Phalanx Road, New Jersey. (Photo: Mr. Matté/WikiCommons CC BY 3.0)

Phalanx Road is a quiet road that runs through the towns of Lincroft and Colts Neck in central New Jersey. It’s not unlike many thoroughfares in places where the suburban and the rural quietly blend into one another. But if you look closely enough at the side of the road, you’ll see a small plaque, alluding to a little-known piece of social history: This modest stretch of road was home to a utopian community in the 19^th century, whose backers included the abolitionist editor Horace Greeley.  

Phalanx Road was not named by an urban planner with a fondness for ancient Roman military formations. Instead, it’s an acknowledgment of this unique place. From 1843 to 1856, the North American Phalanx, a community built around the ideals of the French philosopher Charles Fourier, was located in what is now Colts Neck. Fourier’s philosophy emphasized communal living and labor and at its peak, 150 people resided in this particular community. One of the backers was Greeley, an early supporter of Fourier’s ideas in the United States.

The North American Phalanx was one of the largest communities of its kind in the United States, second only to Massachusetts’s Brook Farm, which was run along Fourierist lines from 1843 until 1847.

Horace Greeley, 1844. (Photo: Library of Congress)

The project was begun with gusto. Photographs of the Phalanstery, the centerpiece of the community built in 1847, reveal a building modest in design but expansive in scale. From a central entranceway runs a long two-story wing, with several chimneys arising from the roof. It was one of several buildings on the property, including a dormitory, a blacksmith shop, and a flour mill. In an article in the Spring 1974 issue of The Monmouth Historian–the journal of the Monmouth County Historical Association–the Rev. M. Joseph Mokrzycki described the components of the Phalanstery, including apartments, a musicians’ gallery, and a grand salon, a reading room, in which international newspapers and a paper produced by the Phalanx could be found. 

Would-be members had to submit to a lengthy probationary period. “[P]rimary attention was placed on an individual’s ability to work with others under the theory of association,” Mokrzycki writes–“association” being Brisbane’s preferred term for Fourierism. Fourier believed (this is something of a simplification) that by bringing diverse groups of people into a system of collective living, social divisions would gradually erode, and more and more people would spontaneously adopt the Fourierist manner of living. Unfortunately, the reality of many Phalanxes did not correspond to Fourier’s ideals: several such communities were set up in the United States, but none endured.

The remains of the North American Phalanx, before it was destroyed by fire in 1972. (Photo: Library of Congress)

But humans weren’t the only problem at this particular utopia. In 1854, a fire destroyed several of its buildings, with the resulting cost being the primary factor that led to its disbanding two years later. The community was already a tenuous one at that point. Founder Albert Brisbane had hoped for a population of over 1,000, a goal that was never reached, and a rival utopia–the Raritan Bay Union in nearby Perth Amboy, established in 1853–caused some members to drift away.

An interior from the North American Phalanx, prior to the fire. (Photo: Library of Congress)

A later fire destroyed what was left of the Phalanstery in 1972. Two cottages from the original property remain as private homes. A historical marker denotes the site, and, in 1998, a local Eagle Scout restored the Colts Neck cemetery that likely housed the bodies of several members of the community. 

After the Phalanx left the site, a man named John Bucklin bought it and operated a cannery there. Bucklin was the maternal grandfather of Alexander Woollcott–writer, critic, contributor to the early New Yorker, and member of the Algonquin Round Table. And it was in the Phalanstery that Woollcott was born, over 30 years after the Phalanx dissolved.

Charles Fourier. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

This is how a failed, short-lived experiment in communal living in New Jersey made it into 20^th century American literature. Woollcott’s 1934 nonfiction collection While Rome Burns contains an essay titled “Aunt Mary’s Doctor,” described as a “chapter from an as yet unwritten autobiography.” Here, he recalls the circumstances of his aunt’s death, and discusses the house in which he was born. He repeatedly cites “ghosts,” including the legacy of slavery in New Jersey, which has ties to the assembly of a building on the property; and of the rumor that several of George Washington’s troops were later buried there. And then he takes the reader to a more recent–though still many years distant–moment, bringing them back to the days of the Phalanx.

Photograph of the sign on Phalanx Road in Colt's Neck, NJ. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Then there is the ghost of Mr. Greeley, who used to take his nap on a chair on the veranda, the red bandanna, which would be thrown across his face, bellying rhythmically with his snores, and all the young fry compelled to go about on tiptoe because the great editor was disposed to doze.

Portrait of Art Samuels, Charlie MacArthur, Harpo Marx, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott - part of the Algonquin Round Table - in 1919. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

This is not a recollection of Woollcott himself, as he was born 15 years after Greeley’s 1872 death. Instead, it’s a kind of summoning of the past, an exhumation of an intellectual legacy. Whether or not the Phalanx had a more direct influence on Woollcott’s intellectual development is less clear, though the two seemed to share a contrarian streak. Perhaps the history of his birthplace helped him to understand the virtues of a life that eluded societal convention. Or perhaps the image of Greeley in slumber was simply too good to pass up. Regardless, the legacy of the North American Phalanx can be found if you look closely enough–in archives, in memoirs, and on the side of a road.

Takayuki Fukada's "Longing"–the best aquascape of 2015, according to the International Aquatic Plants Layout Contest. (Photo copyright Aqua Design Amano)

You're standing before a fairytale landscape. Ancient tree branches twist together, dripping with moss. Sunlight plays over rocks and then gives way to deep shadow. Far off, the sky is visible. You're about to step into this story–but just then, a fish swims in front of your nose. 

Welcome to the world of aquascaping, an up-and-coming sport-slash-art that brings together horticulture, design, and cutthroat international competition, then dunks them all underwater.

Though people have been turning fishtanks into fantasylands since the Victorian age, the pursuit got a new champion in the 1990s, when cyclist Takashi Amano poured his professional-athlete salary into his true passion: aquarium design. Amano's innovative approaches inspired devotees across the globe. He now designs tanks for hotels and museums, jobs so huge and precise he has his workers hold onto the inside of the (dry) tank with suction cups while delicately tweezering each plant into place. 

The fourth place 'scape, Paulo Pacheco's "Deep Nature," plays with perspective to make empty space look like a pond. (Photo copyright Aqua Design Amano)

Such dedication is necessary before and after the initial setup. Aquascapers not only plan out and plant their bottled worlds, they support them, too, providing the right light and atmosphere and keeping the plants trimmed and healthy. According to competition guidelines, the best have balanced design and balanced pH. 

This year's International Aquatic Plants Layout Contest (IAPLC), which invited aquascapers to submit a photo of their creation for judging and the chance at a million-yen ($8,125) first prize, showcases the incredible possibilities of the genre. Those selected by the judges rose to the top of the largest pool yet in the competition's history–2,545 entries from 69 countries. Drawing from many known styles, including classic Dutch and more modern Japanese, the winning 'scapes bring to mind mountain ranges, pastoral scenes, and haunted forests (all share a certain air of seriousness, in defiance of their fishy inhabitants). 

Michael Leroy's "The Stone Forest" uses reflection to design advantage, and took 23rd. (Photo copyright Aqua Design Amano)

See more of this year's winners below–and if you're having a bad Monday, sink into one of the many aquascape compilation videos available for perusal on YouTube.

Fifth-place entry "Metempsychosis," by Yi Ye, is a sane home for fish. (Photo copyright Aqua Design Amano)

Katsuki Tanaka's sunny river, "Trace the Headwaters," took eighth place. (Photo copyright Aqua Design Amano)

For 19th-placer "Journey to the Origin," Hai Xue made an underwater "waterfall" out of white sand. (Photo copyright Aqua Design Amano)

"Flooded Ancient Nature," by Ana Paula Cinato, features long grasses and colorful stones, and was ranked 12th. (Photo copyright Aqua Design Amano)

In "Faith," by Andre Longarco, which gained 21st place, fish get their own rocky mountain path. (Photo copyright Aqua Design Amano)

Tenth-place "Father," by Luis Carlos Galarraga, showcases ferns and symmetry. (Photo copyright Aqua Design Amano)

All photos courtesy of Aqua Design Amano and IAPLC.

One Chris Denorfia bobblehead–about 0.15% of the original haul. (Photo: NBC 7 San Diego)

Hardcore baseball fans will recognize the name Chris Denorfia, the right-handed outfielder who has been a free agent since this baseball season ended. Before that, he was a Seattle Mariner and a Chicago Cub. But to one group of roommates in San Diego, Denorfia will always be a Padre. 

The University City millennials are suffering not from denial or nostalgia, but from whatever traffic spill, cosmic accident, or great prank left 600 "San Diego Padre Chris Denorfia" bobbleheads at their doorstep this past Thursday. 

That night, the roommates heard a crash, and saw a white van speeding away from piles of what turned out to be boxed-up bobbleheads. Fearing the toys might be "from a drug cartel or something," the roommates contacted the San Diego Police. 

Denorfia in the flesh, in his Padre days. (Photo: SD Dirk/Flickr)

But when officers came to inspect the load, they found that the plastic 'Norfs were drug free. The roommates piled half of them in the room of an absent compatriot and went to sleep. By morning, the other half were gone, true free agents once again. 

Since then, the accidental Deno dealers have been trying to unload their 300 big-headed sluggers on friends, coworkers neighbors, and members of local news crews, to medium success. Swaths of Denorfias have colonized the front hall and the high shelves, and have been stacked into "a playhouse for the dog." When asked if they will stay forever, they can only nod.

A stack of 'Norfs. (Photo: NBC 7 San Diego) 

One of Danforth's cartoons, which shows different groups through history who all fought in Iraq. (Image: Ted Danforth)

What better way to understand and explain geopolitics than through maps?

The Eastern Question, a new book filled with hand-sketched maps and cartoons about history and international relations, rests upon the idea that both are woven of repeating patterns, and that no war is an isolated event.

The book's author is Ted Danforth, a letterpress “scholar-printer” whose deep appreciation for political history and the written word is evident in the highly detailed and ambitious production. Danforth, looking through a geopolitical lens, tries to capture three millennia of human history with the help of 108 maps, drawings, and political cartoons. 

"As the West declines relatively and the East rises, seemingly new questions are asked that are in fact old ones. The current conflicts in the Middle East are present-day manifestations of geopolitical dynamics that have been active in the historical process from the beginning," writes Danforth. (Image: Ted Danforth)

Danforth's idea for the book was spurred by the attacks of September 11, 2001. As subsequent events unfolded, “I saw that what might seem to be the multitudinous and arbitrary events of history…are manifestations of dynamics that go back to the beginning of recorded time,” he writes. Danforth spent the next 14 years “reading, thinking, positing things, organizing things, then trying to figure out what is going on here,” he says.

The book's title, "eastern question" comes from a 19th century term that alluded to the inevitable fall of the Ottoman Empire, a collapse whose repercussions are still being felt today. The sketches are relatively simple, but they aim to portray complex concepts that set the course of history. 

A map that paints a picture of areas that are "desert" and others that are "sown." (Image: Ted Danforth)

The above map of “Desert & Sown” illustrates the world’s prime agricultural regions, determined by earth’s climatology. With European conquest of the world, Danforth explains, areas of greater agricultural strength conquered weaker ones. There is now a reverse trend of migration from the desert to more cultivated regions, and as more and more people today move across borders, the desert is enfolded within greener landscapes. The “non-integrating gap” is the band of deserts and mountains that cut the world in half, dividing the “Known World of the ancients”–the Greeks and Romans–from Africa, India, and China. The Silk Road ran through this gap, linking these two “world systems,” controlled by the Persians, then Turks, Mongols, and finally the Ottomans.

The book features six major players: the Mongol (later Russian) Empire, the Catholic Latin West, the Eastern Empire, the Northern Europeans, the Shia Persians, and the Sunnis. The perspective is distinctly Western, though. For example, the East is described as being “where the trouble comes from.” (Danforth points out that you couldn’t say that trouble comes from the east if you’re in the east; for the West, "trouble" refers to steady streams of Eastern invaders such as the Mongols and Turks.) 

Places like South America, Africa, and most of Asia remain silent and on the periphery of history–a result, Danforth says, of having to limit the scope of the project. That said, he thinks it would be interesting to approach the same concept from a different lens, a place where the North, or South, or West is instead where "trouble comes from."

A flow chart of sorts illustrating relationships between different wars. (Image: Ted Danforth)

The Eastern Question is not exactly casual bedtime reading. Danforth throws around a lot of big words and even bigger concepts: democracy, tyranny, freedom, stability, chaos, boundaries, failed states. Properly understanding the inseparability of history and geography through all of these maps requires mental energy and an alert mind.

Danforth, however, says that people should read and flip through the book quickly. “It’s meant to give people a framework for their own knowledge or future knowledge,” he says. He’s really trying to provide a big view of the world, world history, and the larger dynamics that have been active from early on. 

History and geopolitics: There is a lot going on. (Image: Ted Danforth)

As for predicting the future, Danforth says he tries to avoid that. “How reliable are the predictions of meteorologists? I’m trying to look at these dynamics as natural phenomena.” Weather forecasts are never guaranteed, but they do anticipate certain patterns.

History, politics, warfare—it all reduces down to an eternal, atlas-proven truth: Location is everything.

Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.

Flying near a fast-forming storm in North Dakota. (Photo: Shawn/flickr)

The storm is fierce and glowing turquoise, and Steffany Royal is waiting for it at the border of Montana and North Dakota circling 7,000 feet high in a Piper Seneca—a tiny airplane that looks a bit like a large metal mosquito.

Back on the ground, Wayne Mrnak, a sixth generation North Dakota farmer, fearfully watches the sky. The strange tropical ocean-colored clouds indicate light reflecting off bits of ice in the storm’s core. This means hail, a potential death sentence for farmers like Mrnak, whose 6,000 acres of wheat, barley, corn and sunflower lie striped across picturesque rolling plains in the state’s southwestern corner, near a region of rugged hills called the Badlands. “We’ve had hailstorms here where there is nothing left,” says Mrnak. “It will take the crop completely down—down to the ground.” In mere minutes, millions of dollars of plant material, including the delicate kernels, which aid in reproduction, can be smashed to bits. It’s a crop’s version of death by stoning.

The job of pilots like Royal is to fly directly at monstrous thunderstorms—something most pilots diligently avoid, given that the turbulent airflow in these storms occasionally brings down commercial jetliners—and discharge chemicals into a particular part of the cloud, a technique called “cloud seeding” intended to suppress the storm’s ability to produce hail.

But on this late June day, the storm racing across the prairie is outmaneuvering the 22-year-old Texan pilot. “I started approaching from the east, which is the front of the storm and should have been kind of calm,” says Royal, “but it was so turbulent that my seatbelt wouldn’t even stay fastened.” 

So she turns back, and for the moment, the lives of Mrnak’s crops hang in the balance.

The view from Steffany Royal's Piper Seneca of a gathering singlecell thunderstorm. It produced hail the size of baseballs. (Photo: Steffany Royal)

Florida has the sun, Buffalo gets snow, the Gulf Coast faces hurricanes and southern California tackles a potpourri of earthquakes, fires, droughts and mudslides. North Dakota is hail country. The most regular and severe hail storms occur in a north-south stripe across the middle of the continent, extending from the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma up through eastern Colorado, Wyoming and Montana, the western Dakotas, and on into the Canadian province of Alberta.

In late spring and summer, winds blowing east over the Rocky Mountains tap moisture streaming north from the Gulf of Mexico to create massive thunderstorms on the Great Plains that occasionally produce tornados and frequently produce hail. Unfortunately, the hail belt also happens to be the farm belt. In North Dakota, about 90 percent of the land is covered by crops or used for cattle ranching, meaning if it is hailing, someone’s plants are probably getting pelted, if not completely crushed. 

A North Dakota newspaper from 1966 reporting on hail tornadoes. (Photo: Tim Evanson/flickr)

For those who only occasionally experience short bouts of hail, the idea of a hail belt might not seem that bad. But hail in this region can tear the shingles off roofs, pock cars so bad they look as if they were sprayed from above with a machine gun, pile so deep that snow plows need to be called out—a 1980 storm in Orient, Iowa left hail drifts six feet high—rip leaves and even branches and bark off trees. Death comes with hail: the ice chunks bludgeon to death birds, cows, and people. The last known human fatality in the U.S. was in 2000, when a 19-year-old Texas man was struck by a softball-sized hailstone estimated to be traveling at 100 miles per hour. Hail causes around $1 billion in crop and property damage annually. One safeguard against the ice is hail insurance, which is now common across the nation, but in the hail belt there is a more proactive means of protection: cloud seeding pilots like Steffany Royal.

Royal’s employer is Weather Modification Inc., or WMI, the world’s largest company of its kind, and one of the oldest, started by a group of Bowman, North Dakota, wheat farmers in 1961. But WMI Vice President of Meteorology Bruce Boe, speaking from global headquarters, a lackluster office building near the runways at Hector International Airport, in Fargo, North Dakota, is quick to critique the phrase that defines the industry.

“To call what we do ‘weather modification’ is misleading,” says Boe, a sturdy man with a crew cut and a master’s degree in atmospheric science. “We are not modifying weather so much as modifying clouds.”

The history of weather modification was, until fairly recently, littered with failures.

Hans Ahlness, WMI Vice President of Operations (at left), with Bruce Boe, Vice President of Meteorology, in front of one of their air craft on the runway, at the headquarters of Weather Modification Incorporated, at Hector International Airport, in Fargo, North Dakota. (Photo: Justin Nobel)

In the 1st century A.D., the Greek historian Plutarch hypothesized that rain followed military battles. This theory died hard; Napoleon believed volleys of gunfire could bring rain, as did the U.S. Civil War brigadier general, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. In the late 1800s, the U.S. Congress bankrolled a project to initiate rain over West Texas using an elaborate system of kites and homemade mortars—despite somewhat promising early results, the effort was eventually deemed a disaster. 

War played a role in WMI’s genesis too. After World War II, and the Korean War, many North Dakota-bred fighter pilots returned to the farm, only to have their crops ruined by a succession of hail storms. As North Dakota farmers were pioneering ways to halt hail, the U.S. government, spurred into action by the Soviets—who were claiming great success using rockets to seed clouds—was initiating Project Skywater. From mountaintop stations across the Rockies government scientists were spraying clouds with silver iodide. “We had just come out of World War II and felt we were on top of world,” says Boe. “We thought we could do anything, we could be Adam, and humanity had no bounds on what science could do.”

During the 1960s and 1970s the project, monitored by the National Science Foundation and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, continued in eastern Colorado as the National Hail Research Experiment. But after several summers scientists concluded there was no evidence their work was enhancing rain or reducing hail and killed the project, which joined a long list of failed government weather mod schemes. 

A Cessna 340 undergoes repairs in a hanger at the headquarters of Weather Modification Incorporated, in Fargo, North Dakota. (Photo: Justin Nobel)

Despite Boe’s aversion to the idea of weather modification, the term favored by the industry is weather mod, and few people realize just how much the process may be affecting their lives. If you fly into Salt Lake City in winter, a weather mod company may have helped clear the fog that allowed your plane to land. If you water ski on Lake Mead in summer, weather mod may have helped to prime the clouds that poured the rain that meandered into the rivers to fill the lake. And if you are in Philadelphia or New York City and dare eat a peach, or plum or apricot or nectarine, it may well have come from California’s Central Valley, irrigated by water channeled from snowmelt on the Sierra Nevada mountain range, above which weather mod planes regularly fly, aiming to enhance snowfall.

There is no firm data on weather mod’s economic footprint, but there are about a dozen weather mod companies operating in the U.S., and the industry as a whole is likely worth somewhere in the tens of millions of dollars—WMI is mum about costs, but larger projects probably cost several hundred thousand dollars, and smaller ones considerably less.

But weather mod goes far beyond the borders of North America. WMI pilots have flown airplanes into thunderstorms on six continents. The company has worked to suppress hail in Argentina and Alberta, build snowpack in California and Wyoming, and enhance rain in Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Mexico, India, Morocco, and Mali. Present projects are in North Dakota, California, Idaho, Wyoming, Alberta and India. Typically, the company’s contact is with government agencies or militaries, but not always. An unusual request came from lush Papua New Guinea, where a copper mine wanted WMI to help boost rainfall during the dry season in order to keep a steady flow in rivers that run the hydroelectric dams that power the mine.

WMI planes are equipped with silver iodide burners on both wings, each capable of running for about two to two and a half hours. "People think of storms as something fixed, but that is not the case at all," says 22-year-old WMI pilot Steffany Royal. "They are like living organisms, and are changing constantly. The average cell only lasts 15-20 minutes." (Photo: Justin Nobel)

“This is a rainforest that gets 10 meters of rain a year and has moths as big as your hand,” recalls Boe, who has been working in the industry for over 40 years. (His company is still writing the project’s proposal.)

Occasionally, a local entrepreneur reaches out to WMI, as has happened in Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, but none of these projects made it off the ground. “With Syria the dialogue never got that far,” says Boe. “With all their civil war problems and everything else, I would not want to be going there right now.”

It is worth noting that individual citizens of some of the world’s most volatile regions have asked WMI for cloud seeding services. A growing body of research addresses the idea that many wars and conflicts are stoked by environmental problems, which are often underlain by weather problems. Increasing drought across north-central Africa has ruined crops, starved the populace and is thought to have enabled Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb’s invasion of northern Mali in 2012. A paper published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal stated that drought in Syria between 2007 and 2010 was the worst since instrumental record-keeping began, and caused widespread crop failure, mass migration and helped spark the Syrian conflict.

A storm seen from the runway at Bowman Regional Airport in Bowman, ND.  (Photo: Steffany Royal)

If superimposing locations of drought and war on the world map isn’t convincing enough, economists have crunched the numbers. “In sub-Saharan Africa specifically,” reads a 2014 Brookings Institution report on conflict and agriculture, “a proportional change in rainfall (from the previous year) of five percent increases the likelihood of a civil war the following year by 50 percent.”

If drought equals poverty equals war and disaster, every single raindrop alleviates the situation. And, one imagines, in places where hail is common, every single crop-crushing hailstone worsens it. Which seems to make a good case for cloud seeding: rein in the weather and you can literally end wars and save the world. Of course, the reverse seems to be happening. The weather appears to be on an unprecedented climate change-induced rampage, which involves stronger hurricanes and typhoons, and more frequent floods, droughts and wildfires. In response, a sort of weather mod on steroids has been advocated: geoengineering. It differs from weather mod in that it posits that not only can the weather be modified on a local level, but with the right infusion of chemicals or mirrors or god knows what else, the entire climate system can be readjusted. But Bruce Boe’s plans are not so grandiose.

“What we are really doing,” he says, speaking about rainfall enhancement over a bacon cheeseburger at a popular Fargo lunch spot, “is making clouds a little more efficient.” Or, in the case of hail, making them a little less deadly.

A rainbow appears over North Dakota's badlands. (Photo: Kirsten/flickr)

Rain falls regularly from clouds onto our umbrellas and faces, yet rarely do we contemplate its dramatic journey. To do so, first erase your mental image of water. It is nothing but a loose-knit collection of H2O molecules, which we call a liquid. Ice is a tightly-packed collection of H2O molecules, a solid, and a bunch of H2O molecules on their own constitutes water vapor, a gas. Oceans, lakes, swamps and even vegetation-covered landscapes like forests and fields contain copious amounts of liquid water, which sunshine helps evaporate into the air as water vapor. Sun-heated air and water vapor near the earth’s surface float up into the sky and cool while rising, the air condenses, and the H2O molecules are drawn closer together. 

But water vapor cannot become liquid water without the help of tiny wind-blown particles in the atmosphere such as dust, soot and salt. These particles serve as collection points, drawing water vapor molecules into a glob of water called a cloud droplet, the beginnings of a cloud. Still, cloud droplets are small, typically five to 10 microns across, and one must collide with a million other cloud droplets before becoming large enough to form the thing we call a raindrop.

In 1946, the atmospheric scientist Bernard Vonnegut, novelist Kurt’s older brother, discovered that when compounds like silver iodide are dropped into clouds they act like the dust, soot or salt and enable water vapor to cling to them, jumpstarting the raindrop formation process. Rain can’t be created from nothing, but clouds can be made more efficient at producing it, or so says the science of cloud seeding.

A diagram on how cloud seeding works. (Photo: Smcnab386/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Ice crystals are formed in basically the same way as rain. Like the change from vapor to liquid, water is sluggish in its transition to ice, but again, particles in the atmosphere help draw liquid water in and lock it into place to become solid. The thinking behind hail suppression is that spraying silver iodide into a developing thunderhead—the birthplace of all hailstones—spawns an army of smaller ice particles that uses up the available cloud water, thus preventing the larger crop-crushing hailstones from forming. 

WMI planes are equipped with silver iodide burners on both wings, each capable of running for about two to two and a half hours. Silver iodide flares sit in racks under the wings. Upon release, they last anywhere from around 30 seconds to two minutes and deliver a concentrated dose to the would-be ice particles. When suppressing hail, the goal for pilots is to release the silver iodide directly into the storm’s updraft, which is the vertically-oriented region of warm moist air rising up off the ground that fuels thunderstorms. Hail forms when cloud droplets get shot up the updraft of a storm into the taller parts of the cloud and freeze. The stronger the updraft, the longer the hailstone can stay suspended in the storm, the more liquid water it can freeze onto its surface, the bigger the hailstone can become. 

Replicas of two of the largest known hailstones ever to fall from the sky in the United States. The 1.937 pound, 8-inch diameter monster hail stone at left landed in Vivian, South Dakota during a summer storm in 2010. The other hail stone fell in Coffeyville, Kansas in 1970. (Photo: Justin Nobel)

Resting on a desk in Darin Langerud’s office is a jagged hunk of plaster that looks like a craft project made by a troubled kindergartener, but is actually a replica of the largest known hailstone ever to fall from the sky in the United States, a 1.937 pound monster that landed in Vivian, South Dakota, during a summer storm in 2010. Langerud is the Director of the North Dakota Atmospheric Resource Board, and runs the state’s cloud modification project. For over 50 years, the group has employed WMI pilots to fly late spring and summer hail suppression flights over counties in the western part of the state, including Bowman County, where Wayne Mrnak's farm is located. 

Using a framed photograph of a billowing thunderhead, Langerud illustrates the anatomy of a classic thunderstorm. The mature section towers 40,000 feet or more into the sky. Cloud seeding pilots don’t go here because updrafts are too strong—sometimes more than 100 miles per hour—and these storms are usually already producing hail. Instead, pilots aim their silver iodide burners and flares at the juvenile part of the storm, where cottony cumulus clouds are swiftly blossoming and there are more moderate updrafts. An updraft is like an invisible elevator of hot air that rises off the earth’s surface and rushes energy into the heart of the storm. Releasing silver iodide here is a clever ploy to use the developing storm’s own engine to weaken it. “We try to influence the small clouds,” says Langerud, “so we can teach them how to behave when they get older.”

"Most pilots don't ever get to do anything like this," says 26-year-old WMI pilot Vadim Alekseyev. "It looks good on the resume." (Photo: Justin Nobel)

Langerud is keen to drive to Bowman and check on his pilots. Bismarck is in the middle of the state, and driving west on Interstate 94 a steady light rain pings the windshield. The endlessly rolling prairie is cloaked under low gray clouds. This precipitation is not coming from a thunderstorm, but a broad belt of clouds covering the central part of North Dakota, a pattern Langerud says is unusual for this time of year. And what of weather mod’s future, I ask him, as we approach Bowman, entering a misty landscape of lofty buttes.

“There has been some discussion that in the future they are going to be using drones, and they may be,” he says, “but I think that’s a ways down the line.” Later on, he explains further: icing conditions make drone operations “problematic.” He’s not aware of any unmanned planes in current use. 

The past of weather modification, though, stretches into even more fascinating places than its future. Along the banks of the Missouri River, in North Dakota, once nested a pair of eagles called the Thunder Birds, by the local Native American tribes of the region—namely the Mandan, the Arikara and the Hidatsa. The eagle had a wingspan a mile wide, and bolts of lightning flashed from the wings. The Thunder Birds seemed invincible, but every year a tremendous serpent snatched their eggs. One year two young Shoshoni warriors decided to guard the nest. When the snake appeared, they fired arrows into its throat, killing the beast. In return, the Thunder Birds granted the braves the power to make rain. When the men died the power lived on in their skulls, which were severed from their bodies, wrapped in buffalo hide and kept in a bundle by the tribe. In 1907, commissioned by a rich New York City man who wanted to put the treasure in a museum, an anthropologist bought the bundle for about $100. At some point these sacred rain-generating bones may have made it back to the American Indians, but no one seems to know for certain.

Flying towards a cell thunderstorm. (Photo: Steffany Royal)

Steffany Royal has turned her Piper Seneca around to flee the storm and its turbulence, but already racing toward the cell is colleague Vadim Alekseyev, 26, in a Cessna 340. He approaches from the south and finds a clear, less-turbulent path to the edge of the storm. Here he spots what he’s looking for, a shelf, or fluffy layer of clouds just below the base of the thunderhead that indicates an updraft. Alekseyev turns on his burners. And lo and behold, Royal is back. Repositioning, she follows Alekseyev’s route into the storm, making sure to keep her Piper Seneca about several miles distant from his Cessna so the two don’t collide, and switches on her burners. Alekseyev also unloads two burn-in-place flares, an extra bump of silver iodide.

Although it is impossible to instantaneously assess if the dosage has any effect, the storm is weakening, and within minutes it vanishes altogether. “It was amazing,” says Royal. “Once it started dissipating there was nothing, no trace the storm had ever been there.”

The effectiveness of cloud seeding has been hotly debated. Boe points to evidence, published in reputable scientific journals, such as the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, that indicates seeding clouds for snowfall enhancement can show a five to 15 percent increase in precipitation. But these assessments are often done by painstaking analysis of weather radar outputs and other data and tend to be weighted down with caveats. A more thorough assessment entails lacing seeded clouds with a tracer that can later be detected in the actual rain or snowfall that makes it to the ground, but such projects are prohibitively expensive and still don’t necessarily confirm that the precipitation would have fallen anyway.

Measuring the success of hail suppression is just as difficult. “I’m not aware of any statistical evidence that it works,” says Harold Brooks, a senior research scientist at the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, Oklahoma. “Mind you,” he adds, “it’s very difficult to design and carry out experiments to test it." 

Perhaps the best analysis comes from Boe himself. “It is not a total solution but it works,” he says. “And it is comparatively cheap, and not doing it is so disastrous that our clients are happy to do it.”

A storm approaches the plains near Adams, North Dakota. (Photo: William Neuheisel/flickr) 

With climate change exacerbating the already delicate dynamic between weather and farming, one would imagine this niche industry to blossom. “We’re staying busy,” says Boe. “Interest is increasing, I think because of increasing water supply pressures.” He is hesitant to peg the increased interest to climate change, but says that, “what we do know is that there is increased demand for water.”

Back on the ranch, Wayne Mrnak is quick to defend weather mod. “I remember back when I was young we never expected to get a crop harvested completely without losing some to hail, and in some years losing all of it to hail.” But, he adds, “Since weather modification started, losses have gone down, and in the last five years we’ve had very little measureable hail damage.” 

It’s still summer though, and the black wedge of a thunderstorm can consume the horizon on almost any given day. And these final days and weeks before the harvest are crucial for crops.

“If I can only make it through till September and the harvest then I am golden,” says Mrnak, with an eye to the sky. “But if just one of them storms comes, I am done.” 

This story was funded with support by Longreads Members. Join, or make a one-time contribution.

A replica of a 5,000-year-old shoe from the Alps (Photo: Josef Chlachula/Wikimedia)

Where did Europeans come from?

As genome sequencing becomes easier, geneticists have been puzzling together the history of European ancestry—but there has always been one piece missing. Now, researchers publishing in Nature Communications have found a new group of hunter-gatherers who came from the Caucasus region.

Previously, researchers had identified three groups of European ancestors. There were hunters who came to the region at least 40,000 years ago, well before the Ice Age began, and spread from Spain to Hungary. Many years later, after the Ice Age, farmers from the Middle East came to Europe and added their DNA to the mix, about 7,000 years ago. And most recently, 5,000 years ago, a group of herders, called the Yamnaya, came from the east. 

But scientists had not entirely untangled the genetic history of the Yamnaya. The new research shows that they descended partially from a group of hunter-gatherers that spent the Ice Age isolated in the Caucasus region, before making their way west. Researchers are calling this newly discovered group "the fourth major strand of ancient European ancestry."

Bonus finds: An island where Greeks and Spartans fought, 2,600 undelivered letters from the 17th century, a sneaky alligator

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. 

NASA is on a magic mystery tour... for science! (Image: NASA)

For an icy little dwarf planet, Pluto is looking better and better these days—thanks to the New Horizons probe's fantastic photos. And now Pluto has gone, in NASA’s own words, “psychedelic.”

One of the latest images of Pluto, released on November 12th, shows the dwarf planet not as a monochromatic ball of dirt and ice but as a rainbow-colored acid freakout. There are ranges of electric purple craters here, a rocky field of yellow-green terrain there. Rarely has the much-loved former planet looked so vibrant.

While this spectacular image of Pluto might look like it came from the poster rack of a head shop, there is actual science behind it.

The raw image of Pluto. (Image: NASA on Wikipedia)  

Of course the Pluto does not truly look like a neon nightmare. While the image that was captured by the New Horizons probe is a detailed look at the surface of the cosmic midget, the colors were actually added by NASA scientists. These colors, though, were added to accentuate the actual colors present on Pluto. The Lisa-Frank-In-Space tones correspond to actual different colors on the surface, and were determined using a complicated method known as “principal component analysis.” This mathematical process helped determine what the various, distinct regions on the dwarf planet were, and then the New Horizons scientists filled each one with a different hue like it was an adult coloring book.

The end result is this terrific image that makes the differences on Pluto’s surface much easier to see and identify. As well as being a great desktop background.

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.

Chinese carpets are sneaking into foreign markets, fooling tourists and knocking down local prices. (Photo: Deb Collins/WikiCommons CC BY 2.0)

Hereke carpets have a unique, illustrious, and now confused history that began over 150 years ago in a village on the edge of Turkey’s Izmit Bay, near Istanbul. The intricate weavings are known for being some of the finest hand-knotted carpets in the world. So how is it possible that near-identical versions of the decorative rugs are tumbling out of Chinese factories, but labeled “Made in Hereke”?

Perhaps because China went ahead and named a manufacturing complex the “Hereke Industrial Zone,” thereby enabling companies to legally tag their products with the Hereke name. But what about Hereke, Turkey? Is anyone there upset?

Hereke, Turkey technically no longer exists; it lost its municipality status in 2008 due to an insufficient population. The unfortunate circumstance only aided Chinese efforts to tap into the centuries-old Hereke carpet industry. According to Turkish newspaper The Hurriyet Daily News, the Chinese have taken over 90 percent of the local Hereke market, which constitutes one quarter of Turkey’s $2 billion carpet market.

When asked how Chinese manufacturers are changing the Turkish carpet landscape, Solveigh Calderin, the owner of Hereke Carpets, responded with the tweet: “You are destroying the work places of Turkish women with your mass production fakes!” 

The Turkish are proud of the quality and artistry of their carpets and their distinguished history, and none more so than their Hereke, which boast high levels of craftsmanship. A proper Hereke carpet is made with wool or silk through a painstaking process of hand-made knots, and takes many months or years to complete, depending on a carpet’s size. One square meter of carpet is comprised of about one million knots, a process which might take a skilled weaver about one year. 

An original Hereke carpet in the Ambassadors Hall of Dolmabahçe Palace, built by Sultan Abdulmecid in the mid-19th century. (Photo: Gryffindor/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

The emergence of Hereke carpets can be traced back to the Ottoman Emperor, Sultan Abdulmecid, who established the Hereke Imperial Factory in 1843 to produce carpets, fabric, upholstery and curtains for Ottoman establishments including his new Dolmabahçe Palace in Istanbul. Abdulmecid was of the opinion that the world’s greatest palaces should display the finest carpets, and into the early 20th century, the Hereke weavers threaded knot after double knot not only for the imperial aristocracy, but also for visiting dignitaries and heads of state.

In 1894, German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II even brought gifts to further improve Hereke carpetmaking, introducing dyes that enabled the carpets to truly become the finest ever made, according to any Hereke website you consult. The coveted carpets were presented to royal families of Japan, Russia, Germany, and England, their designs combining traditional Turkish compositions with Persian and Egyptian motifs. 

These days, anyone with a carpet craving can get their hands on a Hereke, but the odds of it being genuine are increasingly rare. Chinese-made carpets fall into the hands of unsuspecting tourists passing through Istanbul aching for that perfect souvenir. You can find questions posted on Lonely Planet and Trip Advisor forums asking whether or not a new purchase is a Turkish original or a Chinese clone. One Hereke website clarifies, “The Ottoman Empire never extended to China and there has never been a Hereke Imperial Factory in China.” But did they know that there is a Hereke Industrial Zone?

“These imitations do not use the same production techniques, nor do they use the same quality materials as genuine Turkish Hereke carpets,” the webpage continues. Chinese Hereke carpets are reportedly woven by machine and with inferior materials—but here’s the question: can anyone besides experts really tell the difference?

Traditional Turkish carpets, knotted by hand. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

If you can’t make the trip to Turkey, log onto eBay and you’ll find plenty of Hereke to choose from, as cheap as $30. One of the chief sellers, Yilong Carpet, claims to have 9,000 skilled weavers at its headquarters in Henan, China. The 30-year-old company has over 800 items listed on eBay, with carpets selling for up to $84,000, and it claims to have sold its handmade products in over 100 countries. Yilong apparently even created specially customized silk carpets for Kazakhstan’s presidential palace. 

In 2015, Yilong Carpet launched a handmade “Top-Turkey” series, which apparently has no actual association with Turkey. Amy Yu, a company representative, clarified via email, “We cannot send these rugs to Turkey. It is just a name. There is no any meaning.”

Some Hereke experts provide detailed instructions on how to differentiate a real Hereke from a fake, such as counting the knots and demanding a certificate. But as for cheats, Yilong’s website also has a page for “hateful swindlers.” But who’s swindling whom here? And now that Hereke, Turkey, is no longer a thriving center of industry, how much does it really matter? 

A traditional Hereke carpet. Chinese are now accused of cloning not only the carpets, but the whole concept of Hereke. (Photo: Cllane4/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Brian Berkey, Assistant Professor of Legal Studies and Business Ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, says that the “Made in Hereke” carpets do seem intuitively problematic. “As a philosopher, I would want to know–what are the important values that are being violated?” he asks. “This is actually a topic of debate among philosophers–how important these sorts of historical, cultural practices are, and the moral issues raised by their being taken on outside of what’s sort of thought of as the original, cultural context.”

You could look at the issue through the lens of history and culture, or perhaps from the perspective of art and forgeries (or simply judge the economic impact). “I think this case is really interesting because probably a lot people have this very strong intuitive reaction,” says Berkey, “but it can be hard to explain that reaction, and to put into words what really seems objectionable.”

China has rarely been praised for its handling of intellectual property, and many companies and countries have found China’s business ethics at times objectionable. But if China starts renaming industrial zones, we’ll soon have no idea where half our things come from, whether we’re in Istanbul or Walmart. 

Solveigh Calderin, of Hereke Carpets, later tweeted, “Very simple: The Chinese Hereke fakes are destroying the market. That's all.”

Autocrat coffee syrup, for blending with milk. (Photo: Sean Benham/flickr)

In 1993, coffee milk was declared the official state drink of Rhode Island and not everyone was thrilled. According to the Wall Street Journal, it was “to the great irritation of the state’s vocal frozen lemonade lobby.”

But those frozen lemonade lobbyists had to bow in the face of the mighty coffee milk—even if the rest of the country doesn’t know of its existence. The beverage is often referred to as weird and distinctly Rhode Island, something only locals understand and appreciate, and something they can’t even give away to tourists.

The appeal is pretty straightforward: It’s like the milkiest, sweetest latte you’ve ever had. It’s like somebody melted coffee ice cream and served it to you room temperature. It’s a non-alcoholic White Russian.

So where the hell did it come from?

Rhode Island, the home of coffee milk. (Photo: Taber Andrew Bain/flickr)

The concept of coffee milk is nearly universal. One of the earliest recipes for that phrase can be found in this 1808 cookbook, published in London, which calls for “coffee-powder” to be boiled in milk, and cleared with isinglass. A similar recipe was published in an American cookbook in 1823, which suggests it be served with “real Lisbon sugar of a good quality.” But coffee milk as we know it was most likely brought to America by southern European immigrants, not the English. And it’s also most likely not unique to Rhode Island.

In Rhode Island most people trace the beverage to the state’s Italian population. Between 1898 and 1932, over 55,000 Italians arrived at the port of Providence, mainly from southern Italy, to work for cheap in the state’s textile mills. And from Italy, they brought an appreciation for strong but milky coffee. "In Italy they often made a bitter coffee with grain. The brew was then heavily sweetened. The children drank what the parents did. The tradition of sweetening continued here,” wrote Nancy Verde Barr, author of We Called It Macaroni: An American Heritage of Southern Italian Cooking.

Ingredients for coffee milk... (Photo: Dtrap/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0) 

From there, it’s not hard to see how the trend spread. As more Italians came their traditions blended with those of everyone else in the state, and as the soda fountain and diner became common places to socialize, coffee milk moved from the home to the menu. By the 1920s, Eclipse began producing coffee syrup specifically for the beverage, and its cousin the Coffee Cabinet (the regional term for a milkshake), and by the 1930s was selling the syrup directly to consumers. In 1940, it was joined by competitor Autocrat, which would inspire fierce brand rivalries (that would end when they bought Eclipse in 1991). And though it was available elsewhere in New England (one 1954 study had 24 percent of students at the University of New Hampshire preferred coffee milk over both regular and chocolate), Rhode Island was its home.

It could just continue being a Rhode Island staple if it weren’t for one pesky anomaly—Louisiana coffee milk. “Many Louisiana families raised their children on coffee milk,” says Jodi Conachen of Community Coffee Company, the coffee brand most Louisianans point to as a necessary ingredient to their coffee milk, “Coffee milk can often be found even in baby bottles with the milk and sugar proportion very high and then the proportions adjust over time to include more coffee.” One Cajun writes the recipe for Louisiana coffee milk as four parts milk to one part Community Coffee, with a heap of sugar. It may not be made of syrup, but from a taste perspective it’s the exact same thing.

The finished product, chilled. (Photo: Sean Benham/flickr)

Community Coffee Company was founded in 1919 in Baton Rouge by Cap Saurage, who was of Cajun heritage, and indeed it seems Louisiana’s coffee milk tradition came from the Cajuns and French, not the Italians. (Even though Louisiana had a similar Italian immigration to Rhode Island—one ship line went straight from Palermo to New Orleans.) The Cajuns had strong coffee, often buttressed with chicory to save money, and flavoring it with milk and sugar was an easy way to stretch it even further.

Both Rhode Island’s and Louisiana’s coffee milk cultures have a lot in common. The French and Italians have cafe au lait and caffe latte, respectively, which certainly are the distant relatives of coffee milk. They also both have no qualms about serving the mixture to children. “Drinking coffee milk while your parents and relatives drank their regular coffee was like a sense of well…community,” wrote one Cajun author about the tradition. The syrup was really a formality on Rhode Island’s part, an easy way to mass-produce the treat outside of the family kitchen.

In Rhode Island, the love for coffee milk remains strong, perhaps stronger than in the South. Grocery stores are not only stocked with Autocrat and Eclipse, but smaller artisanal brands like Dave’s and Morning Glory keeping the tradition fresh for a new Rhode Island generation. The same can’t be said in Louisiana. “It is still practiced but not on the same scale that it once was throughout the area,” says Conachen.

Arguably, Rhode Island has held onto its coffee milk out of necessity. The state has a deep history and culture that is often overshadowed by the rest of the Northeast. Rhode Island was a colony, but there were 12 more of those. Rhode Island has incredible seafood, but so does the rest of New England. All the while, Louisiana has jazz, Sazeracs, po-boys and Jean Lafitte. Coffee milk is something Louisiana can afford to lose. Rhode Island can’t. As the number of truly regional quirks in this country get absorbed or forgotten, Rhode Island coffee milk is thankfully going strong. Even if it’s not the only state sipping it.

Forrest, a Great Horned Owl. (All photos: © Leila Jeffreys) 

Photographer Leila Jeffreys settled her carefully chosen subject into position. The background was a complimentary shade of light brown. Except this was not an ordinary portrait shoot. Jeffreys' subject was a magnificent Great Horned Owl known as Forrest.  

Forrest stayed in place throughout the shoot, watching Jeffreys with her serious golden eyes. Her “horns”–tufts of feathers–descended across her face to give the impression of a single watchful eyebrow. At the time of the shoot, Forrest was in the care of the Ojai Raptor Center in California, which rehabilitates birds of prey. Despite being warned that Forrest was "strong willed," the portrait of the owl came out beautifully.

The session is now included in Jeffreys' new book Bird Love. Each photo in the printed menagerie of wild cockatoos, song birds, budgerigars, parrots and birds of prey is accompanied by a name and mini-biography of the bird. As with the best portrait photography, the personality of each subject shines through, from a jovial cockatoo named Bob, to a stern-faced budgerigar called Jimmy, to the regal Soren, a wedge-tailed eagle.

For this selection, Atlas Obscura focused on Jeffreys’ owl portraits, for which she worked with the Eagles Heritage rehabilitation center in Western Australia, as well as the Ojai Raptor Center. Below, delight in these photos of the most intriguing and charming of birds–the owl. 

Pixie, Northern Pygmy Owl.  

Sooty, Lesser Sooty Owl. 

Yule, Barking Owl. 

Pepper, Southern Boobook.

Ava, Western Barn Owl chick. 

Jeda, Greater Sooty Owl

Riley, Eastern Screech Owl. 

Tani, Australian Masked Owl.

The cover of Leila Jeffreys new book Bird Love, published by Abrams. 

A friend to pirates everywhere. (Photo: peasap/flickr)

Ever since Long John Silver clomped around on a wooden leg with a parrot on his shoulder, the literary and pop-culture conception of pirates has involved the parrot. But at this point, fact is very hard to separate from fiction. What, exactly, about a classic pirate Halloween costume—the parrot, the peg leg, the eyepatch, the bandanna, the snarling vaguely Scottish accent—is actually real? Is any of it real?

“The parrot trope is almost certainly grounded in reality,” says Colin Woodard, author of The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down. Long John Silver, the star of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, was the first major fictional pirate character to walk around with a pet parrot, but this, according to Woodard and other experts in the field of classic piracy I spoke to, was based on real truths. And the reasons why the parrot became associated with pirates actually give us a pretty good glimpse at the real, true-life existence of a pirate during the Golden Age of Piracy.

Long John Silver, Jim Hawkins and his Parrot, from the 1911 edition of Long John Silver.  (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

The Golden Age of Piracy, a period lasting from, in the broadest sense, the mid-1600s through around 1730, encompassed a few different major geopolitical and economic movements that created a space for pirates. For one, the discovery of the Americas and Australia led to a boom in exploration, which in turn led to an absurd amount of money and valuables being ferried across oceans. Money, gold, slaves, spices, and other highly prized goods (“goods,” in the case of slaves) traveled back and forth. They were comparatively unprotected, the vastness of the oceans and the miserable conditions of trans-oceanic journeys leaving them weak and vulnerable. And many former sailors, with deep knowledge of the sea, wondered why they should bother the difficult slog of ferrying goods when they could simply steal them.

And so came the pirates.

Different portions of the Golden Age of Piracy, which is a term created by and endlessly argued over by pirate historians, resulted in different forms and different amounts of piracy. Angus Konstam, author of The History of Pirates and one of the foremost experts in the world, would prefer the term was restricted to an eight-year period from 1714 through 1722.

A French Ship and Barbary Pirates, c. 1615. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Regardless, pirates, depending as they did on robbing ships, mostly had to go where the ships were. They followed trade routes, which means they ended up in specific places; you didn’t see pirates flocking to deep South America or anywhere in the Pacific Ocean. They stayed with the ships, and ended up largely in the Caribbean, West Africa, and the Indian Ocean’s coasts.

On long trips, whether conducted legally or illegally, pets were desired but would need careful vetting. These long voyages, remember, could last weeks or months, and mostly, they were incredibly boring and uncomfortable. A companion animal could help ease the way. What kind?

Capture of the Pirate Blackbeard, 1718. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

“I would reason that any large pet would be difficult to keep on a seagoing vessel, but cats might very much be prized for their ability to catch vermin like rats in the holds, etc of a vessel,” says Woodard. David Head, author of Privateers of the Americas, told me: “I've never seen references to dogs. Dogs as pets was more of an aristocratic thing in the early modern period.”

But pirates were traveling to exotic lands, had quite a bit of free time, had disposable income, and thus had no particular reason to restrict themselves to ordinary European pets like cats and dogs. Monkeys were not uncommon, and the concept of a pet monkey made its way into fiction as well—Captain Barbossa, in the Pirates of the Caribbean films, has one. But a parrot was more sensible. They don’t eat much, compared to a dog or a monkey, and what they do eat (seeds, fruits, nuts) can be easily stored on board. They’re colorful, and intelligent, and funny, and for a pirate (or a legal sailor) wanting to show off in port, a parrot would do nicely.

An engraving of Blackbeard the Pirate - but no parrot. (Photo: Library of Congress)

I asked the pirate experts I spoke to whether parrots would have been part of any sort of exotic pet trade. “Back home people would pay good money for parrots and other exotic creatures, and sailors could easily buy them in many Caribbean ports. Some were kept though, but most were sold when the ship reached home. They were colorful, they could be taught to talk—always entertaining—and they fetched a good price in the bird markets of London,” says Konstam. Woodard, though, noted that it might be tricky for a pirate to legally sell anything, especially an attention-grabbing item like a parrot from the New World. Cities like Boston and Charleston, where a parrot might be sold, were much smaller in those days, and pirates were often well-known and hunted criminals who would have a hard time entering the waterways of more populous cities like London.

Konstam also noted one account from the early 18th century when William Dampier, a British explorer, noted that the best parrots came from near Vera Cruz, a coastal region of Mexico. Pirates may have changed but humans have not. Vera Cruz remains a hotspot for the illegal parrot trade, a place where thousands are illegally poached each year.

The diamond. It's giant! (Photo: Lucara Diamond)

In a mine in Botswana, the Lucara Diamond Corporation has come up with the largest diamond discovered in the past century and the second largest ever found.

The newly discovered diamond is 1,111 carats and measures 2.6 by 2.2 by 1.6 inches. Previously, the largest discovery this century was a comparatively paltry 603 carats. That diamond was eventually cut into 26 diamonds that were collected into one necklace, Bloomberg explains.

Though certainly impressive, the diamond unearthed at by Lucara is not the largest one ever found. That honor goes to the Cullinan diamond, which was discovered in 1905. That gem was 3,106 carats and got cut into nine major stones and 96 smaller ones, according to Bloomberg. The two largest stones are now part of the British Crown Jewels.

All of these giant diamonds were discovered in Southern Africa; four of the world's 10 largest diamond mines are in that region. (Most of the others are in Russia, with one in Australia.) Oh, and the same diamond company, Lucara, also found another smaller diamond recently. But that one's only a (whopping) 813 carats. 

Bonus finds: Cave lion cubs

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. 

(Photo: Aldo Hynes/flickr)

Ah, autumn. The brightly colored leaves! The crisp Thanksgiving turkeys! The ... brightly colored Thanksgiving turkeys? 

Every year for decades, the folks at Gozzi's Turkey Farm in Guilford, Connecticut have been using a temporary feather dye to turn their white turkeys blazing shades of pink, purple, and yellow. 

 

A photo posted by aba45 (@aba45) on Nov 25, 2014 at 3:05pm PST

For the most part, people don't go pick up their turkeys at small family-owned farms anymore–Gozzi's sold 150,000 birds a year in the 1970s, but by the late '80s they were down to under 20,000. If you want to compete against easily-available, widely-distributed supermarket meats, you gotta have a gimmick, and for Gozzi's it's Manic Panic birds.

 

A photo posted by @mstoriale on Nov 21, 2012 at 1:17pm PST

But you don't have to be a meat-eater to appreciate the Gozzi's turkeys. The Gozzis are tight-lipped about the exact formulation and method of their feather dyes, but it doesn't hurt the birds (and owner Bill Gozzi says they kind of like the attention). Animal lovers should be able to visit the birds without distress.

(Photo: Aldon Hynes/flickr)

After all, as Bill Gozzi pointed out to Today news, the punked-out gobblers are meant as attractions, not dinner. Turkeys that are fixing to be eaten are already packaged up, not strutting about with hairdos. "Those are the only ones walking around here Thanksgiving morning," he said. "They're the lucky ones."

 

A photo posted by Emily Wrann (@emilywrann) on Nov 3, 2013 at 11:31am PST

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 edit@atlasobscura.com.

Starlings on a telegraph pole. (Photo: David Prasad/flickr)

The city of Mount Vernon New York was under siege. The distraught residents had tried to drive their tormentors away with shotguns, fire hoses, rockets, dishpan pounding, huge battleship searchlights and the sounds of trucks blaring the terrifying noises of their enemies in distress.

Still the little black birds wouldn’t leave.

“For ten years, 10,000 starlings have flown into Mount Vernon at twilight in August to settle in tree tops and disrupt lawn parties and besmirch walks, cars and houses,” reads an August 21, 1959 account of the town’s plight in The New York Times.

 The circumstances of this invasion are strange but the town’s solution might be even stranger. For starters, the human cause of the problem was long dead by the time the lawn jockeys faced off against the birds. It was 19th century drug manufacturer Eugene Schieffelin who, between 1890 and 1891, released 100 starlings in Central Park. He did this because he was obsessed with both Shakespeare (who references starlings in his texts) and with putting non-native animals into the wild as a member of the American Acclimatization Society, whose purpose was to ferry animals and plants from Europe and transplant them on U.S. shores. (Starlings are indigenous to Europe.) Since the initial birds took flight, Schieffelin's flock has grown around 200 million strong. They live together by the thousands and create strange, lovely patterns in the air known as “murmurations”.  They are noisy; they eat crops; they defecate everywhere; they drive people nuts. 

A murmuration of starlings. (Photo: Airwolfhound/flickr)

In 1914, the city of Hartford, CT tied teddy bears to the branches of trees and fired off rockets in an attempt to dislodge a starling infestation. In 1952, Washington, PA tried running electrified wires into starling roosts in order to give the birds “hot-foot”. Two years later, high frequency radio waves were deployed in Rochester, New York. 

Desperate times call for desperate measures, which is why the city of Mount Vernon hoped that its savior had been delivered in the form of a 71-year-old man from Great Bend, Kansas named Otto Standke in August 1959. He was a wisecracker, a former phonograph salesman and furniture buyer for Montgomery Ward, and he wore a silver tie pin with the legend “The Bird Man” emblazoned on it.

Standke’s reputation as a starling banisher was polished over the course of many years. He invented his method after growing angry with his hometown for spending $1,000 on aluminum owls to scare starlings, but that ended up providing roosts for the birds. He’d made a business of going around to starling-infested locales and scaring the birds away with a combination of metal clappers, a chime, and a mysterious double-locked box whose contents he refused to disclose. He claimed to have chased birds from several places, most recently Indianapolis, and carried around a mimeographed sheet detailing his triumphs. After checking Standke’s references, the city of Mount Vernon enlisted him in their bird war and promised him a payout of $4,000 if he could rid them permanently of the starlings. He had one week. 

Starlings on a branch. (Photo: Phillip Cowan/flickr)

The saga of the bird man and the starlings of Mount Vernon were covered thoroughly by the New York Times, who followed his exploits almost daily at one point, and between August 1959 and September 1960 published 16 stories about Standke.

Upon arriving in Mount Vernon and checking into the $7 a day Hartley Hotel, Standke got down to business. Donning a red-checked cap and smoking a cigar, he proceeded to march around Mount Vernon, bothering starlings with the “very special noise” of his clappers and bell.

Children came out in the street to watch him; the adults held umbrellas over their heads in anticipation of the reactions of thousands of startled birds.

“The starlings fell silent but did not move for fifteen minutes,” read the August 29 account. “Then covey after covey of them flew off as Mr. Standke walked up and down for forty-five minutes.”

So far, so good.

A close up of a starling's feathers. (Photo: Alden Chadwick/flickr)

But as the days ticked by, it seemed as if the starlings were departing one area simply to land a few blocks away. By August 25th, the people of Mount Vernon decided Standke might need some help and a group of about 100 followed him through the street with Halloween noisemakers and banging pots and pans. Standke fretted that the crowd was impeding his success; his August 27 deadline loomed just two days away.

On August 29, the headline said it all: “Bird-Chaser Sulks as Deadline Passes; Starlings Remain.” 

The day arrived, but Standke retired to his hotel room and watched a boxing match. “When police sent a car to The Hartley Hotel tonight to transport Mr. Standke to the battleground he said, ‘I’m not going out tonight,’” the paper wrote.

Irritated, Standke told the Times, “You see, I keep my eyes open, even if I did hardly read the contract. Contracts don’t mean anything to starlings. I’m interested in my reputation as a birdman, not in contracts.”

In the following days, Standke hung around Mount Vernon except for a short trip to New York City for a TV appearance. Finally, it was decided that the city would extend his contract for two weeks. Standke agreed to go back to annoying the annoyers as long as the residents and police officers promised to stop observing his “secret” work. On September 1, he took up his clackers, chime and mystery box again.

Starlings in a tree. (Photo: Micolo J/flickr)

Almost immediately, his efforts were met with resistance. The police insisted that the birds remained. Standke insisted that they were native birds, not starlings, that lingered. The second deadline arrived, the city refused to pay Standke, and he departed, supposedly to chase starlings from Youngstown, Ohio. 

“Mount Vernon’s birdman left today with his pancake flappers and other noisemakers,” wrote the Times with barely concealed schadenfreude. “Now, only starlings disturb the evening quiet in Chester Park and Kingsbridge Gardens.”

The next year, the town tried a more straightforward approach: They had the cops blast the birds from the trees with shotguns. “Some residents approve and others complain that the gunfire awakens their children and is a greater nuisance than the starlings,” read a July 19 account.

Not surprisingly, the mayor of Mount Vernon declared this method to be far more effective than noisemakers. At one point, it was reported, the police were killing about 60 birds a night. Some of those were stashed in a refrigerator for use in court to prove starlings still terrorized the town, just in case Standke came calling for his money.

Standke did file a claim in 1960 for the $4,000, but was refused, and this may have settled the matter because—unlike the starlings from Mount Vernon—his name vanished from the headlines.

Today, starlings are members of an exclusive club: They are one of just a short list of animals that are unprotected by the state of New York and can be hunted all year long without limit. Reports on their presence in Mount Vernon are scant, but it seems like lawn parties can go on, unmolested.

A blue-capped cordon-bleu. (Photo: Heather Paul/Flickr)

Scientists studying the courtship behaviors of the blue-capped cordon-bleu (Uraeginthus cyanocephalus) have discovered what Fred Astaire fans have known for decades: if you want to entice a potential paramour, nothing's more alluring than a soft-shoe shuffle.

In their study, published in Scientific Reports, the researchers report having observed the "first example of a multimodal dance display" during the cordon-bleu's courtship process.

While it has long been known that the male birds sing to attract females, the seductive dance moves—which include bobbing and "quite rapid step-dancing"—are a new discovery.

These slick moves were captured on a high-speed camera:

The dancing is thought to attract potential mates by producing vibrations that, when applied in conjunction with melodious singing, seal the deal. However, in the study, the birds who got extra fast and wild with their tap-dance moves were not guaranteed success in the hook-up stakes.

Researchers said that "high-motor performance individuals were not necessarily popular among the opposite sex."

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 drawing of the fossilized trees (Image: University of Cardiff)

In the present time, the archipelago of Svalbard is located about as far north as humans care to live, edging up into the Arctic ocean. But 380 million or so years ago, this same piece of land was an equatorial place, covered, according to a new study published in Geology, in palm-like trees that helped dramatically change the planet's climate.

Chris Berry, of the University of Cardiff, has discovered on Svalbard an ancient forest, now fossilized. The fossilized tree stumps indicate that this area would have been covered in dense stands of lycopod trees, reaching about 13 feet tall.

At the time, these would have been wildly impressive trees. Before this period, which is known as the Devonian, the plants on Earth were scrubbier, shorter things. But as trees started towering towards the sky for the first time, they changed the entire world. They began to cover the land and sucked up huge quantities of carbon dioxide, so much so that they changed the global temperature of Earth. 

Ultimately, that change set the stage for the existence of life as we currently know it. These growing plants transformed this planet into an entirely different place than it once was, just by existing.

Bonus finds: Skeleton of a "witch" girl, hoard of Roman coins

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. 

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s both at the same time! (Photo: Alf van Beem/WikiCommons CC0 1.0)

This past Wednesday, window-seat passengers on a flight bound for Fort McMurray, Canada were met by a disturbing sight. Just minutes after takeoff, huge fireballs began shooting out of one of the plane’s engines. After a few shaky rounds of the terminal, the plane managed to land back where it had started, at Calgary International Airport, without incident.

The culprit was not a drone, a bomb, or a black box. This trip was foiled by older denizens of the sky: a pair of birds.

Encounters like this, officially termed “bird strikes,” are on the rise–but they were already fairly frequent. Last year, in the U.S. alone, a record 13,668 bird strikes were reported to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)–a few dozen a day, up from about 2,500 in 2014. Although most of these encounters cause harm only to the bird, damage to machinery is still bad enough that it costs airlines over $700 million annually. Experts, who fear that fuller skies caused by recent conservation victories may push these numbers even higher, have spent decades trying to keep regular birds out of the way of big metal ones.

Ever since humans first reached the sky, we've been knocking birds out of it. The first bird strike ever recorded happened to Orville Wright, who ran into a flock while zipping over a cornfield in 1905. Since then, birds have played the hapless villain in a number of high-altitude dramas: Calbraith Rodgers, the first pilot to ever fly across America, was felled a mere five months later by a bunch of seagulls, and the daring water landing of 2009’s “Miracle on the Hudson” was both reminiscent of and necessitated by some migrating geese. Smaller strikes are common enough that they barely budge the news cycle. Over the past week, birds downed a two-person microlight flyer in Scotland and a commercial Airbus in Boston, in addition to causing the Calgary conflagration.

The crash that caused the "Miracle on the Hudson" was itself caused by a flock of geese. (Photo: US Army Corps of Engineers/Flickr)

There are a number of ways a bird can rough up a plane. It can get “ingested,” or sucked into a turbine, blocking the fan and causing engine failure. It can crack a windshield, messing with visibility and cabin pressure, or knock into a sensitive instrument, interrupting the pilot’s ability to gauge how things are going. Waterfowl, which tend to be both large and numerous, generally cause the most damage, followed by seabirds and raptors.

Other wildlife have their own strategies: deer and coyotes get tangled in landing gear, and according to the FAA Wildlife Strike Database, at least 18 flights into or out of Florida have been interrupted by runway alligators. No species is too small: at high enough speeds and in great enough numbers, bugs can coat entire windshields with their own smushed selves, reducing visibility and grossing out even the toughest Air Force pilots.

Of course, things come out much worse for the animals. The FAA’s wildlife strike photo gallery is a mess of gore and feathers, more than enough to get across that when birds and planes collide, everyone loses. For this reason, federal law requires that all commercial airports have a wildlife strike mitigation plan. Such strategies are the fruit of collaboration between wildlife biologists, aircraft engineers, and regulators, and are crafted with the help of an extensive pilot-sourced database that keeps very detailed track of strikes. Further aid comes from the Smithsonian Institution Feather I.D. Lab, experts in “snarge,” or plane-busted bird remains.

A military plane covered in snarge. (Photo: Air Combat Command/WikiCommons Public Domain)

Much of the more experimental work goes down in Sandusky, Ohio, home to the National Wildlife Research Center. There, scientists from the USDA’s Division of Wildlife Services put birds and planes through the paces in order to figure out how to make them get along better. One current study subjects crates of birds to videos of oncoming vehicles, to measure exactly when they start getting out of the way. Others test the relative repellency of particular configurations of airplane lights, and the efficacy of bird-tracking radars that help pilots decide when to take off.

In the past, similar projects have led to a variety of creative solutions. Workers at North Carolina’s Raleigh-Durham International Airport scatter bird gatherings with pyrotechnics. Ohio’s Dayton International Airport is planting hundreds of acres of prairie on little-used parts of airport land to draw birds away from the business end. When snowy owls mistake the long, flat runways of Boston’s Logan Airport for more familiar tundra, a team of dedicated scientists swoops in to humanely relocate them.

The award for the most ironic fix goes to New York City’s John F. Kennedy airport, which once employed teams of falcons to chase away their feathery brethren. Though airport workers swore it worked, the USDA found no effect, and the program was shuttered in 2011.

After a bird destroyed one of his planes, this aircraft owner put a warning on his new one. (Photo: Vans RV/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Other strategies are working somewhat better. Although overall reported strike numbers have gone up, “the number of damaging strikes, especially in the airport environment, is actually decreasing,” says Travis DeVault, project leader at the National Wildlife Research Center, adding that current tricks “seem to be doing a good job overall.”

Perhaps one day planes and their inspiration will coexist peacefully once again. Until then, there are always revenge videos.

Time to rocket into the sky for that bird's eye view. (Photo: Steve Jurvetson/flickr)

Most of us have probably spent the past few decades wondering when someone was finally going to give us an affordable personal jet pack. Well—it’s almost here!

While not ready for mass public use quite yet, recreational jet packs are deep in development and projected to become available within the next few years, at a cost of around $150,000. If that still sounds fanciful, take note: jet packs targeted at specific groups, such as first responders who need to blast off to emergency situations, are already being ordered for delivery in 2016. A safe and stabilized jet pack for curious and otherwise aerially unqualified consumers is just around the bend. Really.

A 1928 cover of science fiction magazine Amazing Stories, featuring a jet pack that did not yet exist. (Image: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

Personal jet packs have had a long and often frustrating history that goes back to 1919, when a Russian inventor debuted a design for the device. A jet pack, generally worn on the back, is propelled by jets of escaping gases that push an individual up and off the ground. Several different people have claimed to have created the first functional jet pack, and today, the race is still on to see who can create the most functional one. Purists believe that jet packs must feature Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL), but the device exists in different variations.

Jet packs, sometimes called rocket packs, appeared in works of science fiction a few decades before entering the realm of reality. In 1928, the jet pack could still only be seen in places like Amazing Stories, an American science fiction magazine. By 1965, the James Bond film Thunderball featured its hero deploying a jetpack known as the Bell Rocket Belt—and saying that “No well-dressed man should be without one.” 

Astrogeologist Gene Shoemaker wearing a Bell Rocket Belt while training astronauts during the 1960s. (Photo: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

The Bell Rocket Belt was built in the early '60s for the U.S. Army, and used hydrogen peroxide as fuel. These early versions only allowed up to 30 seconds of flight, which left enterprising jet pack fans like New Zealander Glenn Martin with a lot of room to improve. Martin, whose company Martin Jetpack now has the most functional contraption in the market today, began developing his device in 1981. His company is currently working on a pack that will allow over 30 minutes of flight at altitudes of up to 3,000 feet and speeds of 45 miles per hour. The team is also working to install a ballistic parachute system that can deploy when the jetpack is a few meters above the ground, to ensure the flyer lands safely. 

More recently, there’s also been Jet Vest (whose Kickstarter campaign never managed to take off) and Skyflash, an 11-foot winged backpack that would be the smallest twin-engined plane ever built, if it works out. There’s also Jetman, a 120-pound winged contraption that only two men in the world are equipped to fly; it travels up to 125 miles per hour but requires jumping out of a plane. 

Jetpack Aviation, which claims its JB-9 to be “the world’s only true jet pack,” is the current frontrunner, alongside Martin Jetpack. While the JB-9 is compact enough to fit in a suitcase, it can only handle around 10 minutes of flight. David Mayman, one of the company’s founders, says that the only thing keeping them from selling the model immediately is safety sensibilities. But Mayman says the day when anyone can strap into a jet pack, push a button, and hover above the ground is not far off. “This stuff is not massively clever any more and it’s certainly not heavy. It’s just a matter of time and money,” he told Gizmag. 

Both companies have already been receiving a lot of interest from companies, governments, and cashed-up individuals around the world. Though 80 percent of Martin’s inquiries comes from the U.S., they have also received $50 million in investment from a Chinese aerospace group. The jet packs are also seen as a more effective alternative to helicopters in rescue and reconnaissance missions. 

 

A photo posted by JetPack Aviation (@jetpackaviation) on Oct 22, 2015 at 7:21pm PDT

Then there are the DIY-ers tinkering with their own personal flight devices. Troy Hartman, who’s spent time as a military pilot, sky-surf X-Games champion, and aerial stuntman, has been building his own jet pack. Hartman has a background in aerial engineering, and his ultimate objective is to create a compact personal flying machine that travels high, far, and fast. “The search is for something that has wings but is not so big that it turns into an airplane, and just enough of an aircraft so it can take off from the ground,” he says. “Something in between wing suit and hang glider, with jet engines that can whip through the sky really fast.”

Right now, Hartman doesn’t see a way to make those plans happen, but that doesn’t mean he’s not experimenting with new flying devices. His projects are geared towards the masses, more fun than practical, with the hopes that anybody can go and try them out. He’s even working on a completely new form of flight, but he’s still keeping that secret. 

Ever since people have looked up at the sky, they’ve had the desire to fly like a bird. It's a desire that has led from fantastical inventions like Da Vinci's flying machines to tragically thwarted attempts—as when Franz Reichelt plummeted to his death in 1912 when he tried to test his wearable parachute by jumping off the Eiffel Tower. But finally, personal flight is just around the corner. Whether DIY or made by a corporation, jet packs are ready for blast-off.

A biscuit of reduced uranium from the Manhattan Project (Photo: Wikimedia)

One of the worst-case scenarios for a terrorist attack in a dense urban place involves stolen nuclear material.

Occasionally, reports pop up of nuclear material being available on the black market or being smuggled from country to country, as part of an illicit sale. In a new report, the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit investigative journalism organization, details one such smuggling case. Though the deal was stopped by Moldovan police, the case convinced nuclear experts that there's a dangerously large amount of lost uranium still out there, CPI reports.

According to the investigative outlet:

"thieves inside of Russia somehow made off years ago with a full bomb's worth of highly enriched uranium. Western spies fear the thieves have been doggedly looking for a buyer for the past 15 years, by repeated dangling in front of them identical, genuine samples of that highly valuable material."

The most recent foiled attempt to sell this material happened in 2011, in Moldova, where a shopping bag full of highly enriched uranium was being sold as part of multiple planned shipment of the  element totaling 22 lbs. That deal was stopped by law enforcement, but an analysis of the seized material showed that it came from the same source as highly enriched uranium seized in 1999 and 2001, the Center reports.

That material was dated to October of 1993, a time when political turmoil in the former Soviet Union made security lax and, as the Center explains, it was not uncommon for workers to try to make off with uranium. Investigators believe, though, that these particular thieves made off with enough highly enriched uranium to construct a nuclear bomb. As far as anyone knows, it's still out there somewhere. 

Bonus finds: Hundreds of silver bars, a trove of Holocaust documents sealed into a wall, Greek papyrus New Testament, being sold on eBay

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.