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FOUND: A Fish That Looks Like It Has Legs

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The view from Motukiekie Island (Photo: Fuadounet/Flickr)

The Bay of Islands is on the northern island of New Zealand, almost as far north as it's possible to go on that island. It has 144 islands, and it's a popular spot for fishing, probably because it looks like paradise (see above).

This January (which is solidly in the middle of New Zealand summer), three people found a creature in the shallow waters of the Bay of Islands that they didn't know quite what to make of. It had a stubby face, a feathery tail fin, and two appendages on its side that looked like legs. It's the sort of creature that you could imagine flopping from the sea into the prehistoric muck and pulling itself onto land for the first time. 

Fish with 'legs', sent in for ID by Claudia Howse, Glenys Howse and James Beuvink.

Posted by Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa on Sunday, January 10, 2016

The finders sent pictures of the creature to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, which tentatively identified it as a frogfish.

These fish don't look much like typical fish: they're stockier, and they can use their fins to propel themselves along the sea floor. When it wants to eat, though, it's surprisingly fast—it captures its prey in 1/6,000th of second, the BBC says—so fast that the human eye can't see it. One second the frogfish's prey is in the water; the next, it is in the frogfish's mouth.

Bonus finds: 118,000-year-old stone toolsmore secret chalkboards

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. 


Tourists Love to Rub the Bronze Balls of Wall Street's Charging Bull Statue. Why?

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Don't they just look so touchable? (Photo: Tao Tao Holmes/Atlas Obscura)

"It gives you good luck," is the usual justification for fondling the testicles, according to tourists from South America, Asia, and all sorts of places in between.

It's a frigid January day in New York City; the ground is dusted with winter's first snowfall and temperatures (not counting significant windchill) hover around 27 degrees Fahrenheit. It's not an ideal day to be touching bare fingers to bronze balls, but people are doing it—hundreds of people, all day long. 

The Charging Bull statue just south of Wall Street is slightly bigger and burlier than a Humvee, weighing in at 3.5 tons (7,100 pounds). Each of its cojones is comparable in size to a slightly distended soccer ball. Rubbing these giant golden-bronze testicles has become a superstitious pursuit for visiting businessmen and tourists alike. 

Originally a guerrilla art installation, the bull was plopped down by its Italian sculptor Arturo Di Modica and some cronies under a Christmas tree outside the New York Stock Exchange on December 15, 1989. Due to its illegality the bull was soon removed, but thanks to local rallying and the park commission, it was relocated nearby to a little cobblestone island between Broadway Avenue and Morris Street in the heart of Manhattan's financial district. It sparked the attention of the media and has been a destination ever since, with a steady stream of tourists flocking to take photos from dawn-ish till dusk. 

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 The Charging Bull has become a symbol synonymous with financial power. (Photo: Sam valadi/flickr)

Since its installation, the Charging Bull has become an international symbol of Wall Street. When asked, tourists from Argentina and Japan alike say it symbolizes "the prosperity of Wall Street," and the words "money," "strength," and "financial power" come up again and again. A street vendor on Morris Street explains that the statue is a symbol of the stock market. "Go back a few hundred years, and stock was literally livestock," he says, mentioning a similar bull statue in front of Germany's stock market.

Fair logic, but Di Modica, who spent over two years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on the sculpture, didn't intend it to represent Wall Street. Di Modica's website for the Charging Bull explains that the statue is not a celebration of Wall Street, but rather a "perfect antidote" to the Wall Street crash of 1986:

"Arturo Di Modica first conceived the Charging Bull as a way to celebrate the can-do spirit of America and especially New York, where people from all over the world could come regardless of their origin or circumstances, and through determination and hard work overcome every obstacle to become successful.”

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 Cold day, bull's balls, clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose. (Photo: Tao Tao Holmes/Atlas Obscura)

It doesn't make much sense, then, that for the three years following the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests, the bull was mostly off limits and under police scrutiny, its (misunderstood) symbolism suddenly inspiring ire.

Right, so back to the balls. It's clear they represent the intersection of two universal and timeless human fascinations: money and genitals. But when did touching them become good luck? Why do Brazilian businessmen rub their briefcases against the giant genitalia? Why do groups gather around the bull's majestic butt crack for family photos, parents gently pushing their children to climb underneath and hug the balls from below?  

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 This is on a cold January morning. On warm days, the lines stretch much, much longer. (Photo: Tao Tao Holmes/Atlas Obscura)

It may be fruitless to try and find an origin to this superstitious tradition, which appears to have entered the global tourist consciousness around 15 years ago. There are two other Charging Bulls, also by Di Modica—one in Shanghai and the other in Amsterdam. But without that Wall Street ambiance, their balls have yet to achieve the same international recognition. A couple from Italy and Venezuela suggests that the bull-fighting tradition in Spain and Latin America may have popularized the Wall Street statue in those regions, while a couple from Australia simply found the bull's nether regions an amusing photo op. When questioned about the rubbing ritual, in which they did not partake, the husband responds, "I mean, once something becomes sacred, people just do it."

Certain tourists on TripAdvisor forums express disbelief at the dedication people have to rubbing these hallowed balls. "Never seen so many people want to hold fake bull's balls for a photo," posted MrHungryBrycie of Perth, Australia. MuggleDude from Santa Cruz understood the long lines waiting to pose with the head and horns, "but a line to take a pic holding its balls???"

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Shanghai's Bund Bull does not see as much action. (Photo: Adam Lam/flickr)

You can watch the lines ebb and flow throughout the day on the handy webcam on Di Modica's website. The real-time stream allows viewers to see fluctuations in the relative popularity of the bull's front versus backside. Hardly a moment passes that the bronze testicles aren't being touched and caressed. Aside, perhaps, from those of Genghis Khan, the Charging Bull must have the most fondled testicles in all of recorded history. 

Ultimately, there seems to be no identifiable origin to the "good luck" charms of these monstrous mountain oysters. Most likely, as with so many bronze statues, one person stroked the balls, and then another imitated, and thus began a trend. Frankly, it's hard not to be drawn to the Charging Bull's round and resplendent family jewels, dangling so enticingly for all to admire. As Di Modica himself said, there's an undeniable virility on display. That said, one former Wall Street analyst notes that "touching cast-iron balls is not my idea of fun—that must be a trader thing."

Drinking Vodka With Elderly Settlers Who Refuse to Leave Chernobyl's Exclusion Zone

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Radiation warning sign in Pripyat. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Let me introduce you to Ivan Ivanich. He is a proud fascist who would truly like to kill us all, however, approaching ninety he appeared to pose little threat. To substantiate this further, he is one of the friendliest men I have ever met. Ivan will talk your ear off, even if you don’t understand his raspy Ukrainian, as his wife stands by in silence. She listens stoically, likely having endured this prattle for decades. The Ivanich’s are settlers living about 13 miles east of Reactor 4, which had an epic catastrophe here in Chernobyl in early 1986.

Heading west out of the town of Chernobyl, we pulled off on a dusty dirt road about a mile before the Belarus border. The people living here are called “self-settlers,” even though there are only five of them and Ivan hates them all. He confides that he would prefer a different group of people and admits that his wife falls into this category at times. Fortunately, there are many abandoned homes nearby where he can go spend the night when domestic tensions escalate.

A quick look at the satellite imagery does reveal an eerie expanse of overgrown neighborhoods (around lat 58.288º, long 30.322º) and abandoned farms, far larger than we had the time or the bushwhacking equipment to explore.

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A view across Chernobyl in 2015. (Photo: Michał Huniewicz/flickr)

On an April evening of 1986, during a routine test, Reactor 4 erupted in what has been described as a brilliant light show, as a result of massive quantities of steam and fission products being released into the atmosphere. This resulted in a deadly radioactive fire which burned for 10 days. While the explosion alone did enough damage, the resulting fire spread contamination across Europe, heavily in the Ukrainian town of Pripyat, and crept into what is now Belarus. This prompted the USSR to evacuate the area, albeit slowly as nuclear catastrophe is typically bad press.

The thriving community abandoned the area and an exclusion zone of 30 kilometers was established. It remains off limits to this day with an inner exclusion zone of even higher levels of radiation, which is 10 kilometers from the reactor.

In the years following the evacuation, however, a little over 1,000 “self-settlers” made their way back to their homes inside the 30-kilometer zone. They were mostly older people who did not believe in an invisible enemy. This was not the case for Ivan and his wife. 

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Abandoned neighborhood houses. (Photo: Adam McGhee) 

Though they drink from a well just outside their home, eat their own crops and hunt the local critters (less these days as it is becoming more difficult for Ivan to hunt), this couple does not disregard radiation as a myth. The Ivanichs know that their lifelong home was upwind during the disaster, and is thus in a relatively safe area as far as contaminated zones go. 

They are also not bothered by the continuing threat from the nearby reactor, which was set to be enclosed this year. This $1 billion project has more than doubled its projected cost, and the completion date has now been pushed back to the end of 2017. This international project only a few miles away does not worry Ivan, although many people in nearby European countries are losing sleep over the condition of the original sarcophagus, which is rusted and collapsing due to hasty construction after the accident.

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The entrance sign for Chernobyl. (Photo: Adam McGhee)

At the height of the Cold War, when the Ukraine was a satellite of the Soviet Union, Ivan worked first in construction then security at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The house he now lives in was built completely out of bricks and other materials smuggled home after a hard day’s work on the construction site. He is proud of the communist era, a time where opportunities like that existed, as modern construction jobs frown upon taking building supplies.

Ivan is also upset with the Ukrainian government, his major complaint being the lack of adequate health care. While part of the Soviet Union, mobile medical treatment was provided to these distant urban villages. Today the Ukrainian government has trouble funding such benefits, especially during the current war over Crimea. The fact that this zone is supposed to be unpopulated does not help matters.

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 Full body radiation scanners. (Photo: Adam McGhee)

These “self-settlers” have gained a minor amount of notoriety in the western media as a stubborn and courageous group, and the science does seem to be in their favor. Radiation is a difficult hazard to explain easily, but comparing a lethal dose (around 500 roentgens) to one mile of roadway can be a useful allegory to describe its effects. It can affect us based on rate and accumulation–or distance in the road analogy. Most countries have a maximum dose for the general population of say, six inches on a mile of road.

At 100 yards your risk of cancer may begin to increase slightly within the entirety of your lifetime. Racing forward to the half mile mark, you may begin to feel some symptoms and much higher likelihood of cancer, before you arrive at your lethal dose at one mile. Most of these settlers are living within the first few feet of this metaphorical mile, so at their age, any effects will be minimal.

This is different for children, which is why the Ivanichs' two sons joined the rest of their generation in Kiev. Every settler in Chernobyl is elderly. This is not simply because children are not authorized inside the exclusion zone, but because the older generation is far more willing to toil. Ivan explains that in Kiev, a bag of potatoes may cost a few dollars, while here the settlers work in generally barren fields for months to cultivate sustenance. Most people would not go to this amount of trouble for a sack of potatoes, they would simply go to the store.

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Disused bumper cars. (Photo: Adam McGhee)

The settler’s potato-dominant diet is supplemented with wild mushrooms and the occasional unmarked liter of unidentified liquor, proffered when inquisitive visitors drop by. I was beginning to appreciate the source of Ivan’s enthusiasm for visiting with us as we presented this wine....or was it tinted homemade vodka? From the taste, it could have been either. 

He has a car which has not run for many years, but he eagerly ushered us to his garage for a look. Ivan’s wife trudged back into the house, glad to be rid of these intrusive visitors and escape Ivan’s yapping. “It is a deathtrap!” he repeats in Ukrainian, though he is obviously proud of the car. Though his car has spent a decade trapped in this garage, it seems like Ivan may have been working on it when we arrived. He had initially rushed to meet us from this garage, with grease under his fingernails and smelling of oil.

"It would catch fire regularly," he tells us through a translator. "The engine is in the rear and it is only air cooled by two small side vents.” This minor design flaw has caused it to overheat and burst into flames numerous times over the years.

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A memorial statue inside the Chernobyl exclusion zone. (Photo: Adam McGhee) 

Life in the exclusion zone is simple, yet dangerous. The couple’s neighbor passed away a few days prior to our arrival, falling while trying to fixing her roof. She was believed to be in her nineties. Ivan is one of the few men left, as most have succumbed to severe alcohol abuse and the inevitably shorter male lifespan.

The Ivanichs have evaded Soviet-imposed famine, invasion by the Nazis, and the greatest nuclear accident in history. But the most significant close call this stubborn old Ukrainian wishes to describe is surviving his prized vehicle. As we drove off under the perpetually overcast sky, Ivan was returning to his lifetime project, and deathtrap.

After Terror Attacks on Pathankot Air Base, India Considers Censoring Google Maps

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Part of the Pathankot Air Force Station, marked as "Pathankot Airport" on Google Earth. (Photo: © 2016 Google/Digital Globe, CNES/Astrium)

Following militant coalition United Jihad Council's January 2 attacks on the Pathankot Air Force Station in Punjab, the Delhi High Court is looking into concerns over the military base's visibility on Google Maps.

The High Court's actions come in response to a petition filed by Lokesh Kumar Sharma, which seeks to "restrain Google from showing, providing and making available maps and images of sensitive installations and defense establishments.”

The petition implies that the attacks may have been informed by the online maps of the airbase, which is located close to the disputed territory of Jammu and Kashmir. It accuses the government of being "absolutely negligent and callous in preventing Google from displaying such maps." The petition also criticizes a competition run by Google in India called Mapathon. The winner of the open-source map project, Vishal Saini, was the individual who mapped the city of Pathankot, including the Air Force Station. 

This is not the first time that Google India's Mapathon has been in hot water. The contest was investigated in 2013 by India's Central Bureau of Investigation for publishing images that revealed information about sensitive military locations—Pathankot Air Force Station in particular. Pathankot has come under attack before—during the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war, Pakistan bombed and attacked the airbase with paratroopers. 

The Delhi High Court will come to a decision as to whether or not to ask Google to remove the images at the next date of hearing on February 24. In the past, such censorship requests have resulted in Google blurring locations around the world, from a nuclear site to an entire archipelago

The Snake Catchers Who Handle Australia’s Most Venomous Home Invaders

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An eastern brown snake, one of Australia's many highly venomous slitherers. (Photo: Peter Woodard/Wikipedia)

Reports of snakes unexpectedly slithering into homes and freaking out their inhabitants are pretty common. But in early January a particularly nightmare-worthy incident went down in Adelaide, South Australia, when a woman went to fetch a cold drink from her fridge and spotted a potentially lethal eastern brown snake hiding beneath the appliance. 

The species is the second most venomous terrestrial snake in the world. Accordingly, the shocked fridge owner called in the services of Rolly Burrell, professional snake catcher, who engaged in some careful "fauna relocation," as it's known in the industry. The video below provides some highlights from the process, including Burrell picking up the deadly snake with his bare hands while onlookers try not to scream.

Burrell is one of many on-call snake catchers around Australia. The country is home to five of the top six most venomous land snakes in the world, but its strict conservation laws make it illegal to kill a native snake, with the penalty for committing such an offense being a $10,000 fine. When venomous snakes turn up in a backyard, barn, or—heaven forbid—bathroom, it's time to call in a relocation specialist.

Marcus Cosentino is just such a specialist. As the owner of Slithers & Slides, a snake removal service based in Perth, Western Australia, he is on call 24/7 for any domestic serpent situations that may arise. 

The state of Western Australia has an unusual set-up when it comes to snake removal. "Ten years ago there was no one offering this service," says Cosentino, "so they had to turn to volunteers." The Department of Parks and Wildlife built a list of volunteer reptile removers—"just people who were enthusiastic, who had some experience with snakes and were willing to go out in their spare time."

Cosentino estimates there are now over 230 such volunteers, all of whom have taken a half-day course in reptile relocation. Western Australians who spot a snake on their property are welcome to request the services of one of these unpaid people via a centralized phone line. The problem with this arrangement, says Cosentino, is that most volunteers work full-time and have weekend commitments, meaning that by the time they are available for snake hunting, the snake may have disappeared. Enter the commercial snake catchers. 

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Marcus Cosentino relocating a venomous western brown snake that slithered into a home. (Photo: Slithers & Slides)

The number of calls to Slithers & Slides depends on the time of year—snakes behavior being affected by the heat, cold, and rain—but Consentino receives anywhere from zero to seven snake removal requests a day. Many of these involve confined spaces and otherwise tricky spots. “I’ve pulled apart air conditioners, I’ve crawled my way under people’s back decking, I’ve been up in roofs,” he says. 

Sometimes, if the resident has lost sight of the snake, the search ends up being fruitless. Other times a snake will shoot out from its hiding spot and blindside all in attendance. “I’ve had three people watching one bush and the snake’s gotten past all of them,” Consentino says. He got bitten by a tiger snake once, but it was a "dry bite," and did not inject venom. (That's very rare—“the toxicologist at our main hospital hadn’t encountered it before.”)

Despite the danger of dealing with venomous fauna on a daily basis, Consentino stresses that snakes aren't out to get people. When they turn up on your turf, they're probably just looking for warmth, a cool surface, or a tasty mouse.

That was the case with the eastern brown snake found under the fridge in Adelaide, who just wanted a warm, humid place to rest her pregnant belly. Yes: she was full of fertile eggs, and laid a baker's dozen shortly after being captured.

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Fridge snake and the next generation. (Photo: Snake Catchers Adelaide)

Rolly Burrell, the snake-catching star of that YouTube video, told us that he's feeding up the mother snake and incubating her eggs. When the baby snakes hatch he'll take them all into the bushland and release them back into the wild where they belong.

FOUND: Desert Hot Spots Just for Microbes

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The dark spot is extra hot (Photo: Ferran Garcia-Pichel, Arizona State University)

Out in the desert, in addition to hermits, Mars simulations and one lonely mailbox, there are whole communities of microbes staking a claim.

It begins when soil-stabilizing cyanobacteria pioneer a spot in the desert and are followed later by less adventurous microbes which colonize the desert surface. Eventually, a spot will have so many microbes living in it that their community will become a dark spot on the desert sand.

When a large surface area gets darker, it absorbs more heat, and once these desert microbe communities are large enough, they actually increase the temperature of the area in which they live. In a new study, published inNature Communications, scientists working in Arizona and California found that these spots can raise local temperatures as much as 18 °Fahrenheit. 

Part of the reason microbes darken the surface of the desert is that they create compounds to protect themselves from the UV rays of the sun–they create microbial sunscreen. In the communities the researchers studied, that compound was scytonemin. And since these microbial hot spots are estimated to cover 20 percent of Earth's continental land surface, that adds up to a lot of sunscreen, an estimated 15 million metric tons. 

The upshot here is that microbes, though tiny individually, together can have a huge impact on the planet's climate. Microbes bring the heat.  

Bonus finds: A "bleeding" treea 22-million digit prime number

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. 

 

Fleeting Wonders: A Petrified Forest Unearthed By A Beach Storm

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Your average sea squall usually coughs up a few good pieces of driftwood. But last weekend, a storm in Cornwall, England, went straight to the source, unveiling an entire petrified forest normally hidden in the sand.

The forest looks like a tangle of rock-hard, skeletal roots and stumps, all poking out of the sand. At one point, they made up a coastal woods–but after the seas began to rise, the trees became submerged by mud and muck. Eventually, they compressed and became petrified near the village of Portreath. Similar beach forests exist in Wales and Oregon

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The submerged forest in Borth, Wales. (Photo: Richerman/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Cornwall's petrified forest is revealed when rough seas combine with low tides, which happens every couple of years. Visitors always flock to see these landscapes collide. "You can see the roots and the branches," a Portreath Association spokesperson told the Daily Mirror. "It's very interesting to look at."

By Monday, the petrified forest was once again hidden beneath the sand, where it wil stay until the next storm releases it.

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.

How Lady Bible Hunters Made the Victorian Era's Most Stunning Scriptural Find

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Paintings of Scottish twins Agnes Smith Lewis (left) and her sister Margaret Dunlop Gibson. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Scottish twins Agnes and Margaret Smith were the last people you’d expect to discover one of the earliest known copies of the gospels, but in a dusty closet in an Egyptian monastery in 1859–without a university education or formal language training between them–the God-fearing twins uncovered the Syriac Sinaiticus. 

The latter half of the 19th century was a time of huge anxiety of the Bible’s veracity, and the importance of such a find cannot be overestimated. Overnight, the newspapers turned the middle-aged sisters into public figures, much to the chagrin of the leading Biblical scholars who had dreamed of making such a find for decades.

Born in 1843 and raised by their father, the twins were inseparable from a young age. And they were privileged: Educated as if they were boys, for every language they learned, the girls would be taken to that country by their father. And so it was that the twins had mastered French, German, Spanish, and Italian by their teens.

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A photochrom of Egypt in the 1890s. The sisters traveled to the Sinai Desert in 1892, by camel. (Photo: Library of Congress)

The twins’ father died when the sisters were 23, and they received a huge inheritance of about a quarter of a million pounds. Alone in the world and now exceptionally wealthy, the young women took a trip–not to fashionable Paris or the Italian Riviera–but to Egypt. As would become characteristic of the women, they refused to follow the morés of the time: Instead of having a male chaperone, they let themselves be accompanied only by a young female teacher.

Back in Britain following their adventure, the twins dedicated themselves to mastering more languages, including ancient and modern Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac.

The twins settled in Cambridge in 1890. Even though the university was barred to women students with its scholarly atmosphere, the city should have been the perfect spot for these self-taught linguists. However, Janet Soskice, who wrote the seminal biography of the twins, The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels, notes that the insular Cambridge set cast the twins as outsiders with their gaudy home, their lack of husbands, their expensive dresses, bonnets and private coach. The twins’ eccentricities, like exercising in the back garden in their bloomers, didn’t help.

But they eventually shed their ‘spinster’ label: Margaret married a renowned Scottish minister named James Gibson when she was 40; Agnes married the Cambridge scholar Samuel Savage Lewis four years later, in 1887, a match that helped the women’s entry into Cambridge society. Tragically, both men died after just three years of marriage.

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St Catherine's Monaster in Egypt. (Photo: Joonas Plaan/WikiCommons CC BY 2.0

Once again, the twins only had each other, and so in 1892 they decided to venture to Egypt’s Sinai Desert, armed with a tip from the Cambridge-based orientalist James Rendel Harris to search out a dark closet off a chamber beneath the archbishop’s rooms at St. Catherine’s–perhaps the world’s oldest Christian monastery –where there were chests of Syriac manuscripts that Harris had noticed but hadn't been able to inspect on his last trip to the monastery.

They were all hoping these manuscripts might contain early versions of the gospels, as the western Christian world was clamoring for finds that could disprove some of the questions Darwin had raised about the veracity of the Bible.

And so Agnes and Margaret Smith braved an area where, ten years before, Cambridge’s leading Arabic professor was murdered by bandits. Together with their guide, a Syrian Christian called Hanna, and 11 Bedouin helpers, the sisters rode temperamental camels and camped in tents for weeks on end–no small test for two wealthy women used to living in luxury.

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A page from the Syriac Sinaiticus, discovered in St Catherine's Monastery, Egypt, in 1892 by the sisters. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons) 

Agnes had been learning Aramaic–a branch of Syriac, and the language Jesus would have spoken–in the six months before the trip. Just as well, because she managed to do what so many male professors and scholars had failed to do in their searches of the monastery–she found what appeared to be an ancient manuscript of the four gospels. 

The twins couldn’t be sure of their find, but nevertheless they were convinced enough to use almost all of their film on photographing the palimpsest.

Back in Cambridge, when they tried to show the photographs to the university’s eminent professors, they were ignored as dilettantes...until the professors got a proper look. It looked like Agnes Smith really had discovered something of worth. Yes, the Syriac Sinaiticus dated back to the mid-4th century, and the translation it preserved went back to the 2nd century, very close to the fountainhead of early Christianity.

A group of scholars, including three world-class transcribers–Professors Robert Bensly, Francis Crawford Burkitt, and Rendell Harris– was hastily put together to go back to the monastery and transcribe the manuscript.

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Another page from the Syriac Sinaiticus. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

Everyone on that trip expected to leave the Sinai to a burst of fame and glory, but the newspapers only had eyes (and column inches) for these eccentric twins who’d come out of nowhere. Bensly and Burkitt were livid–they saw the women as uneducated upstarts who had stolen their claims to fame. Sure, the male professors did not dispute that Agnes had physically come upon the manuscript, but they refused to credit her with much more. 

While the men stewed, the twins became public figures who were finally accepted into scholarly society: There were invitations from eminent professors across the country, and honorary degrees from St Andrews and Heidelberg, Trinity College and Halle.

Margaret died in 1920, and Agnes in 1926. During their lifetime, the University of Cambridge never recognized the sisters for their monumental scriptural find of the Syriac Sinaiticus. But that isn’t wholly surprising from a university that denied women full degrees until 1948. 


FOUND: The New 9th Planet! (Maybe)

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The orbits of Kuiper Belt objects and of Planet Nine. The entire solar system is tiny in comparison. (Image: Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC))

Ever since Percival Lowell began searching in 1906 for a "Planet X" that explained strange patterns in Uranus' orbit, astronomers have been captivated by the idea that there's a mysterious planet out there that hasn't been found yet. On the other side, many astronomers who believe any search for Planet X is misguided: If there were more significant planets orbiting in the sun, we likely would have found them by now.

Now, a new paper from Caltech astronomers Michael Brown (the notorious killer of Pluto's planetary status) and Konstantin Batygin argues for a rather large planet far out beyond Pluto. They're calling it Planet Nine. If it exists, it would:

  1. Be as much as four times the size of the Earth (but somewhat smaller than Neptune)
  2. Take 15,000 years to orbit the sun
  3. Be, at its closest orbit, 200 astronomical units of distance away from the center of our solar system (IE, about seven times the space between the sun and Neptune)

No one has seen this planet, although a telescope in Hawai'i called Subaru (!) is now looking for it. Although it would be a rather large planet, as planets go, because it's so far away, it could be very hard to catch a glimpse of, even with a very powerful telescope.

Brown and Batygin were among the Planet X skeptics, but their modeling shows that certain weirdnesses in the orbits of objects in the Kuiper Belt, beyond the orbit of Neptune, could be explained by the existence of a body like Planet Nine. Their analysis shows that there's little probability (just 0.007%) of those weirdnesses being due to chance, but as one scientist cautioned in Science Magazine, the statistical significance of that probability is less than one might hope. 

In other words, it's still possible that this might be a false alarm, although as one astronomer told the Washington Post, this new research increases the odds that Planet Nine is real from about 40 percent to 60 percent. We won't know for sure, though, until astronomers see direct evidence of its existence.

FOUND: Evidence of Early Violence Between Foraging Humans

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One of the clubbed skulls (Photo: Marta Mirazon Lahr/ Fabio Lahr)

One of the great questions of human history is when we started organizing violent attacks on one another. Often, the beginning of warfare is associated with the advent of agricultural society, when people stored resources worth stealing and were settled in one place. But a new study, published in Nature, shares evidence of an early attack on a group of hunter-gatherers that lived 10,000 years ago, an unusual example of a massacre of a group of foragers.

In an area called Nataruk, in Kenya, not far from Lake Turkana, archaeologists found a group of 12 mostly complete skeletons, 10 of which show clear signs of meeting violent deaths. The place where they were found may have once been a lagoon; the ground now contains the shells of gastropods and clams. The archaeologists also found fragments of bone harpoons: likely, the people who lived here fished.

This group of people was attacked by another: the skeletons show marks of clubbing, with two different sized clubs, and stabbing, with stone blades. The archaeologists found an obsidian bladelet in the skull of one man, and since obsidian is not common in this area, it suggested the attackers came from outside.

The skeletons were also positioned randomly: "no standardized orientation or position of head, face, or bodies was observed," the scientists wrote in their paper. Some were face down, others had their cheeks to the ground. Perhaps the most chilling skeleton the team found had been pregnant–the bones of her fetus were there, too–and her arms were positioned in a way that looked like she'd been tied up.

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This woman's hands were crossed as if they had been tied (Photo: Marta Mirazon Lahr)

One possible explanation for the violence is that the attackers were after resources gathered by this group of people. Or perhaps they were just unfriendly strangers. Either way, this group of unfortunate people is evidence that humans were killing each other even before we settled down in towns and cities. 

Bonus finds: A Welsh dinosaur named Dracoa Loch Ness monster-sized trencha tree frog that hasn't been seen since 1870

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. 

100 Wonders: The Mapparium

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Ever notice how big Greenland is on most maps? There is a problem with flat maps. Due to the distortion that happens when you plaster a sphere onto a flat surface, the sizes of things at the top and bottom tend to get all wonky.

Globes offer a much more accurate view of the world, but even they are not perfect. When you look at the sphere, its curvature distorts relative size because the countries curve away from you. If you want the best view of what our world really looks like, there is only one place for you: standing in the center of the Mapparium.

In the Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston, Massachusetts is a three-story stained glass globe, flipped inside-out so the left-right orientation is correct. A 30-foot-long glass bridge runs straight through the globe. Standing in the center of those 608 stained glass panels, you can see the inside-out world in perfect scale. And It. Is. Weird!

It is fascinating to view Earth this way. Africa is huge. North America, Europe, and Asia are all jammed way up against the North Pole. You have to look nearly straight up to see them. Sizes and locations of continents and countries you’ve always taken for granted are suddenly unfamiliar.

The Mapparium was completed in 1935, meaning that while the relative size of its land masses is correct, some of the country names and boundaries are decidedly out of date.

In 1930, Boston architect Chester Lindsay Churchill was commissioned to design the new Christian Science Publishing Society headquarters to compete with the other grand newspaper headquarters of the day. He had seen the 12-foot globe in the lobby of the New York Daily News building and wanted to do one better.

Originally called “the Glass Room” or “the Globe Room,” the Mapparium gets its name from the Latin words mappa (“map”) and arium (“a place for”). Built by Old World craftsmen who were fleeing an emergent Nazi Germany, the Mapparium opened to the public May 31, 1935. It cost $35,000—which was a lot of money back then.

Based upon Rand McNally political maps published in 1934, the Mapparium put the politics of the era on view. Colonialism was still in full effect, with huge swathes of Africa divided among the European powers. Much of Southeast Asia is still French Indochina and don’t go looking for Israel or Pakistan, as they didn’t exist yet. Some countries are there but with their o names like Siam or Persia. Germany looms ominously large.

Renovated in 1998 and lit from the outside with LEDs the mapparium is now able to put on a short light and sound show. To clean the interior of the three story glass globe workers have to use a cherry-picker is set up in the middle of the bridge. Workers go out on the machine’s arm and clean each panel with a gentle solution.

The Mapparium also has another unusual quality, one that was almost certainly unintentional. Like the dome in Grand Central it is a whispering gallery, but being a sphere its acoustics are even stranger. People whispering privately in India can be heard quite clearly in Mexico. And if you stand in the center, you will find yourself speaking to yourself in surround sound.

Fleeting Wonders: Vacation In a WWI Cable Hut

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The Cable Hut–once a war tool, now a romantic getaway. (Photo: ceridwen/geograph CC BY-SA 2.0)

Prefer your weekend getaway with a side of intrigue? You might want to check out the Cable Hut in Pembrokeshire, Wales. The hut, which was recently reincarnated as a tiny vacation home, spent the beginning of its life housing telecommunications employees, who relayed important wartime messages between the United States and London.

In 1862, officials laid an underwater cable between Wexford, Ireland, and this hut, telegraphically connecting the two countries for the first time. Because American mail was routed through Ireland, this enabled news to spread much faster between the two allies. The hut was lined with benches and telegraph instruments, and the clerks slept in three-tier bunks in the back. During the First World War, this communication hub was important enough that soldiers were dispatched to patrol the roads around it.

After the war ended, the building enjoyed a short stint as a bathing hut before being purchased as a vacation home. Its most recent owners, John Marsh and Elly Winn, kept the hut's distinct stone-and-sheet-metal exterior, but the indoors is now less "Spartan transmission station" and more "adorable gingerbread cottage." The nearby ocean, of course, remains the same.

If you would like to stay in the Cable Hut, send a wire to Unique Home Stays, and hope it doesn't get intercepted.

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.

7 Dubai Locations That Defy Their Desert Setting

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Who cares about sandstorms? (Photo: brett jordan/Flickr)

It’s no secret that there is so much money floating around the city of Dubai that it essentially exists in the future.

Yet many of the wondrous sights found in the rapidly expanding city just really shouldn’t exist in a desert. In an arid climate where temperatures routinely rise well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the abundance of luxury, water-dependent spots like ski slopes, massive flower gardens, and lush green golf courses seem like a directed F.U. to the harshness of the surrounding environment. And with a world expo set to take place in the city in 2020, things are just getting weirder. Here are seven places that somehow really exist in Dubai.    


1. Ski Dubai

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Winter fun in the desert sun. (Photo: neekoh.fi/Flickr)

Located inside the Mall of the Emirates, this year-round ski slope gets fresh snow each night in direct defiance of the scorching temperatures on the other side of the walls. The fully functional ski center offers a fake mountain to ski down, as well as other ice-based attractions like an ice bar and a penguin encounter. Knock it off, Dubai.   

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(Photo: Marko Kudjerski/Flickr)

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(Photo: pravin.premkumar/Flickr)

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(Photo: Jay Tamboli/Flickr)


2. Dubai Miracle Garden

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Yes. Those colors are real. (Photo: Srilatha Sharma/Flickr)

Want to plant the world’s largest natural flower garden? Why not do it in the middle of the desert? The aptly named Dubai Miracle Garden is a sprawling technicolor wonderland of fresh, growing flowers. It contains over 45 million flowers set into elaborate displays that form words, patterns, and images using a rainbow of natural color. The caretakers say they use wastewater to irrigate the garden and keep it growing. But whatever they are doing, it’s safe to say that no desert on Earth has ever seen this many lush flowers.

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(Photo: Srilatha Sharma/Flickr)

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(Photo: Tim Adams/Flickr)

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(Photo: Srilatha Sharma/Flickr)


3. Jumeirah Islands

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The swamp islands of Dubai? (Photo: Dubai Construction Update/Wikipedia)

For some, living in an ultra-wealthy city of the future isn’t quite exclusive enough. The Jumeirah Islands developments were created so that people could live on their own little man-made land on the water. The neighborhood consists of 50 small islands set in an artificial lake that was also purpose built for the development. Each island contains just 16 separate villas, making them little communities within their own communities. It’s not quite having your own island, but it’s close.

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(Photo: Dubai Construction Update/Wikipedia)

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(Photo: Dubai Construction Update/Wikipedia)

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(Photo: Dubai Construction Update/Wikipedia)


4. Palm Islands, The World, and The Universe

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The future of the Dubai coast will encompass the entire universe. (Photo: Tobias Karlhuber/Wikipedia)

Speaking of islands that probably shouldn’t exist, some of the most iconic features of modern Dubai are the ever-growing artificial island that have been built into the coastline. Not content to just create more land (disrupting the local marine environment), the eccentric goofballs that planned these new land features made them into fun shapes like a palm tree and a map of the world.

A second, larger palm tree island is currently underway, and a second artificial archipelago, titled The Universe, is set to be created beneath the already finished, The World. It’s official: they are playing God over there.

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(Photo: NASA/Wikipedia)

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(Photo: Aheilner/Wikipedia)

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(Photo: Dubaiworld/Wikipedia)

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(Photo: zlatko/Wikipedia)


5. Emirates Golf Club

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Dubai or Miami? (Photo: dubaigolf.com)

A golf course in the middle of a barren desert isn’t absolutely unheard of, but it is pretty odd to see one that is covered in almost blindingly green grass. The Emirates Golf Club actually consists of two different courses that incorporate the natural environment, but each includes fairways of such a lush green that they would likely get a California resident arrested if their lawn looked as good. Of course the surrounding resorts offer all manner of modern luxury, but having grass that green in the desert is maybe the most decadent part of the whole affair.

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(Photo: dubaigolf.com)


6. Meydan One Swimming Pool

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Just the beginning of a yacht-filled waterway. (Photo: crystal-lagoons.com)

Meydan One is a planned development expected to be completed in 2020. When it is finished, it is set to break multiple world records including the one for the world’s tallest residential tower. But maybe the most remarkable parts of the whole affair are the planned canal and lagoon structures, which will have room for around 100 yachts, and a 90-acre swimming pool. Inland from the coast. In a part of the world where water isn’t exactly easy to come by. Why not? While these features are not yet complete, a portion of the massive swimming lagoon has been finished.  


7. Burj al Arab Tennis Court / Helipad

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Looks totally safe guys. (Photo: brett jordan/Flickr

In 2005, Roger Federer and Andre Agassi played a tennis match on a truly terrifying court. The grass, court lines, and net had been installed specially atop the helipad of the world’s third largest hotel, the Burj al Arab. Shaped like a UFO and lacking any sort of guard rail, the helipad is suspended over 700 feet in the air. This is all well and good until you remember that Dubai is subject to intense sand storms that can last days as high winds buffet the city in sheets of flying sand. A blinding sandstorm probably isn't so great for your game. 

The tennis court no longer exists, but the helipad awaits your arrival. You own a private helicopter, right?

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(Photo: Michael Coghlan/Flickr)

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(Photo: Nitin Badhwar/Flickr)

A Blizzard In This Part Of Canada Delays Exams For 6 Months

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A high school in Nunavut, Canada, with snow mobiles parked outside. (Photo: eanoee/WikiCommons CC BY 2.0)

For the past week, the East Coast has been blanketed in warnings about the incoming blizzard. But the prospect of a snow day—or several—is nothing compared to what is happening in Canada’s Nunavut province, where students will have to wait as much as six months between exams.

This area holds an awful lot of superlatives: it’s the nation’s newest province (officially separating from the Northwest Territories in only 1999), as well as its biggest (roughly the size of all of western Europe), its least populated (having about as many people as the city of Kizil'urt in Russia), and its northernmost and its coldest.

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Fog in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. (Photo: Alan Sim/flickr)

Life in Nunavut is not like life in the rest of North America. The capital and largest city, Iqaluit, has a population of around 6,700. Food and amenities are wildly expensive; Iqaluit, for example, lies on Baffin Island (possibly the site of Helluland, a land sighted by explorers in ancient Norse sagas), which is not accessible by road. In fact, it’s mostly not accessible by sea, either; for most of the year, the sea routes are frozen. Alcohol is fiercely regulated and sometimes banned outright, which, obviously, leads to a thriving black market. Bootlegging alcohol is a multimillion-dollar industry in Nunavut. 

This year, thanks to a huge blizzard after unseasonable warmth, Nunavut students had to delay exams—for four to six months.

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 Grise Fiord in the Qikiqtaaluk Region of Nunavut, Canada (Photo: Mike Beauregard/flickr)

The 12th-grade (“grade 12,” as the Canadians say) students in Nunavut are subject to anti-cheating measures of the standardized tests, which were made for a much-more-temperate Alberta, there are only a few times per year that students are allowed to sit for the exams.

This isn’t the first time Nunavut has gotten smashed with weird winter, as you might guess; the Kivalliq region reigns as Canada’s Blizzard Capital, with over 20 storms that qualify each year. One blizzard, the longest in Canadian history, lasted for over seven days, with stores completely sold out of food by the time it subsided. In one town, they cancelled Halloween in 2014 due to the threat of polar bears. Seriously. New Yorkers, you don't have it so bad.

From Wine Labels to Rembrandt: Celebrating a Century Of Striking Prints at the Met

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Sphaera Mundi (Sphere of the World), 1485. (Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

This year marks the centenary of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Prints. Extraordinarily, for half of this period, there were two men responsible for growing the Department’s holdings: William Mills Ivins Jr and A. Hyatt Mayor.  

In 1916, Ivins was appointed the department's first curator. Educated at Harvard and Columbia, Ivins had worked as a lawyer for nine years before joining the Met. His role was to grow the small collection which had originated in 1880 with a gift of 670 prints from Cornelius Vanderbilt. His 30-year tenure was celebrated by the acquisitions he made, and also by his choice of protégé and successor, A. Hyatt Mayor. 

Another Ivy Leaguer (a Princeton graduate and Rhodes scholar), Mayor joined Ivins in the 1932. His brief, when he arrived, was to “learn the collection”.  After 14 years working in the Prints Department, Mayor took over when Ivins retired. From 1946 to 1966, Mayor continued to expand not only the collection, but also the scope, as he acquired sheet music covers, wine labels and film posters.

Today, as it reaches 100 years in operation, the Met’s Department of Prints holdings are vast: 1.2 million prints, 17,000 drawings, and 12,000 illustrated books. Items from the collection are exhibited for shorter period, usually around 3 months, and under specific conditions, to protect them. 

To celebrate the department’s centenary and the legacy of Ivins and Mayor, The Power of Prints opens on January 26, 2016. Displaying works collected in those first 50 years, including masterpieces from artists such as Rembrandt and Goya, the exhibition is an opportunity to experience first-hand some of the heritage of the Department of Prints.  

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The Letter, Mary Cassatt, 1890–91. (Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

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Nemesis (The Great Fortune), Albrecht Dürer, 1501–2.  (Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

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Adam and Eve, Albrecht Dürer, 1504 . (Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

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A Giant Seated in a Landscape, sometimes called 'The Colossus', Goya , by 1818. (Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

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The Great Hercules, Hendrick Goltzius, 1589.  (Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

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The Three Trees, Rembrandt, 1643. (Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

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Christ Crucified between the Two Thieves: The Three Crosses, Rembrandt, 1653. (Photo: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) 


Changes in Climate Have Always Made Things Worse for (Accused) Witches

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Stop messing with the weather, grandma! (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

This week, 2015 was officially declared the warmest year on record. Droughts are worsening, resources are dwindling, and sea levels are rising—alongside witch killings, if the past has anything to say about the present. 

Witches probably make you think of the infamous witch trials of medieval Europe, which led to the execution of as many as one million individuals between the 13th and 19th centuries. These trials, as well as those that occurred in Salem, Massachusetts during the late 17th century, have long been fascinating for their oddity and inexplicability.

There have been all sorts of hypotheses about why the accusations might have come about—tensions between Roman Catholics and Protestants; a need by men of medicine to dispose of midwives and female folk healers; scapegoating; socio-political turmoil; a way to eliminate the diseased, mentally ill, or social outcasts; class conflict, superstition, or simple misogyny. 

But what about the effects of weather and climate? Could they have influenced all the unfounded accusations and mass lapses in logic? More than one researcher believes so.

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Talk about controlling the weather. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

While climate, and its changes, is something a lot of humans prefer to ignore, it wiggles its hot-and-cold fingers into everything, and witch hunts are no exception. In a paper published in 2004, Brown University economist Emily Oster argues that the witch persecutions that took place in Europe between the mid-16th and end of the 18th century were influenced by noticeable weather changes during the period. A 400-year “medieval warm period” was followed by a “little ice age” before things started warming up again—factors that would have severely affected food production. The cultural framework at the time suggested that witches had control over the weather and thus could be justifiably persecuted. 

Oster collected data on witchcraft trials and looked at correlations between weather and witchcraft across several regions. While Oster admits that drawing strong conclusions on such potential links is difficult, the fact that her results show even marginal statistical significance, she writes, is suggestive, especially when you look at the close overlap between weather, food production, and economic growth during these times.

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This graph indicates a correlation between colder temperatures and the number of witch trials. (Image: Emily Oster)

Though Britain passed the Witchcraft Act of 1735, criminalizing witch accusations, witch killings still take place today in a number of countries across the globe. And, just like hundreds of years ago, extreme weather can play a role. 

In his 2005 paper, "Poverty and Witch Killing," Edward Miguel of the University of California, Berkeley finds that in present-day rural Tanzania, twice as many witch murders take place in years of extreme rainfall than in other years. In his evidence from 67 villages across 11 years, the victims are almost entirely elderly women and typically killed by their own relatives.

article-imageA negative correlation here between temperature and witch trials. (Image: Emily Oster)

This is not unique to Tanzania. In northern Ghana, thousands of women over the past decade have been attacked or driven from their villages, often after struggles over household resources. Such violence has been getting worse since 2002, with similar cases in Nepal, Papua New Guinea, India, and parts of Latin America and Africa. 

In a 2010 poll of 18 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, over half of respondents believed in black magic. As in 17th-century Europe, witches in these communities are still seen as bringers of evil, misfortune, disease, and death. In some places, witch killing is considered a public service, pinning blame for things outside of human control. In others, the legal system even defends the practice of witch killing. In parts of Nigeria, Evangelical preachers are even labeling children as witches, leading to money-making, fear mongering, and the abuse and murder of hundreds or thousands of children. 

In India, witch killings, which can be truly brutal, show up weekly in newspapers; upwards of 2,500 people accused of witchcraft were killed between 2000 and 2012. Like elsewhere, witches in India are almost always women. Ramesh Singh of the Indian Social Institute wrote:

“Often a woman is branded a witch so that you can throw her out of the village and grab her land, or to settle scores, family rivalry, or because powerful men want to punish her for spurning their sexual advances. Sometimes, it is used to punish women who question social norms.”

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A woman gets old and suddenly she's a witch. (Photo: Vasantdave/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Robert Thurston, author of The Witch Hunts: A History of the Witch Persecutions in Europe and North America, doesn’t think that the climate arguments hold much water. He says there are too many counterexamples—periods of bad weather and faltering economies where little happened by way of witch killings, or a town with vicious killings neighboring a town with none. 

Thurston points out that women were the ones around the house, cooking the food and taking care of the children, so it was easier to blame them for mishaps. Women, and in particular menstruation, were mysterious to men, spurring different kinds of legends and ideas. On top of that, older women tended to look funny, he says, with warts, lumps and wrinkles. 

Older women, simply put, have everything going against them.

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For a Tanzanian village like this, droughts are not a good sign for old ladies. (Photo: Rod Waddington/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)

There’s also the unavoidable factor of geronticide, the killing of elders, which has existed across all sorts of cultures, with and without the label of witchcraft. There are a number of examples where the availability of food resources directly affects the treatment of the elderly. Icelanders, Amazonian Bororos, Fijians, and Australian Tiwi are just a few examples of groups known to have practiced death-hastening activities against the elderly.

Mitch Horowitz, author of Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation, has heard the climate thesis before and thinks it has some validity. “Clearly the witch craze, generations ago and today, involves regional superstitions, very old propaganda against the targeted group, family or local conflicts, and often age-old scapegoating of a certain group," he says, specifying "women today in the South Pacific, Jews in Tsarist Russia, orphans in Africa, Gypsies in Western Europe.” In periods of instability and strife, humans naturally reach for someone to blame or explain what is going on. 

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Where's an old lady meant to go when society spurns her? (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

But there may be some possible solutions. One thing that might help is the introduction of measures that predict and prevent famine, such as the Famine Early Warning System (FEWS). Another is support for society’s elder members. After an old-age pension was introduced in South Africa’s Northern Province in the early 1990s, witch killings there dropped dramatically. Granted, other political and social changes were taking place during the same period, but one imagines that such a pension could only help the grandmas at risk of being accused witches. Unfortunately, many countries, like Tanzania, couldn’t afford the measure even if they wanted to.

There is clearly a multitude of social and cultural factors at play when it comes to witch hunts, both in the past and in the present. Killing suspected witches is a way of addressing the seemingly unexplainable (sudden illnesses, crop failures, foreign threats), but the factors influencing these killings are not so easy to explain. Regardless of whether climate has anything to do with it, little old ladies are still being lit on fire, stoned, and beheaded for being little old ladies, chosen to bear the brunt of society's ills. Who, here, is practicing the real black magic?

Fleeting Wonders: Gold-Sprinkled Haggis With a $5,700 Price Tag

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In an era of champagne grilled cheese and gold-plated Cristal doughnuts, a Scottish company has brought the gourmet game to plucky new heights: they've created the world's most expensive haggis.

The haggis costs £4,000, or about $5,670. While the traditional dish is always loaded with sheep organs, cow fat, spices, and oatmeal, this incarnation adds Wagyu beef, French white summer truffles, Indian black pepper, and "edible 24 carat gold to sprinkle on top," The Scotsman reports.

The gastronomes at Macsween Haggis (tagline: "Trust us to be interesting") unveiled the brand new delicacy just in time for Burns Night, a celebration of the Scottish bard Robert Burns that falls on January 25. A traditional "Burns Supper" includes whiskey toasts, readings from the poet's work, and "the entrance of the haggis on a large platter to the sound of a piper playing bagpipes."

After this presentation, the evening's host reads Burns' "Address to a Haggis," which begins: "Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face / great chieftain o the puddin'-race!"

This particular haggis comes in a handmade wooden cask and must be specially commissioned. As of yesterday, no one had ordered it yet. To quote Burns again, "the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/ gang aft agley"–but you can be the first* over at the Macsween website.

*(Unless you live in America, where haggis has been banned for 44 years because it contains sheep's lung. Better luck next time.)

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.

FOUND: The Stolen Statue of a Berkeley Crew Coach, Now Decapitated

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Ebright, a bit worse for the wear (Photo: San Leandro Police Department)

One night in early January, UC Berkeley crew coach Carroll "Ky" Ebright went missing from the college's boathouse in Oakland. Ebright had coached the men's crew team from 1924 to 1959, with three of his teams taking home gold medals at the Olympics. He died in 1979, but for years a life-size, 300-pound bronze statue of the coach stood at the boathouse, megaphone in hand.

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Ebright, as he was meant to be (Photo: UCPD)

After the statue vanished, police put out a call to find it, and started broadcasting pictures all over the news. And, a few days later, police in the nearby city of San Leandro found the Ebright statue. 

Only, it was missing a few parts.

The police stopped to investigate a truck with expired registration, parked in a closed storage facility. But in the bed of the truck, they found "the upper torso of the readily identifiable statue," the department said in a press release. The statue, though, was headless and footless. It also had deep cuts on its chest and megaphone, as if someone had kept working after cutting off the head and feet. 

Next door, they found a deep hole in a backyard. It was three feet wide and three feet deep. Inside, were the head and feet.

The police arrested the man in whose backyard they found the hole: he was on probation for previous convictions, and police suggested he may have intended to sell the metal as scrap.

The statue has been returned to Berkeley, but is in need of some serious surgery. 

Bonus finds: David Bowie doing amazing impersonationsa burial ground in Harlem

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. 

Palm Trees Have Vanished All Over Athens, But Not For The Reason People Think

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Work in progress on "Imagine a Palm Tree..." Navine G. Khan-Dossos's artistic exploration of the palm in Athenian culture. (Photo: Navine G. Khan Dossos)

Once upon a time, in a mythological Greece, a half-Titan named Latona had an affair with Zeus and brought down the wrath of the goddess Hera. Pregnant and fleeing for her life, she found shelter on Delos, a "lightly floating island" that, because of its geographical autonomy, served as a safe haven. There, the poet Ovid writes, "between an olive tree and a date palm," she gave birth to the gods Artemis and Apollo.

Eons later, palm trees—their presence, their provenance, their comings and goings—remain a frequent topic of discussion in Athens. “Everyone I meet has a palm tree story,” says Navine G. Khan-Dossos, an artist and a relative newcomer to the city, for whom the palm tales have become a “micro-obsession.” There’s one in particular she hears over and over again: that the Athenian government, at one point in the 19th or 20th century, went on a palm destruction spree, shearing the streets of the tall, slender trees in order to give the city a kind of cultural makeover, away from Middle Eastern aesthetic trends and towards European ones.

There is no doubt that the city has lost many palms since the 1800s, when, as one historian describes it, it was known for "its palm trees, its camels, and its mosques." The city had to truck thousands of new ones in from North Africa when they hosted the Olympic Games in 2004. But was the palmicide an act of historical whitewash? Can you change the cultural identity of a place by removing its trees? 

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"The Reception of the Ambassadors in Damascus," an anonymous Venetian painting from 1511, sets the scene with a palm. (Image: WikiCommons/Public Domain)

The purposeful removal of palms isn't so hard to imagine. In many ways, Greece is a country caught between regions. Although it’s solidly European both continentally and politically, due to its its long stint under Ottoman rule, Greece “shares cultural traits with countries in the Middle East and with countries all around the Mediterranean,” Artemis Leontis, a professor of Modern Greek, told the International Business Times in 2011. Meanwhile, while the palm offers a panoply of associations—Christian martyrdom, Islamic devotion, tropical relaxation–for many centuries, it served largely as a kind of symbolic shorthand for the global East. “In Orientalist painting in the 18th and 19th centuries, you always get these palm trees,” says Khan-Dossos. “If Athens did decide they wanted to break away from this [association], then removing that tree removes that shortcut.”

Try to find actual evidence of a plot against palms, though, and things get muddy. Some who relay the story place the trees’ removal at the end of the Ottoman empire, when Greece gained its independence from Turkey. Others trace it to World War II, when the Nazis occupied Greece and destroyed much of its infrastructure. Still others pin it on the Junta, who ruled Greece for seven years in the 1950s and ‘60s after a military coup and who, according to historian Yiannis Papadakis, also changed the name of the citizens’ favorite coffee from “Turkish” to “Greek.”

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Omonia Square in 1900, decked out with palms. (Image: MB-E/Flickr)

Unmoored in time, and caught up in Athens’s wide-ranging oral storytelling tradition, the tale acts like “kind of an urban legend,” suspended between symbolic and actual history, says Khan-Dossos. To see what might lie underneath it, she has teamed up with Nikos Thymakis, the founder and president of the Hellenic Palm Society. Thymakis, a horticulturist, points out that it doesn’t necessarily take a vendetta to kill a palm. Lack of water or lack of care—both side effects of the kind of municipal neglect that comes with tumultuous times—will do the trick. “Every time I research, the real reason for the removal of the palm trees turns out to be much more practical than symbolic,” says Khan-Dossos, even if the consequences are emotional.

Take the depalming of Omonia Square, a central meeting place in Athens. For a brief period at the turn of the 20th century, Omonia Square was covered in palm trees, which splayed over the streets like shade-bringing giants. The palms reigned over the square until 1927, when they were chopped down en masse to make room for ventilation shafts for a major metro stop. Now the square, which will host the next Athens Biennale, is essentially a concrete slab–even though the train hub underneath it means it's the first taste of Greece for many, including newly arriving refugees.

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Dead palms in front of an Athenian hospital. (Photo: Ιωάννης Πρωτονοτάριος/Flickr)

Meanwhile, in a strange twist, a more recent and definitively symbolic decision is now decimating Athens’s remaining palms. Walk around the city today, and you’ll see a number of dead and dying trees, their normally proud leaves brown and droopy or their heads broken clean off. They’ve fallen prey to the invasive red palm weevil, a thumbnail-sized beetle that gnaws holes in palm fronds. These weevils were likely brought over in 2004,  along with palms imported from North Africa in order to give the Olympic Games an exotic feel for athletes and tourists. Thanks to the hitchhiking beetle, “all of those trees that were planted are on their way out,” says Khan-Dossos, “and the ones that were here before that are also suffering.”

Horticulturists in Athens are trying to save what trees are left. In the meantime, Khan-Dossos is hard at work on “Imagine a Palm Tree…”, an immersive mural that will turn the top floor of the Benaki Museum’s Islamic Art Collection into a huge forest of ceiling-high palms. She hopes the exhibit, which runs through September, will serve as a space for people to discuss palms—their presence, their provenance, their comings and goings, and everything they imply.

“Imagine if the refugees arrived and they were in a massive palm garden,” says Khan-Dossos. “It would be quite different.”

Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.

This Week in Google News Alerts: 'Ghost Town'

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Bennettville Bunkhouse, California. (Photo: Utilizer)

I’m a pretty bad driver, if we’re being honest. I live in a city with public transportation, fortunately, but my parents live in a rural area, so whenever we visit I find myself behind the wheel. During a recent round of “Jessie Can’t Drive and It’s Terrifying, Ha Ha!” my mom pointed out that a sparsely populated county of flat roads and few intersections was probably the safest place for me to drive.

Someone at the University of Michigan must have had similar reasoning, because this week’s Google News Alert for “ghost town” featured MCity an “intentional community,” except the community is self-driving cars and the intention is safely testing them. MCity has it all: a variety of roadways and signage, hydrants, sidewalks, stoplights, buildings, “stationary and mechanized pedestrians, and anything else you might need to simulate real driving experiences. It’s a 21st-century definition of “ghost town:” an empty town where driver-less, passenger-less vehicles roam the streets aimlessly.

Surprisingly, Mcity isn’t the only ghost town playing a role in scientific research. The rare minerals stichtite and crocoite can be found in western Tasmania’s abandoned ghost town, Dundas. Scientists have traveled to Dundas to study the stichtite, which may help determine whether life ever existed on Mars. Today, the only inhabitants of Dundas are a couple with a love of minerals.

Bonus: Medieval News Alert 

My “medieval” alert provided a variety of news this week. Chastity belts became a trending topic when a woman required the assistance of firefighters to get out of hers. However, despite the enduring tales and a few artifacts, historians believe medieval women didn’t actually use them. If you’d like to verify this by consulting a few primary sources, there’s a new app available for Android and iOS to help you do so. The app features genuine manuscripts from the Leeds University Library and allows you to test your transcription skills. Hopefully, newly digitized materials such as Lehigh University’s collection will be added in the future.

With your chastity belt on and your Book of Hours transcribed, you’re now ready to fully commit to the medieval lifestyle. Luckily for you, Medieval MMA fighting can fulfill your athletic needs, and even your cat can get in on the action, thanks to the more modern technology of 3D printing.

Other Alerts of Note 

"Haunted"Delhi is going after the AO market by emphasizing the city’s haunted and generally spooky tourist destinations.

"Mummy": The world’s largest scientific study of mummies commences at the Warsaw Mummy Project.

"Two-headed": I’m happy to introduce you all to Medusa], a two-headed Honduran Milk snake who so far seems to be living a happy life (lives?) with her owner.

That’s it for this week! Remember, let us know what terms you’d like to see, and we’ll see you next week!

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