Created in partnership with Enjoy Illinois and the Illinois Obscura Society. 

Benld, Illinois seems like an improbable place for sauropods, raptors and Dracorex hogwartsias to roam. However, the bucolic 1,500-person town is home to Charlie McGrady's Studio, which works with paleontologists to produce very accurate reproductions of dinosaurs using fiberglass and precise sculpting, texturing and painting techniques.

Their tagline is "For All Your Dinosaur Needs," and that really says it all.

These are not your giant orange T-Rexes from the miniature golf course: these guys are enormous and detailed enough to make you wonder if they're breathing. The finished product often finds its way into museums, such as the pterodactyl that flies over Sue the T-Rex's head at the Field Museum in Chicago. The video above provides a rare peek into the world of Illinois's finest dino studio. 

Sign up to find out more about the back room tours, unusual adventures, and incredible parties that Atlas Obscura will be putting on in Chicago and greater Illinois.

Bodies end up being preserved in many ways, for many reasons, and through many different means. Few are as unique as Jeremy Bentham's preserved head and skeleton, though.

The philosopher had his skeleton de-fleshed, dressed it up in one of his standard black suits, and stuck his mummified head atop it. Brought to life with a pair of bright glass eyes, this was his "auto-icon." 

A more common way bodies end up lasting long after death is through natural mummification, a phenomenon more jauntily referred to as "spontaneous mummification." These are bodies preserved accidentally by extreme heat, cold, dryness, or in other circumstance where dead bodies are in low oxygen environments such as at the bottom of bogs.

The 2000-year-old Lindow man was discovered at the bottom of a bog with a blow to the head and a rope knotted around his neck. A crime scene perfectly preserved for two millenia. The Maronite mummies of Qadisha Valley were hiding in a cave during a siege when they died. They cool dry environment preserved their bodies for the next 700 years when they were discovered by a team of speleologists. Same with the mummies found in a church basement, and the hundreds of mummies on display in Mexico's Museo De Las Momia De Guanajuato. 

Of course, the most familiar method of mummification is also the most deliberate one. Known as "Anthropogenic Mummification," this method is exemplified by the mummies of ancient Egypt. But it also covers mummies of a religious nature.

Examples of these range across faith. Religious mummies include Buddhism's mummified monks, like Ivolginsky Datsan and the Sokushinbutsu of Japan, both of whom began mummifying themselves while still living. Catholicism is also chock full of mummified remains. There's the full body mummy of Catherine of Bologna, and the mummified right fist of a Hungarian Saint King, just for starters. 

But Jeremy Bentham's Auto Icon stands alone. Bentham preserved his corpse not for religious reasons but for secular philosophical reasons, and unlike legions of other mummies, he did it of his own plan and accord.

Bentham even wrote an unpublished treatise on the subject titled "Auto-Icon; or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living." In this he described both his reasons for turning himself into well preserved corpse and his vision of the benefits if everyone did this. He ended this treatise with the final and most important reason for turning himself into an Auto-Icon.

"It would set curiosity in motion, – virtuous curiosity." 

John Moses Browning, the firearms designer and namesake of the Utah state gun. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Many people realize that their states have state seals, state flags and state songs. Many are also familiar with their state flowers (in Tennessee for instance, it’s the delicate iris) and trees (in California it’s the majestic sequoia). 

But state symbols have run amok over the years, and every state now has several totems: there are state tartans, crustaceans, poems, and toys.

A carousel is the official state “Folk Art” of Rhode Island, Louisiana’s state musical instrument is the diatonic accordion, Oregon’s state seashell is the Oregon hairy triton. And in recent years a more eyebrow-raising symbol has been added to the ranks. 

Since 2011, six states have adopted state firearms, so that guns along with flora and fauna, officially represent them.

It all started in Utah in 2011. The first state gun effort was to name the Browning M911 semiautomatic pistol the official firearm. The House of Representatives passed the measure with hot debate on the House floor. Republican Rep. Carl Wimmer rallied on behalf of the gun, saying, “This firearm was created by John Moses Browning, who was a son of Utah pioneers.”

A painting of a Second generation Colt Single Action Army Revolver. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Democrat Carol Spackman Moss spoke out against the measure, invoking the then-recent shooting of U.S. House of Representatives member Gabrielle Giffords: “It seems insensitive to me at this time when many people are mourning the deaths of six people in Tucson and the serious wounding of Gabrielle Giffords, a friend of mine.”

The proponents prevailed, and after the House voted in favor, Utah’s governor signed into law the very first official state firearm. 

Arizona adopted the Colt Single Action Army Revolver later that same year. Gun control advocates bridled at the bill, which was working its way through the legislature just two months after the Tucson shooting. Opponents pointed out that the firearm wasn’t even made in Arizona—it is manufactured in Connecticut and the gun’s maker lobbied for the bill.

Todd Rathner, a lobbyist for Colt, told the Associated Press that “Arizona was founded by rugged individuals who took care of themselves and did so largely with a Colt Single Action Army Revolver on their hip.” Again, proponents prevailed, and then-Arizona governor Jan Brewer signed the bill into law in April 2011. 

Winchester Repeating Arms Company advertisement, 1898. Alaska's state rifle is the Winchester pre-1964 Model 70. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Now state guns began arriving at a steady clip. Indiana adopted the Grouseland Rifle in 2012. In 2013 West Virginia anointed the Hall Flintlock Model 1819 their official firearm. In 2014, two states followed suit: Pennsylvania chose the Long Rifle and Alaska the Winchester pre-1964 Model 70. A special history or connection with the state is the typical reasoning for earning state symbol status and guns are no exception.

“To be an Alaskan during the period 1930 to 1963 meant carrying the “rifleman’s rifle,” the Winchester pre-1964 Model 70,” reads the Alaska bill. “This was the bolt-action rifle that helped Alaska men and women establish a firm foothold in the untamed and often wild Alaska wilderness.”

In Pennsylvania, state representative Mark B. Cohen told the House that “having a state gun is deeply offensive to many people in Pennsylvania. We ought not to pass this amendment. We ought to show some sensitivity to the loss of human life.” 

Louisiana’s state musical instrument, the diatonic accordion. (Photo:F Lamiot/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

But others opposed the effort for different reasons. Patrick Hornberger, a historian and a member of the Pennsylvania Antique Gun Collectors Association, wrote to a local newspaper to point out problems he had identified in the language of the bill including that the gun played an important part in the Industrial Revolution (it was actually handmade, he argued), that it was the first American firearm (that distinction belonged to the New England musket/fowler, he wrote), and that the gun was designed by a Martin Meylin.

“As no rifle has ever been positively attributed to Meylin,” Hornberger wrote, “How can his rifles possibly be called ‘artistic’?”

State guns are arriving on the scene during a time when there is a bit of exhaustion over the proliferation of state symbols. An Associated Press article chronicled the annoyance that many legislators are beginning to feel at the mounting pile of proposals that suck up their time—these proposals are often literally the work of children. Proposing state symbols is a popular way to teach kids a civics lesson. The exhaustion is such that Missouri is considering a bill that would put a cap on state symbols. Twenty-eight may be enough for them.  

Milk, the state beverage of 21 states. (Photo: Stefan Kühn/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

State symbol fatigue may have reached it cultural peak this year when a group of students went to the New Hampshire House Gallery to hear lawmakers debate their bill to name the red tailed hawk the official state raptor. Students listened as officials excoriated the bill.

“We already have a state bird. But do we need a state raptor? Isn’t that a bird?,” opined one. “If we keep bringing more of these bills and bills and bills forward that really I feel we shouldn’t have in front of us, we’ll be picking a state hot dog next,” said another.

HBO’s John Oliver pounced, devoting a segment to the story and lambasting the legislators. “What is wrong with you?,” he shouted before declaring the Red Tail Hawk the official raptor of Last Week Tonight.

A red-tailed hawk, the official raptor of 'Last Week Tonight', but not New Hampshire. (Photo: Brocken Inaglory/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Oddly, children have long been involved in the choosing of state symbols, a tradition that is often traced back to the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, when states were preparing to send exhibitions that represented everything unique their state had to offer, including flowers.

According to a June 1917 National Geographic, Oklahoma was the first to adopt a state flower in 1893, prompted by the fair. (They picked mistletoe, which would eventually be renamed the “state floral symbol” and the Oklahoma Rose was named the state flower. The state wildflower is the Indian Blanket, or Blanket Flower.)

In the years that followed, letting school children nominate and vote on the state flower became popular. School children chose the state flower of Mississippi, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Maine and others. By 1917, 26 states had picked state flowers.

The school children and ladies’ auxiliary clubs of the past probably could not have predicted that their interest in flowers would many years later lead to heated debates over gun-control on the floors of state governments. But even if such debates, and the proliferation of symbols, may have exhausted some, it has electrified others. Indiana’s recognition of the Grouseland Rifle prompted Field & Stream magazine to ask their readers what the firearms of every state should be and published the list in their July 2012 issue.

At least one of those predictions became reality when the Long Rifle was added to Pennsylvania's list of state symbols in 2014, joining the Great Dane, Ruffed Grouse, and milk.

The note (Image: Matthew Di Caterina/Facebook)

One night in October 1986, a student at the University of Adelaide in South Australia was working on a paper, when inspiration struck. The student, whose identity is a mystery, tore off a bit of paper, and started writing:

"This slip of paper serves as a time capsule for the first person to find it. As you read this, cast your mind back to 9:25 p.m. 14/10/1986. Ask yourself "where was i?" "what was I doing?" I was in the Barr Smith Library, writing an essay. Add the date you find this, on the back, and return the slip to be discovered again…and again…and again…"

Yesterday, Matthew Di Caterina found the note, the latest in a line of students to come across it. Eleven people before him had added their mark to the note after that first October entry: the book, published in 1976, was used regularly enough through the late '80s that two or three students each year found the slip and decided to play along. 

There were no names, but, starting in 1987, the book's readers added notes. It was one person's birthday. A few were up late, or working on overdue essays. Everyone seemed to welcome a little break from schoolwork. 

After 1989, though, it seems the book fell out of use. There's one entry from 2002; Di Caterina's is the first after that. He posted his find on the "Overheard at Adelaide" Facebook group. He showed the library staff, too: the "reaction was pretty priceless," he wrote. He's not revealed what book he found the note in, though — it'll be there as a surprise for some future student, one late night.

Bonus finds: An underwater city, an ancient six-foot-long sea scorpion, giant clams

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

The Soviet arcade game "Magistral". (All photos: Kristin Winet)

When you walk into the Museum of Soviet Arcade Games in St. Petersburg, the first thing you’ll see is a series of gray, hard-edged soda machines from the early 1980s. If you choose the one in the middle, it will dispense a tarragon-flavored and slightly fermented soda whose recipe relies on a syrup that has not been mass produced since the fall of the Soviet Union. It tastes not unlike a mix of molasses and breath mints.

All around us are beeps, pings, and shot blasts coming from rickety old machines that seem like they’ve time-traveled from the golden era of American arcade games. And yet, everything’s in Russian, we’re using kopecks as currency, and there is no Donkey Kong here.

This is not your typical museum. For one thing, everything is not only touchable, but playable. Designed to look like a 1980s USSR video game arcade, the museum is filled with restored games carefully modeled after those in Japan and the West and manufactured to the approval of the Cold War-era Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev. 

The museum entrance. 

Now, 24 years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russian families spend their afternoons here playing the propaganda arcade games of their youth, drinking increasingly hard-to-find sparkling beer from 1980s soda machines, and popping Soviet coins into strength-training and eye-coordination games that were approved by the Soviet government in the 1970s and 1980s as having “real” value to children.

The museum has recovered nearly 60 games, many of which are the last remaining ones in the world. The project began three years ago when four college students in St. Petersburg decided to rescue the bulky relics from obscurity, and teach the country about the USSR’s improbable arcade gaming history.

“The fact that some of these products are in danger of disappearing is why they are beloved,” says Dr. Steven Norris, a Professor of History at Miami University who specializes in Russian and post-Soviet studies. “Nostalgia for the video games of the 1970s and 1980s is part of a larger nostalgia for Soviet consumer products of late socialism,” a period when Russians were introduced to many popular items, from wall-mounted radios to the now-ubiquitous beveled drinking glasses to vacuum cleaners.

Soviet-era kopeck coins.

The story of how arcade games made it to the USSR is a circuitous one. Though it has never been substantiated by historians, the anecdote goes that on a trip to the United States, Khrushchev was so smitten with the arcade games he saw that, upon his return, he invited all the game makers to come to Russia and showcase their best games. Then, he bought all of them, and sent them to Russian military factories with orders to figure out what made them work. Afterward, he took bids for new game ideas.

"I have heard this anecdote too, but do not know if it's apocryphal or not," says Norris. "I cannot state with 100% certainty that it is this correct."

Whether or not this is hearsay, what we do know is that the manufacture of arcade-style games in the USSR did take place in the wake of the famous American exhibit held at Sokolniki Park in 1959, an exhibition that ended with Khrushchev visiting America and returning with a renewed commitment to produce more consumer goods—among them, of course, the arcade games here in St. Petersburg today. 

Once it was determined which games would be produced, the blueprints were allegedly sent to military factories that primarily made electronics used in nuclear testing and weapons. These were perhaps the only places in the USSR that had the manpower and the means to understand the engineering required to build the arcade games.

In a curious twist of fate, however, it meant that the instruction manuals were also produced in the factories, and therefore were considered classified government documents. Because of this, the manuals are thought to have all been destroyed. Therefore, anyone intent on restoring the historic arcade games today needs to do a lot of guesswork when servicing the old wires, pipes, lights, and engines. 

"Winter Hunt," in which the gamer shoots bunnies who pop up in the snow. 

According to Oksana Kapulenko, one of the museum’s curators, there are three major differences between the Soviet games and those of Europe and North America in the 1980s: cost, weight, and subject matter. For one thing, it was extremely expensive to manufacture and distribute them, so they were rare. Secondly, clocking in at 330 to 375 pounds each, these hefty games weighed up to five times more than their prototypes across the ocean because of the lack of availability of lighter materials.

Because of the scarcity of materials after the fall of the Soviet Union, many of the machines were destroyed in order to repurpose their parts. And, unlike machines in the West, every single machine that was produced during Soviet-era Russia had to align with Marxist ideology.

What does that mean, exactly?

"Basketball" game. 

Well, to put it simply: it means no Pac-Man. It means no fantasies. It means presenting work as physical labor, promoting Communist patriotism, and glorifying habits of mind that were appropriate to Marxist thinking. Fantasy and role-playing games featuring treasure-hunting, princesses, and invented creatures had no home in the USSR.

Instead, the most popular games were created to teach hand-eye coordination, reaction speed, and logical, focused thinking. Not unlike many American games, these games were influenced by military training, crafted to teach and instill patriotism for the state by making the human body better, stronger, and more willful.

It also means no high scores, no adrenaline rushes, or self-serving feather-fluffing as you add your hard-earned initials to the list of the best. In Communist Russia, there was no overt competition.

Gamers playing a shooting game called "Sniper 2". 

There is one curious game in the museum that seems to break this pattern. It was constructed under the guise of being a strength-training game for children using a popular children’s story as its framework. Much like the carnival games in the West in which someone pulls a level or smashes a hammer down onto a platform, this game—called Repka, or “radish”—is intended to test and increase a person’s brute strength by asking the gamer to pull up on a lever as hard as he or she can to help pull a stubborn radish out of the family garden.

The machine face of the family member whose strength the player matches with lights up after the game registers the amount of kilos they can pull. Strangest of all, however, is the lineup of radish pickers: after failed attempts by a mouse, a cat, a dog, a daughter, and a grandma, the vegetable can only be pulled up once the grandpa jumps in and the entire family works together to pull it out collectively.

According to Norris, the fact that a group of young people revived these games says a lot about how nostalgia for the Soviet Union operates in Russia today. They “are not nostalgic for a restoration of the USSR and certainly not for the violence of the Stalin era,” he explains. Instead, theirs is “a wistful, often ironic attempt to make sense of the past and to keep parts of it alive.”

The three drink dispensers visitors in the entrance to the Museum. 

As with all conservation efforts, imminent questions loom over the future of these rickety games, clunking soda machines, and old photo booths. For one, the museum claims to already own nearly 85 percent of the world’s remaining supply of discontinued light bulbs that make the Snaiper-2 game work. What happens when they run out? What happens when the one factory in the country that still produces the tarragon-flavored syrup from the Soviet era stops making it? What happens when they can no longer find the right wires to properly configure the basketball game, a game that, underneath the hood, looks like a tangled pile of metal spaghetti?

The ongoing—and increasingly difficult—act of restoring, maintaining, and repairing these arcade machines is simultaneously an act of respect for the harsh reality of life in Soviet-era Russia, which used models from the West to create its own idiosyncratic gaming culture, and a defiance of it. 

These questions are very real, and yet, the Russian attitude toward preserving play doesn’t involve keeping the machines locked up tight or preserved behind glass. “They are meant to be played,” curator Oksana tells me as she leads me upstairs, “not examined like specimens.”

The menu at the museum's cafe. 

Oskana’s favorite game is called Gorodki, or “little village,” a bat-and-sticks game originally invented by Russian peasant farmers. The game began in rural Russia, where families would line up and try to knock down wooden poles arranged into shapes on the ground; the goal was to destroy as many of the pole arrangements (known as “little villages”) as possible.

According to the 18th-century Russian military leader Alexander Suvorov, the traditional game was a perfect method for teaching the tactics of warfare: striking the pins made players swift in attack; knocking the pins down honed their force; rebounding for the next attack heightened their awareness. The game saw a cultural revival in the 1970s, when nearly every stadium, health spa, summer camp, factory, and backyard had its own designated gorodki-playing area. Soon, it was turned into an arcade game, too.

The Gorodki game beeps to life after coins are dropped into the slot. As the “little villages” appear on the screen, spinning in circles across the screen, it feels a bit like playing old-school Tetris, as the poles spin around into little villages that resemble stars and airplanes, floating across the screen and waiting to be demolished. 

The "Gorodki" game. 

In recent years, the Russian Duma has taken up the issue of “patriotic games,” with members lamenting what they perceive as the harmful influence of Western games. “Lawmakers have called for games that introduce young Russian players to Russian heroes, Russian history, and Russian culture,” says Norris. Heeding this call, 1C Game Studios recently released a pair of video games based on the Battle of Stalingrad and the Battle of Moscow. “In many ways, the Russian video game market today is a return to the role the games of the Brezhnev era were meant to play."

There may have been ulterior motives behind the development of Gorodki in the 1970s too, but Oksana admits she just thinks it’s fun. That seems to be the general feeling in this retro arcade parlor in St. Petersburg.

There are few natural wonders as strange as a columnar water spout. It’s one thing when a cyclone-like column of wind picks up a tower of loose dirt, but when it dips into the ocean and whirls up a spire of water that reaches to the clouds, the sight resembles something from another world.

A prime example of this rare weather phenomenon occurred off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida this past weekend. Reaching down from an ominous black storm cloud, the waterspout was visible for miles around, as this Washington Post video shows.  

The National Ocean Service defines a waterspout as "a whirling column of air and water mist." Waterspouts come in two varieties: tornadic waterspouts and fair weather waterspouts. Tornadic waterspouts are generally, well, tornadoes. Fair weather waterspouts, the kind that occurred in Jacksonville over the weekend, form in lighter wind conditions and are not generally associated with storms. They develop on the surface of the water, then spiral upward.

While fair weather waterspouts don’t generally pose a threat to anyone on solid ground, as they usually dissipate when they reach land, waterspouts can be a hazard (and a frightening sight) to anyone on nearby boats that are dwarfed by the towers of water. They can also pose a threat to marine wildlife, as fish can get swept up in the vortex and tossed for miles.   

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

Arrivals and departures board with information desk, TWA Flight Center, c. 1962. (Photo: © Library of Congress/Prints & Photographs Division/Balthazar Korab Archive LC-DIG-krb-00617)

In October 1958, Pan American World Airways launched its first scheduled jet flight with the brand-new Boeing 707-120 from New York Idlewild airport, as it was then known, to Paris-LeBourget. The flight was carrying 111 passengers, and the cost of an economy seat ticket was $272. After making one unscheduled stop in Newfoundland, it landed in Paris with a flight time of 8 hours and 41 minutes.

This journey marked the dawn of the jet age. Airline passengers more than quadrupled between 1955 and 1972.  This was the era when air travel became more comfortable and ground facilities were improved. It was also when Finnish architect and industrial designer Eero Saarinen designed the Trans World Airlines terminal.

Commissioned in 1955, Saarinen’s design for TWA resembled a giant bird, and it caused a sensation when it opened. Saarinen, who passed away less than a year before the terminal was completed in 1962, was posthumously awarded the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal.

The story of the TWA Terminal's complicated development is told in full in a new book by Park Books, called Designing TWA: Eero Saarinen’s Airport Terminal in New York. Below, gaze upon a selection of photographs from the book showing the creation of what architect Robert A. M. Stern called “the Grand Central of the jet age.”  

Eero Saarinen, year unknown. (Photo: © Photographer unknown/Eero Saarinen Collection (MS 593)/Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library)

Preliminary design first presented to TWA by ES&A. (Photo: © Eero Saarinen Collection (MS 593)/Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library)

The key feature of Loewy’s design is a new company logo, which this advertisement from 1963 illustrates. (Photo: © Illustrator unknown / Kornel Ringli Collection)  

Plan, section, and elevation of information desk with arrivals and departures board, no scale, 35 5/8 " × 26 ¼" (90.5 × 66.8 cm), ES&A, July 12, 1963. (Photo: © Eero Saarinen Collection (MS 593)/Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library)

While Aline Saarinen gives the architect a voice, he perfects the visualization of his projects. (Photo: © Library of Congress/Prints & Photographs Division/Balthazar Korab Archive LC-DIG-krb-00576)

Drawing Ambassador Lounge. The publicly accessible areas are elaborately designed and conform to the TWA corporate look. (Photo: © Illustrator unknown./Eero Saarinen Collection (MS 593)/Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library)

Eero Saarinen leases a sufficiently large studio space expressly for working on the design of the terminal. (Photo: © Richard G. Knight /Richard Gamble Knight Papers (MS 1999)/Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library)

Thanks to numerous press releases, the elaborate construction of the vaults and the photogenic building shell elicit broad coverage in the media. (Photo: © Library of Congress/Prints & Photographs Division/Balthazar Korab Archive LC-DIG-krb-00596)

Terminal interior. (Photo: © Library of Congress/Prints & Photographs Division/Balthazar Korab Archive LC-DIG- krb-00609)

Cover of a restaurant menu, TWA, c. 1962. (Photo: © Illustrator unknown/Kornel Ringli Collection)

(Photo: © Teju Cole)

TWA Terminal, c. 1961. (Photo: © Dan Page/Eero Saarinen Collection (MS 593). Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library)

Denali, in 2015 (Photo: Todd Paris/UAF/USGS)

This has been a big week for North America's tallest mountain. First, President Obama changed its official name to Denali, the name that native Alaskans used for the mountain before the U.S. government decided in 1917 it should be called Mt. McKinley. And today, the mountain's official height is being changed as well.

Denali shrunk, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Not by much, though! When the mountain's elevation was measured in the 1950s, its height was determined to be 20,320 feet. Denali's new official height? 20,310 feet—just 10 feet shorter.

Researchers trekking on the mountain (Photo: Rhett Foster/CompassData/USGS)

The new official height is actually a bit taller than the height measured in 2013, by a digital elevation model that used radar data. That method averaged the elevation of a wider area around the summit, and put the mountain at 20,237 feet, 83 feet below the 1950s number. 

In June of this year, four climbers went to the summit hauling GPS equipment to get the most accurate reading possible. They set their survey equipment directly on the summit. This method of measurement works by measuring the distance between the GPS receiver and satellites orbiting the planet. The climbers, one from the University of Alaska–Fairbanks and three from the company CompassData, returned in early July with a wealth of data. 

At the summit (Photo: Agustin Karriere, CompassData)

It took about a month, though, to determine the mountain's official height: while satellites' distance from Earth is measured with respect to the planet's center, a mountain's height is measured with respect to sea level, a complicated calculation. The GPS experts also had to take into account factors like the depth of the snowpack, USGS says. 

Given all that, an elevation change of 10 feet is pretty minor. The next tallest mountain on the continent is still hundreds of feet shorter than Denali. Plus, because of the tectonics beneath, Denali's still growing, about 1 millimeter per year. Give it long enough and it could get that 10 feet back. 

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

Cris Orfescu's nanoartwork entitled "Power." (All art provided by Cris Orfescu/Used with Permission)

Equally in love with art and science? Can't choose between becoming a molecular biologist or a landscape painter? You may not have to. You could become a nanoartist.

NanoArt is artwork done on an atomic and molecular scale. With the aid of an electron microscope, nanoartists examine the textures of atoms and molecules, take microscopic images of them, and alter the resulting images to create surreal, alien works of art. 

Materials scientist and pioneering nanoartist Cris Orfescu describes NanoArt as“a new art discipline at the art-science-technology intersections.” Orfescu began creating NanoArt as a way of both making something beautiful and raising awareness of the rise of nanotechnology, which operates on a scale that can be difficult to conceptualize. Technically speaking, a nanostructure can be no bigger than 100 nanometers in size. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter, or, as Orfescu put it in an email interview, 100,000 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.

Each nanoartist’s method is a bit different, but every piece of NanoArt begins in a lab. The first step is to decide whether to create what Orfescu calls a “nanosculpture” or find a “nanolandscape.” A nanosculpture is a molecular structure that the artist manipulates via a chemical or physical process—such as laser carving—to create a unique image they then work with further. Conversely, a nanolandscape is a naturally occurring structure, such as a boron molecule. 

“The making of the nanosculpture or the discovery of the nanolandscape is the most important part of a NanoArt piece creative process,” says Ofrescu. Once a nanoartist decides which type will form the basis of the artwork, they decide on what element they want to use. For Orfescu, there is a definite frontrunner: carbon. “I like to work with this material and most of its compounds,” he says, because they offer “flexibility, beautiful shapes, [and] ease of sculpting.”

When the element is chosen, it’s time to get up close and personal with it to capture images. Because the subject is invisible to the human eye, the only way to take a look is through an electron or atomic microscope. (Orfescu uses a scanning electron microscope interfaced with a computer.) Since most raw electron microscopy produces images without color scales, the nanoartist must add any new hues they want to see. 

The methods used for adding color and flair are up to each individual artist. Orfescu, for example developed his own approach to digital painting that takes a cue from traditional painting methods. He calls it “Digital Faux.” As he explains, “Like traditional faux, Digital Faux is done by overlaying translucent layers of color to create the perception of depth, volume, and form.” Instead of using paints or glazes, Orfescu manipulates the image digitally using Photoshop. But because his focus is on showing the “raw structure” of the image he has captured, he is careful not to get too wild with his digital paints.

In addition to allowing artists another mode of creative expression, NanoArt makes nanotechnology seem a little more human and friendly. Though nanotechnology has the potential to effect major positive changes in realms like health, electronics, and energy production, it doesn’t have the most friendly reputation. Apocalyptic “grey goo” scenarios, intelligent viruses, and self-replicating molecular robots are among the cinematically diabolical scenarios that have been conjured up.  

"There are legitimate health and environmental concerns about nano products,” Orfescu says, “and I hope most of the nanotech companies are willing to develop their products responsibly." Despite cautioning that "the general public should keep an eye of these developments and products," Orfescu envisions a world where nanotech use is widespread and transformative, where medical nanotech could provide “a cancer treatment where the chemotherapy drugs will destroy only the sick cells and leave anything else intact.” It's a vision that, as a nanoartist, he is helping usher along. 

Intrigued by NanoArt? Want to give it a try? You can, but it'll require a lot of money or a bit of relationship-building. While electron microscopy has become much cheaper and more ubiquitous in the modern age, you can’t just pick up your own microscope at the local Target. A quick Google search will turn up a couple ofprivate laboratories that will let you look at things under an electron microscope for a fee, but that’s a steep price for a starving artist.

Orfescu has a couple of alternative suggestions. “There are two ways to become a nanoartist: being a scientist or teaming with a scientist," he says. "Artists could find scientists interested in art at local universities or analytical labs and could start a very rewarding collaboration.” 

Otherwise, you could start by working with Orfescu himself. He posts nano images that he has captured to his NanoArt 21 site, and encourages potential nanoartists to take them and turn them into their own art. He also organizes a number of competitions and exhibitions that any nanoartist is welcome to take part in. 

Correction: Previously the NanoArt process was said to take "photographs" of the atomic material which is untrue as the nanostructures are much smaller than photons. The article has been updated to use the term, "imaging." 

A fishing vessels does battle with the Atlantic off the coast of Ireland. (Photo: UK Ministry of Defense/Flickr)

"How do men act on a sinking ship? Do they hold each other? Do they pass around the whisky? Do they cry?"

In an effort to answer this question, author Sebastian Junger investigated the disappearance of Capt. Billy Tyne and his crew of fisherman aboard the Andrea Gail. When talking to other mariners who survived that infamous storm off the coast of Massachusetts in 1991, Junger realized the true horrors of the ocean. 

"A 70 foot wave has an angled face of well over 100 feet. The sea-state had reached levels that no one on the boat, and few people one earth, have ever seen," Junger's wrote in The Perfect Storm. When one storm-battered ship "finally limped into port several days later, one of the officers stepped off and swore he would never set foot on another ship again." 

Now it's September, and hurricane season is once again upon us. Since it is an El Niño year with cooler than normal temperatures across the tropical Atlantic, everyone is hoping for a low-drama season.

However, as AccuWeather reports, we may not end up being so lucky. Indeed, it is likely that a few tropical storms will track northerly, and make life a living hell for pleasure boaters and working crews alike.

While you may never set sail on the seven seas, why not watch some terrifying, yet mesmerizing videos of ships stuck in storms from the safety of your computer screen?

1. 

In this harrowing footage, the British Royal Navy icebreaker HMS Endurance slowly makes it way through the roiling Southern Ocean on the way to Antarctica for scientific research. It's no surprise that in 2008, in similar conditions, the Endurance suffered crippling damage and was scrapped. 

 2. 

M/S SC Nordic careens unsteadily out of the Vanylvsgapet harbor in Norway. Filmed from a passenger ship heading the other direction, the SC Nordic is passing through the famously tempestuous waters of the Stad peninsula which divides the Norwegian sea from the North sea.

 3. 

A North Sea ERRV, or Emergency Rescue Ship, braves a storm on its way to deliver much needed supplies to an oil rig in the North Atlantic. This particular ship is captained by Youtuber Bigwavemaster1, who has a minor following for condensing his month-long voyages at sea into 30 second clips. 

 4. 

Here's the MV RTS Pioneer enduring extremely rough waters off the coast of the Philippines in the Pacific. For perspective, this ship weighs up to 70,000 tons when fully loaded. 

 5. 

This video comes from a Japanese Coast Guard vessel. Tsunamis, though huge, are much more gentle when encountered at sea. If there's prior warning, many ships prefer to ride out a tsunami at sea. It's when the waves hit shore that they get violent. 

 6. 

The Volvo Ocean Race is arguably the toughest offshore sailing race in the world. Completing a global circumnavigation in 20 days or less, the sailors race day and night in harrowing conditions. "Boat-breaking" conditions are said to occur when the wind exceeds 50 miles per hour. 

 7. 

Rogue waves are technically defined as spontaneous waves whose peak is more than twice the height of the "significant wave height" of the current sea conditions. What this really means is that rogue waves are monstrous and unexpected. And they can be dangerous. In this video, a cruise ship gets smashed–and the passengers are none too happy. 

 8. 

The Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) is a British charity that, "saves lives at sea." It functions similarly to the American Coast Guard, though it is an all-volunteer organization for the express purpose of saving lives, rather than enforcing the law. The RNLI lifeboats and crews are famous for their seaworthiness. In this video, a lifeboat delivers much needed supplies to the remote, weather-bound Scottish island Arran. 

 9. 

One of the most consistently rough parts of the ocean is the Northern Atlantic, particularly the stretch between England and Iceland. In this video, a cargo ship deals with wave heights of up to 70 feet from the ocean's surface. 

What is this huge spoon scooping up the Florida skyline? (Image: veroskibum/Youtube)

Floridians up before dawn this morning were treated to a strange, unearthly sight—a plume of light arcing over the skyline, looping, expanding, and dissipating into strange cloudy shapes.

It was not a space lasso, nor a joyriding bird with chemtrail wings—it was the Atlas V rocket, carrying a satellite from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station to "a geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles over the equator," writes James Dean at Florida Today.

Here are a few more pictures from this morning's @ulalaunch of the #AtlasV ... #MUOSpic.twitter.com/Xlu0T6P51i

— Andrew O'Brien (@aobrien7) September 2, 2015

Atlas V's cargo is the fourth of five planned satellites in the U.S. Navy's "Mobile User Objective System," aka MUOS, which will allow troops in remote locations to stay in contact with each other by "enabling hand-held radios in the field to work much like smartphones." At 9:15 a.m., almost three hours after takeoff, the satellite separated from the rocket as planned.

 United Launch Alliance, which oversaw the launch, credited the impressive visual display to good timing. "The sunlight happened to come through it at the proper time," ULA's John Hilliard told Bay News 9. When it hit the plume—the combined product of five rocket boosters—the result was visible throughout Florida, from St. Petersburg on Florida's gulf coast all the way down to Key West.

That wasn't thunder this AM, Florida: An absolutely stunning #MUOS#AtlasV launch by @ulalaunch @ 6:18am.cc:@yourtakepic.twitter.com/ziywAephly

— Michael Seeley (@Mike_Seeley) September 2, 2015

The launch resulted in such spectacular visuals that it "had some people wrongly worried the rocket had blown up," the Orlando Sentinel reports. The National Weather Service Miami proactively Tweeted down other potential speculation, assuring its followers that "the strange light/cloud in the sky this morning" was "not a meteor." Just a young satellite practicing getting phones buzzing. 

Atlas V takes off with the New Horizons probe in January 2006. (Photo: NASA)

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com. 

A screenshot from Miniature Space's sushi-making video.

Here's a novel option if you're stressed out and seeking a way to relax: fire up YouTube and lean in close to see human hands making tiny meals for tiny invisible diners. 

Japanese miniature cooking videos, in which hands appear in a dollhouse-esque kitchen to prepare minuscule meals, are slowly becoming an internet sensation. One channel, Miniature Space, features the hands of an unknown chef making everything from sushi to croquettes to custard, all on a scale that requires tiny tools, steady fingers, and a lot of patience. The videos, each a few minutes long, all have hundreds of thousands of views. 

Lilliputian curry, anyone? (Screenshot from Miniature Space's curry video.)

Part of the appeal of these videos is in seeing how inventive the mysterious kitchen whizzes can be with the real food they use. To make it look realistically scaled-down, the chefs cut human-sized food into diminutive portions using teensy knives. In the case of the sushi-making video, that means shaving off the merest sliver of tuna, then rolling it into a cylinder of seaweed and vinegar-splashed rice that's about half the width of the chef's index finger. The precise, orderly approach is fascinating to watch.

It's also calming. Miniature Space's videos fall into the serenity-inducing category of "ASMR." ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, is the name that has been given to a pleasant, soothing feeling that some people feel when they encounter others demonstrating a process or performing a methodical task. Often, the task involves intense focus and soft sounds such as clicks, tapping, and scratching. The "ASMR feeling" usually incorporates a tingling sensation in the neck, scalp, or back of the head.

Ever since the term "ASMR" was coined in 2010, a rash of "ASMRtists" have been uploading videos to YouTube in which they attempt to induce tingles in viewers via whispering, tapping, and performing procedural role-plays. These are known as "intentional ASMR." The Japanese cooking videos, however, can be considered "unintentional ASMR," because they were not created to trigger tingles in the viewer. 

Robert Duff, a psychotherapist who creates ASMR videos for his YouTube channel Duff the Psych, says unintentional ASMR videos that involve miniature cooking can be "relaxing, stress relieving, anxiety combating, or sleep facilitating." And they don't necessarily have to involve real food to induce such feelings. It's more about the careful nature of the processes involved.

Another Japanese YouTube channel, formerly known as RRCherryPie and now known as Nameless, creates cooking videos that make use of miniature plastic food items and utensils. One video, which chronicles the making of tiny bento boxes, has amassed an astounding 145 million views.

In this video, the light clicking sounds are a big ASMR trigger, says Duff. There is also another element that brings on the tingles: make-believe. Pretending to make dinner using dollhouse miniatures is "the sort of thing that might remind you of childhood," says Duff—a childhood in which someone is "very specifically focused on a task and demonstrating the activity with much care." By inducing a return to a simpler, more innocent time, such behavior can have a soothing effect on those who report experiencing ASMR.

Beyond the tingle factor, miniature Japanese cooking videos also demonstrate an impressive level of attention to detail. Miniature Space and Nameless' videos both make use of finely detailed miniatures made by the Japanese company Re-Ment, whose name is short for "reform the entertainment." Re-Ment cooking miniatures are designed to take you through the entire process of a make-believe meal.

Take the Nameless cooking video, for instance, in which the chef makes tempura shrimp. There are three varieties of the Re-Ment shrimp miniature shown: a raw one, a version that has been battered and breaded, and one that has been deep fried.

And you thought your kitchen was small. (Screenshot from Miniature Space's cheeseburger video.)

It's this thorough attention to detail that makes Re-Ment particularly appealing to fans of tiny props. Susan Chi, an artist who is drawn to miniatures because she has "always been fascinated with the details and the creative ways to add realism in small scale," says she likes to study Re-Ments to get ideas on texture and detailing for when she makes her own miniatures. Online communities like the Re-Ment Addicts group on Flickr post macro photos of their sets, often carefully set up in dollhouse environs, and debate the finer details of each new Re-Ment offering on message boards.

The fascination factor of these Japanese videos may vary according to the viewer's interests and propensity for feeling tingles, but the care and creativity behind them is remarkable regardless. Here are a few more examples of the itty-bitty culinary artistry being served up:

So many trees (Photo: Anita Ritenour/Wikimedia)

How many trees are there on Earth? There's never been a true tree census, where people go from forest to forest counting each tree individually. The best estimates to date came from looking at satellite imagery and estimating the density of the tree cover in forested area—and they came up with wildly different results. One estimate in the mid-2000s put the total number of trees on the planet at around 400.25 billion. But a more recent study, in 2013, suggested that the Amazon alone had 390 billion individual trees.

Now, a new survey has come up with a much larger estimate of the total number of trees on Earth. According to the study, published in Nature, there are 3.04 trillion of them.

What, in this context, is a tree? Any woody plant that has a stem 10 centimeters in diameter about three feet off the ground. Where did 2.6 trillion trees come from? In theory, they were there all along: this new study made much more detailed estimates of tree density in different parts of the world, basing them on 429,775 on-the-ground measurements in more than 50 countries.

As many trees as there are, there used to be many, many more—basically twice as many, in the days before deforestation began. But we're now cutting down trees at a rapid pace, at a net loss of about 10 billion per year. No matter what way you think about it, we're surrounded by plants, and we've been waging war on them for about a century. You have to imagine that they're pretty pissed. And maybe we should be worried — there are trillions of them, after all, and they're all around us. 

Bonus finds: A red spider that's not supposed to be red, a beetle that can eat poison

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

A visual approximation of the hen in question. (Photo: Konstantin Nikiforov/Wikipedia)

On Wednesday morning a hackneyed old joke became an unexpected reality when a chicken attempted to cross the road at Bay Bridge toll plaza in San Francisco.

CBS San Francisco reports that, at approximately 5:50 a.m., a brown hen was spotted "running around the Fastrak lanes" approaching the plaza. In addition to causing bewilderment and slowing traffic, the bird did not appear to be in possession of the electronic device required to pass through Fastrak toll stations.

Oh, chicken! Just before Bay Bridge toll plaza right now. I fear this will not end well. pic.twitter.com/8ANfapwp9K

— Jeff Chu (@jeffchu) September 2, 2015

Thirty minutes after the initial sighting ruffled feathers, callers to KCBS radio station's traffic watch service reported that there was more than one hen on the road. These reports, however, were never confirmed—it appears to have been just one rogue hen that caused the traffic trouble.

California Highway Patrol officers in neon yellow high-visibility jackets eventually captured the bird following a low-speed on-foot chase across multiple road lanes. The hen was escorted to the back of a patrol car and taken to a local veterinarian, with many "fowl play" puns made along the way. No charges were laid.

The felonious foul is now in custody at the @BayBridgeInfo Toll Plaza... #CantBelieveImSayingThis

— CHP Oakland (@CHPoakland) September 2, 2015

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

The church in the village of Guestling, where Luke Spencer's ancestor lived. (Photo: Mark Duncan/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)

Thanks to online resources like Ancestry.com, tracing your family tree has never been easier. Which means it has also never been easier to discover skeletons hidden in the family closet—obscure distant relatives; long-held secrets. Or a mass murderer.

Exploring my family tree, I discovered among my forebears a genuine serial killer on my mother’s side of the family. It was a chilling discovery, but what was all the more extraordinary was that the murderer was, in fact, a murderess.

The plotting of my family tree suddenly became an exploration of old London court papers, lurid eye witness accounts, midnight exhumations, entries on Murderpedia.org, and macabre reports from the archives of the London Times. All of this centered around a seemingly normal Victorian housewife, who coolly dispatched her loved ones with arsenic, until she was at last caught and hanged in the town square.

The small, peaceful village of Guestling, population just over 1,000, lies in the picturesque rolling hills of the county of Sussex on the southern coast of England. It is roughly three miles northeast of Hastings, where King Harold received a French arrow in his eye en route to losing his kingdom in 1066 to the Norman conquest.

Mary Ann Geering, who would eventually become known in newspaper reports as the Guestling Murderess and the Murdering Mother, was born in 1800 to a family of agricultural laborers. Like many girls of the lower classes, at the age of 18, she became a maid at a larger house. It was here she met Richard Geering, a farm worker from East Sussex. They were duly married and went on to have eight children.

In September of 1848, Richard suddenly took ill. He complained of chills and a pain in the abdomen, sweated profusely, and was having difficulty breathing. The local physician, a Dr. John Lucas Pocock, was called and diagnosed an intermittent fever. The London Times reported that, calling back two days later, Pocock recalled seeing Geering’s wife, “who informed me that her husband was dead, that he died about a couple of hours before I was called. I expressed my surprise.”

An 1833 illustration of the effects of arsenic poisoning on the stomach. (Photo: Wellcome Images, London)

One Sunday in January 1849, one of the Geerings’ middle sons, George, then aged 21, started to suffer from similarly violent bouts of sickness and a raging thirst. He complained to Dr. Pocock of “having heat on his inside.” George died three days later. Six weeks after his funeral, his older brother James, 26, also fell ill, passing away on March 6th, 1849. Three weeks after that, a third brother, Benjamin aged 18, began to suffer from an unnatural hunger and vomiting.

Dr. Pocock’s suspicions were aroused by the recurring symptoms and deaths taking place at the modest Geering cottage in Guestling. A second physician by the name of Ticehurst was called in, Benjamin’s diet was altered, and he soon began to recover.

Because the doctors were already fairly certain that Benjamin was slowly being poisoned by his mother, he was removed from her care. They also suspected that the other deaths, attributed at the time to natural causes, were anything but.

The only way to tell was to exhume the bodies.

Despite its reputation as the one of the more respectable newspapers of the era, the London Times was not above lurid prose when it came to reporting crime stories in Victorian England. Under the headline “The Poisonings in Sussex,” on April 30th, 1849, the Times published an account of the exhumations:

“The three graves from which the bodies had been taken were on the east side of the church, and were very watery. The coffin containing the body of Richard Geering was first brought out of the church and placed on a tombstone. The lid was then unscrewed, and on its removal the body was found to be in an advanced state of decomposition, except in the region of the abdomen.”

Reading like a chapter from the work of Edgar Allan Poe, the Times continued:

“The effluvium was dreadful, and the body swimming in water. To remove the latter holes were bored in the coffin. The whole of the deceased's intestines were removed and placed in jars. The coffins containing the bodies of the two sons were then brought out and opened.”

The investigation showed that the stomachs of the deceased were all in an unusually good state of preservation, while the rest of the bodies had decayed. Small pieces of a “white, gritty matter ... resembling arsenic” were found.

An illustration from the 1840s showing the ease with which poisonous substances were available. (Photo: Wellcome Images, London)

The investigation concluded that “on the whole, the appearances presented by the different bodies seemed to be strongly indicative of death by poison. Arsenic has been discovered in sufficient quantities to account for death.”

Mary Ann Geering was immediately placed under arrest to await trial, while the jars were sent to London for forensic examination. The remaining Geering children were sent that most Victorian of institutions: the poor house.

An inexpensive by-product of the enormous mining industry, arsenic was a common ingredient in items developed during the Industrial Revolution. In his book, The Arsenic Century, James C. Wharton says it was found in “candies to candles to cookware, concert tickets, and preserved partridge heads used to ornament ladies headdresses.” It was used in bright dyes, such as the fashionable Paris Green, which, says Wharton, colored “playing cards, wallpaper, clothing and ribbons.” Ladies would mix arsenic with vinegar and chalk, and rub the mixture on their faces and arms to make themselves paler, to show that they did not work in the fields. Arsenic and old lace was indeed the order of the day.

It was also widely available to Victorian households as a deadly rat poison.

On August 5th, 1849, the trial of my arsenic-poisoning ancestor began. The next day, the London Patriot newspaper reported, “Mary Ann Geering, a woman of masculine and forbidding appearance, aged forty-nine, was arraigned at Lewes Assizes for murder.”

The court heard from a Mr. Pittman, a chemist in Hasting, who remembered the accused as a regular customer, and of how she purchased arsenic on four occasions. “Two pennyworth,” he recalled, “rather a large quantity of poison to sell over the counter.” He also claimed that he would not have “sold such a quantity to a stranger.” But Mrs. Geering was a known customer, and she explained it was for dealing with rats.

An advertisement c. 1890 of arsenic-free wallpaper. (Photo: Wellcome Images, London)

The prosecution divulged that two years before his death, Richard Geering had inherited £20, which he had deposited in the Hastings Savings Bank. In the mid 19th century, that would equate to just under half a year’s salary for a laborer. 

Most damning of all was the testimony of Mary Ann’s son Benjamin, who, recovered from his poisoning, gave evidence against his own mother. He explained how the family had been members of a Burial Friendly Society, an ad hoc insurance arrangement in the village, where subscribers would “in the case of illness receive ten shillings a week, and on death, one shilling from each member.”

As the gentry and farmers of Guestling crowded in the courtroom to hear the mounting evidence of financial gains, a local widow, Judith Veness, was called to the witness stand. “The deceased and his wife frequently disagreed,” she said, “and I have heard her to say to him several times, ‘I wish you were dead—you are only a trouble to me.’”

A witness from the Royal College of Surgeons gave medical evidence that the jars of intestines and viscera recovered during the exhumations indeed contained high amounts of arsenic.

Dressed all in black and wearing a shawl, Mary Ann Geering confessed to the murders and, as reported in the Times, “after an absence of 10 minutes, the jury found a verdict of guilty. Sentence of death was passed; which the prisoner heard almost unmoved.”

In Victorian England, the maximum penalty of the law was public execution: “the drop.”

The current FBI definition of a serial killer is a perpetrator who commits three or more murders with a distinctive “cooling off’ period between crimes. This differentiates from “spree” killers or mass murderers, who kill multiple people in a shorter amount of time. Female serial killers are rare, and often overlooked.

Marissa Harrison, Professor of Psychology at Penn State, made a study of all known U.S. serial killers dating back to the Revolutionary War. There are just 64 recorded female serial killers— roughly one in six of all known serial-killer cases. Quoted in the New Yorker, Harrison said “I think society is in denial that women are capable of such hideousness.”

Her study showed that while their male counterparts aggressively hunted strangers, female serial killers largely targeted people they knew—usually family members—and that their primary weapon was poison. Further, they were more likely “to kill for money or power.”

Mary Ann Cotton, another serial killer who is believed to have poisoned up to 20 people with arsenic. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Harrison also told the New Yorker that “contrary to preconceived notions about women being incapable of these extremes, the women in our study poisoned, smothered, burned, choked, bludgeoned and shot newborns, children, elderly and ill people as well as healthy adults; most often those who knew and likely trusted them.”

These profiles certainly match the Guestling Murderess.

Mary Ann Geering was by no means the only such case of a female murderer in Victorian England. Between 1843 and 1890, another 48 so-called “Black Widows” were convicted and put to death. In her book Victorian Murderesses, Mary S. Hartman profiled how “these lower class murderesses … chose their victims largely among spouses, relatives and acquaintances.” A look at their motives reveals that “they murdered far more frequently for money.”

Of these 49 convicted killers, just under half did so “often for very small amounts, such as the pitiful sums obtainable from burial societies.” Burdened by crippling poverty and unable to care for their children, some of these mothers used an unthinkable alternative. More often than not, arsenic poisoning was the poison of choice.

“The symptoms of arsenic poisoning were vomiting and dehydration,” David Wilson, a professor of criminology at Birmingham University, wrote in the Daily Mail. A doctor in the 19th century, when life expectancy was considerably shorter than today, “was always more likely to diagnose this cluster of symptoms as gastroenteritis, especially in patients who were poor and undernourished, than to suspect murder.”

The key to a successful arsenic poisoning was patience. Too many grains and a quick violent death would alert the attending physician. It seems likely, given the subtle nature of arsenic poisoning, that many more “Black Widows” eluded suspicion and arrest.

Mary Ann Geering was unable to escape detection, convicted largely on the evidence of the son she had tried to poison. On August 21, 1849, the Guestling Murderess was hanged in Lewes town square.

The Sussex town of Lewes, where Mary Ann Geering was hanged for her crimes. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

According to the Times, “between three and four thousand made their appearance” to watch her hang. “No feeling was manifested when she mounted the scaffold,” the Times said. “In about two minutes the necessary arrangements were completed and the wretched criminal ceased to exist.”

My ancestor was left to hang in the square for about an hour, until she was cut down and “buried in the precincts of the gaol at four o’clock.”

An abandoned school (Photo: Nitram242/Flickr)

Boynton Beach's old high school is a beautiful building. It was built in 1927, by William Manley King, a south Florida architect of some renown, and if you look closely, you might notice that it has Art Deco lines integrated into its Mediterranean revival form.

"I haven't seen any other building in South Florida that tried to blend both styles of architecture," says Rick Gonzalez, president of REG Architects, a firm based in West Palm Beach.

The building is undoubtedly unique, but at the beginning of August, city commissioners voted to knock it down. 

The high school has been vacant for the last 15 years; for about a decade before that it was used as storage. Elementary and middle school students were in class here until 1990, but the building hasn't been used for its original purpose—a high school—since 1949.

The old Boynton Beach high school (Photo: REG Architects)

The building may still have a chance: two weeks after the initial vote, the city decide to give Gonzalez four months to come up with a plan to redevelop the building. But there's no guarantee: "We've done eight studies in 15 years, on this one building, and none of them have panned out."

Boynton Beach is far from the only city saddled with old school buildings. For a decade, from 2001 to 2011, about one to two percent of America's total stock of schools closed each year. Despite the yearly loss of between 1,400 to 2,160 schools, the total number of schools has actually stayed relatively stable, between 98,000 and 99,000 schools, according to the federal Department of Education.

But the closed schools still represent a blow to local communities. "Communities feel more ownership over a school build than they might over another abandoned building," says Emily Dowdall, who's written two Pew Charitable Trusts reports on the topic of shuttered schools. "It's seen as a community asset. When it's closed, it's seen as a loss, and one that's shared by the whole neighborhood."

No one's using this track now (Photo: Nitram242/Flickr)

Cities all across the country are dealing with this issue. St. Louis is trying to sell 22 schools. The Wisconsin state legislature has ordered Milwaukee to put its vacant schools on the market. In 2013, Philadelphia shut down 23 schools. In Iowa, hundreds of school buildings have been vacated since the 1950s. A few years ago, Detroit's public school district had more than 200 vacant properties in its real estate portfolio; last year, the district gave 57 to the city in exchange for debt forgiveness. 

Some of these schools are reborn. In Philadelphia, the hottest bar in town right now, the Awl reports, is Le Bok Fin, a gastropub temporarily set on the rooftop of one of the schools closed two years ago. In Portland, Oregon, one company transformed an old school building into a hotel: there's a bar in the old boiler room, a brewery in a girls bathroom, and a movie theater in the auditorium. Some of the rooms still have chalkboards in them. In 2012, St. Louis sold an elementary school to the Universal Buddhist Congregation, for use as a monastic institute.

But many more buildings have remained empty. A couple years back, when the Pew Charitable Trusts looked at shuttered schools in 12 districts across the country, its researchers found that since 2005, the districts had found new owners or uses for 267 properties, but still had 301 unused sites up for sale.

An old elementary school (Photo: Detroiturbex.com)

There are several big trends contributing to today's empty schools. The baby boom necessitated a school building boom, but as those kids grew up, they moved away from their hometowns, or had fewer kids of their own. Cities like Detroit lost huge portions of their population, and demand for schooling dropped in kind.

In other cities, the population might have stabilized, but the people who are living in urban areas these days tend to be younger and childless. On top of all this, city budgets have been tightening, giving an incentive to consolidate less-than-full schools into a smaller number of spaces.

Schools are somewhat singular buildings, with soaring gymnasiums, dark auditoriums, science labs, offices, and classrooms. Explorations of abandoned schools might turn up old music rooms full of drums or brightly colored murals.

Kosciusko Elementary School (Photo: Detroiturbex.com)

But some schools—the historic ones, like Boynton Beach's—lend themselves more easily to reuse.

"A lot of those schools are architecturally gorgeous," says Alan Mallach, a senior fellow with the Center for Community Progress, who's been working with older cities for years. "Almost all school built before World War II were designed to be lit with natural light and ventilated. The floor plans weren’t too large. Those convert very nicely to apartments or small, boutique office space."

The schools built from the 1950s onwards, to accommodate baby boomers, are less adaptable, lacking in natural light, and dependent on air condition. "They're not very well built, they're not very attractive, and they tend to be one-story boxes," says Mallach.

A music room, once (Photo: Detroiturbex.com)

In the 2013 report, the Pew Charitable Trusts looked at how buildings that were sold were reused. The largest portion, 40 percent, became charter schools, they found.

"That's the easiest thing to do with a school building—make it a school again," says Dowdall. But she and her co-author found that schools had also been transformed into homeless shelters, churches, community centers, offices, recording studios, daycare facilities, a tech center, shopping centers, and condos. Many schools, too, have been transformed into subsidized low income housing, where there's demand for it. And ultimately, the economic state of the neighborhood in which the school is located will have a strong influence on its fate.

"There's not going to be a market to turn every school into a boutique hotel," says Dowdall.

Kosciusko Elementary School (Photo: Detroiturbex.com)

That's part of what's kept the school in Boynton Beach empty for so long. But the neighborhood is changing. "West Palm Beach is to the north, and Delray Beach is to the south. They're both thriving urban areas. Boynton Beach is like the little step sister that never went to the dance," says Gonzalez. "Now it's being discovered. There are two old houses that are being turned into restaurants. There's a mixed use project going up to the east. There's a marina that the city owns that it's just finished remodeling."

He hopes that this time, the building might get a second life. "The school has wood floors and exposed steel trusses on the second floor. There aren't a lot of buildings like that here," he says. "it has cool old chalkboards that we want to leave. It has a lot of potential."

Clayton Intermediate School, in Salt Lake City, before demolition (Photo: Jared Eberhardt/Flickr)

Clayton's auditorium (Photo: Jared Eberhardt/Flickr)

Sometimes old schools are knocked down, often an expensive outcome (Photo: Jared Eberhardt/Flickr)

Back in Detroit (Photo: Nitram242/Flickr)

Prospect Middle School, in Connecticut (Photo: Matthew Hester/Flickr)

The sarcophagus (Photo: Israel Antiquities Authority)

Inspectors for the Israel Antiquities Authority went on a mission Tuesday night. They had received a tip, Live Science reports, that at a construction site in Ashkelon, an Israeli city on the Mediterranean Sea, construction worked had tried to cover up the discovery of a rare artifact.

They woke up five workers who were sleeping at the site, and the workers admitted it: they had found a sarcophagus in the ground, pulled it out with a tractor, and poured concrete over the spot where they'd found it.

The sarcophagus, it turned out, was an amazing object—according to the Israel Antiquities Authority, it's superlative in many ways ("rarest," "most important," and "most beautiful" have all been used to describe it). It's a little over eight feet long, and on the lid is the figure of a reclining man with a Roman haircut. Elsewhere, it's decorated with jugs, grape leaves, grapes, bull's head, cupids, and Medusa's head. It's dated to the region's Roman period, 1,800 years ago.

When the workers pulled the coffin out of the ground, though, some of the carvings were damaged. In Israel, this sort of behavior—failing to report the discovery of an ancient object, damaging an artifact—is a crime, and the workers could be punished by up to five years in prison. When you live someplace where every plot of land has the potential to contain a valuable historic object, laws like these are basically the only way to do construction without destroying the past.

Bonus finds: A lost baby alligator, a strange "alien creature"

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

(Image: British Library/Public domain)

Shooting pool. Smoking cigars. Hanging out with a bunch of other divorced guys, crowing about being freed from the shackles of the ol' ball and chain.

Not exactly what you would expect to encounter during your average prison sentence, but that’s exactly what it was like inside the New York Alimony Club, a turn-of-the-century prison more formally known as the Ludlow Street Jail.

It was here that deadbeat ex-husbands who owed alimony would allow themselves to be jailed just so they could live it up while sticking it to their ex-wives. But even before all of that began, the Ludlow Street Jail, which crooked politician William “Boss” Tweed would both help found and later die in as an inmate, had a history full of extortion and corruption.  

Overseen by the Board of Aldermen—including Boss Tweed years before he would get caught stealing millions of dollars from the city—the Ludlow Street Jail was constructed in 1862 on the corner of Ludlow and Broome Streets in lower Manhattan. The red-brick building with towering arched windows held 87 two-man, 10-foot-square cells, but did not look particularly menacing on the outside. The only real indications that it was a jail were the large iron doors and the crossed iron bars over the windows.

William "Boss" Tweed in the 1860s. (Photo: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration/Public domain)

Though about 10 percent of Ludlow Street Jail inmates were serving time for federal crimes, the main population was there due to civic offenses—particularly unpaid debts. Debtors' prisons had been outlawed by the Federal Government in 1833, but claimants who could convince a judge that the debtor was a flight risk could, and often did, have the cheapskates locked up. Ludlow was also where people who defaulted on their alimony ended up, a trend that would later turn the jail into an unofficial clubhouse for divorced men.

Corruption ran rampant through the New York City government at the time, so it is no wonder that the Ludlow Street Jail slipped almost immediately into the world of back-door deals and shady habits. In a New York Times piece from November 4th, 1871, a Judge Barnard, in the process of discharging a number of inmates, was quoted as saying, “I’ve had occasion to look into the matter of Ludlow-street jail, and find that it is as well kept as any jail can be in the point of health and good treatment, [...] the chief in that department, Judge Brennan, is not only as kind and humane a man as any in the community, but is an honest man,” Of course this could not have been further from the truth.

In reality, Brennan was running the prison like a black-market hotel. In May of 1871, the New York Tribune arranged to have one of its reporters incarcerated in the Ludlow jail to check on some strange rumors about the facility. The reporter found that inmates were being offered better treatment and accommodations if they shelled out between $15 and $30 per week for the privilege. Inmates who couldn’t pay were trundled off to the top cramped top floors of the prison, where they were crammed into too-small cells where there often weren’t enough beds for everyone. Given that a huge majority of the inmates were dead-broke debtors, there was no way they could be expected to pay for this extortion.

On the other side of the coin, those who could afford to pay enjoyed a number of luxuries. In addition to kinder treatment and a general relaxation of prisoner restrictions, anyone who ponied up could play chess, smoke cigars, play billiards, and generally carouse like they were hanging out in a private gentlemen's club. Eventually, there was even a little market stall called the “Hole in the Wall” that was set up in one of the vacant cells.  

It was around this time that Boss Tweed’s political machine began to break down. His political schemes, through which Tweed had fleeced New York out of as much as $200 million, fell down around him. He was finally sent to Ludlow Street Jail after the city filed a civil suit in an attempt to recover some of the millions he had stolen.

Boss Tweed had it better than anyone while in the Ludlow Jail. For $75 a week, Tweed rented out the warden’s office and bedroom to use as his own luxury cell. In addition, and most bafflingly, he was allowed regular visits to his home. When he failed to return from one of these jail-sanctioned sojourns in 1875, one would be hard pressed to call it an “escape.”

Out on the lam, Tweed went to Spain, where he worked as a sailor. But there is a cost to being the boss, and that is fame. Thanks to Thomas Nast's cartoons of the disgraced politician being published in Harper’s Weekly, Tweed’s face had been spread far and wide. After someone in Spain recognized him and ratted him out to the U.S. authorities, they were able to pick him in 1876. Surprisingly,  Tweed was once again placed in the Ludlow Street Jail. But before he could plan another not-so-daring escape, Tweed contracted pneumonia and passed away on April 12, 1878, still stuck inside the corrupt jail he helped create.

A Thomas Nash cartoon of Boss Tweed escaping jail. (Image: Library of Congress/Public domain)

Tweed’s death did nothing to stop the ingrained corruption of the jail. The institution had been under investigation for years, what with the seemingly endless stream of exposés and reports about the poor conditions and unfair treatment within. Efforts were made to reform the jail—the biggest and most influential of the changes, which happened in 1904, was to permanently remove the federal prisoners. The thought was that there was no need to keep harmless civic offenders in the same space as potentially hardened criminals, and removing the tough guys would free up some much-needed space.

In the early 20th century, almost all of the inmates left in the Ludlow Street Jail were men who had defaulted on their alimony payments. At the time, the laws in New York stated that if a man refused to pay alimony, he would be sentenced to six months in jail, after which he would be free of all further payments. Accordingly, divorced men whom the courts had decreed owed payments to their ex-wives began shrugging their shoulders and heading off to jail for an all-expenses paid vacation at what came to be nicknamed The New York Alimony Club.

Gone were the days of corrupt extortion. The days of gleeful misogyny had arrived. As one member of the club described to the New York Times in 1911, “Many of us have preferred to come here as a matter of principle rather than pay money that was demanded of us practically as black-mail from wives, who, while we were hard pressed, were living in luxury.”  

The Alimony Club would host lavish holiday dinners for the inmates, and lived in a convivial little cabal—one that was “utopian,” according to the Times article. The new warden who arrived in 1912 even began playing music for the delinquent ex-husbands.

But the party did not last long. By the 1920s, the number of inmates enjoying their stay at the Ludlow Street Jail had dwindled to the point that the facility was of no more use to the city, and seemed more and more to simply be a financial albatross. The Alimony Club was disbanded with the closure of the jail in December 1927. In its place now stands Seward Park Campus, a collection of five small schools that each aim to inspire self-betterment.

The newest iteration of the MIT Freshman Orientation Coaster. (Photo: Atlas Obscura)

Ah, freshman college orientation—a time of boisterous dorm rivalries, a capella tryouts, and helping your institution's upperclassmen construct a rickety three-dip roller coaster out of wood. 

This tradition is particular to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where what is normally a small leafy lawn near the East Campus dorm has become a temporary amusement park. 

Pile of lumber + @mit students = build a roller coaster pic.twitter.com/pVihYhV91b

— Mike Foster (@mjfoster83) September 4, 2015

Roller coaster building has been an East Campus hobby since the mid-2000s—see 2010's offering, the "Reverse Cowgirl," which slingshotted upside-down students through a U of death. Thanks to increased attention from safety-minded Cambridge officials, the tradition sputtered out until last year, when three juniors from the Mechanical Engineering department reinstated it and called it "bigger and better than ever." 

The trio worked hard to design a structure that would, in their words, "moderate the g-force on riders, but still maintain the ambitions of a multi-hilled profile"—Mech E speak for "maximize fun while minimizing concussions." 

After removing some more boundary-pushing features, like a loop-de-loop (MIT's Environment, Health and Safety department "said no upside-down people, period," the team wistfully recalled), the designers got the stamp of approval from a local engineering firm—and therefore, Boston Magazine explains, from the city as a whole. They then put their new classmates to work building the thing.

This year's coaster is now in its full-flight phase, entertaining new kids nightly. The final design involves a long first drop, a couple of swoops up and down, and a very tall, steep final ascent. Although this last hill is meant to slow things down—riders only climb it a certain distance before rolling backwards again, and friction eventually brings the whole thing to a stop—it appears, on first glance, to be a chute into nothingness, making it a perfect college orientation activity.

CRASH DUMMY MIT student Lauren St. Hilaire goes down the MIT Roller Coaster constructed on the campus by students pic.twitter.com/78YjOUZYiY

— David L. Ryan (@GlobeDavidLRyan) September 3, 2015

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.