This will be difficult and you might die.

On a recent summer day in Northamptonshire, England, Kieran Boughan, 66, found himself seated on the triangular front deck of a motorized narrowboat along England's Grand Union Canal—awaiting entry to the canal's 1.7-mile-long Blisworth Tunnel. After hours meandering through the pastoral landscapes bordering the waterway’s riverbanks, past quaint country villages and wide-open meadows, Boughan knew the tunnel would be a drastic change: its pitch-black and oppressive cave-like interior; the eerie echoing of water dripping from its curved walls and rooftop; and a drastic drop in temperature as the boat traveled slowly through the long, damp passageway in no more than five feet of water.

As Europe's longest, freely navigable tunnel wide enough for two boats to pass, Blisworth is just one of more than two-dozen canal tunnels dug during the United Kingdom's Industrial Revolution in the 18th and early 19th centuries. This was a time when engineless narrowboats—pulled by horses that walked along a canal’s towpaths—transported mass quantities of goods like coal, iron, and pottery along a “super highway” of inland waterways and their locks, tunnels, and aqueducts throughout Great Britain, eschewing muddy and rut-filled primitive roadways for these easy-to-use, large-capacity canal systems. Still, it was the tunnels that Boughan was most excited to experience, because they're the whole reason that “legging” exists.

Legging is the act of moving a narrowboat through a canal tunnel, while lying on your back either atop the boat or—as was most common—on a plank jutting out across its bow at both sides, and walking along the tunnel's roof or walls. It usually requires two people, one on either side of the boat and each holding onto the plank for stability, keeping their legs at a 45-degree angle as they ”leg it” with equal pressure through tunnels that could stretch over three miles long (at 3.24 miles, it would take leggers approximately 1 hour, 20 minutes to leg through Standedge Tunnel with an empty boat, and three hours with a full load). It was an actual profession during the Industrial Revolution. While the legging was being done, a tunnel keeper or the boat owner would unhook the boat's pull horses and lead them up and over the hillside to the tunnel's far end, reconnecting them when the process was complete.

“Have you heard a person say they're 'legging it,' meaning going somewhere, preferably fast?” asks Judy Jones, Heritage Advisor for the U.K.'s Canal & River Trust, an organization that overlooks the care of more than 2,000 miles of canals and rivers in England and Wales. “This is where that expression comes from.”

But “legging it” is far from efficient—it's a job that came out of necessity. Although canal systems in much of the rest of Europe developed at a much slower pace, the U.K.'s rapid industrialization meant that construction had to be done swiftly. “[The companies and individuals] building these canals were on a tight budget and didn't think the canals would still be functioning in two- or three-hundred years. They didn't really care. They needed to get them done and get them open quickly,” says Jones. Building a tunnel with a towpath and one high enough for a horse to walk through would increase costs considerably, so many times they skipped the towpath completely and made their tunnels just wide enough for the boats, which could be no more than 70 feet long and approximately 6 feet 10 inches wide.

Tunnels like Shrewley Tunnel in England's West Midlands added rails that boaters could use to pull their way through. In other instances, boaters propelled their vessels with poles. Legging, however, was the most common technique for getting a boat through a tunnel, albeit one that was harrowing, hard, and extremely dangerous, especially in such dark, narrow, and closed-in spaces. “It wasn't glamorous by any means,” says Jones. “There were loads of fatalities.”

There was the constant drip of water in some of the more damp, poorly ventilated tunnels, making the surfaces slippery; and although many of the tunnels were lined with stones or bricks, others had sections that were completely cavernous, so that a legger could misstep easily. Boughan was amazed at how difficult a job it must have been. “You can imagine how the weight of the boat could trap one of the person’s legs, or even their entire body, if the opposite legger accidentally pushed too hard,” he says.

Dizziness was common, and the slow and arduous process of seemingly endless walking (“You had to keep moving,” says Jones, “because there were boats waiting at the other end.”) was exhausting, causing leggers to sometimes fall off the planks between the boats and the tunnel walls.

While working, leggers often stuck a sack of grain between their backs and the plank to help ease discomfort, and stuffed their boots to keep their feet cushioned when the tread inevitably wore down. “The trick to the job was to get a really good rhythm going between the two leggers,” says Jones. “If they could do this, it made the work a lot easier.”

Alison Smedley, Policy & Campaigns Official for the U.K.'s membership-based Inland Waterways Association, says that it was only the longer tunnels—such as Blisworth, Dudley Tunnel in the West Midlands, and Britain's “longest, deepest, and highest canal tunnel,” the 3.224-mile-long Standedge Tunnel in West Yorkshire—that actually had their own legging teams. At Standedge Tunnel, official leggers eventually became the law. “On the shorter tunnels boaters were expected to get their vessels through on their own,” she says, which meant that the wives of some boaters were more than likely legging it through as well.

Still, being a legger was really a last resort, one reserved for men looking for whatever work they could find. “When people are desperate they'll do anything—even if it's for a shilling,” Jones says. Blisworth Tunnel, in particular, was notorious for its ”unofficial” leggers who would often terrorize boaters into employing them. “This was a time when many considered the boating community to be the fringes of society—there were families living on their boats, sometimes with five kids on board, hauling things up and down the river,” says Jones. “People referred to them as 'Water Gypsies,' and leggers were on the fringes of this community.” A typical legger was likely male and uneducated, a bit older—in his 50s or 60s—and unable to get work in other fields. “[These men] hung around at the entrance to tunnels and just waited. You have to think they had very little options,” she says. “I mean, three hours legging it through a damp, dripping, claustrophobic place where you can't see the light at the end of the tunnel? It's an awful existence, really.”

Although ”wing” boards, which hooked directly on to a boat to provide added stability, soon came onto the scene and made legging slightly safer, the profession was thankfully short-lived. Steam and electric tugboats eventually replaced horses and in the 1920s motorized boats appeared, making legging almost obsolete.

Many of the U.K.'s most famous legging tunnels remain today, including Blisworth Tunnel, which features the Canal Museum of Stoke Bruerne—with a gift shop full of canal-themed maps and literature—at its southern end, and two-mile-long Dudley Tunnel. Because of its poor ventilation, the latter still requires either an electric pull tug or a team of leggers for boats that want to travel through. In fact, the Dudley Tunnel Trust (part of the larger open-air Black Country Living Museum) even allows visitors to give legging a go along a small portion of its largely limestone tunnel. Anyone with their own or a hired gunnel-height boat, meaning no higher than the top of the cargo carrying level, can also leg it all the way through by arrangement.

Smedley, who lives on her own ex-cargo-carrying boat from the 1930s, has actually done it.

“The first time we tried legging it through Dudley Tunnel there were only three of us on board and it took us three hours—with two of us legging and one of us taking a rest. The second time we had eight people on board, so we had four people legging and four people resting at any one time. Then we hopped out and swapped over, and we did it in two hours.”

But it was the tunnel's nostalgic ambience that Smedley found most appealing. “Often when you're taking a narrowboat through a tunnel you've got all the noise and the fumes of its diesel engine, because they really have nowhere to go,” she says, “but when you're legging it through you can hear every little sound—it might just be cobwebs or a bit of debris that you've dislodged and it plops into the water, but you just hear it. It's very atmospheric.”

They weren't appealing.

It was 1940, and Britain was squarely in the blitzkrieg of the Second World War, battling the European Axis powers. But for young Joan Stokoe, then a child growing up in Northumberland, it wasn’t the war making her miserable. Nor was it that her brother Harry was away fighting, or that she had no chocolate. No, all Stokoe could talk about was bananas. She dreamed of eating them. She imagined how sweet they would taste. And she badgered her mother for some at every opportunity.

At the time, the United Kingdom was importing 20 million tons of food annually for its population of about 50 million, including nearly three-fourths of its cheese, sugar, cereals, fats, and fruit, and nearly half of its meat. The German strategy prioritized attacking this food supply through naval missions that cut off the island nation from trade. To cope with shortages, the British Ministry of Food rationed imported foods.

On November 9, 1940, the Minister of Food, Lord Woolton, ordered a complete ban on the import of bananas. The tropical fruit had to be transported in refrigerated ships, which were needed for the war effort. The sudden dearth of soft, sweet tropical fruit was a devastating blow to Britons. Wartime songs memorialized the elusive banana. Dance hall favorite Harry Roy belted out “When Can I Have a Banana Again?,” London’s Tin Pan Alley endlessly covered the American revue hit “Yes We Have No Bananas,” and the novelty song “I’ve Never Seen a Straight Banana” got regular airplay.

In addition to making decisions about food distribution, the Ministry of Food sought to educate the British people on how to eat healthfully despite limited access to food. It employed a team of home economists to tutor Britons in a new subgenre of cookery utilizing war-time rations. Of these, Marguerite Patten, one of the first television chefs in the United Kingdom, would become best-known as “the queen of ration-book cuisine.”

Patten held demonstrations at grocery stores and factory canteens, showing the British populace how to eat well on a modified diet. Mock sausages (made with lentils), mock fish cakes (potato and bean croquettes with anchovy paste), and mock oyster soup (with artichokes in place of bivalves) became part of kitchen parlance, thanks to Patten’s reconception of austerity as an opportunity for culinary invention. And if mock entrées were in her repertoire, could mock desserts and fruit be far behind? Patten’s mock cream (margarine, caster sugar, milk powder, and a splash of milk) and mock bananas entered the British household starved for a sweet treat during thrifty times.

In the BBC’s “WW2 People’s War,” a user-submitted archive of memories of the war, Stokoe recalls, “Our mothers used to make ‘mock banana’ with parsnips. It was awful!” These distant approximations of the real fruit were actually boiled (or roasted) parsnips, sweetened and flavored with banana essence (a bottled extract, typically containing diluted isoamyl acetate), and occasionally colored yellow—a depressing gastronomic make-believe that embodied the privations of war. Carolyn Ekin, a contemporary British blogger who recreated the recipe to make a mock-banana sandwich, describes it as “rather strange and bizarre, but not unpleasant.” Ekin says she was acutely aware of its parsnip taste.

While it is difficult to determine just how commonplace mock bananas were during the war, readers readily responded to Ekin’s recreation by recalling their own encounters with the dish. “I remember a dear friend telling me she made this for her husband who loved it, thinking she had got hold of bananas in wartime,” writes one reader, “but when he found out the truth, he refused to eat any more.” In another wartime memory, submitted to the BBC archives, one Mrs. Farrow mentions that her mother would put yellow coloring on mashed parsnips and make "banana sandwiches" for school. "We thought it was bananas, as we had never tasted them before!" she writes.

In the BBC archive, Stokoe recounts that the rare gift of actual banana sandwiches arrived one blessed Sunday afternoon, when her mother’s friend sent one for the family from a stash her husband had brought from one of the “hot countries.” Stokoe’s mother mashed the banana and mixed it with some milk, to increase the meagre portion. They spread it evenly on their rationed bread with some butter. As she took a bite, Stokoe’s eyes closed. “We had never tasted anything so delicious,” she writes. “[I]t was magic.” The young girl paraded the peel to her disbelieving friends, and made her banana-deprived companions very cross.

After the war, the first shipment of bananas called for a grand parade. Footage from the Ministry of Food shows five million bananas being lifted out of the ship’s hold, in 1945, by large conveyors at the Avonmouth dock. “The first cargo of bananas has arrived at this port since the war,” a narrator ceremoniously proclaims. “We hope it’s the prelude of many more to come.” The Lord Mayor of Bristol stands with a group of children, most of whom had never had a banana before. A little girl chosen to present the Mayor with a stack of bananas is offered one. “Isn’t it lovely!” she declares happily.

That first lot of bananas was meant only as a wartime treat for children. But the Ministry evidently underestimated the adult yearning for bananas. Auberon Waugh, son of the famed British author Evelyn Waugh, describes in his memoir, Will This Do?, how his father confiscated the first postwar bananas obtained for each of the Waugh children. “They were put on my father’s plate, and before the anguished eyes of his children, he poured on cream, which was almost unprocurable, and sugar, which was heavily rationed, and ate all three,” wrote Waugh. “[H]e was permanently marked down in my estimation from that moment.”

Why the banana has become the world’s second most popular fruit (only behind tomatoes) is a mystery. Unprecedented mass production, along with aggressive marketing, certainly helped. But there also seems to be something about the fruit itself: Few fruits can boast an entire museum dedicated to their celebration, and there are more songs about bananas than any other fruit. The legend of mock bananas is a tale as much of human resilience as of the fantasies people create in the face of scarcity. Whatever their peculiar charm, one must give thanks that, for now, a banana is a banana is … not a parsnip.

National Parks Airways only lasted for 10 years.

In 1872, Yellowstone National Park—which straddles Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho—officially became the first national park in the United States. Though indigenous communities had been living in the geologically stunning region for over 11,000 years, Americans of the 19th century were newly enamored with the park’s vastness. But as the National Park system grew, the sites weren’t always easy to get to, so in a stroke of brilliant business savvy, Alfred Frank founded National Parks Airways in 1927.

The local airline only serviced three states upon its founding—Idaho, Montana, and Utah—which was not unusual for small airlines in the early 20th century. And despite its obviously branded name, the airline did not operate in conjunction with the National Park system in its first years. Instead, the two Stearman C3MB's (open cockpit mail planes) that made up the airline operated strictly as airmail carriers.

“Securing an airmail contract and then beginning passenger service was the typical beginning for a new airline,” says Marie K. Force, Archives Director at Delta Flight Museum. “To encourage the development of commercial aviation, the U.S. Post Office subsidized the carrying of mail.” Since Stearman C3MB planes were so small and had so few seats, airline owners like Frank could make additional revenue from transporting mail from Salt Lake City, Utah, to Great Falls, Montana (a 500-mile route). According to a September 1929 issue of Aero Digest magazine, located in the Delta Flight Museum’s archives, National Park Airways carried 61,870 pounds of mail and 870 paid passengers in its first year of operations.

Soon after, the airline’s fleet of aircraft was expanded to include three Fokker Super-Universal planes, which were “single-motor aircraft, considered deluxe for the time with a closed cabin,” says Force. Since these were built to carry just four passengers and NPA’s success was steadily growing, Frank sought to upgrade his fleet with planes that were faster, safer, and more comfortable. “The Boeing 247 aircraft were necessary because on October 31, 1934, the U.S. Post Office required twin-engine aircraft to carry the mail,” says Force. “In November 1934, Alfred Frank leased NPA’s first Boeing 247D from United Air Lines.” These planes were touted as having 10 reclining seats, a two-way radio, a heated cabin, and the ability to hold two pilots. They were also designed to fly 160 miles per hour.

Naturally, as interest in traveling to national parks such as Yellowstone increased, National Park Airways put its name to use and adjusted its business plan. “The name was [initially] for marketing reasons as it connected Salt Lake City with points north to its terminus in Great Falls, near Glacier National Park,” says Bob van der Linden, curator of Air Transportation and Special Purpose Aircraft at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. “As airlines expanded across the country, they began marketing to vacation travelers as well as businessmen.”

The promise of serving Americans and their dreams of vacationing in the great outdoors caused Frank to extend his route to Idaho Falls, Idaho, and West Yellowstone, Montana. Both towns are adjacent to Yellowstone National Park, and provided easy access to the grounds. And thanks to the pre-existing relationship the businessman had with United, “Alfred Frank’s airline connected with United Air Lines’ main line route from New York to San Francisco at Salt Lake City,” says van der Linden.

Once National Park Airways was fully engaged with the national park system (it started charting direct flights to Yellowstone National Park in 1936), other unique perks followed: During the summer months of 1935 through 1937, the airline operated a local sightseeing flight out of West Yellowstone Airport. But around 1936, Frank started seeking other pursuits. Existing airmail contracts had been cancelled by the U.S. Post Office in February 1934, and mail pay rates had decreased, so the airline’s profits were dwindling. Selling National Parks Airways to a larger airline made sense, since the cost of operating a multi-engine aircraft with limited room for passengers was steep for a small operation.

On July 31, 1937, Western Air Express (later Western Airlines) purchased the airway route NPA occupied. Western wanted to expand their route structure in the western United States, and since this overlapped with NPA’s route stop in Salt Lake City, they eventually acquired the entire National Parks Airways airline. “We have a 1936 brochure that promotes a joint NPA-WAE package vacation ‘Sky Tours / America’s Greatest Vacation by Air,’ with highlighted attractions including San Diego, Los Angeles, Boulder Dam, Zion National Park, Salt Lake City, Yellowstone National Park, and Montana dude ranches,” says Force of the Delta Flight Museum’s archives. (Delta and Western Airlines merged in 1987.)

The collapsing of National Parks Airways into Western Airlines proved to be a complementary fit, as the pilots for both airlines had experience flying over rocky western terrain. And thus, the 10 year reign of the little local airline that merged national park land and the sky came to a close.

It's way cooler than an aurora.

Several times a year, around the border between the U.S. and Canada, STEVEs take to the sky. STEVEs aren’t plaid-clad dudes with dreams of flight, but rather a celestial phenomenon that illuminates the sky with an enormous crescent of mauve light and an accompanying row of dashes of lime-green light. And STEVE isn’t a nickname for Steven, but rather Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement. The physics behind STEVEs has stumped scientists almost as soon as they were officially named in 2017, but a recent study published on April 16, 2019, in Geophysical Research Letters sheds new light on the atmospheric reactions that conjure STEVE’s signature hazy purple ribbon in the sky.

Though STEVEs bear an uncanny resemblance to auroras—which gain their glow from charged particles cascading into Earth’s upper atmosphere—they’re not quite the same thing. In 2018, scientists confirmed that STEVE’s mysterious purple light originated from another mechanism entirely. But no one knew precisely what that mechanism was or how it operated, so they coined it a “skyglow” and called it a day.

Now, scientists understand that the elements of a STEVE originate from two distinct atmospheric phenomenon, writes Toshi Nishimura, a space physicist at Boston University and the lead author of the study, in an email. The researchers analyzed data from satellites passing over eight years of STEVE events. They also contrasted measurements of the electric and magnetic fields in Earth’s magnetosphere against photos of STEVE events to see what caused the mysterious glow.

The team confirmed that a STEVE's row of green lights—which scientists call a picket fence—arises from a mechanism similar to auroras, where energetic electrons streaming in from space collide with oxygen atoms to emit a green light. Except a STEVE’s green fences occur in atmospheres much closer to the equator than normal auroras.

A STEVE’s purple stripe, however, has a much more alluring origin. The light emerges when charged particles in the ionosphere collide, thus creating friction that heats the particles and causes them to emit light the approximate color of an eggplant. “The purple part is like a stream of excited particles zipping through the ionosphere,” Nishimura says. “Instead of knocking off electrons, this actually generated friction, which heats up the particles and causes them to vibrate and jump about a bit.” He likens the reaction to the process that lights incandescent bulbs, where electricity heats a tungsten filament until it glows.

Though the researchers now know what causes a STEVE’s arc of light, they’re not quite sure why it’s purple. Nishimura hopes to resolve this question in a follow-up study, but he believes nitrogen might be involved, as the element has been known to create a mauve-colored auroral emission in similar altitudes.

Beyond further clarifying the mystery of an atmospheric phenomenon that sounds a lot like a dude from your high school, the study has big implications for radio communication, Nishimura says. The new study reveals that STEVE events are associated with troughs, or holes in the plasma density of the ionosphere. These holes can disrupt radio communication between Earth and space, such as GPS navigation. Spotting a STEVE event help researchers visualize where these holes occur and how they evolve and may even help scientists predict areas of radio communication problems in the future, Nishimura says.

STEVEs are quite common and easy to spot, especially if you live in New England, British Columbia, or New Zealand. Nishimura says that photos of STEVEs taken by citizen scientists proved crucial for the team’s analysis. So if you see a STEVE, snap a picture and you can help scientists like Nishimura better understand this stunning ethereal occurrence.

For the past decade, every elevator in the Canadian province has been graced by Cheryl Lashek's name.

She tosses her blonde hair over her shoulder as she looks to the server to pay the bill for her dinner. As she passes him her credit card, he looks back at her in amazement. “Are you the Cheryl Lashek?”

Lashek has won her fame in the Canadian province of Manitoba not through her presence in the media, or politics, or any such thing. No, Lashek is what she calls a “desk jockey,” bearing the formal title of government director of mechanical engineering. But it just so happens that—until recently—if you lived in any corner of Manitoba, you would find her name plastered on the wall of every single elevator you rode in.

Lashek’s signature has graced the paper permits hanging in the elevators for over a decade. Eventually, Manitobans all started wondering the obvious question: Who is this invisible yet ubiquitous engineer who keeps us safe as we fly up and down in these careening metal boxes?

“It’s just one of those mysteries in life. You don’t know who Cheryl is,” says Todd Scott, a long-time Winnipeg resident and Lashek admirer.

“It’s always been an inside joke with my family,” says Alex Plante, an artist who lives in Winnipeg. “It’s like, ‘Oh, there’s Cheryl!’ Or if something’s wrong with the elevator it’s, ‘Dammit Cheryl! Thanks for nothing.’ That kind of thing.”

In the last couple of years, fans of the mysterious Cheryl Lashek found each other on Instagram and Twitter. Photos of her famed permits circulate, pointing out her diligence. Those comforted by the sight of her name are united using the hashtag: #InCherylWeTrust.

But not all is well in the Lashek fandom. Recently, the government of Manitoba posted a job listing online for an elevator inspector. Fans were concerned that this meant Lashek was out. Those worries were exacerbated by a rumor that as of April 1, 2019, signatures would be removed from the certificates altogether.

Outrage and disappointment surfaced from all corners. One tweet described Lashek’s rumored retirement as a nightmare realized, that future generations will never know the comfort of Cheryl Lashek’s name. A page on Facebook surfaced suggesting Lashek should run for the province’s premiership. A local radio station wrote a song in her honor.

However, these rumors were greatly exaggerated. In her first public interview, Lashek says it was not her job that was posted, and she remains a director of mechanical engineering. However, while she remains in the same role, the oversight of elevators has been moved to someone else’s purview. Additionally, the government is looking at the possibility of removing the paper certificates from elevators altogether, but this did not take effect on April 1.

“I am not retiring, I am nowhere close to retirement,” Lashek says. “It definitely makes me chuckle, some of the comments, like, ‘How are we going to know the maximum capacity?’ They see me as the oversight of all of this, and making sure they’re safe and they get to their destination. To me, it’s hilarious that one signature can be all encompassing and so comforting to so many people.”

For Manitobans it seems Lashek’s watchful eye was a predictable comfort that, like so many others, was not properly recognized until it was on its way out. Her signature invoked a similar emotional response as the beeping whirr of a dial-up internet connection, or the omnipresent reminder to “be kind and rewind” plastered across VHS tapes.

While there are many middle-of-the road “Cherylheads” out there, Scott and Plante go a bit further than most. Scott, upon hearing the rumors that Lashek’s name would no longer be adorning the walls of Manitoba’s elevators, had magnets created with her signature.

“People put them on their fridge, so they know their fridge is safe. They put them on their cubicles, in the elevators at work,” Scott says. “They went and they spread her name, so that even if she’s not [certifying] this elevator, she’s doing other things that are safe and Cheryl-approved.”

As for Plante, she took her skills as a digital painter and went to work on an image of a halo-donning Lashek, holding an elevator in her hands.

“I was shocked to see that,” Lashek says with a laugh. “One of my friends sent me a screenshot from Reddit, and I knew right away exactly what it was. And I was just like, ‘Oh boy, okay, this is happening. Somebody painted a picture of me.'”

Lashek bought a copy for her office. “And the guy who delivered it, the postman, instead of putting it in the mail slot for our government office,” says Lashek, “he actually walked it up to the office to meet me, and he took a selfie because he recognized the name.”

For Plante, it was the most flattering of compliments. Even she was surprised by the number of orders she got, having just sent one off to Scotland.

The fame has meant Lashek is recognized whenever she pays by credit card, or gives her email address at a store. But what’s important to her is not the viral notoriety, but the opportunity to show young girls that engineering can be a career path for them.

“I want to encourage other people to pursue their dream, not to get Instagram famous,” Lashek says. “But it’s really cool to be recognized for my accomplishments, and to know that people know I am an engineer.”

“[Winnipeggers] will just cling on to something that is familiar,” she adds. “And if I could do that and become one of those Winnipeg-isms, one of those things asked at trivia nights, that would just totally make me smile.”

Standard Oil was not about to be left earthbound.

Humans attempted to map the lunar surface long before Galileo famously trained his “spyglass” on the moon in 1609. At Knowth, a Neolithic site in County Meath, Ireland, for example, a 5,000-year-old rock carving depicts what appears to be Mare Imbrium, Mare Frigoris, and Mare Serenitatis. William Gilbert sketched lunar maps in the early 1600s, around the time he became Queen Elizabeth I’s private physician. And the English mathematician Thomas Harriot recorded the moon’s features with the help of a telescope four months before the better-known Italian astronomer did.

Lunar maps became increasingly sophisticated as telescopes became more powerful and printing techniques more advanced. Johann Baptist Homann, the Imperial Geographer of the Holy Roman Empire, included one with his colorful 1716 world atlas. Tabula Selenographica features two views of the visible hemisphere alongside three insets that illustrate the moon’s phases—all floating in a bubble-gum pink sky. In 1834, Wilhelm Beer and Johann Heinrich von Mädler, of Germany, produced the most detailed lunar map of its day, using a 9.5-centimeter refractor at Beer’s Berlin observatory. At more than 10 square feet, Mappa Selenographica prefigured the detail of Rand McNally’s large Official Map of the Moon, from 1958, based on photographs provided by the U.S. Air Force.

Popular selenography, or the study of the moon’s surface, went into hyperdrive 50 years ago, as the United States and the world prepared for the Apollo 11 landing on July 20, 1969. And Standard Oil—the behemoth behind countless 20th-century road maps—was not about to be left earthbound. It commissioned two distinctive maps that would go where none of its free road maps had gone before—the moon.

Companies like Standard Oil got into the mapping game in the early 1910s, as Americans began logging more and more miles in their new automobiles. Gas station giveaways functioned as indispensable Garmins and Tom Toms: Updated annually, they were how motorists navigated the nation’s quickly developing highway network. Maps were particularly attractive “aides to product sales,” explained the General Drafting Company of New Jersey, which designed many of them for Standard Oil’s Esso and Humble Oil brands, because they were such durable vehicles for 20th-century brand promotion. “People just don’t throw away maps,” General Drafting assured its commercial clients. “Not even free maps.”

Despite the lack of roads and gas stations on the moon, Standard Oil recognized the marketing potential of the Apollo program, and it hired General Drafting’s competitor Hammond Incorporated of Maplewood, New Jersey, to produce two offset lithographic maps (19” x 24”). Printed sometime after November 9, 1967, when NASA launched Apollo 4, they combine lunar geography, photography, and spacecraft illustrations, along with celestial facts and purple prose: “The pale moon hangs like a distant target against the jet-black background of outer space,” Map of the Moon explains.

Its companion, Trip to the Moon, charts a potential route for the astronauts Michael Collins, Neil Armstrong, and Buzz Aldrin, with the “bug-like” lunar lander touching down close to the Ocean of Storms, one of five potential landing sites identified by the Apollo 11 press kit that NASA released on July 6.

Unlike the typical Esso road map, or the pictorial maps Standard Oil also distributed for kids in the backseat, Map of the Moon and Trip to the Moon are printed single sided. Instead of the much more economical recto-verso combination, each has a completely blank back. Their physicality anticipates collection and display, rather than use in the car, and their visual style appeals to either a child’s bedroom or a parent’s den. (Today, collectors might pay hundreds for the former freebies.)

While the red, white, and blue of Esso’s (or Humble’s) logo is prominent on the maps, American patriotism is virtually non-existent. An inset photograph on Trip to the Moon shows “USA” stamped on a Saturn V rocket, and includes a small NASA credit, but nowhere else does it mention the United States or the space agency by name. The word “astronaut” subtly reminds viewers this will not be a Russian cosmonaut mission, but nowhere does the American flag or NASA insignia appear.

Similarly, Map of the Moon eschews the nationalistic rhetoric of the Space Race and instead notes the Soviet Union’s “historic feat” of photographing the far side of the moon, in October 1959. The place names Moscow Sea and Tsiolkovsky reinforce Russia’s role in lunar exploration. Though it does credit the U.S. Air Force for providing the map’s base photo mosaic, it makes no reference to NASA. Instead, it encourages users to “use this chart to follow the news of future moon missions as the second phase unfolds and actual landings and exploration are made by man”—implicitly landings and exploration made by men of any nation.

With unexpected patriotic restraint, Map of the Moon and Trip to the Moon speak to the universal appeal of the lunar landing—a watershed event that would attract a global television audience of 600 million. (Capitalizing on that appeal, after the Apollo 11 astronauts splashed down in the North Pacific Ocean, Hammond Incorporated published a “talking” version of Trip to the Moon, complete with photographs from the mission and a 14-minute record custom-pressed by MGM.)

If Map of the Moon and Trip to the Moon downplay America’s lead in the Space Race, two other handouts would have left no doubt among gas station regulars of America’s winning space program. Also designed by Hammond and distributed by Esso and Humble, The Solar System and America’s Space Flight Program chronicle by name the “elaborate” accomplishments of NASA’s Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, while anticipating “the Mars Excursion Module” that will take both astronauts and, no doubt, American flags into the great beyond.

A new inventory shows just how at risk these icy giants are.

Researchers from the International Union for Conservation of Nature have conducted the first-ever full inventory of glaciers at World Heritage sites. Their findings, published in the journal Earth’s Future, offer new clues as to when some of the world’s most iconic icy giants will disappear forever.

The IUCN team utilized an updated version of the Randolph Glacier Inventory and GloGEM, a program that can compute glacier mass, balance, and changes to geometry, to model the evolution of World Heritage site glaciers. The team found more than 19,000 glaciers in 46 World Heritage sites. The researchers then analyzed the glaciers for recent changes, assessed their current status, and estimated how their ice mass may alter throughout the 21st century. They discovered that of those 46 sites, 21 will be without their glaciers by 2100 under a high-emissions scenario.

“The results are both very alarming (very rapid and major glacier decline, glacier extinction in many WH sites) and interesting because they show that ice melt in the future will strongly depend on carbon dioxide emissions scenarios and thus human activities,” writes Jean-Baptiste Bosson, scientific advisor for the IUCN's World Heritage program and lead author of the study, via email. According to the IUCN, even under a low-emission scenario, eight of the 46 World Heritage Sites will still be glacier-less by 2100.

Many of these locations, including Los Glaciares National Park in Patagonia and Tajik National Park in Tajikistan, were designated as World Heritage sites precisely because of the massive glaciers within their bounds, according to the study. Without them, the integrity and special quality of these sites will be forever degraded, argue the study’s authors.

The ultimate goal of this research was not only to document World Heritage site glaciers and provide predictions, but to also display the importance glaciers have for our planetary ecosystem. The study refers to glaciers as a “keystone species” because of the tremendous impact they have on all life-forms. “The key message is that we have to make utmost efforts to conserve glaciers because if they disappear, current earth systems and the life at its surface will be completely modified,” writes Bosson. “Because they are very iconic and sensitive to climate change, glaciers have to be used to raise global awareness to accelerate climate mitigation.”

The location of his remains is in dispute.

May 2, 2019, marks the 500th anniversary of Leonardo da Vinci’s death, and to mark the occasion, we may finally be able to confirm the location of his final resting place—thanks to a lock of hair believed to have come from the Renaissance Man’s head.

The Italian researchers Agnese Sabato and Alessandro Vezzosi, who have been studying the da Vinci family tree for years, found the lock in a private American collection, affixed to a label announcing “Les Cheveux de Leonardo da Vinci,” French for “Leonardo da Vinci’s hair.” Though we don’t know precisely where da Vinci is buried, we know that he died in France, since he moved there late in his life to work as an artist in the court of King Francis I. He was first buried in the chapel of Saint-Florentin at the Chateau d’Amboise, in France’s Loire Valley, but those remains had to be exhumed and transplanted after the chapel was destroyed in the French Revolution. If not quite lost, they seem to have been scrambled during the move, and since then we’ve only been able to guess which bones are Leonardo’s.

But a corpus of DNA evidence has been gathering since 2016, when Sabato and Vezzosi revealed that they had traced a familial line from Leonardo’s half-brother, Domenico, to 35 male descendants. After they complete the DNA analysis of the lock, the researchers will be able to compare the results with the DNA of da Vinci’s relatives, and with “his presumed remains” in another tomb in Amboise, Sabato told The Guardian. The hair will eventually go on display at the Ideale Leonardo da Vinci Museum in Vinci, the town in which he was born. Vezzosi is the museum’s director, while Sabato is the president of the Leonardo da Vinci Heritage Foundation.

Unusual as this situation may seem, it’s hardly the first time that an historic lock of hair has turned up somewhere unexpected. In 2014, a few strands of Napoleon Bonaparte’s hair were among the loot of a theft from Australia’s Briars Homestead museum. In 2018, an envelope apparently containing some of George Washington’s hair was found in an almanac held by New York’s Union College. And just a few weeks ago, after Antiques Roadshow uncovered a ring in a Welsh attic, the Brontë Society deemed it “very likely” that the braided hair discovered in the ring belonged to Charlotte herself.

The wealthy once labeled their ketchup, soy sauce, and champagne with style.

Whether on Dom Pérignon or plonk, wine labels tend to feature elegant lettering, illustrations of rolling green hills, and the promise of an unrivaled taste experience. Your average bottle of soy sauce or ketchup might have a recipe on the side.

But starting in the 18th century, one kind of label symbolized both wealth and good taste. By using elegant silver attached to small chains, British silversmiths created labels for customers' wines and sauces. Either a simple etched word or an elaborate medallion, these labels were both useful and beautiful.

In Georgian Britain, wines flooded into the nation from all over the world. But the opaque bottles hid their contents. Plus, wines and liquors of the period often contained sediment, and their containers could be banged-up and dirty after a long journey. For the discerning, a filthy, unfiltered bottle of wine on the dinner table would be unthinkable. At high-class tables, wine needed to be poured into a clear decanter before serving. To mark which wines were inside, decanters sported "bottle tickets," or silver wine labels, hung around their necks. Made from silver, silver-plate, enamel, and even mother-of-pearl, their shapes and designs were equally varied, from scrolls to escutcheons to elaborate cut-out letters.

Silver firms owned by Hester Bateman and James Phipps made labels for everything from champagne and sherry to curaçao and hock, a type of German white wine. Wine labels could be made and used abroad, with the most fascinating example being Chinese bat-shaped wine labels. Yet, according to the Victoria and Albert Museum, which has a large collection of wine labels, they were "peculiarly English and never became fashionable abroad." But in Britain, the custom was crucial. When a captain served an un-decanted bottle of Moselle wine at a regimental dinner, his commander, mistaking it for the beer he had forbidden, had him arrested. The ensuing furor, which included a duel and a trial in the House of Lords, was known as the "Black Bottle Affair."

Sauces, whose cruets were often elaborately cut glass, making it hard to see what was inside, also got the silver-label treatment. Like with wine, the taste for sauces was surprisingly global. In fact, writes John Salter in Sauce Labels, 1750-1950, "From 1780 for some 60-odd years, the demand for a wide range of sauces was incessant." Often, sauce containers came in sets called "soy frames." After all, in the mid-18th century, soy sauce was on wealthy British tables, along with flavored vinegars, spicy kyan, or cayenne sauces, chili sauces, and a range of ketchups, from walnut to mushroom. Labels existed for all of them, even sauces that today are almost unknown, such as Harvey's sauce, made with anchovies and colored with cochineal, and the gloriously named Zoobditty fish sauce.

Medicine bottles also sometimes had silver labels describing the inner contents. Describing a label inscribed with the slightly terrifying word "acid," the Steppes Hill Farm Antiques website notes that doctors provided mildly stimulating acids to "Hypochondriacs and ... persons afflicted with flatulence."

According to Wine Labels, 1780-2003, published by the Wine Label Circle, as the Victorian era went on, "improvement in the production of wine enabled it to be served straight from the bottle." That, along with new legislation allowing wine to be sold in stores, meant that paper labels became standard. Plus, writes Salter, as "transport facilities improved, less reliance was placed on highly flavored sauces to make food palatable." Silver labels, for both sauce and wine, became novelties, and then nearly unknown.

But there's one big exception. The Wine Label Circle is a passionate group of collectors with twice-annual meetings that publishes books on the history of silver labels of all types. While the wines and sauces they helped identify are long gone, the silver labels that adorned them continued to be celebrated.

The dial-in conferencing service is a popular hub for theology chat and tractor-related recommendations.

The voice on the opening recording is so cheerful it could be a representative from the tourism board of some perpetually sunny Caribbean island.

“Welcome to the Amish and Mennonite Conference Line! Use it for God’s glory!”

The Line is a conference room-via-phone for speakers of Pennsylvania Dutch, a dialect of German brought to the United States by European immigrants beginning in the late 17th century and preserved today almost entirely by the Amish and Mennonites in the United States and Ontario, Canada.

Founded in early 2006, the Conference Line is the brainchild of then-38-year-old Gary, an Amish Mennonite man who asked to be identified in this story only by his first name. When Gary serendipitously “met” two other Anabaptist men on Soapbox, a now-defunct conferencing service he dialed into to socialize on occasion, the trio came up with the idea for having a conference call once a week for Plain people—an umbrella term for Amish and conservative Mennonites, referring to their simple, monochromatic uniform. The call would focus on their shared Anabaptist history, which Gary said would be “common ground” for members of different church denominations. (The Amish and Mennonite faiths are both Anabaptist traditions with their origins in the Radical Reformation of the 16th century, but the Amish, a breakaway sect founded by Jakob Ammann in 1693, worship in members’ homes rather than church buildings and have beards, to name a few distinctions. Today, Amish and Old Order Mennonite groups share some cultural similarities, like dress and language, but don’t interact much.)

What Gary says started “as a hobby and as a service to the people” soon became his full-time job. The Line now operates 24 hours a day, 6.5 days a week (they’re closed Saturday night and Sunday morning, to encourage people to be properly rested for church on Sunday), and can connect more than 9,000 callers comfortably; more than 10,000 unique phone numbers have registered for “talk passwords”—unique PINs they key in to chat—and many more people have dialed in just to listen. The Line is “largely self-operating,” and conversation usually flows naturally and politely, though Gary or a designated moderator has had to step in on the rare occasion when a “nuisance caller” starts kicking up trouble or people begin talking over each other. In the beginning, Gary advertised the Line in The Budget, an Ohio-based newspaper with a large Amish and Mennonite readership, but knowledge has mostly spread via word of mouth since, to great effect.

“Historians tell me that never before in history has something pulled different denominations together like the conference line,” he says, while clarifying that a majority of the participants are Old Order, or “horse and buggy,” Mennonites. There are exceptions: in 2007, after the school shooting in the Old Order Amish community of Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, over 1,000 listeners, many of them were members of Old Order churches, tuned in for real-time updates on the tragedy.

These days, thankfully, the conversation is usually more prosaic. People are free to discuss anything they wish as long as it doesn’t go against the rules; callers talk “quite frequently about tractors, combines, farming practices,” Gary says. “Any topic that a group of people would talk about when they’re sitting in their living room.” The Line also has a news dispatch six days a week (three nights in Pennsylvania Dutch and the other three in English), discussions of history and theology (sample topic: “Jewish Culture in the Time of Christ”), people giving talks about vacations they’ve recently taken or natural disasters they’ve survived (in 2006, a man described a series of tornados he’d recently endured in Pennsylvania just as a tornado siren in Missouri sounded on the line), and hosts the occasional game of checkers or Connect Four on separate-but-connected lines that operate kind of like sub-Reddits. Sometimes, families or church groups perform hymnals for a rapt audience of callers; on January 17, 2019, 2520 people called in to hear a family from Indiana sing, which is the record number of people to be connected at one time.

When I dialed in early one Thursday, I first listened to the upbeat woman on the recording go through the Conference Line rules: polite, clean language; no proselytizing or “sheep stealing” (attempting to poach members of another church); and no “boy and girl visiting on the line” (basically, using the line as a way to chat before formal courtship is sanctioned). There is also no playing of musical instruments, as Amish and Mennonites believe that mastering an instrument might make the player feel a sense of personal pride, which could dissuade them from yielding to the collective body. Most importantly, she implored, “Please do not let the conference line take away from family time, Bible reading and prayer.”

After being granted access to the line for journalistic purposes, I pressed a button to indicate I wanted to participate in “listen” mode. I’m not one of America’s roughly 400,000 Pennsylvania Dutch speakers (that number is rapidly growing, thanks mostly to the high birth rate among the Plain) so there isn’t much I could contribute anyway.

Ninety-four people were participating that morning, but the dialogue was dominated by a few male voices: one of the rules is “women talking on the line should be kept to a minimum,” which is reflective of the conservative Christian belief that women should be largely subservient to men and remain unobtrusive in public life. (When asked to elaborate, Gary cites 1 Timothy 2, which includes such dictums as “A woman should learn in quietness and full submission.”) Their cadence was unhurried and monotone—as integral a part of the Plain communication style as their vocabulary. On occasion, they peppered their speech with English phrases: I heard one man say “40 years,” and I could almost parse a conversation about a trip to Sarasota, a popular vacation destination for the Plain, based on “August 9 or 10,” “man, it’s going to be hot,” “alligator” and “watch your step, watch your step, please!” (For a sampling of what Pennsylvania Dutch sounds like, here is a link to a recording of people speaking it.)

Though it may appear to an outsider that all Plain churches have the same draconian and immovable rules about technology, the reality is far more nuanced. In the Amish and Mennonite traditions, unlike in other Christian denominations like Catholicism, there is no one denominational executive body; as each individual church is self-governing, there is actually “a lot of diversity of practice,” says Steve Nolt, Senior Scholar and Professor of History and Anabaptist Studies at the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College. While the “Old Order” Amish and Mennonite groups, generally speaking, eschew technology, the specific rules vary both by denomination and from individual church to individual church: for example, certain Old Order Mennonite congregations accepted landlines in their homes as early as 1910, while most Old Order Amish still rely on communal “phone shacks” that resemble outhouses. Paradoxically, the Amish have become more accepting of cell phones for work purposes compared to the former, particularly as they’ve transitioned away from agricultural jobs. Computers are generally verboten in private residences for Amish and Old Order Mennonites.

Their rejection of Facebook and Instagram might make it seem like Plain folk are simply more self-sufficient than we Apple sheeple, but in fact, Amish and Mennonite craving for communal interaction means they are motivated to develop creative workarounds to their religious restrictions. The Conference Line is just one ingenious product from a group of communities equally as obsessed with connectivity as Silicon Valley scions.

“An interesting parallel and much older tradition in Old Order circles, particularly Amish circles, has been and continues to be the correspondence newspaper[s] that are a kind of ‘social’ media,” Nolt says. The letters of hundreds of volunteer scribes—they cover topics like “who came to visit, where church was hosted, who’s sick, who’s died, who had a baby, maybe some news about the weather”—are printed in The Budget and Die Bottschaft newspapers, with certain scribes even developing their own followings, like Amish versions of influencers. “It seems to me that the Conference Line in some ways is doing that verbally and on a daily basis, rather than a weekly basis, for Old Order Mennonites.”

Jeff Smith, a Michigan-based journalist and author of Becoming Amish: A Family’s Search for Faith, Community and Purpose, dialed in to the Line a few years ago while conducting research. “[The idea] appealed to me because when I was growing up, we had these kind of chat lines too, and all the 13-year-olds would be on it after school, which was just generally amusing to contemplate. I felt the line was such a great example of that struggle with technology that the Amish have, as we all do.”

An Amish man Smith befriended doesn’t use the line, dismissing it as a “time waster,” but Amos Hoover, an amateur historian and library archivist from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, disagrees. Hoover, who is an Old Order Mennonite, believes the Conference Line is helping to ensure the survival of the Pennsylvania Dutch language, which is an essential part of Amish and Mennonite heritage. He also thinks it aids in bridging denominational divides by making it easier for Amish and Mennonites—and the many variations within those camps—to interact. After all, they have more in common than not. “This morning at three o’clock, I couldn’t sleep, and when I called in, sure enough, there was a Mennonite truck driver from Wisconsin heading towards Minneapolis, and we visited a little bit,” he said, chuckling. “I knew exactly who he was when he told me who his father was.”

The newly described species has a five-unit compound eye and an unbristled butt.

Just shy of 100 million years ago in what is now Myanmar, a small but long critter found itself stuck in a sticky spot of tree resin. It died there, its slightly iridescent body coiled into the shape of an S and pristinely preserved in lemon-yellow amber. When scientists recently unearthed its fossilized body, they realized the arthropod was a newly described species of millipede with such a strange morphology that it revises what scientists previously understood about when and how millipedes evolved. These findings appear in a new study published May 2, 2019, in the journal ZooKeys.

In fact, the 99-million-year-old specimen is so unusual that it necessitated the creation of an entirely new suborder in the current tree of millipede classification, Pavel Stoev, a researcher at Bulgaria’s National Museum of Natural History and the study’s lead author, said in a statement. For context, the small but mighty field of millipede research has only seen a handful of new suborders established over the past 50 years. So the researchers named the unusual new species Burmanopetalum inexpectatum, with the latter word translating into “unexpected” in Latin.

In order to verify that Burmanopetalum did indeed mark a new species, the researchers used 3D X-ray microscopy to construct a virtual model of the 0.3-inch-long specimen, including its skeleton, internal anatomy, and healthy abundance of tiny legs. The millipede’s uncannily perfect preservation allowed the researchers to observe the tiniest morphological traits that rarely show up in fossils.

“It came as a great surprise to us that this animal cannot be placed in the current millipede classification,” Stoev said in a statement. One of the unique morphological features that set this millipede apart from the rest of the pack includes an eye composed of five ommatidia (the optical units that make up a compound eye). By comparison, many other millipede orders boast just two or three ommatidia. Another distinction is the arthropod’s unusually smooth, unbristled hypoproct (the spot located in between the anal opening and the genitalia)—an evolved kind of bikini wax, if you will. Apparently modern millipedes are significantly bushier down there.

This millipede was the only one of the order Callipodida identified among the other 529 millipede specimens found in the same amber deposit. Scientists have never before discovered a Callipodidan in Myanmar, so this new fossil extends the historical range of the order into Southeast Asia. “In the past few years, nearly all of the 16 living orders of millipedes have been identified in this 99-million-year-old amber,” the fossil arthropod expert Greg Edgecombe of the Natural History Museum in London said in a comment. Now, this strange Callipodidan joins the club.

A hundred years and counting of promoting childhood literacy.

In 1913, Franklin K. Matthiews, the librarian for the Boy Scouts of America, traversed the United States with the goal of raising awareness about the importance of childhood literacy and children’s books. In 1919, his advocacy culminated in the creation of Children's Book Week, the longest-running national literacy initiative in the U.S. This year marks the 100th anniversary of Matthiew’s endeavor to make books an essential part of every childhood. In celebration, the Library of Congress has made available online a collection of 70 rare children’s books all published in the United States and England before 1924.

The collection includes titles such as The Slant Book from 1910, which follows a young baby named Bobby as his carriage careens downhill and across the city. The book was created in the shape of a rhombus rather than a rectangle, allowing Bobby to ride the slope of the book as the pages turn. There are also educational titles including The Juvenile National Calendar, which dates back to 1824. The book taught children the responsibilities of various government officials, such as the President, Vice President, and Secretary of the Treasury, all during a time when the country itself was still an infant. Many of these books are accompanied by artwork from famed American illustrators, such as W.W. Denslow, Peter Newell, and artists from the Golden Age of Illustrations, such as the English illustrator Randolph Caldecott, after whom the Caldecott Medal for children’s picture books was named.

The collection isn’t just a hodgepodge of random children’s books from the past. Each book represents one of three themes chosen by the library: Learning to Read, Reading to Learn, and Reading for Fun. But perhaps what’s most notable about these 70 texts is that, some of them harken back to antiquated notions of race, class, and gender, providing parents the opportunity to have important discussions with their children on how societies can change. As Lee Ann Potter, the director of the learning and innovation office at the Library of Congress, told the New York Times, “We’re celebrating the fact that these books provide us with the opportunity to have conversations about what is appropriate or inappropriate, that they help us understand a different time.”

It includes the first writing from a human on another celestial body.

On July 20, 1969, the astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin successfully landed on the moon for the first time in history. And in the summer of 2019, the manual that got them there will officially be for sale in an auction celebrating space exploration and the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11.

This lunar module timeline book was used by the two U.S. astronauts to land Eagle, the lunar module that allowed for exploration of the moon’s surface. This rare hardcover manual contains 44 three-hole-punched pages of detailed instructions for the launch and descent of Eagle.

“The portion of time the book covers is from the beginning of entering the lunar module, undocking from the command module Columbia, [until] they begin the power descent initiation,” says Christina Geiger, head of books and manuscripts at Christie’s America.

This step-by-step manual offers rare insight into the process of conducting the first moon landing, particularly the fact that the NASA astronauts weren’t completely certain their mission could be completed. In the book, there’s a section that gives details based on whether they decide to stay or not stay on the moon. “It’s almost like a choose your own adventure,” Geiger says. “They have a box with steps to abort the mission [if necessary].”

Each individual sheet in this manual is marked with reports from the sky: the dates of the missions, what revolution the vessel was on, and the time stamps of the team’s completed tasks. The instruction list details the procedures that both the commander module pilot (Michael Collins) and lunar module pilot (Buzz Aldrin) were supposed to complete. “We counted 150 checkboxes, completion marks, and annotations which are almost exclusively numbers made by Armstrong and Aldrin in real time during the mission,” says Geiger.

Though several manuals of this sort exist, and people back on Earth at mission control likely would have had some iteration of the book to track the Eagle’s steps, this item is unique because it is the only one that actually made it to the moon aboard the lunar module, and that had Armstrong and Aldrin’s original handwritten notes in it.

This highly technical book was in Aldrin’s personal collection until he sold it to a private collector. Christie’s estimates that the anonymous consigner will get anything from seven to nine million dollars for this extremely valuable book. Says Geiger: “The reason people collect books is to get close to this moment of discovery… [to connect] with history in a way where you’re getting close to moments when the human imagination got a little bit bigger. ” To that point, historians know that the instruction manual was sitting right between commanders Armstrong and Aldrin as they descended upon the moon.

“The most exciting page is the one that represents the actual landing,” says Geiger. “And that has the first writing from a human on another celestial body… those are Aldrin’s handwritten landing coordinates.” These vital coordinates were written in the lunar mare known as the Sea of Tranquility.

According to a press release, there was no video recording and only an imperfect audio recording of the astronauts in Eagle, so this manual provides the only first-hand accounting of the moon landing. The Apollo 11 Lunar Module Timeline Book will be on public view in New York starting May 3 through May 17, 2019, and will then travel the world visiting Hong Kong, Beijing, and Seattle, Washington, before landing back in New York for its official auction on July 18.

Now a queer stereotype, the lesbian potluck has radical roots.

Jen Martin and Liz Alpern lived in “that house.” Many queer friend groups have one. It’s the kind of place where a pot of soup is always boiling, where bread is always in the oven, where someone is always willing to read your tarot cards. Friends stopped to visit the Brooklyn apartment on weeknights. It was a space to cook and eat, to work and relax.

For years, Alpern, a chef, had contemplated expanding her house’s welcoming vibe into a formal event, a soup night that would promote queer chefs. After the 2016 presidential election, as Alpern wondered how to support swelling social justice movements, she thought: Why not turn her soup idea into a fundraiser? The first event—a donate-what-you-can dinner—happened the night after the 2017 Women’s March. Protestors returned to New York from D.C. with sore feet and crumpled banners. Exhausted but still revved up, they piled into a local cafe for soup and community. The love, says Kathleen Cunningham, a Queer Soup Night organizer along with Martin and Alpern, was palpable. Yet friends kept asking: What kind of soup could they bring to the potluck?

“We have this joke in Queer Soup Night land: that we’re not a potluck,” Alpern says. But it’s no wonder the trios’ friends were expecting collective cooking. Potlucks have been a hallmark of queer women’s spaces since the 1950s, when the Daughters of Bilitis, the U.S.’s first modern lesbian organization, began meeting in secret over coffee in San Francisco. Nowadays, the potluck is synonymous with lesbian tradition—so ubiquitous that lesbians have been known to potluck everything from protests to sex parties.

Yet the humble potluck has a radical history. From secret ‘50s meetups to ‘70s separatist communes, shared cooking and eating has long nourished the lesbian movement. “The potluck epitomizes the idea of how much more you can have when you grow together,” says Karla Jay, a Professor Emerita at Pace University and a pioneering lesbian activist. “That’s for me the essence of political togetherness.” Born of economic necessity and nurtured in political struggle, lesbian potlucks fed a vision of a more equal world.

To understand how the shared meal became lesbian canon, we have to return to a time before marriage equality and Ellen, before even Stonewall, to a small house in San Francisco. In 1955, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon, a couple who had been living together since 1953, asked a pivotal question: Where are all the lesbians? There were plenty of gay people in 1950s San Francisco. They had migrated to the city in droves after the War, leaving Midwestern towns or the battlefields of Europe to seek community and freedom. The emerging gay and lesbian establishments of the city’s North Beach neighborhood, such as The Paper Doll and The Tin Angel, were full of them.

Yet the bar scene was often the target of police violence, and was largely dominated by gay men. With more access to money and public space than their lesbian counterparts, gay men, while still in danger of homophobic violence, could dance, sweat, and cruise more freely. Lesbians, meanwhile, struggled under the dual burden of sexism and homophobia. They made less money than their male counterparts, and were subject to specific kinds of sexual harassment and violence. Those who were mothers, married or divorced, risked losing custody of their children. Martin and Lyon decided that if they couldn’t find lesbians in the gay bar scene, they would create a lesbian space for themselves.

Their first meeting, in September 1955, was simple enough: a dinner between four couples in a friend’s home. But Martin and Lyon had tapped into a collective craving. Within five years, chapters of the group had sprung up from San Diego to Chicago, New Orleans to New York. They called themselves the Daughters of Bilitis.

One of their signature events was called Gab ‘n Java, and it was exactly what it sounds like. Women came together over coffee and cake, sharing what they could. These meetings, while less overtly political than later lesbian activism, did something amazing: In an era where being out could lead to serious legal and social consequences, they helped American lesbians realize their collective strength. Soon, the meetings included more extensive offerings—salads and quiches, booze and baked goods. “Some women were very accomplished, some women were struggling,” says Marcia Gallo, a professor at the University of Nevada who wrote a history of the DoB. “Many of them felt like they were the only ones.” But at Daughters of Bilitis meetings, they were together.

Bolstered by groups such as the DoB, the gay movement grew quickly. By the late ‘60s, radical developments were brewing. Students across America protested the Vietnam War. Black Americans marched and were jailed for freedom. Women demanding equal pay and the right to abortion took to the streets. The Daughters of Bilitis, by then a national network with its own magazine, was still going strong, but was split between those who wanted to be more politically active and those who did not. A new, more radical generation of lesbians was coming up.

Karla Jay was part of that new generation. In the early 1960s, she became involved in student activism at Columbia University’s Barnard College. When more than 1,000 student protestors rose up against the University’s proposed gentrification of nearby Harlem in 1968, occupying five buildings and taking the Dean hostage, Jay was among them. But there was something wrong with the leftist student movement. While activists claimed to be against violence, many men in radical circles retained sexist expectations: Men would make the revolution; women would make the coffee. At the same time, women’s liberation activists, such as feminist Betty Friedan, saw lesbian visibility as a threat to the respectability of the feminist movement.

Stonewall changed everything. In 1969, a group of queers, led by trans women of color, fought back against police harassment at the Stonewall Inn in New York’s Greenwich Village, effectively launching the modern LGBTQ movement. So when Friedan referred to lesbians as a “lavender menace” haunting women’s liberation, Jay and other young lesbians sprung into action. Dubbing themselves the Lavender Menace, they staged a protest inside the 1970 Second Conference to Unite Women, where they distributed a statement declaring a new, militant politics. Like the opening shots in a war, it started with a resounding declaration: “A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion.” The U.S. lesbian movement had begun to combust.

Around that time, Jay was living with roommates in a rent-controlled Manhattan apartment. Money was tight; dinner was tuna casserole or spaghetti in powdered sauce. Jay and other lesbians, most of them balancing activism with low-wage jobs, found that both politically and culinarily, they had more if they banded together.

Women across the country had similar experiences. Fleeing intolerant families and stifling small towns, lesbians flocked to cities. They met each other at bustling bars, in universities, and in the newly formed community publications of the gay liberation movement. In these corners of the world—in dive bars or low-rent apartments that had, just a few years before, been immigrant tenements—lesbians were not alone anymore. They met to flirt and plan protests over shared food. Gallo, who became involved in lesbian politics as an ACLU organizer in 1978 San Francisco, sums up the experience simply: “I had died and gone to heaven.”

Potlucks’ radicalness extended to the menus. Now, lentil stews and tofu bakes are stereotypical “lesbian” food, the punchline of community jokes. But in the ‘60s and ‘70s, these dishes represented new ways of thinking about power, violence, and equality. For many lesbians, the rejection of meat was practical: Women simply couldn’t afford it. But refusing to eat animals was also deeply political. Since women’s suffrage, Western feminists have valorized political vegetarianism. Some lesbians, particularly ecofeminists, took this a step further, equating animal slaughter and destructive agriculture with patriarchal abuse. For Jay, who came of age amid the violence of the Vietnam War, vegetarianism had a specific urgency. “I felt that I couldn’t participate in killing at any level,” she says.

These beliefs led to culinary experimentation. White lesbians, many of whom grew up on standard Middle-American fare, began using ingredients outside their culinary repertoires: tofu, brown rice, hummus. Meanwhile, women rejected processed foods, boycotting brands engaged in corporate practices they viewed as harmful to women and workers. Some lesbians—conscious of the sexist expectation that women cook for their families—declined to cook altogether.

Despite these radical aspirations, however, many potlucks remained racially segregated. “These were gatherings almost entirely of white lesbians,” says Sue Hyde, an activist with the National LGBTQ Task Force, about the potlucks she frequented in 1970s St. Louis. Absent more affirmative efforts to create communities where lesbians of color would feel safe and welcome, white lesbian spaces often perpetuated the racial inequalities of the outside world. These tensions were coded into food. Bonnie Morris, a woman’s history professor, applied to live in a collective house of mostly white, Protestant lesbians, but decided against joining after she saw a list of what the members considered staple food. “It was bran flour and black strap molasses,” says Morris, nothing that she recognized from her own Jewish upbringing.

Food politics are culturally specific; what is radical for one cultural group may be banal for another. By pushing a highly ideological veganism, some white lesbians made spaces exclusionary to women of color, by stigmatizing dietary practices important to their cuisines.

The exclusionary undertones of some queer vegan cultural spaces have proven stubbornly persistent. Lani Sol, founder of the queer vegan of color group Queer, Vegan, and Melanated, didn’t see her experience reflected in either white queer vegan spaces or predominantly straight, people-of-color vegan spaces. When she organized the first Queer, Vegan, And Melanated Meetup in 2017, she says, “There was a sense of relief.” Participants shared experiences of balancing their connections to cultural and family traditions, which may include animal products, with their own commitment to a plant-based diet. Unlike stereotypical white American vegan cuisine, she says, “We wanted our cultures represented in our foods.”

Sol’s group is part of a long history of queer people of color claiming cultural and culinary space for themselves. In 1980, Black lesbian feminists Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, and their collaborators founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. With an image of shared food at its very center, the Press would go on to publish some of the most epochal works of women of color feminism. “We chose our name because the kitchen is the center of the home, the place where women in particular work and communicate with each other,” Smith wrote in 1989.

These ideological struggles over food earned “lesbian cuisine” a reputation as dour and overly politicized. Gay men’s cookbooks were full of sensuous recipes—with ingredients they, on the whole higher-income than their lesbian counterparts, could afford—for staples like “crab lorraine, quiche, white wine, and anything baked in pastry,” says Morris. But lesbian cuisine, like lesbians themselves, was stereotyped as austere.

Yet lesbian food, too, could be sensual, even bawdy. Morris recalls the nude shots in pioneering lesbian erotic magazines such as On Our Backs, whipped cream covering bare flesh lush with pleasure. She recalls a musician asking audience members at a lesbian music festival to raise their hands if they were “vagitarians.” She recalls couples eating together on lesbian-only vacation cruises—flirting over wine, making sexy jokes over dessert. Away from homophobic public space, lovers could enjoy their food, and luxuriate in each other.

As some lesbians were sharing grocery lists in urban housing collectives, others turned to agriculture. From Oregon to the Ozarks, women pooled their resources to purchase rural plots. While these “land dyke” collectives had different rules and structures, they shared common commitments to collaboration and a harmonious relationship with the environment.

Mel Braman, now a staff member at the National LGBTQ Task Force, moved to the Ozarks with her girlfriend in 1985. At the time, Braman identified as a lesbian separatist, a stance she would maintain until the AIDs crisis. She had seen the brutality of patriarchal violence while working at a shelter for abused women, and she wanted nothing to do with it. So she and her partner borrowed money and bought a parcel of land. They built a 12 by 12 foot cabin, ate vegetables from their own garden, and received milk every Thursday from Queen, their neighbors’ cow. Braman remembers driving slowly with their weekly haul, hoping the bumps in the dirt road wouldn’t mix the precious cream into the milk.

Women who couldn’t move to the country had a short-term alternative: music festivals. Growing out of the womyn’s music circuit—the name a euphemism for music by lesbian artists; the spelling a political decision—festivals were day- or week-long events. In recent years, some festivals’ historic exclusion of transgender women has been widely criticized by LGBTQ and feminist activists. But for Morris, who worked at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival for 30 years, these festivals created a much-need community space.

Feeding thousands of campers was a feat. The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, which most years hosted more than 3,500 women‚ featured giant cooking tents, where attendees chopped hundreds of pounds of produce for mostly vegetarian fare. One recipe for Nut Loaf, a famous (or infamous) vegetarian meatloaf, called for 275 pounds of yams, 300 pounds of spanish onions, 10 pounds of garlic, and 250 pounds of shredded cheddar cheese—for one evening meal.

Health-conscious vegetarian festival food inspired a child-like delight in contraband. As a 20 year old at the Michigan Festival, Morris slow-danced with a woman in the hopes that her flame would share her mint M&M’s. It was the first time she held another woman close to music. In later years, Morris would smuggle Pop Tarts into the campgrounds, saving the sugary cakes to eat after long days of labor. “Do you want a Pop Tart, honey?” was one of Morris’s favorite pickup lines. It was irresistible.

At a recent Queer Soup Night, the same feeling of playful togetherness animates the atmosphere in a small restaurant in Brooklyn. Light glints from a disco ball, playing dappled patterns over attendees’ skin. For many guests, the warm, dinner-party atmosphere is a welcome change of pace from the boozy fog of gay bars. But sobriety doesn’t prevent the play of glances over soft focaccia and creamy, lemon-bright cauliflower soup.

Alpern, Martin, and Cunningham are on their feet, chatting with guests, handling logistics, and roping in friends to work the door. Alpern may joke that Queer Soup Night is not a potluck—and admittedly, the professional chefs’ soups are better than most buffet fare—but shared labor lends the feeling of a potluck to the event. It’s no coincidence that this space, while mixed-gender, is filled with queer women. If the labor of cooking, cleaning, and loving—inculcated in women by traditional gender roles—continues to hold us back, it is also a superpower. The beauty of potlucks and soup nights alike, says Martin, is precisely in this reclamation. “It’s finding value in things that people have told us aren’t valuable,” she says.

In the warmth and bustle of Queer Soup Night, it is easy to imagine the women who came before us. To San Francisco in 1950; to New York in 1960; to St. Louis in 1975. They came animated by the suspicion that they were not alone; that somewhere, others loved like they did. Those first lesbian potlucks—the arguments over politics; the humble tables laden with lentils; the couples holding each other without shame or fear—must have felt like a revelation. Evidence that the love we crave is not only possible, but nourishing. That the life we longed for is ours, and more delicious than we ever could have imagined.

This traditional art from Guangzhou can never be produced legally again.

In 1388, the Ming scholar Cao Zhao published Gegu yaolun, an instrumental guide to collecting and assessing Chinese antiques. Among his writings on fine craft, including porcelain and bronze items, is a description of a peculiar object: guǐ gōng qiú (鬼工球), or “devil’s work ball.” That name might bring to mind something insidious, but Cao was referring to beautiful, hand-carved ivory orbs that nest inside each other, such that the inner ones are free-floating. Each layer has holes evenly distributed across its thin surface, simultaneously concealing and revealing the artistry beneath.

So why the allusion to spirits? “People said that something like this could not be carved by a human,” says Jeffrey Moy, the executive director of Chicago’s Heritage Museum of Asian Art. “When you look at them, they look perfect. Later on, they became known as ‘concentric balls’ or ‘puzzle balls.’”

The Heritage owns two exquisite puzzle balls from the 19th century, when the art form—a special style of carving from Guangzhou, or Canton—reached its peak. Each has about 20 to 25 layers of ivory, all carefully chiseled from a single piece of the material. In comparison, the early examples Cao Zhao describes have just three. While puzzle balls are technically puzzles, solved by aligning the holes (using toothpicks is recommended), they were largely decorative due to their fragility.

The carvings alone are mind-boggling: At the Heritage, the outermost layer of one ball features a garden scene, complete with tiny human figures; the other is more textural, embellished with dragons weaving among undulating patterns. According to Moy, dragons were common puzzle ball motifs because of their auspicious meaning in Chinese culture. Similar examples can be found at Gettysburg College, which owns nine ivory balls. The mythical beasts are often depicted with phoenixes, a pairing that has long represented the perfect coupling of yin and yang. Inside these showstopping shells, inner layers tend to feature simpler but still highly intricate designs, often of geometric latticework.

Europeans, in particular, were captivated by puzzle balls and collected them as curiosities starting in the 18th century. The spheres were among the ivory goods carved by Chinese artisans in Canton that became popular as export ware; others include fans, combs, and backscratchers. “Foreigners visiting were always looking for something to buy,” Moy says. “Puzzle balls were common works of art for them to purchase and were a way for artisans to try to show off skills.” The dark reality of this desire for ivory products, of course, is that it fueled the ivory trade, resulting in the death of countless African elephants.

In Germany, craftsmen even tried to replicate the techniques to create their own market. “Lorenz Zick [of Nuremberg], in imitation of the Chinese, carved balls, enclosed one inside another; his son Stephan, continued the same style of work,” writes the 19th-century French art historian Charles Jules Labarte. The work from Canton, however, was more intricate.

The region’s method is detailed in an 1876 publication by the Scottish photographer John Thompson, who traveled extensively around China. According to him, an artist first used a lathe to rotate a block of ivory, shaping it into a sphere. They then drilled evenly distributed conical holes towards the ball’s center. Accessing the interior with an L-shaped tool, they would carve grooves to form concentric gaps, creating layers. “Hole after hole is in like manner centered,” Thompson wrote, “until all the grooves are cut, and meeting each other, the innermost ball falls into the center of the sphere. This inner ball is then moved about and carved with long tools passed through the holes, after which the bent chisel is again brought into play to cut out the next ball.”

The “devil’s work ball,” though, still holds secrets to this day. Researchers with the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, a Dutch computer science institute, have partnered to scan and 3D-image two of the museum’s early-18th-century puzzle balls—one with nine spheres, and one with a dozen. “Through our research we are able to deduce the make process of the balls,” says Ching-Ling Wang, the museum’s curator of Chinese art, adding that the team will publish a report within the next year. Among their questions: How many L-shaped tools are required? What are artisans able to see? As the computer scientist Robert van Liere notes in an early presentation, “It is very dark deep down in the ball!”

The object’s design has also inspired the British firm Steven Chilton Architects to propose a puzzle ball-inspired theater in Guangzhou. The envisioned building consists of a dome of overlapping shells, each decorated with geometric patterns.

If realized, it would stand as a striking homage to the region’s traditional art form that can never be produced legally again. At the end of 2017, China finally banned all domestic ivory sales and ordered ivory production facilities to cease operations. The origins of puzzle balls add to their complexity: While undeniably beautiful to behold, they are tragic reminders of the desires that drive the illegal wildlife trade.

Archival images of Pripyat before the accident offer a stunning contrast to what visitors will find today.

Built to house the workers of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, by 1986 Pripyat was a thriving atomgrad. Schools and kindergartens, a cinema, palace of culture, swimming pools, river port, and a respectable selection of shops and cafés—all these amenities served the city’s young populace, by then numbering nearly 50,000 residents. New administrative districts were under construction in anticipation of further growth. Pripyat offered a standard of life above and beyond that of many contemporary Soviet cities, so much so that, “to men and women born in the sour hinterlands of the USSR’s factory cities… the new atomgrad was a true workers’ paradise,” as Adam Higginbotham explains in his recent history of the disaster, Midnight in Chernobyl.

The city of Pripyat stood in the front line of that disaster—just a couple of miles from the ill-fated plant—and now, in the 33 years since the last human resident left, nature has reclaimed it.

In 2017, the most recent year for which figures are available, an estimated 60,000 paying visitors entered the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. A search for #Chernobyl on Instagram brings up hundreds of thousands of hits, many illustrating a new visual language of the post-disaster landscape: gas masks, headless dolls, souvenir kiosks. The historical authenticity of such scenes is often questionable, but beneath the dense green vegetation, amid thickets of new-grown forest, survive real fragments of this would-be utopia gone to ruin.

Higginbotham’s Midnight in Chernobyl includes a moving selection of archival images from Pripyat. They’re moving, often, because they’re just so blissfully mundane. Children squat in a playground, drawing chalk lines on the tarmac; retirees gossip on benches; majorettes march out of sync; seemingly everywhere, there are families pushing prams.

Many of those archival photographs are impossible to reproduce now that the forest has moved back in. Vantage points that once offered views of broad, open boulevards are cocooned now by tightly woven trees. In summer, the leaves draw in close around the shells of former buildings, cutting each off from its neighbors. Roads are invisible. Paving stones lie buried under decades of dirt and moss. The football field, now thick with vegetation, is recognizable only by the spectator stalls that face onto a solid rectangle of forest.

This disconnect between past and present, between nostalgic family photos and the half-buried city—a post-modern Pompeii explored by tens of thousands of international tourists—can only expand. Nature is relentless. Trees have snuck up on the Ferris wheel in Luna Park. Pripyat’s School No. 1 has lost an outer wall, leaving third-floor classrooms open to the sky. The city’s main thoroughfare, Lenina Avenue, has shrunk from a two-lane boulevard lined in sidewalks and neat grass to a single dusty track flanked by undergrowth so dense that, in summer, it’s hard to see the houses for the trees.

Official Chernobyl tours, heavily regulated by the Ukrainian government, offer less each year to the growing number of visitors. The city of Pripyat is falling apart, and the death of a tourist could do serious damage to what is now a multimillion-dollar industry for Ukraine. Rules about not entering the buildings, typically somewhat lax in the past, are increasingly being enforced. The modernist diving board at Pripyat pool was until recently one of the most popular photo targets in the city, but the installation of alarms and motion detectors has now ensured its removal from itineraries.

It is already difficult to reconcile these forest ruins with the lives that once inhabited them. Some enterprising companies are now offering premium helicopter tours over Pripyat, and one day, when the roads become impassable and the entire area is deemed unsafe for tourists, these may be the only views that are left: concrete skeletons breaking above the surface of the forest, and the sarcophagus over Chernobyl’s Reactor 4 shining silver on the horizon. In the meantime, the atomgrad, consumed by nature, sinks to the forest floor, taking its memories, nostalgia, and political aspirations with it.

Octavio Aburto and other Mexican ecologists want to preserve the pristine reefs of the Isla Marías penal colony.

When Octavio Aburto first dived into the sea surrounding the prison, he saw a nearly pristine underwater jungle. Pink and purple sea fans as large as a person sprouted out of coral-crusted boulders. A shimmering meadow of garden eels poked out of the seafloor. Huge schools of snappers, jacks, and reef fish swooped in and out of the reef. It was one of the most untouched reefs that Aburto has seen in his 20 years as a marine biologist working in the Gulf of California, and he would do anything he could to keep it that way.

For the past nine years, Aburto and his colleagues have been pushing for the Mexican government to protect the entire island archipelago that encompasses Isla María Madre before the region falls into environmental degradation from overfishing and wildlife tracking.

Towering above these waters is the recently shuttered Islas Marías Federal Penal Colony, the last island prison in the southern hemisphere, according to a report by the Associated Press. In February 2019, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador of Mexico announced he would close Islas Marías and relocate around two-thirds of the remaining 659 inmates and free the remaining third. The overcrowded prison was no longer profitable, people had begun to riot, and the old facilities could not withstand the whipping winds of worsening hurricanes, the AP reported. The island would become a cultural and environmental education center, named for Isla Marías’s most notable occupant, the communist revolutionary José Revueltas.

But this, according to Aburto and a coalition of Mexican ecologists, is not enough. In Aburto’s experience, similar declarations have only restricted the terrestrial parts of an island, but left the surrounding ocean vulnerable to human exploitation. “The island is a very special natural laboratory,” Aburto says. “We have a special opportunity to recover the marine resources in this archipelago.”

The Isla Marías Federal Penal Colony sits on the largest of four islands in the Isla Marías archipelago, located around 70 miles off the Pacific coast of Mexico’s Nayarit’s state. The colony was constructed in 1905 under the controversial regime of Porfirio Díaz, intended to isolate political prisoners such as socialists. In its early decades, the prison became infamous for brutality, torture, and repression, according to a statement made by López Obrador. In recent years, Isla Marías adopted a tamer mode of detention, often holding lower-risk inmates with a history of good behavior or those on track to be released soon.

But the golden age of the island penal colony has long since passed. In 1946, France began to empty the deadly Devil’s Island prison in French Guiana. In the 1980s, Chile closed its Santa Maria prison and an insurgency led Peru to close El Frontón. In the 1990s, Costa Rica and Brazil closed two island prisons. Many of these sites have since become nature reserves or tourist attractions, according to a 2005 report in the Los Angeles Times.

Despite what you might think, prisons and nature reserves go hand in hand, according to Joe Roman, a conservation biologist at the University of Vermont in Burlington. “Prisons function in two ways: They’re designed to keep people in and keep people out,” Roman says. “And in the wide spaces between those areas, in the absence of humans, wildlife can actually flourish.” Even landlocked prisons or demilitarized zones can create what is functionally a geographic island, preserving nature by virtue of an area’s isolation from the interference of human activity. Roman points to the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea as a prime example. In the case of Isla Marías, the wide, navy-patrolled radius of protection around the island functioned as a no-fishing zone, inadvertently allowing reefs to flourish.

In Aburto’s eyes, Isla Marías was always a prime candidate for conservation. In his two decades of work as a marine biologist, Aburto saw the entire Gulf of California overrun by overfishing. He wondered if any pristine reefs remained in the gulf. If they did, he realized, they’d be by Isla Marías. So in 2009, Aburto requested permits to dive off the shores of the colony. He received approval a year later. After a two-hour boat ride from the nearby city of San Blas, Aburto had to pass an inspection where Mexican soldiers and marines jumped on the boat to check for weapons. Only then could his team finally enter the waters around the entrance to the prison (they were forbidden to go inside). A navy boat tailed them the whole time.

Though the reefs bore some evidence of human interference, as Aburto expected, he was surprised to see absolutely untouched sandy bottoms that seemed to have never been trawled or exploited by humans. Isla Marías exists somewhere in the transition zone between the colder Gulf of California and the warmer Pacific Ocean, resulting in a strange and beautiful rocky reef landscape covered in hard corals, Aburto says. “It was so beautiful, the things we were able to see,” Aburto says. “Different from all other reefs that have been overfished.” The only thing noticeably missing were bull sharks and hammerheads, larger predators that were likely affected by overfishing in the surrounding area.

Although the colony left Isla Marías’s seascape in superlative condition, it was less kind to the island’s landscape. Workers cut down many of the island’s tropical hardwoods to build the colony, and the prison inadvertently introduced invasive species such as feral goats, dogs, and cats, according to a report in the AP.

Isla Marías is home to the Tres Marías amazon, an endangered species of parrot found nowhere else on Earth. The people incarcerated at Isla Marías often captured these parrots so their relatives could smuggle them out and sell them on the mainland, Ramon Ojeda Mestre, who served as Isla Marías’s head of the environmental recovery program, told the AP. Mestre had long been working to turn the prison into a reserve, but his efforts fell apart in 2005, when the government escalated what is now known as Mexico’s War on Drugs. As the country cracked down on drug cartels, the prison system teemed with inmates and the government reaffirmed the need to keep Isla Marías open and at capacity. The colony also wrecked the natural population of boa constrictors, as incarcerated people would frequently kill the snakes to make belts out of their skins. The other three islands in the archipelago, however, boast thriving colonies of blue-footed boobies and other seabirds.

And then there’s the issue of the prison structure itself, which has yet to be torn down. Incarcerated people were allowed to build their own homes, resulting in a number of houses, as well as a school and clinic, within the grounds of the prison. In 2012, the administration began building a maximum security prison, a project that never came to fruition, Aburto says. So the island contains a hodgepodge of abandoned buildings in various levels of decay.

Aburto doesn’t know if the government plans to tear down the buildings or simply leave them to be swallowed by the jungle. The latter approach has precedence: In 2005, Panama converted the prison on Coiba Island, the penultimate island prison in the Americas, into a national park but did not tear down any buildings. According to the park’s website, “The remaining structure is slowly being reclaimed by jungle and the marine air. Its crumbling buildings and simply marked graves serve as the only memorial to Coiba’s dark history.”

In 2000, the Mexican government deemed roughly 150 square miles of the Islas Marías archipelago a marine protected area. But the reserve still allowed fishing and its other protections were rarely enforced, resulting in a park that only exists on paper, Aburto says. “Basically they declared it was a protected area but it’s not actually protected,” he adds.

So Aburto and his colleagues want Islas Marías’s new status as a cultural and education center to include a strict ecological management plan that will be enforced to protect the archipelago’s biodiversity. The researchers’ plan will delineate clear protections for both the land and sea within the archipelago and bar all fishing activities. The final decision, however, lies in the hands of the federal government.

When reclaiming any prison or formerly militarized zone, Roman believes countries shouldn’t erase the often ugly history of these areas. “It’s important to acknowledge human history and to allow nature to thrive in areas where it already had a foothold,” Roman says, adding that commemorating history can often allow countries with historical conflict to develop peaceful relations. True to his word, Roman has helped lead a campaign to transform Guantanamo Bay into an international ecology lab. Unsurprisingly, efforts have stalled under the current administration, Roman says.

But while Guantanamo’s fate hangs very much in the air, Isla Marías will be converted to an education center—at least, at some point. López Obrador has not released a concrete timeline. According to Aburto, officials from the Mexican government have started working on a management plan for the island that López Obrador will eventually need to approve. For now, Aburto and his colleagues hope to exert as much influence as possible to push the management plan in the direction of greater protection, enforcement, and surveillance of Isla Marías’s marine biodiversity.

After all, the longer the island remains unoccupied, the more danger the island faces from illegal fishing and wildlife trafficking. When Aburto returned to the archipelago in 2018, he discovered hundreds of drilled conch shells littering the seafloor—the remnants of fishermen on the hunt for snails, according to a story in Nature. In other words, the clock is ticking. “Isla Marías has endemic species that you cannot see in other parts of the planet,” Aburto says. “For humans, we not only should admire and respect that evolution, but also use that uniqueness to teach future generations on the importance of preserving biodiversity.” As Roman puts it, Aburto’s team is playing conservation offense—he just hopes the government is game.

But in the wake of the blaze, a ranger said the prognosis isn't so gloomy.

Many literary pilgrims ramble in the footsteps of their textual heroes, or the writers who set words down on the page—maybe packing into an Alabama courthouse to see a play based on To Kill a Mockingbird, or getting a little misty-eyed when they pop into the sleepy town of Chawton, England, to pay their respects at Jane Austen’s writing desk. But some bibliophiles with a flâneur streak don’t follow the path tromped by a human character, but an ursine one.

For years, fans of A. A. Milne’s portly little pal Winnie-the-Pooh have flocked to the Ashdown Forest in East Sussex, England, a landscape that inspired the gang’s Hundred Acre Wood. Milne and his family purchased a home in the idyllic countryside in the 1920s, and the stories about the bear and his motley buddies draw heavily on the surroundings, as well as the adventures of the author’s son, Christopher Robin Milne. “Pooh’s Forest and Ashdown Forest are identical,” Christopher Robin Milne wrote in his memoir. The younger Milne fondly recalled family outings in the outdoors, “the four of us in single file threading the narrow paths that run through the heather.” Those walks through the quiet woods “made us feel that it was our Forest,” he wrote, “and so made it possible for an imaginary world—Pooh’s world—to be born within the real world.” Scores of modern visitors collapse that distance between fiction and imagination by downloading a self-guided walk that winds a few miles through Pooh’s environment.

Then, at the end of April 2019, some of the landscape went up in flames. On April 28, a blaze tore through more than 37 acres (or 15 hectares), according to the East Sussex Fire and Rescue Service. “The fire took hold quickly and was significant,” said Andrew Gausden, an incident commander, in a statement. Several crews reported to the scene to douse the fire, which made quick work of dry bracken. This fire followed two that broke out in February, when a planned burning sparked out of control, Smithsonian reported. The fire department has not yet revealed what caused the most recent blaze.

The recent fire might have been lethal for some of the real-world creatures that walk, flit, or slither through the woods, but Chris Sutton, an Ashdown Forest ranger, told BBC that the overall prognosis seemed promising. "All is not lost,” he said. “Within four weeks we'll have grass growing, and in six months you probably won't know too much has gone on here."

On Facebook, the Ashdown Forest Centre reported that the area that comprises the Pooh walk "was unaffected by the fire and is still open to the public." And while the woods recover, fans can also skitter their eyes over a charming old map of the Hundred Acre Wood, imagining walking the banks of the wending “floody place” and skipping across the smattering of “big stones and rox”—but maybe avoiding Eeyore’s moping grounds, labeled “rather boggy and sad.” Pooh pilgrims can also leave the woods and go say hello to the little plush menagerie that started it all: The threadbare stuffed animals that once belonged to Christopher Robin Milne and helped to inspire the classic now live in the New York Public Library’s Children’s Center. Another option: Stopping by the remains of a little tree stump in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that awaits Pooh’s return. (Years ago, Rabbit and Piglet had nearby nooks, too.) Imagination has a wonderful way of taking root wherever it’s planted.

They were part of a broader wave of adventurous stein-craft.

It’s the late 1800s in Germany, and you’re graduating with a medical degree. You’ve got your robes, your anatomical sketches and, of course, your trusty skull stein. You grab it by the bone-shaped handle and raise it for a toast, as you and your friends sing, “Gaudeamus igitur, juvenes dum sumus.” In other words: “Let us rejoice while we are young,” before our bones are buried in the earth.

Yes, the skull stein—a hollowed-out model skull that could hold up to half a liter of beer in place of a brain—was all the rage in late-19th and early-20th century Germany, particularly in the central state of Thuringia. As beerstein.net explains, the skull stein’s precise origins are unknown, but it’s clear from their present ubiquity how popular they became. According to the site, they “seem to appear in almost every beer stein auction,” even as other kinds of steins from the same time and place are incredibly rare.

No manufacturer was so closely associated with the skull stein as E. Bohne Söhne, whose porcelain factory in the town of Rudolstadt churned our more than a dozen distinct versions of it. The best-known iteration, according to beerstein.net, was the so-called “skull on book,” which was pretty much exactly what it sounds like. The base of these steins, under the skull itself, is a Kommersbuch, a book that collects traditional student drinking songs such as “Gaudeamus Igitur,” whose opening lyrics are written on the book base. A particularly elaborate take on the “skull on book” stein embellished the book base with a music box, which would actually play the song. These features helped turn the skull stein into a popular graduation gift across different departments, even if medicine made the most immediate sense.

Other entries from the Bohne factory included a two-faced skull stein with a regular skull on one side and the devil’s face on the other, as well as another that replaced the bone handle with a pair of coiling snakes. This serpentine handle was an apparent nod to the “caduceus,” Hermes’ mythological snake-bearing staff, which was garnering significance as a medical symbol and could therefore appeal to medical students and doctors, the skull stein’s target demographic. While other porcelain manufacturers also tried their hand at skull steins, none cornered the market nor produced such striking varieties as Bohne. Some stoneware manufacturers in Germany’s Westerwald mountain range also produced skull steins, but in far fewer quantities and variations.

The Milwaukee Art Museum, which has a Bohne skull stein on display, situates the artifact within the broader phenomenon of “character steins,” which are hardly limited to themes of human anatomy. These steins were formed to look like singing pigs, elves, radishes, and even political figures such as Otto von Bismarck, to name but a few. The museum attributes this great boom in novelty to the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution, which gave manufacturers the tools to experiment more easily. And why not? These innovations in the craft remain appreciated to this day by amazingly prolific collectors—radishes, skulls, and all.

Edible additives in mortar served both practical and philosophical purposes.

The city wall of Nanjing, built 600 years ago, was the first line of defense for the founding capital of the Ming dynasty. Originally 22 miles long, it was built with 350 million bricks, most of which have survived centuries of weathering. In 2010, intrigued by the wall’s sturdy composition, a team of Chinese researchers analyzed mortar samples from one section. The secret ingredient turned out to be humble sticky rice, a staple of Chinese cuisine.

This use of gummy grains as an adhesive is not entirely surprising. For thousands of years, Chinese builders mixed sticky rice, or glutinous rice, with lime mortar to assemble structures across the country, including city walls, pagodas, bridges, and tombs. Cooked rice was first boiled into a paste, then blended with sand and lime, a substance produced by heating limestone. According to researchers Yan-Bing Luo and Yu-Jie Zhang of Sichuan University, this starchy concoction “holds important status and value in Chinese architectural history.” Because of its strength and low porosity, they refer to it as “Chinese concrete.”

Scientists have long been fascinated with this unusual formula, and in recent years, different teams have conducted studies to better understand it. Researchers Jiajia Li and Bingjian Zhang spent six years collecting 378 samples of ancient mortar from 159 sites throughout China, dating from the Taosi phase (2300-1900 BC) all the way to the late Qing dynasty (1644-1911). Their numerous chemical tests found that 219 mortars from 96 locations had “organic components”—that is, small traces of starch, protein, brown sugar, blood, and oil. These mixtures have helped preserve much of China’s built landscape. As the researchers write, “the quality of mortar used in construction has played an important role in determining monument durability.”

One notable sample, from a 2000-year-old tomb in Jiangsu province, turned up what the researchers say is the oldest known trace of sticky rice mortar. (A separate study identified an earlier use, dating to three thousand years ago.) While the researchers don’t know the recipe’s origin story, they determined that by the Tang dynasty (816-907), rice was often used to improve construction. By the Song and Ming dynasties, both periods of extensive architectural activity, this unique mortar was prevalent, especially in the foundations of important buildings.

Sticky rice is sweet, and augments savory dishes such as zongzi, pyramids of rice and fillings neatly wrapped in leaves, or tang yuan, a sweet soup with rice dumplings. It is also waxy—a texture that comes from the polysaccharide amylopectin, which gives the rice a denser microstructure. Mixed with lime mortar, the grains boost compressive strength, helping walls bear loads without fracturing. They are also highly water resistant, which protects buildings against erosion.

Mortar samples from halls and the garden of the famed Forbidden City, built in the 15th century, tested positive for the starch. So did sections of the Great Wall of China, which was largely restored during the Ming dynasty. But one sample from the Wall, where it runs through Yanqing County, contained a less common ingredient: animal blood, which showed up in just five sites.

Animal blood might sound like a grisly substance for building walls, but it was a perfectly normal additive used by several cultures. Historical recipes written in French, Italian, and English have detailed ways to mix oxblood and lime mortars. In China, builders used pig blood to improve the consistency of their mortar, according to a 2014 study. It is also easily available, resulting in diverse regional dishes such as pork blood soup and pig blood curd.

Many other organic additives favored by the Chinese helped repel water. Li and Zhang found oil samples from 87 sites, which they believe to be tung oil, a common waterproof seal for wooden ships. Another, egg white, is not only water resistant but also improves the viscosity of mortar. (Eggs whites were also used as a paint binder to color the famous Terracotta Army.) Researchers have found that brown sugar, too, reduces water content in mortars, enhancing their strength. According to ancient literature, sucrose was often used to build forts and homes in eastern and southeastern China.

These mortars were also likely invented out of necessity. In distant Rome, the secret ingredient of concrete was volcanic ash, which improved the durability of lime mortar and enabled it to set underwater. Similar mortars made with volcanic ash were adopted throughout Europe and western Asia; however, volcanic ash was not available in ancient China. Instead, engineers would have used their own regional ingredients to create distinctive building materials. Other innovative mortars have similarly developed out of convenience, from a church in the Philippines made of egg whites to a Brazilian chapel held together by wine.

Great design is often the result of thinking beyond form and function. Philosophy, the researchers posit, might be one poetic inspiration for these fusion pastes. “Ancient Chinese people advocated a view of nature often termed ‘heaven-and-human oneness,’” Li and Zhang write. “The use of agricultural, forestry, and animal products in building materials reflected architectural aesthetics that sought to integrate architecture and nature.”

Incredibly, structures built with sticky rice mortar have survived more than natural erosion. A Ming tomb, of the minister Xu Pu and his wife, was nearly damaged by a bulldozer when found in 1978, but it was “so firm [the vehicle] could do nothing about it,” according to a 2009 paper. Its three authors describe another near-miracle: in 1604, when a 7.5-magnitude earthquake shook the port city of Quanzhou, many temples, stupas, and bridges were not destroyed. Instead, sticky rice mortar kept their foundations firmly secured.

Although clearly effective, these revolutionary adhesives fell out of fashion in the late Qing dynasty. Li and Zhang note that China’s first cement factory opened in 1889 in Hebei province, and this inorganic binder gradually filled the role of composite mortars.

But researchers still see potential in these ancient formulas, especially to stabilize historical sites. Cement is detrimental to conservation work, writes Dr. Gaetano Palumbo, an archaeologist with the University College London. It “contains high quantities of salts and is incompatible (being too strong and rigid) with traditional lime-based mortars.” In China, restorers successfully used sticky rice-lime mortars to mend ancient structures, such as the single-arch Shouchang Bridge from the Song dynasty.

One group of conservationists is combining the timeworn technology of sticky rice with relatively new nanotechnology to develop an innovative treatment for historical sites. “This is an original and ecologic application that can be used to repair any lime-based structure, such as limestone or a lime mortar,” says Jorge Otero, a researcher with the Getty Conservation Institute. His team is still testing the durability of their materials, but the capabilities of the ancient grain are evident. Soon, glutinous rice may glue together historical buildings around the world.