NASA used its Kepler observatory, which orbits the Earth on a mission to find Earth-like planets, to spot the new planets, some of which may have so-called "habitable" conditions, or conditions favorable for the creation of life.
The collection of planets, spread across the universe, was the largest such collection ever discovered, NASA said.
The planets were not seen so much as calculated. Scientists on the ground study the brightness of "planet candidates," using an analysis to determine the probability that they are real. In the case of the 1,284, scientists determined that there was a greater-than 99-percent chance that they were real.
"Planet candidates can be thought of like bread crumbs,” said Timothy Morton, a scholar at Princeton University. “If you drop a few large crumbs on the floor, you can pick them up one by one. But, if you spill a whole bag of tiny crumbs, you're going to need a broom. This statistical analysis is our broom."
Is there anyone out there? It seems increasingly likely.
New scans revealed that a miniature Egyptian coffin held an 18-week-old fetus, the youngest such corpse ever discovered, according to the Guardian.
The coffin, said to be from 600 BC, has been in the possession of Britain's Fitzwilliam Museum since 1907, but was only recently given a CT scan.
It was previously assumed that the coffin contained body parts, not an entire being, but what researchers found was a very small body, with recognizable hands, legs, feet, and a collapsed skull. The arms had been crossed, a sign, according to the Guardian, of the body's importance.
Researchers at the museum suspect the fetus was the result of a miscarriage; it is much younger than two other fetuses previously found in coffins, one 25 weeks old and the other 37 weeks, both from the tomb of Tutankhamen.
If you ever find yourself traveling on Crater Road in Mars Bluff, South Carolina, be sure and carve out a few moments for a marker commemorating this whimsical footnote in Cold War history - that time the US nearly nuked itself.
as well as Buildings B and C (a garage and children's playhouse, respectively), Walter Gregg and his family is pretty clearly the aggrieved party in this scenario. This is how the garage turned out...
And as for the playhouse, that was ground zero - so other than an 70x35 foot crater, there really wasn't anything left for the Air Force to take pictures of.
Again, the blast was not nuclear - the core had been removed for transit - but the Mark 6 was still packed with the traditional explosives used to set off the chain reaction, and weighed in the ballpark of 7,600-8,500 pounds. One of those lands in your backyard, it's going to ruin your day.
So, how exactly does 4-ton bomb landing in your backyard ruin your day? Well, as you can see, the front of the Gregg residence escaped with some minor damage ...
although the back, which was facing the explosion, didn't quite come out so well.
The inside of the house however, was absolutely destroyed - here we have the dining room, where the remarkably alive Mrs. Gregg was working at the time of the blast ...
the kitchen (which I had to rotate a few times before I could finally figure out which side was which)...
and the bedroom, which thanks to Mr. Gregg's pals at the Air Force, has been converted into a sun room, free of charge.
People as far as five miles away reported broken glass in their homes, and the Air Force looked into a church down the road, which had lost a chimney...
and more than a few pews...
to the shockwave. Again - not nuclear.
So, what happen? According to the inquiry, somebody didn't set up the bomb properly. While en route to England for a training exercise, Captain Earl E. Koehler of the 375th Bombardment Squadron noticed an emergency light which indicated that their payload wasn't properly harnessed.
A loose nuke being sufficient cause for alarm, Koehler sent the navigator, Bruce M. Kulka, in to go lock the bomb back into place before it caused any serious damage.
Turns out, Kulka had to get on top of the bomb in order to reset the locking mechanism, so he reached around for something to use as a handhold ... and accidentally pulled the emergency release.
That's Kulka all the way on there right there, with the expression that reads "I'm really sorry I blew up your house."
Again - not nuclear.
The Greggs ended up suing the Air Force for their trouble, and settled for $54,000 - just shy of $450,000 today. To put that in perspective, ten years later, Johnny Cash would burn down an entire forest, and was fined $82,000, or $570,000. Half a million to drop a nuke on a house? That's a steal!
May 12, 2016 marks the first "Moscow Metro Marathon," in which competitors must try to visit all 199 of the transportation network's functioning stations within a day.
Over the expected 20-hour marathon, participants will have a lot of eye-catching architecture to keep them energized. Moscow Metro is widely regarded as being among the most beautiful in the world. But when it first opened on May 15, 1935, the design was not intended to be merely aesthetically pleasing; it was also meant to display the advantages of a socialist system.
The first line to open was Sokolnicheskaya. The stations along this line, such as Kropotkinskaya, Park Kultury, and Oktoyny Ryad, set the tone for being elaborately, beautifully designed. Marble pillars, arched ceilings, chandeliers and mosaics—features more likely to be found in a museum or an art gallery—became standard scenery for Moscow’s commuters.
In addition to the opulent design, there was plenty of symbolism. Take, for example, Belorusskaya Station, which opened in 1951. Within the arched ceiling, there are 12 tiled mosaics depicting life in Belorussia, including three women who appear to be diligently stitching a tapestry decorated with a hammer and sickle.
In the 80-odd years since its debut, the Moscow Metro has expanded along with the city. There are nearly 12 million people living in Moscow, and 2.4 billion passengers ride on the Metro annually. Not counting Metro-2, an alleged secret network of tunnels that exist deep beneath the city, there are 200 different stations and 207 miles of track, with further expansions planned—60 new Metro stations are to be opened by 2020. (This means that today's inaugural Moscow Metro Marathon will also be the last, as the aforementioned expansions will make it impossible to visit all stations in one day.).
The new book Hidden Urbanism: Architecture and Design of the Moscow Metro, 1935-2015examines the heritage of the city's underground train network, from station design to the evolution of signage, logos and ticketing. Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from the book that highlight the unique beauty of the Moscow Metro.
The most popular novel of 1760 England was an episodic narrative of the observations of a mind-reading coin imbued with the very spirit of gold itself.
Largely forgotten today, Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea thrilled contemporary readers with “Views of several striking Scenes”, an insider’s account of the scandalous doings of the “most Noted Persons in every Rank of Life”, and tales from the gold mines of Peru, the streets of London, the canals of Amsterdam, the ports of the Caribbean, and the front lines of the Great War. Despite Chrysal’s tendency to lapse into somewhat exhaustingly florid language, readers loved it—the book went through five print runs in just three years, 20 before the century was out. In 1765, author Charles Johnstone, a failed barrister who would later forge a career as a journalist in Calcutta, produced an expanded four-volume edition, also a best seller.
Though Chrysal wasn’t the first book written from the perspective of a unit of currency—The Golden Spy, written in 1709 by writer-for-hire Charles Gildon, was a collection of stories narrated by a collection of coins of various nationalities— it was a tipping point for what are frequently referred to as “it-narratives”. It-narratives, also called “novels of circulation” or “object narratives”, are novels or stories that take an inanimate object or an animal as its narrator, endowing it with a subjectivity, though not always agency. “The idea is that they’re treated as person-like,” explains Dr. Mark Blackwell, professor at the University of Hartford and editor of The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects and It-Narratives in 18th Century England. That definition, however, can be flexible: One writer in The Secret Life makes the compelling argument that John Cleland’s saucy Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, published in 1749, was a kind of it-narrative of an “enthusiastic vagina”.
These kinds of stories—secret histories and fictional memoirs—gripped the English reading public’s imagination. Chrysal was still the gold standard, so to speak, in it-narratives, but it was a bit like the first detective novel or the first bodice-ripping romance novel: the beginning of a genre. With a market proven, writers for hire began churning them out with variable quality. By 1781, a bored reviewer in The Critical Review complained, “This mode of making up a book, and styling it the Adventures of a Cat, a Dog, a Monkey, a Hackney-coach, a Louse, a Shilling, a Rupee, or — any thing else, is grown so fashionable now, that few months pass which do not bring one of them under our inspection.” The reviewer wasn’t entirely immune to the charms of The Adventures of a Ruppee, declaring it “well imagined and not ill-told” and “better entertainment than cards and dice during the long evenings of the Christmas holydays.” The Adventures of a Hackney-coach, reviewed in the same issue, fared much worse: “This is as execrable a hack as any private gentleman would wish to be drove in; being nothing but a heap of uninteresting, ill-written adventures, in a pompous and turgid style.”
“You sort of read these and you think, ‘This is one version of 18th century writing as a career,’” says Blackwell, noting that the novels were often penned by “hack writers”, writers for hire. “It’s a sort of para-literary form, a certain kind of junk fiction in a way.”
A George III gold guinea, from 1789. (Photo: Public Domain)
But consumable junk fiction was a somewhat new thing in the 18th century, just as the novel itself was a somewhat new thing. When the novel as a literary form was born is a matter of debate; the lineage of the modern novel spiderwebs through the past 2,000 years of history, linking Greek and Roman prose narratives and Japanese tales, experimental philosophical stories of Islamic Spain and heroic romances of medieval England and France.
But in the 17th and 18th century, the novel was increasingly becoming a vehicle for telling a story grounded in how real people would react to real situations. And as the it-narratives exemplify, there was a lot of experimentation in how that vehicle rolled.
“They’re trying to figure out new ways of writing narratives,” says Blackwell, describing the it-narrative as a “narrative gimmick”. And it was useful: Like contemporary fictional accounts of humans, including Moll Flanders and Tom Jones, it-narratives offered writers a way of giving their readers access to stories from different social classes, or typically hidden professions, or other countries.
But crucially, unlike those human memoirs, it-narratives allowed writers to do that divorced from a potentially complicated human perspective. Satirical, snarky commentary on contemporary political or social situations ruled early versions of the form; some, against the backdrop of the abolitionist movement gaining ground in the 18th century, seemed to probe the ethics of treating humans as objects or animals.
But what made it-narratives possible and appealing to readers was that this was a time when an object could plausibly travel farther than a single human would. By the publication of Chrysal in 1760, Britain was a growing colonial power, with possessions in North America, the East and West Indies, and India, as well as established trade routes to Africa and China. Objects, sometimes coming from places inconceivably distant, were increasing in abundance and the Western public’s relationship to those objects was in flux. “What connects the world is not shared religion or nationality, it is trade, it’s an object passing from hand to hand,” explained Blackwell. “I think increasing access to goods and changing relationships with things is part of what’s going on in these texts.”
It-narratives also reveal an anxiety about objects, in ways that hadn’t been expressed before. The it-narrative uses an object or animal’s ability to travel to convey a kind of personhood on to it; it’s perhaps no coincidence that these kinds of stories emerged at a time when philosophy, in the work of thinkers such as John Locke, was becoming very interested in the question of personal identity and what makes a self. How are objects, then, different from people? Even closer, how are animals different? “There’s a lot of angst about how these categories work in the 18th century and I think of it-narratives as a demotic, popular expression of that,” says Blackwell.
Perhaps not surprisingly, with their emphasis on anthromorphoized main characters, more adult it-narratives gave way to children’s versions. Within 20 years of Chrysal’s publishing, books aimed towards children with titles like The Adventures of a Whipping Top and The Adventures of a Pincushion routinely appeared at booksellers. These books were intended to have instructional value for children, reinforcing “good” behavior and existing social structures.
In other words, these were not exactly nuanced social portraits. “They’re hard to read because they’re so overtly moralizing, because the good kids are the ones who take care of their stuff and the bad kids don’t,” says Blackwell, noting that we draw these same kinds of moral conclusions in children’s media today—think evil Sid, the toy-torturer in Toy Story, versus good guy Andy. Blackwell pointed to an essay in the book he edited that reads it-narratives as the product of two forces—an Enlightenment-driven de-sacrilization of daily life and the increasing importance of trade and commercialization. The result, says Blackwell, is that “the notion that there is a kind of omniscient or omnipresent god watching everything you do is replaced with the notion that the world is animated in some way and so you’d better be careful.” It’s a rather paranoid vision: you’re never safe from scrutiny because the walls can talk and they’re talking about you.
Children’s fiction became the refuge of it-narratives and still is: From Black Beauty, Beautiful Joe, The Velveteen Rabbit, and The Little Engine That Could, on through The Giving Tree, The Miraculous Story of Edward Tulane, the Toy Story trilogy, and the forthcoming Secret Life of Pets. It-narratives, for most of the adult literary establishment, were too clunky, too obvious, not real enough; one critic, writing in 1929, branded them “a misuse and often prostitution of the craft of the novelist”. And yet, there is a clear line from it-narratives to how we tell stories outside of children’s fiction now. The descendents of it-narratives are more subtle than Chrysal and his ilk, but they are found in modern literary fiction such as Nicole Krauss’s 2010 Great House, about a desk and the lives that are affected by it; in films, such as 1998’s The Red Violin about the ill-fated owners of a red violin stained with the blood of a woman who died in childbirth, or 1942’s Tale of Manhattan, about the owners of a black formal jacket; or The Hare with the Amber Eyes, a memoir about the fortunes of family collection of Japanese netsuke, a beautiful meditation on the arbitrariness of survival.
Perhaps the strongest link between the 18th century style it-narratives and modern it-narratives is in journalism and the rash of books with titles like The Secret Life of Lobsters, Salt: A World History, and The Paper Trail: The Unexpected History of a Revolutionary Invention, or revealing articles like the New York Times’ 2002 “How Susie Bayer’s T-shirt Ended Up on Yusef Mama’s Back”. (The podcast Planet Money elaborated a bit more on the t-shirt, doing a whole series charting its construction overseas.) Modern it-narratives don’t so much imbue an object with personhood as they explore what it means to be an object in a world of humans, how objects come to have meaning, and how that meaning helps us make sense of our own history.
The anxiety about technology and objects has remained constant since the dawn of it-narratives. Like 18th century readers, we are interested in the transit of objects and knowledge around this shrinking world and, like them, we’re finding ourselves with an increasing amount of stuff—although on orders of magnitude much greater with the average American home stuffed with more than 300,000 items, according to the Los Angeles Times, versus the dozen or so household possessions in many European households through the 19th century. And like them, we’re interested in the emotional lives of the things that we create and live with, if films like Her, AI, and Ex Machina are any barometer.
The concept retains currency because we remain interested and invested in the stories things tell; we’re curious about what they touch and, perhaps more importantly, how they define us or explain us. As Blackwell notes, “You can see the world in a particular way from the perspective of a thing,”
It took two days for the Liberian government to become aware of the ship, and in the meantime, beached on the shore, the ship was looted.
It’s not clear what happened to the crew. In other parts of the world, “ghost” boats have been turning up with corpses inside, but this one was empty. It’s possible that the ship was attacked by pirates; according to news.com.au, the port authorities believe the ship’s owners “might have gone broke and had no money to pay crew members…and therefore, the crew abandoned the ship.
Every day, we highlight one newly found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com.
Hans selecting answers with his nose. (Photo: Public Domain)
Inky the octopus, who made a crafty escape from his tank in New Zealand a few months ago, joined a continuous stream of headline-grabbingcreatures whose antics, especially when captured on video and shared online, tap into a popular fascination with animal minds.
Although metro-riding beavers, militarized dolphins, and their canny ilk seem to pop up almost weekly now, it wasn’t until the early 20th century that psychologists and the general public began seriously considering whether animals had consciousness, emotions, and intelligence. This was due in part to the fin de siècle fad for “wonder animals,” domesticated critters that solved math problems, answered riddles, and discoursed on philosophy, often using a code to communicate with their handlers.
The catalyst for this wonder animal fad wasClever Hans, a mathematically-inclined German horse who gained notoriety in the early 1900s.He could apparently solve math problems–he even did square roots–and carry on simple conversations by tapping his hooves. When Hans started performing for an amazed German public, he amplified a growing interest in animal intelligence that had the potential to transform science and society. Perhaps animals, long regarded asmindless automata, actually had the capacity for reason and language–which meant they might even possess consciousness and something like a soul.
A German crowd gathers to witness Hans' performance in 1904. (Photo: Public Domain)
Clever Hans was not the first “wonder animal” to astound crowds with apparently human abilities. Magicians and traveling showmen had long trained horses, dogs, and more exotic creatures to perform feats like reading and arithmetic–a “learned English dog” discoursed on ancient Greek poetry in the 1750s, while the French lecturer Perrin employed a “little savant dog” for physics demonstrations a few decades a later. The original sense of “wonder” referred to something that didn't fit within the divine order of creation–perhaps miraculous, perhaps diabolical. On the stage, wonder animals straddled a line between freak and fraud, but were seldom taken seriously as a scientific phenomenon.
Wilhelm von Osten, a retired high school math instructor in 19th-century Berlin, held a different view. He felt that some animals possessed real intelligence and capacity for abstract thought–not just a love of tasty rewards. Asserting that animal minds were similar to those of human children, he used classroom methods to “teach” rather than “train” his Arabian stallion Hans.
Within a few years, Hans learned to count and then perform basic arithmetic using a system of hoof-taps. In 1904, the New York Timesdeclared that he could “do almost everything but talk,” including telling the time and discriminating between gold and silver coins.
Rather than a wonder or curiosity, von Osten saw this as proof that animals think, learn, and reason, and he intended to make his case to the scientific establishment. The time was ripe for such a radical assertion. Charles Darwin's theory of evolution was still rippling through the Western world, breaking down the categorical distinction between humans and animals. In 1872, Darwin proposed that emotions like surprise, grief, and pain were part of a shared evolutionary inheritance. This paved the way for the emerging discipline of comparative psychology, and threatened humans’ special status as the only earthly creatures with thoughts and feelings.
Another factor that primed audiences for a serious encounter with the animal minds was the rise ofpet ownership. People had long used animals for food and labor, but only the elite had the luxury of keeping pets as companions. This began to change in the 18th and 19th centuries, when pets became a middle-class trend. As people formed emotional attachments to their furry friends, they observed qualities like loyalty, love, and intelligence in dogs and, to a lesser extent, cats.
Stories about remarkable pets proliferated in the press. The “incredible journey” tale, in which devoted pets travel vast distances to reunite with their masters, originated around this time. Its heroes included Victor Hugo’s poodle, who supposedly trekked from Moscow back to Paris.
Hans and his original trainer, Wilhelm von Osten, pictured with the chalkboard that von Osten used to spell out math problems for Hans to solve. (Photo: Public Domain)
Pet owners like Paula Moekel of Mannheim, Germany, invited scientists to confirm their ambitious claims. Moekel believed that her terrier Rolf could discourse on philosophy in multiple languages. However, when investigators arrived they had an unsatisfactory experience–Rolf suffered from seizures, and was unable to show off for his guests. This cycle repeated in numerous cases: wonder animals, much like human psychic mediums, could rarely perform under the scrutiny of a skeptical audience.
Clever Hans, however, was not just any coddled pet. Von Osten insisted on the scientific importance of the phenomenon, and invited psychologists and physiologists to examine his equine pupil under controlled conditions. Acommittee of experts from Berlin scrutinized Hans in 1904 and concluded that his accomplishments were genuine–they ruled out the use of secret signals by von Osten. One of these experts, however, was not entirely satisfied, and persisted in a solo investigation.
Psychologist Oscar Pfungst's investigation of Clever Hans charted the horse's hoof-taps and correlated them precisely with the unconscious physical cues of his questioners. (Photo: Public Domain)
The dissenter, a young psychologist named Oscar Pfungst, came out with a devastatingcritique of Hans and von Osten in 1907. He found that Hans could not produce correct answers if he couldn’t see his human questioner or an audience member. Suspecting that the horse relied on physical gestures, Pfungst experimented with shrugging his shoulders or changing his posture during tests–and his subtle movements ruined Hans’ performance.
Like so many other wonder animals, the horse merely “read” human cues. Previous investigators had refused to believe that they could send such cues unintentionally, but Pfungst made a firm case, carefully correlating Hans’ hoof taps with the twitches and fidgeting of his handlers.
The legacy of Hans and Pfungst lives on today in psychology textbooks. The “Clever Hans effect” is when an experimenter elicits correct answers from an animal subject by giving the subject unconscious cues, creating a persuasive illusion of intelligent thought. This is where the story traditionally stops, with the debunking of Clever Hans and the moral that psychologists must rule out unconscious experimenter bias in their studies.
Munito, a “chien savant” of early-19th-century Paris, gained a reputation as the “Newton of the canine race,” but his performance was widely attributed to trickery. (Photo: Public Domain)
This was certainly not the end of the line for discussions of animal intelligence, however. Despite scientists’ best efforts to curtail it, popular interest in thinking animals remained vigorous throughout the 20th century. The Hans phenomenon inspired countless imitators, including “Lady Wonder,” a mare purported to have telepathic powers. During World War II, Nazi scientists tried training dogs to read and speak in code, hoping to find military applications for these talents. Even within professional psychology there were supporters of animal intelligence (among them Margaret Floy Washburn, the first American woman to receive a doctorate in psychology), but their work was often minimized or dismissed.
Over the past thirty years, though, the old guard of psychology–which saw human mental faculties as distinct from those of animals–has given way to outspoken researchers like primatologist Frans de Waal, who place humans and animals on a mental continuum. Modern celebrity animals like John W. Pilley's dog Chaser and Irene Pepperberg's parrotAlex, who both appear to understand thousands of words and basic grammatical structures, may be the heirs of Clever Hans, but their handlers' scientific respectability makes them harder to dismiss.
Hans' next owner, German merchant Karl Krall, with two later horses, Zarif and Muhamed, who surpassed Hans in their educational attainments. (Photo: Public Domain)
Indeed, Hans himself was never as marginal as many textbooks made him seem. Von Osten, who died in 1909 a disappointed man, might be pleased to see that animal intelligence has made a comeback in psychology–scientists are even returning tocalculating horses, this time to study how animals make decisions that aid their survival, rather than whether they understand math.
The fate of Clever Hans raises questions about how we define and value intelligence. What, after all, makes figuring square roots more important than reading body language with incredible acuity?Recent work in human psychology is revealing how unconscious cues and impulses actually determine most people’s everyday decision-making.
In the past, we’ve called animals “clever” when they conform to our ideal of rational, calculating intellect–even when we can’t uphold that ideal ourselves. Perhaps neither humans nor horses are as clever as we might like to believe.
More like Darjeeling UNlimited. For the first time in over a century and a half, India’s famed, but exclusively monetized Darjeeling tea will be available to any buyer who is interested thanks to a newly unveiled online auction system.
As reported over on Quartz, tea from the West Bengal town of Darjeeling has historically only been sold to exclusive buyers in America, Japan, and Europe. The unique blends, which are known for their “muscatel flavours” (as the Darjeeling government website puts it), were sold in weekly private transactions among the tea sellers and the largest tea distributors in each of the three countries. Like Champagne, Darjeeling tea is strictly defined as having come from the region, specifically from a grower approved by the Tea Board of India, although countless imposters use the name anyway. This exclusivity has caused Darjeeling tea to become one of the most expensive blends in the world, having, at least once, sold for almost $2,000 a kilo. Generally a kilo of a more common tea sells for around $9.
Indian tea sellers have been allowing online participation in their tea auctions since 2008, but the Darjeeling blend was exempted due to its volatile price point. The seven major tea trading centers in India have been moving over 500 million kilograms of product a year through the online service, accounting for almost half of the country’s tea production, according to the Economic Times. And now that Darjeeling’s blend is in the mix, that number is only set to increase.
The hope is that by selling the rare tea online, the availability will help stabilize the price of the blend, which would make things easier across the board for India’s tea industry, and hopefully trickle down to the consumer market. By making the tea less exclusive, it is also hoped that the amount of tea claiming to be Darjeeling, but not actually hailing from the region, will also decrease.
Reddit user RealHotSauceBoss's grandfather's North Dakota home, in 1916 and 2016. (Photo: Imgur)
Next time you need some Ikea inspiration, take a look at the family in this photo. See that house they're standing in front of? They built the entire thing from a kit they ordered out of the Sears catalog.
Over the decades, the baby in the middle grew up and had kids of his own. They had kids, too, and one of them grew into Reddit user RedHotSauceBoss—who decided to bring that old home back to life.
Nine years before this photo was taken, RHSB's great-grandparents picked up 120 acres of North Dakota land for free—likely through the Homestead Act, a 19th century law that gave land to citizens and intended citizens who proved they could take care of it. They then ordered a house from Sears, which was delivered into town by train. Horse-drawn wagons brought the boxes to the lot, and the family started building.
According to the Sears Archives, the company sold about 75,000 homes this way between 1908 and 1940. (A quick scan of available designs suggests this one might be a "Model No. 137," which sold for about $1,200—the equivalent of $27,000 today).
Getting it back up to snuff required exterior weatherproofing, new outside storm windows, and a full roof replacement (somewhere along the line, the nearby outhouse was also replaced by an expansion).
According to the thread, the poster is now working on fixing up the inside. Although he has never spent the night in the house, he has big plans for it: "We will fill it with pictures and memories so it can be a place where future generations of our family can learn not only about our genealogy, but our history," he writes.
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.
Have you ever stopped to think about how octopuses are born? Do they have eight legs off the bat, or do they start with one? Is it more like cows (one big baby at a time) or like frogs (zillions of slimy eggs at once)?
This video will answer at least some of your questions, though probably not all of them.
Check out minute 1:02 to see the first little octopus squirt squirm out of its egg. Soon, it's a party, with baby octopuses wiggling their many legs all over the place (turns out they are born with all eight).
To make this magic happen, the mother octopus creates a den using rocks or other materials, where she will lay her vast assemblage of white, teardrop-shaped eggs—between 20,000 and 100,000 in total. She seals herself in while the munchkins form, blowing sea water to make sure they stay oxygenated and clean. This incubation period lasts anywhere between two and 10 months, depending on the species and water temperature. During this entire time, the mom gives up food in order to stand guard. But when the squishy little larval octopuses finally burst forth from their pliable swaddles, they're out there on their own.
As for how the eggs get fertilized: a male inserts a sperm packet, or spermatophore, into the female using his third right arm, which is called a hectocotylus. Copulation takes a lot out of the male, and incubation starves the female, meaning that both die not long after reproduction—and that, friends, is an exemplary example of species before self.
Every day we track down a Video Wonder: an audiovisual offering that delights, inspires, and entertains. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
Mario, a sewage sampler robot descending into the underworld. (Photo: MIT Senseable City Lab)
When you think of the Super Mario Brothers, you might think of little mustachioed men shimmying up and down pipes.
Now think of Mario and Luigi shimmying right down into the sewers, to collect samples from the hodgepodge of waste that accumulates underground–sewers brimming with the tens of thousands of viruses and bacteria that make up a city’s collective microbiome.
Instead of pixelated plumbers, these Marios and Luigis are robots who descend into Boston’s sewer system to try and capture data on health and disease by sifting through the run-off from showers, toilets, and rain. The two robots are part of Underworlds, a project at MIT that is taking a closer look at the rich abundance of personalized waste that goes overlooked, sloshing out of sight beneath our feet every day.
The dark bowels of a city may have a lot to tell us. (Photo: Erik Mauer/CC BY-ND 2.0)
Yet Mario and Luigi and the team at Underworlds are aiming to turn “smart sewage” into a tool to predict outbreaks of viruses and disease (think influenza, gastroenteritis, dysentery) by collecting and analyzing biochemical information. By scrutinizing the refuse in our sewers, we can keep a finger on the pulse of entire populations.
The hope is that in the future, a community’s sewage will be able to inform us of the presence of illness, provide demographic data, and keep everyone one step ahead—predicting infections or pandemics before they break out.
The robots, designed and built at MIT’s SENSEable City Lab, replaced the team’s initial sampling method, which involved lowering a 20-foot pole with a bottle taped to the end into a manhole to scoop out sewage samples. It was messy, involving a pump connected at street level to a car battery to push the sewage up from below, according to Carlo Ratti, Director of SENSEable City Lab, and Newsha Ghaeli, a research fellow.
The team used a large peristaltic pump and car battery to manually collect samples before Mario and Luigi came along. (Photo: MIT Senseable City Lab)
The old collection method was then followed by a lengthy process in the wet lab, where the raw sewage was passed through a series of biograde filters to capture the DNA. “Playing with sewage was not that fun,” Ratti and Ghaeli explain over email. “Even when the sewage is flowing quickly you get a particular smell all the way to the street level!”
Hoping there was a more efficient, less smelly way to collect the data, the Underworlds team decided to check in with their colleagues in the computer science lab for help—and thus the sewer robots were born. Mario, the first prototype, and later Luigi, a second faster and slimmer prototype, were designed with the ability to preprocess any amount of raw sewage by filtering it on the spot.
This summer, the team is deploying 10 sewer robots across Cambridge and Boston in order to sample the sewage of multiple neighborhoods simultaneously. They are operated with a simple, battery-powered micro-controller, and will soon function within a GPRS system that will allow the bots to communicate with and be controlled by a central decision maker. They will relay real-time sewer data, such as flow and temperature, through a wireless cloud.
A closer look at Luigi—slimmer and more cost-effective than his brother Mario. (Photo: MIT Senseable City Lab)
Underworlds is planning to dispatch more Marios and Luigis to its planned operations in Kuwait, where they recently received a $4 million grant. Ultimately, cities can decide how many samplers they’d like to have in place. The team is constantly improving the prototype, and they’re far from finished. They’re still looking for ways to detect particular pathogens in real time, and will be continuing the pilot project through 2017.
They are also thinking about time-sensitive sampling—collecting data during “peak poop hours”—and they are continuing to filter, analyze, and decode all sorts of waste. Detecting organisms and viruses is not simple, nor always successful, but the team is feeling optimistic about its progress.
Our collective bowels clearly speak volumes. Mario and Luigi are ready to go out and listen.
Mount Ruapehu, in New Zealand, which was used in the Lord of the Rings films. (Photo: Mirko Thiessen/CC BY-SA 3.0)
There's "heightened unrest" at Mount Doom, er, Mount Ruapehu, the real-life backdrop for a volcano in Mordor, the Lord of the Rings home of the evil villain Sauron.
The New Zealand volcano last erupted in 2007, but this year, according to Reuters, volcanic gas is increasing, and water temperatures at Crater Lake on the mountain are also rising. As one volcanologist said, "There are more signs of life."
The country has warned climbers and hikers to stay away from the volcano for now, as it has become a popular tourist destination, in part thanks to the trilogy of films.
Good advice, because the heightened activity could presage an eruption, or, yes, maybe Sauron lives.
If you were to set up a word association game in which you tell Americans the word mole, the Mexican sauce, it’s pretty likely that the response will be “chocolate”.
When an archaeology team discovered traces of chocolate on a 2,500-year-old plate in the Yucatan in 2012, they described the possibilities this way: “It would also suggest that there may be ancient roots for traditional dishes eaten in today's Mexico, such as mole, the chocolate-based sauce often served with meats.” Recipes for mole, even from noted chefs, very often present a chocolate-containing sauce as simply “mole,” as though a mole must gain its specialness and power from chocolate. Possibly this is because chocolate, until recently, was not often used in savory dishes in the U.S.; our understanding of chocolate is almost universally sweetened and made mild with dairy.
“People think that mole is a sauce made from chocolate,” says Pilar Cabrera, chef at La Olla who cooking school in Oaxaca. But nope: “Chocolate is not the main ingredient and is only added to the more complex moles.”
In fact most moles do not contain chocolate, and either way, chocolate is certainly not an element that makes a molea mole. Looking more deeply into this sauce reveals that its history and impact are as complicated as a 35-ingredient mole poblano. This most traditional of Mexican foods is one of the most fluid, ever-changing items in the country’s culinary history—and all this coming from what might well be the first well-known dish to combine ingredients from the New World with those from Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Different food traditions approach sauces differently. The French, for instance, use a few different basic sauces, which are known as “mother sauces,” which can be either served as-is or modified by adding various flavors to create new variations. Mother sauces, which include well-known options like hollandaise and bechamel, have one thing in common, as Lucky Peach spells out in a nice post: they are composed of a stock combined with a roux. The stock can change—chicken, beef, vegetable, rabbit—but roux is, at its core, a simple combination of butter and flour. The roux ingredients are mixed and cooked to the desired color, and serves as a thickener, creating a glossy, fatty, luxurious texture.
Mole can be seen as the Mexican version of the mother sauce, albeit with some revealing alterations. “What all moles have in common are the following,” says Zarela Martinez, the Sonoran-born ambassador of Mexican cuisine to the U.S. who has, as she says, done just about everything, from restaurants in New York to cookbooks to PBS shows. “They're all pureed, they all contain chiles, either fresh or dried, and they all have aromatics, like onions, roasted garlic, tomatoes or tomatillos. The other thing that they all share is that they have some kind of thickener, which can be nuts, seeds, bread, or tortillas, or some of all of the above.”
If this sounds complicated, well, yes, it is complicated. Mole is not a specific dish, or even an array of dishes, with traditional lists of ingredients that should not be modified. Mexican cuisine is so hyper-local, so varied based on not just region but individual town, that the very few items that are truly eaten nationwide are required to be extremely versatile. Mole is really more a concept than a dish.
Chiles, an essential part of mole, on sale in a market in Oaxaca. (Photo: Jesús Dehesa/CC BY-ND 2.0)
The word mole comes from the Nahuatl word mōlli, which Martinez says means “to grind,” or “ground.” Other sources, like Cabrera, say it means “sauce.” Its origins are mostly unknown; there are several stories about its creation, usually involving a visiting religious leader and a cook with small amounts of many ingredients but not much of any, forced to combine them all.
The basic procedure for making a mole, with some exceptions, involves preparing many, sometimes dozens, of ingredients separately and then combining them into a powder or paste before mixing with stock. Chiles are essential, but Mexico has literally hundreds of varieties of chile, and individual moles will use varying combinations to achieve a certain balance of flavors: some chiles are used for sweetness, others for spice, for smokiness, for umami, for crisp freshness, all kinds of things. Seeds, like pumpkin and sesame seeds, are common. Tomatoes and tomatillos are common, as are garlic and some variety of onion. Herbs, either dried or fresh, may include epazote, hoja santa, or more familiar herbs like oregano and thyme. Dried fruits like raisins and figs, and fresh fruits ranging from pineapple to apple, are used, sometimes. Nuts are common, especially almonds, peanuts, pecans, and pine nuts. Spices may also be used: allspice, cumin, clove, cinnamon (technically the bark of Canella, which tastes similar to the true cinnamon found in Asia), coriander. The thickness of the mole can vary as well; some are very thick and used as fillings, others can be thinned to nearly the consistency of a hearty soup’s broth.
The global influence on the mole comes largely in the spices; at the time the Spanish conquered Mexico, there was a heavy Moorish and Arab influence in Spain, and those spices arrived with the conquistadores. In certain states, especially Veracruz, the Arabic influence really took hold, bringing treasured food items like al pastor (the carved meat-on-a-stick dish with obvious roots in shawarma) as well as spices like anise, clove, and black peppercorn.
As to chocolate, only a few of the ultra-complex, dark, celebratory moles use it. “And usually the one that's used is bitter, even though everybody uses that Abuelita,” says Martinez, referring to a popular brand of chocolate made by Nestle. Martinez doesn’t much like it; she finds it too sweet, and prefers to use a very bitter variety from Oaxaca. Chocolate may be a more recent addition. Though written history is limited from pre-Hispanic Mexico, chocolate seems to have mostly been used as a beverage rather than a flavoring agent in food.
The preparation is laborious and complex for most moles; each individual item must be cooked to perfection, then removed, then ground, then combined over heat while constantly stirring to avoid burning. Some items must be added at certain times in the process; some items must be cooked using different equipment. The combination of so many strong flavors into one harmonious, single-consistency sauce is a ridiculously difficult task, one that makes emulsifying a perfect hollandaise seem as simple as stirring Kraft cheese powder into milk.
Mole verde is one of the famed seven moles of the state of Oaxaca, though of course there are many many more than those seven to be found there. “In reality there are a lot more moles, because in every region they are used to a different mix of ingredients, and in Oaxaca we have 8 regions and more than 570 municipalities,” says Cabrera. Oaxaca, with nearly half its population identifying as indigenous, is a powerhouse of the pre-Hispanic mole. Probably the state’s best-known version is mole negro, a murderously difficult mole involving dozens of ingredients including avocado leaves, at least five kinds of chiles, and, yes, chocolate.
A typical celebratory small-town meal, Martinez said, might well include barbacoa, from which the word “barbecue” comes, along with rice, beans, and a mole. But mole, as a flexible concept, has come to be embraced by chefs eager to push it to new places. It is often served over enchiladas, with eggs, or in all kinds of other applications. Martinez makes it with fideos, broken pasta, in a casserole, and in a sort of lasagna with mashed plantains taking the place of pasta. These newer takes on mole provide some interesting clues as to where the dish’s evolution is going; it has always been a dish arising from the confluence of foreign influences, and that pattern is, if anything, only speeding up. Mole isn’t less traditional or authentic if it comes in the form of a lasagna. This is the way it’s always been.
Jacques Toussaint Benoît believed that snails, once mated, had a lifelong telepathic bond. (Photo: Pierre Watson/shutterstock.com)
Seldom has the race to create a secure and instantaneous means of communication seen a more bizarre episode than Jacques Toussaint Benoît ’s 1850s experiments with the pasilalinic-sympathetic compass, or snail telegram.
The occultist Benoît, working with an American colleague, Monsieur Biat-Chretien, managed to convince investors, journalists, and—albeit posthumously—a Paris communard, that his invention, which employed 24 pairs of mated escargots, could transcend geographical and temporal boundaries to revolutionize communication. It was to render the Morse telegraph—which could be compromised by the inconveniences of atmosphere and ocean—obsolete.
Benoît made up for what he lacked in finances and scientific rigor with sheer chutzpah. His theory was not unprecedented; the concept of “flesh telegraphs” dated back to the 1500s, and in 1839, Irish doctor and cannabis enthusiast William O’Shaughnessy had experimented with using human skin to transmit and receive electrical signals. Benoît’s invention, however, was to be much more portable and reliable. It required only a few pieces of hardware and 24 pairs of sexually frustrated snails.
Benoît's experiments were known as the pasilalinic-sympathetic compass, or snail telegram. (Photo: Internet Archive/Public Domain)
Benoît and Biat had determined that snails, once mated, remained not only monogamous but, through the exchange of “sympathetic fluids,” bound in a lifelong telepathic bond. Poke a snail with an electrical current in one location, they decided, and its partner, however distant, would react in kind as a result of a phenomenon they termed “escargotic commotion.” By placing a letter next to each snail, this evolutionary loophole could be exploited to transmit messages at the speed of thought, across any distance.
The pair lacked the funds to put their ideas into practice, so Benoît somehow charmed Monsieur Triat, the wealthy manager of a Paris gymnasium, into supplying him with lodging along with an allowance to conduct his experiment. Jules Allix, a journalist from La Presse, was talked into witnessing its unveiling.
Journalism Jules Allix witnessed the experiments. (Photo: Public Domain)
When initially asked what he needed to build the device, Benoît replied that he merely required a few pieces of wood; Triat took him to his carpenter’s shop and allowed him to make as much use of the man’s time and energy as his project required.
The device grew in both complexity and cost; when it was finally unveiled on October 2, 1850, to an increasingly impatient and frustrated Triat, it was a scaffold composed of 10-foot-long beams that supported the zinc bowls in which the snails were glued using copper sulfate. While Benoît assured Triat that he had been in communication overseas with Biat using the device, when it came time to test it, he did not even permit the use of a curtain to separate the two compasses, which were set up in the same room.
Nevertheless, the experiment went ahead. Allix was to touch the snails to the letters on one device to transmit his message to Benoît , operating the other device. The transmission was inaccurate; Allix’s “gymnase” became “gymoate” on Benoît ’s compass. Triat sent “lumiere divine” to Allix, who recorded “lumhere divine” on his end.
The results, though imperfect, impressed Allix, who published a breathless account of the experiment’s success on October 17, 1850. Not only did Allix foreshadow the popularity of communication devices as fashion—the Apple Watch had nothing on his suggestion that the compass could be worn on “the waist-chains of ladies”—but he hailed the invention as a revolution in global understanding:
We cannot penetrate the decrees of Providence, but we must nevertheless hope that this will not always be so, and that, thanks to the very discovery of Messrs. Benoît and Biat, with men now able to better listen to and understand one another, the sacrifices of inventors will not have been in vain, that they will on the contrary be able to enjoy, during their lives, the glory and the honors that until now have only been accorded to their memories.
Triat was less pleased with his investment, and demanded a second, stricter test. Benoît agreed, only to vanish on the day of the trial itself, dying penniless in Paris in 1852.
Despite being mocked in the satirical magazine Punch, Allix did not give up on the concept. Benoît ’s invention re-emerged in 1871, on the barricades of the Paris Commune. During the uprising, the need to securely pass messages became a matter of urgency, and Allix’s story was to briefly find a champion in Marquis Rochefort, president of the Barricades Commission, who had earlier dismissed as outlandish strategies to drop hammers from hot air balloons and set zoo lions loose on the besieging army.
Needless to say, the snail telegram proved to be no more effective in 1871 than in 1850, and failed to save the communards from massacre and exile.
Benoît’s invention lives on, however, in the realm of fiction. In 2000 it appeared in the form of a "snail phone" in Eiichiro Oda’s anime and manga One Piece. The animated device is the sole vestige of an alternate future where psychic snails brought a disparate humanity together.
On Thursday, scientists made a surprise announcement. From a gut microbe in a chinchilla owned by one of the scientists, they had discovered some extraordinarily unique cells, according to NPR. Specifically, eukaryotic cells that have no mitochondria, but live on anyway.
A type of organelle, mitochondria were long thought to be essential to the life of eukaryotic cells in humans, animals, plants, and most other living things.
Mitochondria generate a huge portion of energy required to keep cells running, in addition to a variety of other functions, including making iron-sulfur bundles for some proteins. And while other parts of eukaryotic cells can pick up some functions of mitochondria, that latter function was thought to be more essential than most.
These cells, however, had somehow found a way to replicate the iron-sulfur function, though scientists aren't yet sure exactly how.
"This organism managed to adapt in such a way that it could lose an organelle which every textbook will tell you is an essential feature of eukaryotes. That's pretty amazing," Mark Van Der Giezen, a researcher in Britain, told NPR. "It shows you that life is extremely creative in finding a way to eke out an existence."
Scientists said earlier this year that they had found some secret rooms in Tutankhamen's tomb. What could they contain? A popular theory was the tomb of Queen Nefertiti. But other scientists later said that there was good reason to doubt the claims, which were based on scans.
Now, the situation has gotten a little bit uglier. A team of radar technicians performed a second, more detailed set of scans on the tomb earlier this year, and sent their results off to Egypt's ministry of antiquities. But the government now has refused to release their findings, and scientists are beginning to cry foul, according to the Guardian.
What could the government be hiding? Perhaps, the scientists say, the hidden tombs don't exist at all. The first scans have also been called into question, after Hirokatsu Watanabe, the Japanese radar specialist that performed them, refused to release raw data associated with the scans because, he said, no one else could understand it except for him.
“My understanding is that the Egyptians are in a state of denial about this," one unnamed scientist told the Guardian (even science reporting apparently requires anonymous sources sometimes). "They are freaking out, and it has become politically toxic. When you’re the in the middle of a situation in which people are being purged because of their position on this, then scientists should back off and let the politics take its course. We have left the realm of science.”
The Egyptian government has so far refused to address the issue, but scientists quoted in National Geographic, which organized the second round of radar scans, said flatly that the rooms aren't there.
“If we had a void, we should have a strong reflection,” Dean Goodman, who analyzed some of the scan data, told National Geographic, referring to his analysis. “But it just doesn’t exist.”
The hunt for Nefertiti, in other words, is still on.
Of all the species that were once absurdly abundant in American landscape—the bison, the passenger pigeon—the American shad are often forgotten. These impressive fish, the largest type of herring in North America, used to migrate each spring up the eastern seaboard’s great rivers to their spawning grounds, in such great numbers that colonial fishermen could drag thousands out of the water in just a couple of days.
Shad are the East coast’s analog to salmon; as John McPhee reports in his book on shad, The Founding Fish, some reports of abundant salmon in the newly colonized “New World” may actually have just been referring to shad.
In the 21st century, though, despite our yearning for local food, shad is conspicuously absent, in part because now they’re much harder to come by. The problem isn’t that we aggressively overfished shad populations or consciously exterminated them. We just made it much, much harder for them to reproduce.
Back in the early days of America, shad filled rivers from the Carolinas to New Jersey: they would swim each year up the Schuylkill, the Rappahannock, the Delaware, and most importantly, the Susquehanna, the longest Atlantic-draining river on the coast. The Susquehanna begins at New York’s Otsego Lake, near Cooperstown, and twists down towards the border with Pennsylvania, passing by Binghamton, then down around Scranton and west through Harrisburg, before cutting back towards the ocean and dumping into the Chesapeake Bay. At one point, shad covered this entire length, from ocean to headwater, of 640 miles, the longest recorded migratory journey of any eastern fish.
Before the American Revolution, catching and preserving shad was great business. Indeed, the Yankee-Pennamite conflict, in which Connecticut and Pennsylvania sparred over territory in what’s now northeastern Pennsylvania, was fought in part over access to shad. The combatants would burn down buildings, steal each other’s resources, and destroy the fishing nets their opponents used to harvest the fat fish.
George Washington harvested shad in Virginia, and histories of the Revolution often claim that it was an influx of migratory shad in the spring that saved his army from starvation at Valley Forge. There is a record of the British army trying to block the fish from swimming upriver in order to continue to starve the army, and though McPhee thinks plenty of fish would have gotten through the blockade, he’s doubtful that shad were the Revolution’s saviors: there are no actual records of shad reaching Valley Forge, and more damningly, few fish bones found in the garbage pits excavated there.
At the beginning of the 20th century, though, the shad were handily blocked from going upstream. Government-built dams started going up—four in the Susquehanna—and though even in the 19th century, regulations had required dam-builders to make provisions for fish to pass, these were big enough that the shad couldn’t scale them.
Even before the Conowingo dam—at the time the second-largest hydroelectric project in the country—was built 10 miles from the mouth of the Susquehanna in 1928, few shad were making it far up the river. When the new dam went up, government officials decided it wasn’t even worth trying to help the fish bypass such a steep dam. Without access to traditional spawning grounds, shad populations started shrinking to critical levels. Shad season essentially became a thing of the past.
After 40 shadless years, though, the Susquehanna Shad Advisory Committee started working to repopulate the river, by stocking it with tiny shad, born at the first modern shad hatchery in the country, and adding improved fish-moving technology to the dams. The Conowingo eventually got two fish elevators, which lift pools of water, filled with fish. One sends them on their way down the river; the other collected fish that were then trucked upstream, past the other dams.
All this worked, for awhile. The numbers of shad in the river started creeping upwards, and though they never reached their historic heights, or the goal of having millions of shad in the river, in 2001, nearly 200,000 shad made it past Conowingo and more than 16,000 made it past all four dams. But since then, the numbers have dipped, in part because of hatchery problems and high spring flows, but also because the trucking of shad upstream stopped in 1999. This year, by May 7, just 8,121 shad had passed by Conowingo, and 99 had passed all four. (That’s up from the previous two years; in 2014, only eight shad were recorded above the upstream-most dam.)
A new agreement, though, between the Fish and Wildlife Service and the power company that operates the Conowingo dam, will restart the trucking of fish up the river and improve the elevators that lift them up the dam’s length. The goal is to have two million shad make it above all four dams, so that once again the Susquehanna has a shad season.
If shad ever do make a comeback as an American staple, the good news is that they’re pretty tasty, and their roe is supposed to be delicious. Apparently, it’s good with bacon.
Extraordinary colors in Libya's sand dunes, as captured by Sentinel-2A. (Photo: ESA)
Right now, high above us, are a suite of satellites called Sentinels. Operated by the European Space Agency, they are circling the earth with one mission: to monitor the earth’s environment. They can capture a precise picture of our planet, down to types of vegetation and sea surface temperatures.
The Sentinels do this through radar and multi-spectral imaging. For example, the Sentinel-2A uses infrared bands to assess types of vegetation and chlorophyll content. (This also gives some of its images unexpected areas of bright red).
The data that the Sentinels collect has a fundamental application for climate change. For example, in February, March and April 2016, Sentinel-1A captured three radar images of Greenland’s northeast coast. The recently-released composite is a vividly detailed, half monochrome, half rainbow image.
A composite image of the north-east of Greenland. (Photo: ESA)
But it tells a story beyond that as well. The rainbow colors indicate the changes in sea-ice during the three-month period. The same satellite is monitoring in near-real time Greenland's Zachariae Isstrom glacier, in the image at center-left, such is the state of its erosion by warmer water.
To a scientist, the images provide essential information; to a regular person, they are strikingly beautiful, showing mosaics of irrigation, infrared farms and iridescent reefs. Here is a section of the startling satellite art:
A false-color image from Sentinel-2A of southern Mongolia. The shades of red represent different types of vegetation. The turquoise circle at the top is a saline lake, Taatsiin Tsagaan Lake. (Photo: ESA)
The desert in Egypt. The red at the bottom of the image indicates intensive farming along the Nile river. (Photo: ESA)
A image from the Sentinel-2A satellite, with infrared showing a central-pivot irrigation system in Saudi Arabia. (Photo: ESA)
A true-color image of coral reefs in the Red Sea of Saudi Arabia. (Photo: ESA)
A multi-temporal radar image from Sentinel-1A of the Aral Sea in Central Asia. The name is something of a misnomer: the sea has largely dried up. (Photo: ESA)
Lake Amadeus in Australia's Northern Territory. (Photo: ESA)
Dasht-e Kavir, Iran's salt desert, pictured with a combination of Sentinel-1A radar scans. (Photo: ESA)
Central California seen through Sentinel-1A's radar, with the San Andreas fault line running diagonally down from top left. (Photo: ESA)
A true-color image of Namibia's Namib-Naukluft National Park, with orange-red sand dunes. (Photo: ESA)
An algae bloom in the Baltic Sea, as pictured by Sentinel-2A. A boat cuts down from the top of the image. (Photo: ESA)
The dusty shades of the Sahara desert, in Algeria. (Photo: ESA)
Yuma, Arizona, from Sentinel-2A. The different shades of red show the different chlorophyll content between the farms (the squares) and the irrigation system (the circles). (Photo: ESA)
Canada's Manicouagan Crater, which was created by an asteroid strike. In this false-color radar image, the blue is areas of ice and water and the yellows and oranges are vegetation. (Photo: ESA)
Once upon a time, not even a century ago, the American sky was filled with airships. The Navy sent blimps sailing into World War II. Commuters enjoyed smooth zeppelin rides across the ocean. Legend has it that the Empire State Building's pointed top was originally built as a dirigible mast. It took the Hindenburg explosion, and the glamorous ascent of airplanes, to send their reputation up in smoke.
If you listen to a certain class of dreamers, airship-heavy skies are in our future, too—lighter-than-air crafts are being touted as the next big thing in air travel, cargo transport, and, somewhat less romantically, surveillance.
At the moment, though, it's hard out here for a blimp. Characterized by its lack of internal structure, this class of airship in particular has become something of an endangered species. "They're becoming more and more unique and scarce as the years go by," says Gus Fernandez, Director of Accounts and Client Services at Van Wagner Airship Group. Together, Van Wagner and Goodyear handle all of the U.S.'s remaining blimps.
Each is, essentially, a glorified billboard—meant mostly to put a particular company's name in front of as many eyes as possible. Blimps aren't typical ads, though. Slow-moving, stately, and full of history, they're also a reminder of our hope-buoyed past, and a beacon of one possible future. Without further ado, and in alphabetical order, here are all the blimps gracing American skies right now.
Like superheroes, each of the nation's remaining blimps has its own particular skill. The DIRECTV Blimp, for example, is the only blimp in the world with a giant LED screen. It uses this power to broadcast sky-high sponsor missives during sporting events. "It's basically like watching TV on a blimp," says Fernandez.
This broadcastin' blue behemoth spends winters in Florida to avoid snow, and then chugs back and forth between New England, the Midwest, and the South, catching as many games as it can and making sure everyone else catches its ads and offers. It will be back with a new-but-still-recognizable design later this week. More details via its charming Twitter presence, @dtvblimp.
Van Wagner's youngest blimp design, the Flying Cucumber is hard to miss—it's essentially an enormous human eye, embedded in a green-striped envelope and emblazoned with the name of its sponsor, "Hendrick's Gin." The mobile cuke made its debut last summer, and it remains full of youthful, unblinking energy.
If seeing an enormous eye in the sky makes you say "I need a drink," you're in luck—the blimp occasionally touches down for tastings. Currently, it's hanging over the ground-dwellers of Tucson, Arizona; the next month and a half will bring it to Austin, Houston, Miami, New York City, Boston, and Long Island. For more detailed real-time updates, you can check out its dedicated hashtag, #FlyingCucumber.
With its friendly envelope shape and eye-catching red insignia, the Hood Blimp has been brightening Boston's skies for nearly two decades. Due to HP Hood's minority stake with the Boston Red Sox, the blimp is a fixture over Fenway Park, but it occasionally ventures elsewhere in New England, and collaborates frequently with local small businesses, says Fernandez. Blimp-spotters should start craning their necks for it this summer—until then, we can all gaze longingly at its own eponymous Twitter.
4-5. Snoopy One and Snoopy Two
Snoopy One (left) and Snoopy Two (right), preparing to take off from Frederick Airport in Maryland. (Photo: The Washington Post/Getty Images)
MetLife's twin blimps, Snoopy One and Snoopy Two, have a lot in common—physically, they're nearly identical, they've been in the game for decades, and they both love golf. Snoopy One was first launched in 1994, has a blue belly, gondola and fins, and is spending this year following the PGA tour in the Southeast and Northeast. Snoopy Two is a year older, has red accents, and is covering the same tour on the opposite coastline, in the South and Midwest.
Between the two of them, they're in the air 50 weeks out of the year. To find out when they'll be in your neighborhood, check out the PGA schedule here. (Bonus blimp: their third brother, Snoopy J, has the honor of being Japan's only airship. You can follow him virtually at @Airship_SnoopyJ.)
6. The Spirit of Innovation
The Spirit of Innovation checks out last year's Oscar red carpet. (Photo: Goodyear Blimp/Facebook)
The Spirit of Innovation is 10 years old, and the only true blimp left in Goodyear's fleet. This year marks one of your last chances to see it—before the decade is out, it will be retired in favor of a new design (it's still the crowd favorite, though). Catch it on its summer tour, which takes it up and down the West Coast through July.
7. Wingfoot One
To be up front about it, Wingfoot One isn't technically a blimp. It's a semi-rigid airship, and what it (slightly) lacks in rotund cuteness it makes up for in speed and steerability. Like all Goodyear blimps, Wingfoot One will spend this summer hanging out at a number of events, including road races, baseball games, and charity events. You'll soon be able to find its exact schedule online here.
8. Wingfoot Two
Goodyear's newest inflatable family member, Wingfoot Two, was unveiled this past April. (It is, like Wingfoot One, not a strict blimp, but we won't hold that against it.) Wingfoot Two can fly at 73 miles per hour—not bad for a 20,000 pound helium zucchini—and unlike its predecessors, it can also hover in place, giving blimp-spotters plenty of opportunity to gaze up at it in slack-jawed wonder. Since it's new, its schedule isn't set yet, but Goodyear brass promises it will show up soon on their blimp calendar. Welcome to the skies, pal.
