diesel-powered irrigation wells. Local citizens and government officials couldn’t do anything to stop him. Through Texas’s Rule of Capture, landowners own any groundwater they can extract from underneath their property.

In fall 2016, the oil and gas company Apache announced the purchase of land in and around Balmorhea. So far it has installed nearly 200 wells for oil and gas and has plans to develop as many as 5,000. The fracking process, which entails the use of millions of gallons of water for each well, could contaminate or deplete the San Solomon Springs.

Apache has been as gracious a partner to Balmorhea State Park as can be expected of a company that drills 7,000 feet into the earth pumping water, sand, and chemicals to break apart shale rock a few miles from the park’s location. When $1 million in donations were raised to start repairs last year, the company poured in another $1 million to complete them. It has pledged not to drill on land it has leased in Balmorhea, where the risks of disrupting San Solomon Springs would be much greater. Also it has funded a group of analysts from the University of Texas-Arlington to monitor the water at 25 sites. Zac Hildenbrand, part of an independent team of environmental analysts that regularly works with the oil and gas industry, says no major fluctuations have occurred.

Concerns have also died down in Balmorhea. Pat Brijalba, a lifetime resident and unofficial town historian, says as long as Apache stays north of Interstate 10, which is about three miles north of Balmorhea, he’s not worried. And either way, there’s no stopping the oil and gas exploration. “It’s all private land,” he says. “What can you do?”

Someday—whether through nature or agriculture or industry—the springs will be taken away. The desert will be dry. The pool will be closed. The oasis will be gone. In August of 1951, a journalist in the Austin American reporting on the loss of the Comanche Springs wrote, “Only in fables do jars of water and wine that can never be exhausted exist. The fables are delightful.”

Tadpole shrimp hunker down, waiting for water conditions to be just right.

Across the orange, ruddy, desert of the Colorado Plateau—which includes portions of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico in the southwestern United States—summers are dry and sweltering, with upper temperatures closing in on 140 degrees Fahrenheit.

Tadpole shrimp find a way to make it work.

These small crustaceans are armored and tiny; they look like itty bitty horseshoe crabs. They’re widely considered to be among the most ancient species on the planet, having appeared millions of years ago. They love the water—and in the desert, that can be hard to come by.

Scattered around the landscape, the adults find water wherever they can, according to the National Park Service, including making the best of potholes or ephemeral pools that fill seasonally. (This behavior is known as “escaping” a drought.) The murky water may not be anything to write home about, but it’ll do the job.

Their eggs are tough, too. They are capable of withstanding anhydrobiosis, a process of nearly complete desiccation, according to the NASA Astrobiology Institute. Many species manage this by producing trehalose—a type of sugar—to stand in for water, and keep the creature’s shape. Tim Graham, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, told NASA that some tadpole shrimp eggs had stuck around for decades. “Eggs of tadpole shrimp or fairy shrimp have been kept for 50 years in the lab, and were still viable," Graham said.

When the eggs do hatch, the young shrimp in their cozy, watery potholes do a lot in just a little bit of time. To put it bluntly: They gorge, and then they get busy. “With remarkable speed, eating about 40 percent of its own body weight each day, the tadpole shrimp grows to maturity in two to three weeks,” The Guardian once reported. (Other reports say the maturation process is even swifter.) “This enables it to lay another lot of eggs before its home dries out again,” The Guardian continued. Those offspring will remain dormant until conditions are right. The shrimp are no more than a few inches long, but they punch way above their weight, and hang in there like champs.

Fake legends and Southwest imagery sold crystalized cactus to Americans.

In 1891, on the final leg of his long journey from southern Italy to Arizona, 12-year-old Dominick Donofrio looked out the train window and saw his future take shape. For miles, the Southwestern desert was an uninterrupted forest of cacti: tall saguaro and organ pipe, clusters of cholla and prickly pear, and everywhere, the giant, round barrel cactus, known by Native Americans as visnaga.

Arriving in Phoenix, Dominick went to work at his older brother’s booming confectionary. But he yearned to make a mark of his own. “It came to my mind that millions of dollars could be made out of cactus,” he would later recall. For a decade, a scheme combining cactus and candy “preyed on my mind until I could see myself counting the money.” In 1905, Dominick bought the store from his brother and realized his vision right away.

For centuries, the Pima and other tribes used the visnaga’s cooked pulp as food and its spines as fishing hooks, and candy from the plant was a well-known homemade treat in Mexico. But “Donofrio’s Crystallized Cactus Candy” marked its first industrial production in the United States.

The process involved a startling amount of labor, cactus, and sugar. Out in the desert, Donofrio’s hired hands hacked down plants ranging from two to five feet tall and 80 to 100 pounds, then de-spiked and trucked them back to the factory. Here, workers peeled, cored, and sliced up the visnaga into small cubes, boiled them into tenderness, and cooked them in sugar-syrup over and over again, hotter and hotter. Then, via a top-secret Donofrio process, workers crystallized the cubes in vats, cooked and crystallized them again, and set them out on racks to harden. The result was something like a gumdrop, with a sugar crust and a gelatinous core.

“That man’s name will go down in history who first converted the ugly desert plant into such a delightful delicacy.” Thus boasted one of Donofrio’s earliest ads, inaugurating a decades-long marketing juggernaut. Donofrio targeted Christmas shoppers, guilty husbands, and snowbirds anxious to impress friends back home. Cactus candy was “pure, wholesome, nourishing, [g]ood for breakfast, luncheon, dinner,” his ads claimed, thanks to the pure air and sun of the desert. Playing on a romanticized vision of the Southwest, his cactus candy came in boxes illustrated with Spanish missions and sandal-wearing Native Americans.

On top of that, Donofrio’s promotional materials spun an elaborate, fake origin story for both candy and proprietor. According to “Toltec legend,” the Sun God imprisoned a beloved maiden’s soul inside the visnaga to protect her purity. This legend, claimed Donofrio’s, then inspired a Toltec wedding ritual, where prospective grooms had to make cactus candy by ripping out thorns with their teeth and crystallizing pulp with wild honey.

That wasn’t all. At least one brochure stated that the Donofrio family was not Italian, as their name might suggest, but rather had descended from a long line of Mexican confectioners, beginning with Donofrio, royal candy-maker to an ancient Toltec king. Maybe these claims were meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but newspapers and trade journals regurgitated them wholesale.

By all accounts, the gimmickry paid off. Mail-order business soared, and Donofrio’s new treat popped up in candy stores across the nation. The company produced 15,000 pounds of the stuff in 1920 alone.

A year later, another Mediterranean immigrant took up the cactus candy mantle 400 miles away, in El Paso. Originally from Greece, George Carameros and his brother-in-law made candy in Mexico City until around 1918, when the Mexican Revolution forced them north. Then they bottled beer and soda in Texas until Prohibition killed that business, too. Wandering through an outdoor market in search of a new calling, Carameros happened upon a cactus candy stand, gave the merchant five dollars to show him how it was made, and the rest was history.

To announce his new business, Carameros displayed a 300-pound visnaga in downtown El Paso. And he upped the cactus candy game in more ways than one. He made cactus preserves and ice cream, infused the candy with fruit flavorings, coated it with chocolate, and touted an allegedly unique method of anti-mold preservation. His candy was hawked on every transcontinental train, in restaurants and hotels across the West, and even aboard international steam ships. In 1927, Carameros produced 165,000 pounds of cactus candy, and nearly twice as much a decade later.

Success bred plenty of imitators. Throughout the 1920s, smaller, shorter-lived cactus candy ventures sprouted up across Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and California; wherever the open desert offered visnaga for the taking. Gushing at the trend, one news report opined optimistically that “the supply [of barrel cactus] is said to be almost inexhaustible.”

But while cactus candy appeared to be all the rage, whisked from shelves and gobbled by the handful, one thing was missing from the breathless coverage: a description of its actual taste.

Then, in 1924, a cranky El Paso journalist named Norman Walker opted to speak his truth, via a colorful survey of Mexican candies, syndicated nationwide. “Eating Mexican cactus candy is like kissing your sister,” he began unpleasantly, “it fails to satisfy.” After skewering all the cheesy marketing, he got to the bottom of why so many new companies seemed to fail: “Some success has been attained, but it does not repeat itself in sales.” In other words, lots of people bought and sampled one box of cactus candy, but few chose to ever do so again.

But it didn’t make a difference. The trend continued unabated, and by the late 1920s, in California at least, the desert’s supply of visnaga no longer looked so inexhaustible. “Our Sweet Tooth Eating Up Cactus,” one paper reported, echoing a lament among Los Angeles-area garden clubs that automobile access into the desert was causing the demise of a rare botanical treasure. “Barrel cactus on the deserts of San Bernardino and Riverside counties is being taken out by the truckloads daily for the manufacture of cactus candy,” railed one early conservationist.

In 1928, both counties adopted legislation banning removal of desert plant life, but the threat persisted. Over the next decade, alarmed California citizens reported truckloads of pilfered cacti being smuggled along back streets, beloved fields of cacti hacked to the ground, and a Los Angeles candy plant overflowing with giant, freshly-butchered visnaga. Cactus was seized not just for sweets, but for home gardens, shoe-heels, even goldfish bowls. Foreseeing mass extinction, “friends of the desert” groups sprung up across Southern California, lobbying lawmakers for wildlife protection and transforming the public’s vision of the desert, from bleak dust bowl to environmental treasure.

Following in California’s footsteps, Arizona adopted protections for its desert plants, including the endangered giant barrel cactus. But Dominick Donofrio was undeterred. For two more decades, he hired a Native American to procure the cactus from his reservation, where harvest by permit was still allowed. And in El Paso, Carameros continued to send his workers deep into New Mexico’s Organ Mountains for visnaga, until he sold the candy business in the early 1950s. Only in 2014, thanks to a tireless coalition of desert-lovers, was this region granted federal protection under the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks Conservation Act, which named the barrel cactus among its treasured species.

Once facing extinction, visnaga can be found across the southwestern deserts and in Mexico. But it has an uphill battle for survival. The International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the particular species used for candy as “vulnerable” with “population decreasing” in the United States and “near threatened” in Mexico, urging further action to protect them from theft and destruction.

Cactus candy remains an Arizona novelty, on sale alongside cactus jelly in airport gift shops. But these days, most candy is made from prickly pear fruit, rather than the pulp of the imperiled visnaga. So a taste of the desert is now more sustainable.

His proudest achievement? Putting your face on an M&M.

“Candy inventor” is a dream job. But what’s it like to be a real one, especially at a global, multi-billlion dollar company?

Dan Michael knows. As the former R&D Director at Mars, the confectionery company, he spent a career developing a new jalapeño-peanut M&M flavor, figuring out how to produce Snickers in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union, and solving the technical challenge of printing people's faces on M&Ms.

After multiple decades of tinkering with candies, cookies, and snacks, it was this last effort—a product called My M&Ms, which allows customers to personalize their colorful chocolates with any message or image they please—that was his proudest accomplishment. Michael spoke with Atlas Obscura about marketers sneaking down to the prototype kitchen, snooping around in customers' cabinets, and why Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory would go out of business.

Could you tell me about how you ended up working at Mars?

I have an 18-year-old son who’s applying to colleges, and I don’t think he really knows what he wants to be when he grows up. I didn’t either. I remember going to Rutgers University, and there was a dean who said, “If you kind of like science, but don’t want to do heavy-duty chemistry or biology, people need to eat, and there’s this thing called food science.” So I decided to learn how to be a food scientist. [A few years after graduation] I ran across an ad for Mars in the paper and applied. I joined up and stayed there for 28 years.

So you were something of a company man.

Yeah, you know, I had the mindset that I’ll give this a shot, but won’t stay a long time. But I gotta be honest with you, I just love Mars. They let me do all kinds of different things. I wouldn’t have stayed there for 28 years if I wasn’t having a ball.

Looking back, which new candy or product that you worked on do you feel the most proud of?

I was fortunate that I could finish my career with the product I love most, and that’s the My M&Ms brand. I worked on that for five or six years, from prototype to it becoming a pretty successful business for Mars. The reason I loved it is that M&Ms are about colorful chocolate fun, and this took it to a new level. It involved new technology as well. We built a new factory, what we called the Print Shop, to build these products. I’m very proud of how it turned out.

What was challenging about customizing M&Ms?

Our brands, M&Ms, Snickers, Mars, they’re all made on a large scale. You’re making one thing and you’re shipping it out. This was very different. You’re allowing the customer to come to the website and design the one thing. But we’re doing thousands of those one things a day.

There were a lot of challenges associated with the inkjet printing, too. Trying to make an image look good on a tiny little M&M, that involved a lot of technology. It took years.

I believe the origin story of M&Ms is that the inventor got the idea after seeing soldiers eating chocolate with a hard shell, which kept it from melting. Did you or your team ever have a similar eureka moment?

Certainly nothing as successful as the idea that led to the original M&M!

One development related to My M&Ms is that once we had the business up and humming, and people could put in their messages, we were looking at customer requests, and we would see a Harley Davidson. This guy loved his Harley Davidson. Can you print it on an M&M? This woman loves her husband. Can you print my husband’s face on an M&M? We weren’t doing that at the time because we didn’t know how to do it. We could print a message in Comic Sans on an M&M.

It was a kind of hard thing to figure out, as you can probably imagine, because people take poor quality photos with their phone or camera and you have to make sure it looks like something you’d be proud to have on an M&M. Faces on M&Ms is the lion’s share of our My M&Ms business [now], because it is just really cool.

Are your friends and acquaintances always trying to pitch you new ideas?

Yeah! Because it’s fun. “Have you ever thought of? Hey Dan, have you ever thought of? How about this?” The answer is usually, “Yeah, we have.” And that’s not a [slight] against them; a lot of people have good ideas. It’s usually about introducing something at the right time and place.

Roughly speaking, how many ideas are tested to get to one new candy or flavor that’s sold in stores?

At least at Mars, we’ve got these brands that have been around for years that people love. Our main focus is less bringing a new candy into the market, but creating news and interest around ones we have. You’ve probably seen that we release new M&M flavors. Sometimes we put it out to a consumer vote. That’s what we do more than coming up with a brand-new candy bar.

The success rate of new flavors is a lot higher than launching a brand-new product. We probably have hundreds of different ideas around our brands that we’ve held onto over the years. It’s really a luxury, because we can pull those ideas out and apply them when we see that the time might be right.

We don’t tend to say, "Let’s go invent a brand-new candy bar." The top 10 candy bars haven’t changed in many, many years. What people like doesn’t really change that much. It’s great to come out with new stuff. But I highly doubt that a Mexican Jalapeño Peanut M&M is going to replace Peanut M&Ms as a big seller. It certainly has a place though.

So the Willy Wonka image of a chocolate factory, where the focus is always producing zany, brand-new things, is not a model that would do well in reality?

I don’t think so. And I don’t know that that’s a bad thing. The failure rate of brand-new stuff is really high. You’re talking 70, 80 percent, or even higher.

Are there any flavors or products that you’ve been always hoping you could get in stores, but remained elusive?

We didn't invent this, but we borrowed this idea from what we’ve seen globally, especially in the Far East. It’s basically a peanut that’s coated in a cracker shell, and the cracker shell can be seasoned. It’s a really awesome product. I love peanuts; I love crispy-crunchy cracker shells; and I like the ability to be able to play with that shell however you want, whether that’s a honey nut or something really spicy. We actually did mini-launches of this idea in the U.S. But it just didn’t make great business sense at the time. It never went mainstream.

What are those testing sessions like when you demo a new candy?

There are a lot of ways to do it. We talk about it in terms of quantitative or qualitative. The way I like it, with qualitative, is you talk to even one person, one on one, and have a nice conversation and try to get insights from them.

We’ve also done stuff where you go into people’s homes and you look in their cupboards to see how they’re living.

Wait, when you poke around in their cabinets, what are you looking for? What are you trying to learn?

Other than just what type of products they have, you’re looking where they put them. Are they hiding those products over the refrigerator, in a drawer where their kids can’t get to them so they can be their little treat? I’ve seen that. It’s so obvious what they're doing, and they say, “Yeah, that’s my secret stash. I don’t want the kids getting at that.” You learn all kinds of different things. You learn who your competition is. If they’re swapping crackers for cookies. It’s neat; a mystery that’s unfolding. It’s harder to set up than a focus group, but usually worth the effort.

I’m sure Mars is selling candy and products all over the world. Does China want something really different in a chocolate bar compared to the U.S.?

By and large we have taken our Mars candy products all over the world. In the ‘90s, we went into the Russian market and built a factory to build Snickers bars, and our goal was to build Snickers bars just like we did in the U.S. It became the top-selling bar in Russia. We feel strongly that our brands as they are have a lot of legs no matter where they are. It’s one recipe; you don’t have to redevelop stuff.

It’s less work for you though!

[Laughs]

How did you decide it was the right moment for Jalapeño Peanut M&Ms?

I bet if you go back in our archives, it came up 20 years ago as an idea. But that doesn’t mean it was a good idea then. Mexican jalapeño is a pretty topical flavor. But not as much in candy. A lot of the time, you borrow from other categories, and you realize it goes well with chocolate. Sometimes it may be an idea that was thought up a year ago; other times 10 or 20 years ago. There are a lot of things like that, for both savory and sweet flavors.

In the end, we’re trying to make products that our consumers love. It’s fascinating to me to figure out what consumers love by following trends or going to the consumer, whether that’s rummaging in their cabinets or just talking to them. I’m a big believer in prototyping to bring these ideas to life and then get them in front of consumers again. The consumer is our boss and we want to make them happy.

What is it like to prototype something? What’s it like to prototype a new flavor of M&Ms or Combos?

Our product development lab is basically a kitchen. We have Hobart mixers, kitchen utensils, you’d take chocolate and melt it and temper it, and you’d bake crackers or cookies. It’d be very very crude, but that was okay, because you’re just trying to get the general idea.

I just feel like if I was in your job, I’d be sneaking down to the kitchen a lot trying to see what was cooking.

Well, a lot of people do. The R&D lab was a pretty popular spot. You get some marketing people coming down there because they need a break, and I don’t blame them. The R&D lab was the place to be, and it was a good conversation starter for new ideas. The object of a prototype is to have something to react to. I’ve never seen a prototype that went out as first designed. It’s something to get a conversation started among a group of people, and it usually goes through many iterations before it’s that finished Combos you see in a 7-Eleven store.

What kind of reaction are you hoping to see when someone tries a prototype?

Facial expressions tell a lot. You see the eyes open wide or the eyes close. That’s a pretty good reaction right there.

With the kitchen, was there anything interesting you did to try and make it a place that inspired creativity?

In one point in my career, when we had a heavy focus on new product development, we’d hired a number of people from the Culinary Institute, who worked with our food scientists and process engineers. We’d get that creative friction going on between someone who is basically a scientist and someone who is an artist. So we created what we called the Prototype Kitchen, which had a big, square benchtop and a lot of interesting stuff and stimuli around the outside edges. There were different ingredients, the New York Times food section and other food and lifestyle journals, our prototypes and competitors’ products.

So people could gather, there was always a coffee pot. These little cues would invite people in, not just to shoot the shit about the Yankees, although they could do that too, but to talk about some of the stimuli that might be laid out. And we got an awful lot of great ideas.

I know you’re retired now, but do you have a little stockpile of personalized M&Ms with your face on them. Is that a perk?

I tasted a couple the other day. Our shelf life for M&Ms is one year, but I have to report back that these tasted pretty darn good after four.

It has the legs of a sea scorpion, the body of a lobster, and the eyes of an enormous larva.

Javier Luque’s soulmate isn’t just any other crab. Its legs aren’t slender and long like the gams on most crabs, but rather huge, flapping paddles. Its carapace, the hard upper shell of its body, isn’t round but elongated, rather like a lobster. Its eyes aren’t the typical crustacean pinpricks, but soft and glassy orbs so huge that they would be the equivalent of eyes the size of soccer balls on the average human. But still, Luque—who, it’s worth mentioning, is a human, and not a crustacean—loves this crab. “This animal came into my life without asking, like a lucky strike,” Luque says. “I know we were meant for each other.”

Luque, who works as a postdoctoral paleontologist in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alberta and Yale University, named the newly described and very confusing crab Callichimaera perplexa, or “perplexing beautiful chimera,” in homage to its strange hodgepodge of features, according to a study published on April 24, 2019, in Science Advances. The name references the chimera of Greek mythology: a creature with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a snake’s tail. This odd crab is just as terrifying as its namesake, but on a smaller scale.

The chimeric fossil first entered Luque’s life in 2005, when he was an undergraduate student in geology. While hunting for fossils in Pesca, a town high in the Colombian Andes Mountains, Luque and a friend had stopped to catch their breath while walking back home after a long day in the field. As any budding geologist is wont to do, Luque hammered a nearby rock, which split to reveal a layer crammed with hundreds of crustaceans. As Luque looked closer, he recognized many fossils of comma shrimp and ammonites, as well as, he initially thought, some strange kind of spider, with eight flappy legs and huge bulky eyes. But as he peered closer, he saw the creature had pincers.

Luque proceeded to call several experts in fossilized crustaceans to see if anyone could identify his bizarre discovery. To his surprise, everyone else was just as stumped by the perfectly preserved specimen. “If you get to baffle the most knowledgeable experts on fossil crustaceans in the world, imagine how baffled I was!” Luque says. The creature transfixed him so deeply that Luque switched gears from dinosaurs and toward prehistoric crustaceans. Officially a crab—though technically a mystery—Callichimaera represents a novel branch in the modern crab’s ancestral tree, though its body parts bear an uncanny resemblance to animals from other groups. For this reason, Luque calls it “the platypus of the crab world.”

One of the quarter-sized crab’s most bizarre features are its mysteriously enormous eyes, which likely swiveled freely, too large to be contained by any eye socket. Luque finds them extremely cute. “We think the chimera might have had development similar to an axolotl, where it retained its baby features,” Luque says. “Which is why it looks like a pocket Pokémon.” He says these eyes suggest Callichimaera was a predator, as scavengers have little need for good vision. “If you had to have eyes that big, you would be using them actively,” he says. The crab might have dined on comma shrimp, which Luque calls “the noodles of the shrimp world.”

While most long-legged crabs crawled on the seafloor, Callichimaera swam. Its elongated body was much more hydrodynamic than a regular crab’s, and its oar-like legs helped it paddle through the water. “Most crabs in the world are crawly critters,” Luque says. “But this one was a dreamer! It dared to swim away into the water column, like a bird. Not many crabs do that.”

Beyond its evolutionary absurdity, Callichimaera has even greater significance as a fossil discovery made in the tropics. It’s quite understandable that very few researchers go to the tropics to find fossils, as the region has dense layers of vegetation and harsh weather that can make quick work of a fossil. But this lack of focus means researchers know very little about the prehistoric critters of those regions, according to Luque. “We are beginning to scratch the tip of an iceberg,” he says, adding that research institutions in the tropics often lack the budget and resources afforded to institutions in North America, Asia, and Australia.

For now, Luque will continue to investigate his goofy soulmate. He hopes to ascertain how the creature swam, what it ate, and, most importantly, how it saw the world. When Luque lies in bed at night, he often finds himself unable to sleep because he is too transfixed by the crab’s enormous, wobbly, and woefully unprotected eyes. “What were you using those eyes for!” Luque nearly shouts into the phone. “I must know.”

It is one of hundreds of documents taken from the Pittsburgh's Carnegie Library collection.

A 400-year old Bible has returned home to the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, after being declared stolen in 2017.

The theft was discovered during a routine appraisal of the library’s collections two years ago, in which it was determined that over 321 items, including books, maps, and photographs, had been stolen. Among the missing works were first editions of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principe Mathematica from 1687 and a first edition of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, according to Smithsonian Magazine.

A former Carnegie Library archivist and a rare books dealer, who owns a local bookshop located just up the block from the library, have been accused of teaming up to funnel valuables, including the newly-returned Geneva Bible dating to 1615, from the library into the shop over a period from the late 1990s to 2016.

Geneva Bibles were mechanically printed and mass produced beginning in 1560. This was the version of the Bible that would have been available to William Shakespeare as well as working people. Protestant pilgrims would have brought this version with them to America. The stolen Bible had made its way to the American Pilgrim Museum in the Netherlands before the director discovered it was stolen and restored it to the Carnegie.

According to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the recovered Bible is a variation of the Geneva referred to as a “Breeches Bible” because in its translation of Genesis it says that when Adam and Eve discovered they were naked, “they sewed figge tree leaves together, and made themselves breeches." Those breeches became aprons in the King James translation, which appeared 51 years after the first Geneva Bible was printed.

“Conservative Protestants of the early 17th century preferred the Geneva Bible to the King James,” says David Szeczyk, proprietor of the Philadelphia Rare Books Company. “The significance of it is more mythological than it is real … it was a book that meant something to a large portion of the Protestant community.”

The discovery could change what we understand about the rainforest's ancient settlements.

In the Llanos de Moxos region of the Amazon rainforest in northern Bolivia, a team of researchers may have found one of the oldest burial sites ever discovered in southwest Amazonia. Five human burials, along with snail shells, fish bones, and mammal bones, were discovered in the region. The graves are estimated to be more than 6,000 years old and could rearrange the timeline of when people settled and began cultivating the Amazon rainforest. Their findings were published in the journal Science Advances.

The excavations took place on the “forest islands” of Isla del Tesoro, La Chacra, and San Pablo. During the rainy season, the Llanos de Moxos savanna is typically flooded, but these islands offered the perfect refuge for ancient Amazonians escaping flood waters. According to the researchers, it is likely that these islands were used as seasonal settlements.

The burials, along with discarded food remnants and evidence of fires, are all considered the territorial behaviors of a more settled society. During the Early to Middle Holocene period, the settlers at Llanos de Moxos were thought to be hunter-gatherers. With this recent discovery, however, researchers believe that this group may have established the foundation for more complex societies in the region 10,000 years earlier than previously thought.

“These findings suggest that the remaining indigenous populations of the Amazon are the descendants of generations of inhabitants that not only adapted to and transformed this tropical landscape, but also did so in a sustainable manner,” says José M. Capriles, assistant professor at Penn State University and lead author of the study, via email.

By discarding their waste on the islands and constantly returning for extended stays, the ancient indigenous population unknowingly altered the composition of the soil, resulting in thicker vegetation growth and greater land elevation on the islands. When they began to deplete their foraging resources, according to Capriles, they turned to domesticating plants such as peanuts, sweet potatoes, and cassava. Later generations emerging from the area would advance this knowledge of managing the land through building roads, burial mounds, and other earthworks.

There are sure to be other discoveries made across the Amazon regarding ancient civilizations. Those discoveries will continue to alter our understanding of how humans shaped the rainforest, according to Caprilles. “Even the most pristine landscape we see today is not the result of the absence of humans in these biomes, he says, “but of extensive landscape practices that in tandem with landscape change, shaped cultural and biological diversity.”

They're not actually alive, of course, but they do migrate.

Chances are good that no matter where you look while visiting White Sands National Monument, in New Mexico’s Tularosa Basin, you’ll see powdery gypsum dunes. In front of you, behind you, on all sides, you’ll find white humps, maybe two or three times taller than you are. The dune fields go on for some 275 square miles in all (including 160 square miles that aren’t publicly accessible), and it’s easy to imagine them reaching to the horizon, stretching far into the future and back into the past.

Dunes may look monumental, but their grains don’t stay in one place for long. “It’s a constantly shifting environment,” says Raleigh Martin, an AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the U.S. National Science Foundation who worked on research at White Sands during his graduate work in Earth and environmental studies at the University of Pennsylvania. The dune field at White Sands began to form several thousand years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, when an ancient lake evaporated and left behind a dry lake bed caked with selenite, a type of gypsum. These broke down into small grains, which the wind gathered into dunes. Like dunes elsewhere, these mounds are still continuously sculpted and remade by the wind.

White Sands’ sprawling field is home to several types of dunes. At the most upwind edge, you’ll find transverse dunes, which can stretch hundreds of feet wide. A mile or so downwind from those, you’ll find barchan dunes—with sloping arms forming the shape of a crescent moon—and two or three miles downwind from the barchans, there are lower, rounder, lumpier parabolic dunes, whose arms face upwind and may be speckled with plants. On barchan dunes, grains from the upwind side, or stoss, crest and tumble down the slip-face side, which is known as the lee. These avalanches happen at an angle of roughly 35 degrees. Over the course of a day, wind whisks some grains across a dune field, ferrying them from one heap to another. On a larger time scale—months, years, decades, millennia—the entire dune field migrates, crawling along the desert itself. “It’s like a conveyer belt action,” says Martin.

The movement of dunes also seems to be related to seasons and daily cycles. Along with several collaborators, including Martin, Douglas Jerolmack—a geophysicist at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied sediment transport at White Sands—found that the movement of dunes is correlated with a large temperature difference between day and night. That gulf creates an instability between the heat of the ground and lower atmosphere and the cooler air above, which then begins to convect and stirs the sand.

That means that spring is a busy time for dunes. Say it’s an April morning—calm, clear, and a little cool. Clouds might tumble by high above you, but on the ground, there’s no breeze tousling the grains. The dunes are steady and still. “Dunes go to sleep at night, and wake up the next afternoon,” says Jerolmack. As the day wears on and the sun bakes the sand, the little grains start moving. “Around about noon, you start to see little dust devils kicking off in the distance,” Jerolmack says, “indicating that there’s a little wind picking up somewhere.”

In the springtime, when the daytime temperature is around 80 degrees Fahrenheit and the nighttime temperature approaches freezing, Jerolmack adds, an afternoon wind might be expected to blow around five meters (or 16 feet) per second, and propel grains along like a “fine, fuzzy film” bouncing about four inches off the ground. To someone trekking across the park, that’s nothing too uncomfortable. “Imagine you’re on a beach on a windy day,” Jerolmack says. “If you’re picnicking, you get annoyed, but if you stand up, you’re fine.” But things can get frustrating—or even dangerous—pretty quickly. If the wind gusts at eight or nine meters (26 or 29 feet) per second, grains may be carried high enough to rap you on the face; wind blowing at 10 meters (or 33 feet) per second can cause whiteout conditions. But eventually, as the sun slinks lower, the temperature dips, and things settle down.

Dunes can travel several feet per year. In White Sands, spring “is when almost all the action happens,” Jerolmack says. “They come alive.” Even on the same dune field, though, some hoof it faster than others. The researchers found that at the upwind margin, there’s a lot of sand moving around, and the dunes move quickly. “As you move downwind, the wind speed and the wind stress on the surface subsides, and the dunes are moving more slowly,” Martin says. Jerolmack, Martin, and their colleagues found that dune migration slows down as the surface becomes rougher. Over the course of several miles, this puts the brakes on the wind. (Jerolmack likens it to the sensation of running across freshly cut grass, and then into a thicket.) Dunes that are farther downwind are also often colonized by plants, whose roots can help anchor the sand in place.

Often, as grains blow across a surface, proof of their presence vanishes when the wind moves them along. In White Sands, though, migrating dunes leave a trace of themselves behind: Below the moving dunes, there are often little arcs testifying to past ones. Martin calls them “dune footprints.” They look like loopy tire tracks from a desert joyride, and they form because of the unique properties of gypsum and the ready availability of groundwater. Compared to other minerals that form dunes—like quartz or feldspar—gypsum is hygroscopic, Jerolmack explains, meaning that it attracts and clings to water. Since the groundwater table at White Sands is pretty shallow, some of the grains at the bottom of the dunes wick up water and get left behind and cement together. The story of past migrations is written into the ground.

Even so, tracking dune movement can be a tricky business. Markers placed into the ground may be covered up by shifting sediment. (Sometimes, Jerolmack says, trucks trundle along pushing snowplow-like equipment to clear unwanted drifts from roads or trails.) Newer techniques include using airborne LiDAR to perform a topographic survey. Even with these tools at their disposal, researchers working at White Sands aren’t yet sure whether the overall dune field is expanding or shrinking as the dunes travel along, Jerolmack says. But understanding exactly where the dunes are headed and how they’re getting there can help scientists better understand what’s going on in places that are way, way farther from the beaten path—like Mars. Our red neighbor also has dune fields, but a very different atmosphere; same goes for Titan, Saturn’s biggest moon.

“What people are trying to do now are studying dunes here, where it’s easier, and then translate those to other worlds where it’s harder to directly observe,” Martin says. Whether they’re on Earth or another orb out there in space, dune fields look pretty otherworldly as they go on their way.

It went to the tune of $130,000.

Growing up, Ellen Kelly always wanted to play her Aunt Nora’s piano. But Aunt Nora didn’t appreciate the clatter, and the thing didn’t seem to sound right anyway. So when the heirloom went up for grabs in 1992, in a family estate sale, Ellen nabbed it for $25. “Best $25 I ever spent,” she told Sports Collectors Daily—she just didn’t know it at the time.

More than 25 years later, the acquisition has paid some rather impressive dividends, but not because the piano was actually more valuable than Kelly knew. Rather, she found over 110 vintage baseball cards hidden inside of it, including one from Babe Ruth’s rookie season as a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox. Last week, that card sold for more than $130,000 at Goodwin & Co., an auction house specializing in athletic cards. The other 110 cards sold together in one lot, for about $4,400.

Kelly, who lives in western Maryland, may have never found the cards if she had only used the piano for decoration. Back in 1992, eager to learn how to play the instrument, she sat down and found it out of tune, with a pedal that stuck. She recruited a friend to help her fix it, and together they found the culprit: the massive stash of cards that could have been clogging up the piano for close to 80 years. She can’t be sure how the cards ended up there, but Kelly told Sports Collectors Daily that she suspects they were placed there by either her father or her uncle, who wanted a space where the cards would be safe from Aunt Nora’s penchant for throwing things out.

Though Kelly did not go public with the cards or have them appraised until recently, she sensed just how valuable the Ruth card really was. Someone once offered her $40,000 for just that one, but “I thought, ‘That’s Babe Ruth, he’s worth more than that,’” she told Sports Collectors Daily. The card was from Ruth’s rookie season, no less, when he was still a pitcher and not “The Sultan of Swat” he’d become for the New York Yankees. The card also belongs to the historic “M101-4” set of 1916, which ushered in a transition from the lithographic art of older cards to black and white photography.

Kelly ultimately got the cards appraised after a family friend, who had long encouraged her to do so, passed away in October 2017. When it sold, the Ruth card completely exceeded—basically doubled—the auctioneers’ estimate of between $60,000 and $75,000. The piano became something of an afterthought: “I wanted to play it,” Kelly told Sports Collectors Daily, “but I could never get out of the first book.”

Hey there, neighbor!

Laurent Bourgon has never visited the Large Magellanic Cloud. No human has—this gas-filled galaxy, ablaze with newly born stars, is some 160,000 light years from Earth, according to NASA. Still, it's a familiar sight in the darkness—relatively close to us, as far as space distances go, and is often visible from Earth as a smudge in the southern hemisphere sky. Now, Bourgon has glimpsed it from one of the best viewing spots on our planet, and helped to capture an image that can make it feel just a little bit closer.

In 2018, when Bourgon visited Observatorio El Sauce, in Chile’s Atacama Desert, “I thought I was in paradise,” he says. Bourgon, an amateur astronomer who lives in France, was enchanted by the view. Stargazers prize this region’s low humidity and lack of light pollution; the sky is said to be clear roughly 320 nights a year. Standing outside in the darkness, Bourgon says, “You can see the shadow of your body with the Milky Way light.”

That made it an ideal place for Bourgon and his collaborators to site their telescope. The five-person team, called Ciel Austral, uses Bourgon’s software, called MaxPilote, to remotely control their TEC160 refractor telescope and a Moravian G4-16000 astrophotography camera down in Chile while they were far from the setup.

The sky conditions are an obvious improvement over the ones in France, Bourgon says, where cold, cloudy nights dampened a bit of the appeal (and likely payoff) of stargazing. And the software is able to adjust the settings to respond to a particular target, moonlight, and more. The software “does it all for us,” Bourgon says. Back in France, “we can go to sleep.”

This image was assembled from 1,060 hours of observation that spanned 10 months in 2018 and 2019. The raw data took up 620 GB, and 16 panels were stitched together to make this field of view. This version includes color filters that detect specific wavelengths of light to make faint structures more vivid. In all, it took a month of finessing to arrive at the final image. Suffice to say: If you go outside tonight and crane your neck to the sky, you won’t see something like this, looking like levitating bubbles or oil-streaked water. But the image is transfixing, transportive, and beautifully otherworldly.

The seasonal delicacy was discarded for decades.

This past March, at the Charleston Wine + Food festival, I ate a green oyster. I had politely passed at first, taking them for a misguided marketing fad. But after being cajoled by a chef-friend, I discovered that North Carolina’s green gill oysters are just as good as their boosters promise.

“These oysters provide a flavor unlike any other,” says chef Chris Hathcock of Husk Savannah. “A perfect balance of salinity and creaminess.” Matt Register of Southern Smoke BBQ likens their taste to a Carolina salt marsh, and describes them as slightly brinier than a regular oyster.

Yet for decades, these pretty oysters were sold at a steep discount, or even thrown out. Diners didn’t care to try green seafood. It’s only through the efforts of local chefs and oyster harvesters that green gill oysters, the product of the equally vibrant algae in North Carolina’s waters, have begun to be seen as a delicacy rather than trash.

Each winter, for decades, Dave “Clammerhead” Cessna has found green gill oysters in his beds. “Oysters take in a diatom known as Haslea through their natural filtering process,” he explains, “and the algae gets embedded in the oyster's gills.” Diatom, a type of blue microalgae, finds its way into oyster gills up and down the East Coast. In the colder months, when the water is clearer, Cessna says, more sunlight reaches the algae and allows it to flourish. But the coast of North Carolina, where Cessna’s beds are located, bloom bluer than just about anywhere else.

One exception is the clay ponds of Marennes-Oléron, France, where oyster harvesters carefully maintain the Haslea in the bright-blue water to produce fines de claires, their celebrated oysters that attain a similar green hue.

The French may celebrate their green oysters, but they were a tough sell in North Carolina. Cessna was the first to market the oysters, dubbing them Atlantic Emeralds and charging a premium for them. “Along with the unique flavor of the diatom,” he says, “the diatom enhances the oyster's own flavor with an effervescence that lingers in a very pleasant way.” Other harvesters and restaurants were able to follow his lead.

“The success of green gills here in North Carolina [depends] on retailers and restaurants educating customers,” says Sarah Grace Smith of Locals Seafood. “I mean, they are green.” She explains to customers how their flavor can be earthier and more complex. Some are intrigued; others order them as a dare.

To aid in that education effort, some harvesters think carefully about which restaurants and eateries have diners’ trust. Ryan Gadow, of Three Little Spats, in Wilmington, searches out well-respected restaurants all over the East Coast.

Other green-oyster boosters get more creative. Chef Stephen Devereaux Greene of Herons, inside the Umstead Hotel and Spa in Cary, serves green gill oyster soup dumplings, a play on Xiao long bao, to highlight the delicacy in an artsy, abstract way. “We sell them as being a very exclusive find and as fresh as you can get," he says. "Plus it’s the only oyster we use."

These efforts have attracted the attention of local food media, who spread the message, and it has helped that the green-blue hue lends itself to the Instagram age. Chefs say they still have to answer questions about if green gills are safe to eat, but the oysters are increasingly seen as a spring specialty. “Much like shad roe or soft shell crabs,” says Smith. “You have to enjoy them while [you] can.”

The seasonal oysters are hard to find much later than May, and bad weather, such as last year’s Hurricane Florence, can put a real hurt on supply. This differentiates them from France’s green oysters, which are produced in a more controlled environment. While many local chefs seek out North Carolina’s green oysters, chef Sean Fowler, of Mandolin, in Raleigh, looks forward to the sporadic surprises in deliveries, which I imagine is equivalent to scoring the toy in a Cracker Jack box. “It’s a natural phenomenon that we get to enjoy briefly each year,” he says. “It makes them more elusive and more desirable.”

The rising popularity of green gill oysters is a bit of a double-edged sword, since the demand has made them harder to find. But most people in the industry think it’s worth it. “I am of the mindset that when you can get them, let's celebrate them,” says Fowler, “and when they are gone they are gone.”

Thousands of hours of Marion Stokes's personal recordings will now be digitized, one tape at a time.

About 71,000 VHS and Betamax cassettes are sitting in boxes, stacked 50-to-a-pallet in the Internet Archive’s physical storage facility in Richmond, California, waiting to be digitized. The tapes are not in chronological order, or really any order at all. They got a little jumbled as they were transferred. First recorded in Marion Stokes’s home in the Barclay Condominiums in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, the tapes had been distributed among nine additional apartments she purchased solely for storage purposes during her life. Later, they passed on to her children, into storage, and finally to the California-based archive. Although no one knew it at the time, the recordings Stokes made from 1975 until her death in 2012 are the only comprehensive collection preserving this period in television media history.

In 1975, Stokes got a Betamax magnetic videotape recorder and began recording bits of sitcoms, science documentaries, and political news coverage. From the outset of the Iran Hostage Crisis on November 4, 1979, “she hit record and she never stopped,” said her son Michael Metelits in Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project, a newly released documentary about his mother and the archival project that became her life’s work.

“She was interested in access to information, documenting media, making sure people had the information they needed to make good decisions,” says the film’s director, Matt Wolf.

The year 1980 brought the launch of CNN, and the 24-hour news cycle. Soon, three, four, five, and sometimes as many as eight tapes were spinning away at once in Stokes’s apartment, recording news broadcasts, commercials, and everything in between on multiple networks. While many people assumed that television networks held on to everything they aired, that wasn’t the case. Studios were constantly erasing and recycling broadcast tapes in order to save money and free up storage space.

Stokes was no stranger to television and its role in molding public opinion. An activist archivist, she had been a librarian with the Free Library of Philadelphia for nearly 20 years before being fired in the early 1960s, likely for her work as a Communist party organizer. From 1968 to 1971, she had co-produced Input, a Sunday-morning talk show airing on the local Philadelphia CBS affiliate, with John S. Stokes Jr., who would later become her husband. Input brought together academics, community and religious leaders, activists, scientists, and artists to openly discuss social justice issues and other topics of the day.

“Our vision is really aligned with Marion’s,” says Roger Macdonald, director of the television archives at the Internet Archive. “It’s really bold and ambitious: universal access to all knowledge.” Marion’s son had contacted the Internet Archive when he was trying to find a home for her tapes in 2013. Macdonald immediately seized the opportunity. Within 20 minutes, the two were on the phone.

Macdonald recalls asking Metelits, “How could you physically manage taping all this stuff? And he said, ‘Well, we’d be out at dinner and we’d have to rush home to swap tapes’ … that was one of the cycles of their lives, tape swapping.”

In addition to her son Michael and her husband, Stokes’s nurse, secretary, driver, and step-children were enlisted to assist in her around-the-clock task of capturing every moment on television. She would also involve them in active conversations, asking those around her what they thought about how the issues of the day were being handled on broadcast television.

Having been surveilled by the government for her early political activism––she and her first husband, Melvin Metelits, had attempted to defect to Cuba together before splitting up––Stokes was exceedingly cautious about her recordings while she was alive. She eschewed Tivo, and although she was an early and evangelical investor in Apple Inc., she never sent an email in her life. She even managed to convince the rest of the already-wealthy Stokes clan to buy Apple stock, which paid off in spades. She funneled these funds into her recording project and the massive storage space she required as the sole force behind it.

“She’s already excluded from power and established institutions, so it makes sense that she’d want to pursue her life’s work privately,” says Wolf.

Now, Stokes’ work will be made publicly available on the Internet Archives, bit by bit, offering everyone the opportunity to examine history––and perhaps to set the record straight.

All praise to the tireless continuous plankton recorder.

In 1925, on a fruitless whale-watching expedition somewhere in the Southern Ocean, Sir Alister Hardy had a bright idea. The British zoologist had been tasked with investigating whale populations while aboard the RSS Discovery but he was having trouble spotting any cetaceans. Hardy soon realized something: The smartest way to find something as big as a whale was to find something as small as plankton.

Hardy needed to find a way to track and evaluate changes in the abundance and distribution of plankton in order to understand anything about what preyed on them. Hardy’s solution, called the Continuous Plankton Recorder, would exceed his expectations over the rest of the 20th century, not just in tracking populations of plankton, but also in archiving the abrupt rise of plastic pollution across the world’s oceans.

For his first prototype, Hardy whipped up a metal instrument that could pick up planktonic stowaways across an entire ocean, all while hanging off the back of a barge. In 1930, he brought a smaller model back on the Discovery to sample Antarctic krill, a tiny crustacean that feeds on phytoplankton. After making minor tweaks to the design, Hardy led the first CPR survey in September 1931, collecting oceanic microorganisms from Hull, England, all the way to Bremen, Germany. Hardy saw this data as a service, one as simple and necessary as weather forecasting, and something that could help the fishing industry operate more economically.

Now operated by the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth, England, the CPR survey is one of the longest running marine biological monitoring programs in the world, according to a 2003 history of the survey. Since 1948, volunteer barges and merchant ships have carried CPRs in their wake in pursuit of an international chronicling of the earth’s most microscopic species. But in recent years, this project has moonlighted as an archivist of something more sinister and considerably less decomposable, according to a study published April 16, 2019, in Nature Communications. In 1957, a CPR recorded the first known example of plastic pollution in the ocean: a plastic piece of trawl twine. In 1965, a plastic bag.

Because the CPR survey’s methods of sampling and analyzing the plankton have remained unchanged since 1948, the survey has accumulated a comprehensive 60-year data set of both plankton patterns and plastic pollution. Over the past few years, researchers had noticed deployed CPRs were getting more and more entanglements, according to Clare Ostle, a marine biochemist at the Marine Biological Association and the study’s lead author. So they decided to pore over the survey’s historic logbooks and count the number of times a CPR had been stopped in its tracks by plastic.

A CPR is essentially a three-foot-long metal torpedo that hangs off the back of a ship, dangling anywhere from 10 to 30 feet underwater, somewhat mimicking the swimming habits and body type of an average seal, Ostle says. Its stomach contains a cassette of two tightly wound rolls of silk. Water enters the CPR through an aperture at its front and passes through the tiny holes in the silk, ensuring that larger particles in the water column, such as plankton and microplastics, will get caught in the netting. While the cassette entraps these organisms and particles, the CPR continuously winds its roll, ensuring scientists can later geolocate where each sample was collected. The silk then enters a storage tank filled with the preservative formalin.

The entire process is similar to the way film is rolled and stored inside a camera, according to the 2003 history. If the scientists didn’t immediately douse the plankton in formalin, Ostle says, “they would be very stinky and hard to identify if they degrade.”

Later, scientists in laboratories unwind the silk scrolls to count and identify all the species, largely consisting of phytoplankton, copepods, and zooplankton. Every four inches of unwound silk corresponds to 10 nautical miles. The researchers cut and store these sheets of silk in boxes in a specialized, temperature-controlled library in the Marine Biological Association, which stores plankton samples going back all the way to the 40s, Ostle says.

Because CPRs spend their lives trailing behind container ships, they’re most frequently hauled up by crew members from those ships who are asked only to record in a form where, geographically, they pick up and drop off the CPR. The form includes a small section for comments, which Ostle’s team realized was a goldmine of recorded plastic pollution (as well as one-off comments about the weather). Whoever hauled up the CPR in 1957 wrote down less than entire sentence: “recorder fouled by trawl twine.” These comments soon arrived in hordes, noting entanglements wrought by plastic fibers, fishing nets, blue twine, and, of course, way more plastic bags.

Aside from uncovering evidence of some of the earliest examples of oceanic manmade pollution, Ostle’s team is the first to begin to quantify the often observed, but never proved, rapid proliferation of plastics in the sea since the 1990s, confirming what scientists had long believed. From the 1950s to the 1970s, fewer than one percent of CPRs experienced any entanglement with synthetic materials—many were often deterred by natural causes, such as a knotted strand of seaweed or a rogue pipefish that wound its way inside the canister. By the 1990s, almost two percent of CPRs were derailed by plastic. “The clear increase kicked up after the ‘90s, where most entanglements were driven by fishing-related items,” Ostle says. The current figure is somewhere around four percent.

Due to its microscopic focus, the CPR isn’t built to account for larger pieces of plastic pollution, such as water bottles. One time when Ostle was taking samples on a ship sailing in the open ocean from the United Kingdom to the Caribbean, she noticed something strange bob up against the CPR. “It wasn’t a bird or a turtle, but a floating toilet seat,” she says. “It just bounced off, as there’s no way the CPR would capture that.” But CPRs are an effective record of plastics that tend to entangle, as well as an archive of microplastics that scientists have recently begun to count.

The survey nearly faced obsoletion in the 1980s, when scientists considered such monitoring to be as weak a science as stamp collecting (a real zinger by British standards), according to the survey’s history. Thanks to government cuts, the survey was officially closed in 1989, four years after Sir Alister Hardy’s death. For several years, it had been operated by a skeletal staff working outside the bounds of an official laboratory. But it reopened soon, thanks to a rescue package from the U.K. Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food.

Since then, the survey has gained appreciation from the scientific community for its tireless decades of work, monitoring the world’s plankton populations even when no one quite asked it to. Since the first CPR tow in 1931, the humble device has traveled over four million miles and collected close to 190,000 samples, according to the survey’s history. “It’s such a simple design and doesn’t really have anything flashy or new, so people still suggest we should move on,” Ostle says. “But having a consistent dataset is hugely important if you want to look at big shifts.”