In a preview of our new book, we meet beautiful nonbinary animals that combine male and female characteristics.

In the winter of 2019, a bird went viral. “This nonbinary cardinal is flipping gender the bird,” announced the queer news site Logo TV, showing a bird with distinct half-red and half-tawny plumage, as though split down the middle.

The cardinal (or their doppelgänger) reentered the limelight in 2021, having been spotted in the same region of the northeast United States. As similar headlines followed, the large songbird became one of the best-known recent gynandromorphs—organisms that exhibit both male and female physical characteristics at the same time.

These characteristics can be displayed bilaterally, as with the cardinal, zebra finches, or a rose-breasted grosbeak found in Pennsylvania in 2020 with two different colored inner wings, yellow on the left and pink on the right. Bilateral gynandromorphs are sometimes called “halfsiders” or “chimeras.” Halfsiders are particularly striking when the species is sexually dimorphic, meaning males and females have different physical characteristics.

The second-largest butterfly in the world, the Goliath birdwing of New Guinea, can also appear as a halfsider. Goliath birdwing gynandromorphs have different sized and colored wings, making them look like patchwork creatures. Many butterfly and moth chimeras have become important symbols in intersex and nonbinary human communities.

While it isn’t something you see every day, gynandromorphism does happen in a variety of animals besides birds and butterflies, including other insects, reptiles, crustaceans, and even some mammals, like rats. But because many species are not sexually dimorphic, it isn’t always immediately noticeable.

Scientists believe that gynandromorphism is mainly attributable to genetic mutations associated with cell division. As these mutations occur at different stages of development, they produce different types of gynandromorphs. While many are bilateral, some present as mosaics, meaning male and female characteristics are splashed across the organism’s body like tie-dye—as with some gynandromorphic Pamela and blue morpho butterflies. Others are polar, meaning the dividing line occurs elsewhere on the animal’s body.

This phenomenon challenges assumptions about the natural world. For instance, in some types of ants, gynandromorph queen-males have been found, with one black, winged male side and one red queen side. Even in species that tend toward rigid sex roles, individuals have a way of surprising us.

• Range: Worldwide
• Major species: Some of the most striking gynandromorphs commonly seen include northern cardinals (Cardinalis cardinalis), Goliath birdwings (Ornithoptera goliath), and jumping spiders (Myrmarachne formicaria).
• How to see them: Finding a gynandromorph in the wild takes patience and regular observation—either that or a ton of luck. Many examples can be seen online and in museums.

Wild Life: An Explorer’s Guide to the World’s Living Wonders celebrates hundreds of surprising animals, plants, fungi, microbes, and more, as well as the people around the world who have dedicated their lives to understanding them. Pre-order your copy today!

If you, hypothetically, ignore the molten lava core.

Imagine that you could drill a hole straight through the Earth. Suspend your disbelief for a moment, ignoring the molten core that would fry you. Where would you end up?

In geographical coordinates, the answer is quite simple: If the coordinates (longitude and latitude) of a point on the Earth’s surface are (x, y), then the coordinates of the antipodal point can be written as (x ± 180°, −y). So the latitudes are numerically equal, but one is north and the other south. And the longitudes differ from each other by 180 degrees. Plus or minus: it doesn’t really matter in which direction you count those 180 degrees, as either way will lead you to the same point (a circle having a circumference of 360 degrees).

An example: If you start out at, say, 46.95 degrees longitude west and 39.00 degrees latitude north, after you’ve dug through the Earth’s core, you’ll end up at longitude 133.05 degrees east (133.05 being the result of 180.00 minus 46.95) and latitude 39.00 degrees south.

Only, for most people, the place where you’ll end up won’t be land, but water. The oceans cover about 70 percent of our planet’s surface. Your antipodes (a Greek word translatable as: “those whose feet are on the other side”) mostly don’t have feet, but fins. If you could “sandwich” the Earth, the overlap of land would be surprisingly small.

The title of the 1970s movie The China Syndrome refers to the idea that if you dig a hole through the Earth starting in the U.S., you end up in China. This map shows it ain’t so. In fact, only a little bit of China overlaps—and with the southern part of South America. Funnily enough, the good people of Argentina seem to have taken this into account when naming the city of Formosa, which is the antipode of Taiwan, the island off the Chinese coast formerly known as… Formosa. There’s almost no overlap in North America, none in Africa, and just a bit in Europe (the Iberian peninsula with New Zealand’s North Island).

The website Antipodes Map allows for interactive searching for antipodal locations. Which will probably end up in some ocean or other. Anybody know the Greek word for fin?

This Atlas Obscura–themed crossword comes from independent crossword constructor Brendan Emmett Quigley. He has been a professional puzzlemaker since 1996, and his pieces have appeared in dozens of publications. He's also a member of the Boston Typewriter Orchestra.

You can solve the puzzle below, or download it in .pdf or .puz. Note that the links in the clues will take you to Atlas Obscura pages that contain the answer. Happy solving!

One notably delicious citrus turns out to be a secret killer.

In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, we take a look at Meyer lemons, which are so special that restaurants go out of their way to call them out on menus. Martha Stewart loves to bake with them. And yet, meyer lemons also have a fascinating and kinda tragic backstory. Tune in for a very fun episode about this very particular fruit. Our guest in this episode is Mandy Naglich, professional taster and author of “How To Taste”.

Our podcast is an audio guide to the world’s wondrous, awe-inspiring, strange places. In under 15 minutes, we’ll take you to an incredible site, and along the way you’ll meet some fascinating people and hear their stories. Join us daily, Monday through Thursday, to explore a new wonder with cofounder Dylan Thuras and a neighborhood of Atlas Obscura reporters.

Tour some of the world’s richest culinary traditions at these Denver eateries.

Much like its diverse population, the culinary influences of Denver’s food scene span the globe—putting various cuisines and traditions on a delicious collision course. Today, Denver’s restaurants and bakeries showcase that rich international heritage. You’ll find everything from unexpected fusion concepts—like Chuey Fu’s Latin-Asian grub or Koko Ni’s Japanese-French pairings—to elegant explorations of traditional cuisines, like Ash’Kara’s take on the savory North African tagine. While adventurous eaters will find a lifetime of dishes to try in Denver, these spots offer some of the deepest immersions into regional culinary traditions. Behind each door simmers a unique world of flavor, history, and culture. So, pack your appetite, book a table, and begin your globetrotting tour at these 10 establishments.

Ash’Kara

Michelin-approved Middle-Eastern.

Walk through the doors of Ash’Kara and the first thing you’ll notice is the symphony of aromas: lemon, za’atar, fresh bread, and delicately spiced lamb. The menu, which features Middle Eastern and North African cuisines, is a mosaic of flavors and foods, many of which are served hot from Chef Reggie Dotson’s 900-degree wood-fired oven. Highlights include Dotson’s famous wood-fired pita, tangy labneh dip, and sweet-and-savory pomegranate-braised lamb tagine.

The atmosphere echoes the menu. Inside, muted pastels and ornate, Moroccan-style lamps make the space feel at once brightly familiar and lushly exotic. That balance between accessibility and adventurous cooking earned Ash’Kara a Bib Gourmand—a prize for moderately priced restaurants serving quality meals—from the 2023 Michelin Guide. The reasonable price point leaves room in your budget for dessert. (Between the baklava and the chocolate olive oil cake, you can’t go wrong.)

Ace Eat Serve

Dinner—and table tennis—is served.

There aren’t many places where you can order a whole Peking duck and enter a ping-pong tournament in the same evening. In fact, Ace Eat Serve might be the only one. This playful Denver food concept serves up regional Asian cuisine—including spicy pork ramen, pillowy bao buns, and steaming curries—in an airy, industrial-chic space that doubles as a ping-pong hall.

Start your evening with a tangy gin Yuzu Drop and Ace’s famous triple-fried, sweet-and-sticky Tiger Wings. But be sure to save room for the main course: Ace Eat Serve offers a traditional table-side Peking Duck experience, which includes a whole duck, Mu Shu crepes, sauces, and sides. When you’ve had time to digest, work off your meal at one of the restaurant’s six ping-pong tables (reservations recommended).

Chuey Fu’s

Culinary matchmaking at its finest.

What started as a food truck hustle in central Denver has since become a treasured staple of the Capitol Hill neighborhood. And though Latin and Asian cuisines might seem like an unlikely pairing, Chuey Fu’s Chef Joseph Knoblich says the flavors are mouthwateringly complementary. From cilantro and lime to hot chilis, the cuisines share many of the same ingredients. That makes Latin-Asian a heavenly match. Not convinced? The proof is on the plate: try the phở burrito for a delightful mix of Vietnamese and Tex-mex flavors, or the ancho chili chicken with sesame peanut sauce for a sweet-and-salty combo.

While Chuey Fu’s is dedicated to producing seriously good food, it’s careful not to take itself too seriously. Inside the small, industrial space, you’ll find paper maché koi fish, hot pink bar lights, and a mariachi skeleton playing a guitar. Be sure to take a peek outside, too: Chuey Fu’s employs local artists to cover its ever-changing graffiti wall.

Koko Ni

High-end Omakase with a French twist.

The minute you sit down to eat at Koko Ni, you’ll be treated to a revolving door of surprises. Your first courses could include a bouquet of edible flowers dressed in habanada honey mustard and fresh parmesan. Or maybe a ruby-red sliver of tuna sashimi. Next could be handmade pasta with buttery lobster, or perhaps a poached halibut filet. The delights just keep coming—which is exactly the experience James Beard award-winning chef Paul Qui wants his guests to have.

Qui opened Koko Ni in 2018 as a passion project and an outlet for his culinary creativity. Most of his elegant, playful dishes are inspired by Japanese and French cuisines. They also feature the most premium ingredients possible: The restaurant sources all its produce from local Colorado farms and the bulk of its seafood from sustainable fisheries. (Even the carefully curated wine list focuses on small-batch growers.) That dedication to freshness ensures that no meal is the same at Koko Ni: The ten-course tasting menu changes daily, based on the day’s best ingredients.

Colorado Sake Co

Craft sake and Japanese tapas.

Six years ago, William Stuart decided to bring craft sake to Colorado. Scrappy and self-funded, his brewery was a labor of love—and before long, Coloradans started to notice. Today, Colorado Sake Co. (CSC) isn’t just the only sake brewery in the state; it’s also the largest American-owned producer in the country. And it’s not just a tasting room, either. Chef Collin Kirkbride creates imaginative izakaya pairings to complement CSC’s most iconic sakes, and the venue also contains an in-house comedy club.

If you’re new to sake, it’s best to begin with a flight. But if you only have time for one drink, order the smooth, unpasteurized American Standard Junmai Ginjo sake, which pairs perfectly with CSC’s house-made chasu pork bao buns.

Raíces Brewing Company

An ode to culture—and cerveza.

Spanish for “roots,” Raíces is a vibrant, unapologetic celebration of Latin American culture. Located in the Sun Valley neighborhood—a historic hub for Hispanic, Latino, and Indigenous communities—the brewery hosts hundreds of free community events every year, including live music, dances, cultural performances, and poetry readings. But Raíces knows that it’s hard to have a true celebration without good food and drink. To that end, it offers pizza, pretzels, and empanadas from local and Latino-owned businesses, as well as more than a dozen of its own hand-crafted beers. Though it’s tough to choose just one, we recommend the Cafecito, a flavorful, balanced coffee blonde ale. The coffee is grown on fair-trade, Indigenous-owned farms in Guatemala and roasted by women-owned Copper Door Coffee Roasters in Denver.

Chez Maggy

A brasserie for the modern Denverite.

A cozy brasserie tucked within Denver’s elegant Thompson Hotel, Chez Maggy marries the reverent sensitivity of traditional French cooking with the vibrant spirit of the West. The concept is the brainchild of Chef Ludo Lefebvre, who spent 20 years cooking in fine dining kitchens in France and opening illustrious eateries in Los Angles—including the Michelin-starred Trois Mec and the Michelin Bib Gourmand-awarded Petit Trois—before relocating to Colorado. Here, Lefebvre uses a palette of locally sourced ingredients, rich flavor combinations, and modern techniques to craft masterworks of modern French cuisine. Of course, tasting is believing: Start with a bowl of onion soup—a rich broth topped with sharp, earthy Gruyère cheese—and a platter of buttery escargot. For your main, choose either the Bison Tartare or Duck Breast a l’Orange, both of which offer creative twists on decadent French classics.

Safta

Israeli-style home cooking.

Safta takes both its name and its inspiration from chef Alon Shaya’s Israeli grandma (“Safta” is the Hebrew word for grandmother.) “She taught me how to cook from a young age and nourished my interest in being in the kitchen,” Shaya says. “Her energy permeates the colors, textures, and flavors of everything we do at Safta.” You can find her vitality in the menu’s traditional spices and her warmth in the soft, wood-fired pita. Bakers make the dough from fresh-milled flour and tend it three full three days before baking to let the flavors build. It pairs perfectly with Safta’s lutenitsa, a spread made from fire-roasted eggplants and peppers. For your main course, try the harissa chicken, a spicy-succulent dish served with charred lemon and fragrant bay leaves.

Tamayo Denver

Contemporary Mexican done right.

A stylish dinner-and-drinks joint in Denver’s Larimer Square, Tamayo sits beneath twinkling string lights among elegant Victorian-era buildings. The prestigious setting seems fitting: , Tamayo was one of the first restaurants to bring contemporary Mexican cuisine to Denver, and it’s still among the best. The menu’s carefully crafted tacos, enchiladas, and empanadas all burst with flavor, each an aromatic ode to Chef Richard Sandoval’s native Mexico. But Sandoval always finds a way to add his own twist. Among the restaurant’s most iconic offerings are the crispy short-rib corn empanadas and the carne asado tacos, which include Negra Modelo-marinated steak and blistered chiles. Plan to stay for a nightcap, too: Tamayo’s beverage menu boasts more than 200 agave spirits, which it serves both on the rocks and in colorful cocktails. (The spicy mango margarita is a favorite.)

Noisette

Comfort food from the French Countryside.

Plush velvet seats and floral-painted porcelain may give Noisette the air of a sophisticated parlor, but dine at this little eatery, and you’ll be treated to an experience that’s anything but stuffy. A bright restaurant-and-bakery concept located in Denver’s charming Highland neighborhood, Noisette pays homage to cuisine bourgeoisie, a type of home cooking passed down from generation to generation by French mothers and grandmothers. The menu includes unfussy comfort foods like roast chicken, duck breast with wild mushrooms, and Dover sole doused in lemon and brown butter. And for those of us who feel more comforted by pastry, there’s Noisette’s acclaimed bakery. Here, hand-folded dough and rich European butter conspire in an alchemy that only the French seem to have perfected. The plain croissant and canelé are both faultless classics, as is the vol au vent—an airy, puff-pastry case that holds a savory filling.

Explore Denver’s vibrant food scene without breaking the bank.

Denver is a city of many facets. It’s both a launching pad for outdoor adventure and a hub of the arts. It’s at once scrappy and sophisticated. It’s home to hundreds of unique lifestyles, cultures, and traditions—and about as many approaches to food. That’s good news for eaters: With this diverse culinary landscape, you never run out of options. And that means you never have to empty your wallet to eat extremely well.

Denver’s budget-friendly eateries run the gamut from upscale brunch diners like The OG to food-hall dessert counters like Cornicello. And there are some more surprising concepts in the mix, too. Take Avanti F & B, an experimental restaurant incubator that’s open to the public and serves cutting-edge food at rock-bottom prices. Or Vital Root, a vegan-friendly bistro that grows its produce on-site. No matter your budget, there’s a life-changing meal to be had in Denver. Try one of these nine spots and immerse yourself in the Mile High City's affordable food scene.

D Bar

Your sweet tooth’s new favorite spot.

While D Bar does serve savory courses (bacon mac n’ cheese and prime beef sliders, anyone?) no one would blame you for skipping straight to dessert. After all, D Bar is first and foremost a sweets concept, brought to life by celebrity pastry chef and former Food Network Challenge host Keegan Gerhard, along with his wife, fellow chef, and business partner Lisa Bailey. Unlike the cutthroat competitions Gerhard has judged in the past, D Bar takes a relaxed, laid-back approach to dessert. (So do its prices.) Its best dishes put a fun, upscale twist on the familiar. Think: molten lava cake, but with a raspberry compote and pistachio ice cream. Or a classic chocolate cake, but frosted with Madagascar chocolate icing and served alongside a hand-spun milkshake.

Cornicello

Creamy gelato for every palate.

Cornicello is a hidden gem—and we mean that almost literally. Glittering with hanging lights and metallic accents, this polished-counter ice cream parlor lies tucked within the maze-like halls of Denver’s iconic Milk Market. Varied flavors cater to adults, children—and adults who are children at heart. Vanilla and mint chip grace one end of the spectrum, and spiced rum and tres leches hold down the other. There’s room for customization, too: You can order any flavor as an affogato, or in a custom ice-cream sandwich. All in all, we’d call Cornicello a small but mighty ode to Italian gelato at its finest—and one of the few places in Denver where you can snag a gourmet frozen treat for just $3.

Yours Truly Cupcake

A bakery with a buzz.

This RiNo dessert joint does it all: cookies, catering, wedding cakes, the works. But as its name suggests, it’s Yours Truly’s cupcakes that really take center stage. You can’t argue with founder Tiffany Rose Goodyear’s methods: She knows what the people want, and what the people want is dessert and drinks rolled into one. While the menu changes on a monthly basis, she ensures that about half the storefront’s cupcake flavors are booze-infused. (Think: Moscow mule, PBR, cosmopolitan, and Champagne strawberry, but in cupcake format.) Better yet, the daily cupcakes are always baked in miniature—which means you can try as many flavors as you want, (practically) guilt-free.

Mister Oso

A riot of color and flavor.

Mister Oso dishes up playful, Latin-inspired cuisine in ridiculously spunky digs. Its name and a few of its menu items come from its acclaimed sister restaurant Señor Bear, but Mister Oso has a vibe all its own. For starters, there’s color everywhere—splashing across the restaurant’s walls, brightening chairs and decor, fizzing through tropical cocktails, and dancing through every dish. Peruvian ceviche and crudo are menu staples, as is a rotating list of punchy street tacos. Order the shrimp or birria for more traditional flavors, or go with the BLT taco for an American twist.

Vital Root

Fast casual and farm-to-table.

Located within a former candy factory, Vital Root has steered its digs in an entirely different direction: Instead of churning out sweets, this fast casual joint crafts nutrient-packed, plant-based dishes. Many—like the bánh mì tacos or dosa waffle—are imaginative mashups of beloved international cuisines. Others, like the cashew queso and root vegetable reuben, are hearty, flavorful interpretations of classic comfort foods. This cozy space is a haven for folks who like to be thoughtful about what they put in their bodies. Vital Root is one of the few restaurants in Colorado that’s 100-percent gluten-free. Many of the menu items are vegan. And the produce can’t get much fresher: Much of it is grown next door at BeatBox Farms, a sustainable hydroponic farm housed in an upcycled shipping container.

The OG

Denver’s brunch specialists.

We weren’t sure that the brunch experience needed reinventing—until we went to The Original (AKA The OG). Once a full-service, 1950s-style diner, this McGregor Square restaurant found its calling and ran with it. Today, it just does brunch—nothing else—seven days per week. That singular focus has given the OG the time and menu space to really get creative. Executive Chef Stephen Greer is known for experimenting with bold flavors, surprising ingredients, and a healthy dose of nostalgia. Take, for example, the breakfast dog, a breakfast sausage coated in pancake batter and cornflakes, then deep fried. Or the resting spritz face, an innovative twist on the Aperol Spritz that incorporates blueberry, lemon, and a splash of locally brewed sour. It’s not just the drinks that use local ingredients, either. The OG’s sausages and chorizo come from Denver-based Polidori, and all breads hail from Baker’s Way, a local women-owned bakery.

Avanti F & B

The culinary think-tank of Colorado.

Avanti F & B is ground zero for the Denver restaurant scene. Chefs and restaurateurs come to this dazzling food hall to test out new menus and experimental concepts—and foodies come from across the city to try them. The result is a bold, creative energy that lends itself to playful cooking and fuels some of the city’s most brilliant fusions. At Avanti, you’ll always find surprising flavors, original dishes, and—thanks to the test-kitchen nature of the place—affordable prices. While much of the venue can feel like a revolving door, a few beloved staples stay put year after year. Quiero Arepas’s traditional Venezuelan fare has amassed a cult following, and Pho King Rapidos consistently earns top marks for its phở bánh mì. Take a lap, grab some grub, and head up to the rooftop, which unfurls unobstructed views across downtown Denver.

Federales

Tequila and tacos.

Order a round of shots at Federales and you’ll be treated to a surprisingly interactive experience. Your tequila will arrive in a shot glass made of ice, which, once emptied, you can hurl at the massive bell that hangs over the patio fire pit. On busy nights, that triumphant ring sounds a few times an hour. But an extensive tequila list isn’t the only cause for celebration here. In addition to serving top-notch margaritas and cocktails on its industrial-chic patio space, Federales also dishes up some mean Latin-American fare. The wood-fired skirt steak tacos come highly recommended, as do the crisp hatch chile nachos and creamy queso fundido.

Sam’s No 3. Diner

A grassroots neighborhood favorite.

Sam’s No. 3 is famous for a few things. One: its chaotic menu, which unspools seemingly endless options across a hefty three-ring binder. Two: its cozy, no-frills atmosphere. And three: its insanely good food. This delightfully cluttered downtown diner has been a Denver staple since Greek immigrant Sam Armatas first opened its doors in 1927. Since then, Sam’s No. 3 has played host to movie stars, musicians, and politicians alike. Today the restaurant has two locations (the longest-standing is on Curtis Street) and goes through about 22,000 eggs and 420 gallons of chili a week. See what all the fuss is about with an order of the Spero’s Burrito, a hand-held behemoth featuring eggs and homefries smothered in pork green chili. Feeling frisky? Tack on a mango mimosa, another fan favorite.

Have you tried any of these literal sweetmeats?

THIS ARTICLE IS ADAPTED FROM THE APRIL 20, 2024, EDITION OF GASTRO OBSCURA’S FAVORITE THINGS NEWSLETTER. YOU CAN SIGN UP HERE.

This year, I visited Barcelona around Easter, which meant I got to try coca de llardons. This seasonal Catalan pastry, topped with sugar and pine nuts, is made extra decadent with an unusual ingredient: pork cracklings.

I loved the combination of savory and sweet enough that I made my own version as soon as I got home. This got me thinking whether there are other traditional desserts that use animal products in atypical ways. Dairy, eggs, and animal fat are commonplace in sweet dishes: but what about meat?

When you hear “meat dessert,” you might think of boundary-pushing modern experiments like foie gras ice cream. But the use of meat in sweet dishes goes back centuries. In Medieval Europe and the Middle East, when meat, sugar, and spices were all considered luxuries, the upper classes often ate dishes that combined all three. Even today, chefs around the world make recipes that defy modern Western conventions about what does and doesn’t go together: from Moroccan poultry pastilla dusted with powdered sugar, to Vietnamese sausage-and-candied-fruit mooncakes.

When you think about it, it’s not much of a leap from lard in a pie crust to ground meat in a pie filling, or from maple bacon to a maple bacon doughnut. Here are some of the most unique ways that people around the world have meat for dessert.

Khoresh mast

Iran

In Persian cuisine, most khoresht (stews) are savory main dishes served with rice. A notable exception is khoresh mast, meaning “yogurt stew,” which is sweet and may be a side dish, appetizer, or dessert. Meat, typically lamb neck, is used for texture more than flavor.

Chefs cook the meat until tender and separate it from the bones before kneading and pounding it by hand into a doughlike paste. This is blended smoothly with thick yogurt, sugar, rosewater, saffron, and cardamom. The resulting golden-yellow pudding is chilled before serving and garnished with dried fruit and nuts.

Tavuk göğsü

Turkey

In Turkish, tavuk göğsü means “chicken breast,” but it’s also the name for a sweet milky pudding made with that ingredient: primarily for texture, as with khoresh mast. Similar dishes described in the fifth-century Roman cookbook Apicius gave rise to puddings called blancmange or “white-dish” in Medieval Western Europe, as well as in Byzantine Constantinople. After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, chicken pudding entered the Ottoman Imperial court and has stuck around ever since, retaining the meat that was dropped from the Western version of the dish.

One of the secrets to perfect tavuk göğsü is that the chicken must be fresh. The meat is boiled and washed vigorously so that it separates into fine fibers. These are cooked again with milk and sugar to create a pudding with only a faint chicken flavor.

Mutanjan

North India and Pakistan

Like khoresh mast, mutanjan’s origins lie in the courts of Medieval Persia, where savory and sweet were frequently combined. In Medieval times, the term "mutanjan" covered a variety of fried dishes consumed by Persian nobles and by the Persian-influenced Mughal dynasty of India.

Today, in north India and Pakistan, mutanjan refers specifically to an elaborate type of pulao (mixed rice dish) that combines sugary saffron rice with meat and assorted sweet delicacies. Think rice decked out with gulab jamun alongside meatballs, or slivers of seasoned mutton with nuts, dried fruit, and crumbled milk solids. For an added festive touch, the dish may be garnished with silver leaf. Meatless mutanjan has become more common in recent years, but mutanjan with meat is still occasionally prepared for special occasions like weddings.

Mince pie

England

Nowadays, this Christmastime staple is stuffed with a mixture of spices, sugar, shortening or suet (beef fat), and various fruits, including candied, dried, and fresh. But the original medieval mince pies also included mincemeat, made from beef, venison, mutton, or sheep’s tongue: The oldest-surviving English cookbook, from the 14th century, refers to them as “tarts of flesh.”

Some historians connect the mince pie to the meaty sweets of the Medieval Islamic world, perhaps brought back to England by the Crusaders. Meatless mince pies only started to become the norm in the Victorian era, when sugar became more widely available and public demand for sweets increased.

'Mpanatigghi

Italy

The people of Modica in Sicily bake a local cookie with a filling like no other. ‘Mpanatigghi are folded pockets of dough stuffed with a mixture of chocolate, nuts, spices, and ground beef or veal thickened with whipped egg whites.

The sweet and savory treats look a bit like Spanish empanadas, and the word ’mpanatigghi is believed to derive from empanada, meaning “wrapped in bread.” The inclusion of chocolate, introduced to Europe by the Spanish from their American colonies in the 16th century, also hints at possible Spanish influence. The meat is said to be scarcely noticeable in the final cookie: A vegetarian version replaces it with eggplant.

Turcos de Nuevo León

Mexico

Spanish and Middle Eastern influences on Mexican cuisine have produced many dishes that combine savory with sweet, including the Turco, literally meaning “Turk,” a pastry unique to the northern state of Nuevo León. Though it resembles a typical empanada, the Turco is made from a dough that combines piloncillo (raw cane sugar) with flour and lard, and stuffed with a sweet mixture of ground pork, more piloncillo, and powdered clove. Outside Mexico, a packaged meatless version is sold commercially.

One story traces the Turco and its name to a 19th-century immigrant from what was then the Ottoman Empire. Since the dish is made with pork, it’s possible that the inventor was Christian, or that the original recipe used another meat which was later changed to pork due to its popularity and availability in Mexico. A similar transformation occurred with tacos al pastor, first made with lamb by Lebanese immigrants to Mexico but usually made with pork today.

Sanguinaccio dolce

Italy

Commercial sale of animal blood was banned in Italy due to health concerns in 1992; Italian restaurants now need a special license to serve it. Before that, Italians consumed blood in a variety of dishes, including sanguinaccio dolce, meaning “sweet blood sausage.” Chefs cooked pig’s blood in a double boiler with sugar and cocoa powder until it thickened into a dark, sweet pudding. Recipes varied, with milk, nuts, orange zest, nutmeg, dried fruit, and Marsala wine being possible additions. In some regions sanguinaccio dolce was prepared for Carnival, and in others, in January for the feast of Saint Anthony Abate, patron of livestock.

Today, it’s more common to find a bloodless variation made with dark chocolate, but in 2015, the titular protagonist of the NBC series Hannibal prepared the original version of sanguinaccio dolce, using blood of questionable origin.

Maple bacon doughnut

United States and Canada

In 1990s America, “low-fat” became the dietary buzzword du jour, and pork sales declined as consumers avoided fatty cuts like bacon. In response, the American pork industry launched a major promotional campaign, and their marketing efforts paid off. By the late 2000s, the U.S. was in the grips of a cultural obsession known as “bacon mania.”

At the height of the craze, West Coast bakeries started laying crisp, salty bacon slices on top of glazed “maple bar” doughnuts, and the maple bacon doughnut was born. Though bacon mania subsided by the late 2010s, the maple bacon doughnut has proved one of its most enduring creations. It’s still a staple at prominent chains around the United States, such as Voodoo Doughnuts, Duck Donuts, and Dunkin’ (which also sells maple sugar “Snackin’ Bacon,” sans doughnut).

Cicada scientists share the secrets of this spring's rare double brood emergence. The last time it happened, Thomas Jefferson was president.

In the wake of North America’s recent solar eclipse, another historic natural event is on the horizon. From late April through June 2024, the largest brood of 13-year cicadas, known as Brood XIX, will coemerge with a midwestern brood of 17-year cicadas, Brood XIII.

This event will affect 17 states, from Maryland west to Iowa and south into Arkansas, Alabama, and northern Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. A coemergence like this of two specific broods with different life cycles happens only once every 221 years. The last time these two groups emerged together was in 1803, when Thomas Jefferson was president.

For about four weeks, scattered wooded and suburban areas will ring with cicadas’ distinctive whistling, buzzing, and chirping mating calls. After mating, each female will lay hundreds of eggs in pencil-size tree branches. Then the adult cicadas will die. Once the eggs hatch, new cicada nymphs will fall from the trees and burrow back underground, starting the cycle again.

There are perhaps 3,000 to 5,000 species of cicadas around the world, but the 13- and 17-year periodical cicadas of the eastern United States appear to be unique in combining long juvenile development times underground with synchronized, mass adult emergences. There are two other known periodical cicadas in the world, one in northeast India and one in Fiji, but these have only four-year and eight-year life cycles, respectively.

Periodical cicadas raise many questions for entomologists and the public alike. What do cicadas do underground for 13 or 17 years? Why are their life cycles so long? Why are they synchronized? Will the two broods emerging this spring interact? How can citizen scientists help to document this emergence? And is climate change affecting this wonder of the insect world?

We study periodical cicadas to understand questions about biodiversity, biogeography, behavior, and ecology—the evolution, natural history, and geographic distribution of life. It’s no accident that the scientific name for periodical 13- and 17-year cicadas is Magicicada, shortened from “magic cicada.”

As species, periodical cicadas are older than the forests that they inhabit. Molecular analysis has shown that about 4 million years ago, the ancestor of the current Magicicada species split into two lineages. Some 1.5 million years later, one of those lineages split again. The resulting three lineages are the basis of the modern periodical cicada species groups, Decim, Cassini, and Decula.

Early American colonists first encountered periodical cicadas in Massachusetts. The sudden appearance of so many insects reminded them of biblical plagues of locusts, which are a type of grasshopper. That’s how the name “locust” became incorrectly associated with cicadas in North America.

During the 19th century, notable entomologists such as Benjamin Walsh, C.V. Riley, and Charles Marlatt worked out the astonishing biology of periodical cicadas. They established that unlike locusts or other grasshoppers, cicadas don’t chew leaves, decimate crops, or fly in swarms.

Instead, these insects spend most of their lives out of sight, growing underground and feeding on plant roots as they pass through five juvenile stages. Their synchronized emergences are predictable, occurring on a clockwork schedule of 17 years in the North and 13 years in the South and Mississippi Valley. There are multiple, regional year classes, known as broods.

Each color on the map above (source: University of Connecticut, used with permission) represents a brood of 13-year or 17-year cicadas, denoted by University of Connecticut researchers observing active cicada choruses. Broods XIII (brown) and XIX (orange) will emerge in 2024. Click on any point to see which brood it belongs to.

The key feature of Magicicada biology is that these insects emerge synchronously in huge numbers—as high as 1.5 million per acre. This increases their chances of accomplishing their key mission aboveground: finding mates.

Dense emergences also provide what scientists call a predator-satiation or safety-in-numbers defense. Any predator that feeds on cicadas, whether it’s a fox, squirrel, bat, or bird, will eat its fill long before it consumes all of the insects in the area, leaving many survivors behind.

While periodical cicadas largely come out on schedule every 17 or 13 years, often a small group emerges four years early or late. Early-emerging cicadas may be faster-growing individuals that had access to abundant food, and the laggards may be individuals that subsisted with less.

If growing conditions change over time, as is happening now with climate warming, having the ability to make this kind of life cycle switch and come out either four years early in favorable times or four years late in more difficult times becomes important. If a sudden warm or cold phase causes a large number of cicadas to come out off schedule by four years, the insects can emerge in sufficient numbers to satiate predators and shift to a new schedule.

As glaciers retreated from what is now the U.S. some 10,000 to 20,000 years ago, periodical cicadas filled eastern forests. Temporary life cycle switching in diverse locations has formed a complex mosaic of broods.

Today there are 12 broods of 17-year periodical cicadas in northeastern deciduous forests, where trees drop leaves in winter. These groups are numbered sequentially and fit together like a giant jigsaw puzzle. In the Southeast and the Mississippi Valley there are three broods of 13-year cicadas.

Because periodical cicadas are sensitive to climate, the patterns of their broods and species reflect climatic shifts. For example, genetic and other data from our work indicate that the 13-year species Magicicada neotredecim, which is found in the upper Mississippi Valley, formed during a previous interglacial period about 200,000 years ago.

As the environment warmed, 17-year cicadas in the area emerged successively, generation after generation, after 13 years underground. Eventually, they permanently shifted to a 13-year cycle.

But it’s not clear whether cicadas can continue to evolve as quickly as humans are altering their environment. Although periodical cicadas prefer forest edges and thrive in suburban areas, they cannot survive deforestation or reproduce successfully in areas without trees.

Indeed, some broods have already become extinct. In the late 19th century, one Brood (XXI) disappeared from north Florida and Georgia. Another (XI) has been extinct in northeast Connecticut since around 1954, and a third (VII) in upstate New York has shrunk from eight counties to one since mapping first began in the mid-1800s.

Climate change could additional effects. As the U.S. climate warms, longer growing seasons may provide a larger food supply. This may eventually change more 17-year cicadas into 13-year cicadas, just as past warming altered Magicicada neotredecim.

Early emergences occurred in 2017 in Cincinnati and the Baltimore-Washington metro area, and in 1969, 2003, and 2020 in the Chicago metro area, with more individuals participating in successive generations. We hypothesize that this was due to climate warming.

In 2024, 17-year Brood XIII will emerge geographically adjacent to 13-year Brood XIX. However, contrary to some recent media reports, they will not overlap. We know this because we have mapped them in previous generations when they emerged separately. In the area of adjacency, we are not able to tell the two broods apart. They are identical in appearance, song, and genetics.

Researchers need detailed high-quality information to track cicada distributions over time. Citizen scientists are key to this effort because periodical cicada populations are so large and their adult emergences last only a few weeks.

Volunteers who want to help document the 2024 emergence can download the Cicada Safari mobile phone app, provide snapshots and follow our research in real time online at www.cicadas.uconn.edu. Cicadas will be hard to ignore if they’re in your area, so why not learn to appreciate them and have fun?

John Cooley is assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut and Chris Simon is senior research scientist of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut.

Can trees write back?

In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, we visit the city of Melbourne, where every tree was given a barcode and email address in 2012 so people could report when it needed maintenance or attention. But a funny thing started happening. Instead of reporting problems, people began emailing love letters to the trees.

MORE: Is there a special tree in your life? One worthy of a love letter? Let us know! Give us a call at 315-992-7902 and leave a message telling us your name and your love letter to a tree. Just so you know, our mailbox will cut you off after two minutes so please call again if that happens!

Our podcast is an audio guide to the world’s wondrous, awe-inspiring, strange places. In under 15 minutes, we’ll take you to an incredible site, and along the way you’ll meet some fascinating people and hear their stories. Join us daily, Monday through Thursday, to explore a new wonder with cofounder Dylan Thuras and a neighborhood of Atlas Obscura reporters.

Slow Food’s annual "Plant a Seed Kit" encourages home-gardeners to cultivate rare and endangered crops.

Slow Food’s Plant a Seed Kit is an initiative that seeks to get Ark of Taste seeds—rare, endangered, diverse and distinctive foods—into home gardens. And every purchased kit pays for a free kit for a schoolhouse garden. For 2024, the kit includes four grains to grow at a garden scale: Cocke’s Prolific Corn, Coral Sudanese Sorghum, Purple Karma Barley, and Red Fife Wheat.

I spoke to Mara Welton, director of programs at Slow Food USA. A former farmer who ran her own biodiverse vegetable farm for 17 years, she’s the expert that curates each year’s kit. Feel doubtful about your ability to grow, harvest, and process these heirloom grains? Mara has all the advice you need, as well as encouragement for why it's worth planting these grains in our gardens.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Sarah Lohman: I understand every year of the Plant a Seed Kit has a theme?

Mara Welton: The kit used to be like a garden in a box—you’d have a tomato, a pepper, an herb, something like that. But starting in 2022, we decided to have a singular crop focus each year. First was beans, then greens in 2023—collards, chicory, mustards, and lettuces. This year, roots and grains. And for 2025 we're gonna move to fruits and fruiting vegetables. The whole campaign has a four-year cycle, mimicking a crop cycle.

SL: How do you decide what seeds go in each year’s kit?

MW: My goal is to have at least half of the seeds in the kit be from the Ark of Taste. Also, I'm always trying to think about seeds that will have great success across all of the USDA growing zones. I have conversations with partners like Seed Savers Exchange, The Utopian Seed Project and the Experimental Farm Network. I've been leaning on some of those relationships to help me curate these kits so we’re hitting those points of accessibility, interesting crops, and also crops that have a really good story attached to them.

SL: So this year you're featuring Roots and Grains. I wanna focus on grains for this conversation, but I'd also love to give the roots a little shout-out. Can you tell me briefly about the different roots that are going into the kit?

MW: The roots are fun. They do a lot of good sod busting for you, so if you have hardpan soils or some marginal soils, if you plant roots, it helps your soils get more aerated. One is called the Pardailhan Black Turnip. It's a French Ark of Taste crop that's a black turnip that is succulent and delicious. Then there’s the Mangelwurzel Beet, it's the original sugar beet. I really wanted to introduce people to the original sugar beet and just be like, “Hey, this is an important crop for American agriculture.” It’s an incredible storage crop, they have extremely delicious greens. You can actually make sugar from the sugar beets if you really need the sugar, but you can also just eat it and enjoy it. Then there’s the Wisconsin Purple Carrot. Historical carrots were red, purple, yellow. These older carrots actually are extremely delicious.

SL: So let's talk about the grains, because I am both intimidated and charmed by having a mini grain field in my backyard. Before we get into the specifics of them, any tips for curious grain growers?

MW: Each kit comes with a little booklet that I curated; not just the stories of every single crop in the kit, but also growing tips and harvesting tips.

Humans have not always had acres and acres and acres of grain. I think that's a modern human American mentality. We need the amber waves of grain to feed all the people. But you actually don't need that many. You can get 20 pounds of barley from a 10 x 10 plot.

Some tips: If the bird can see the grain it’s gonna eat the grain. So we recommend mulching after you spread your grain with some straw and keeping it evenly watered so that you can get max germination. If you're worried about germination for things like the dent corn, you can actually start those in trays. But I would encourage people to just go ahead and stick it in the ground and watch the process.

SL: Okay, Cocke’s Prolific Corn—this is one of these seeds that was really thought to be lost. Can you tell me the story?

MW: It’s not been commercially available since 1951. It turned out that there was one grower in South Carolina—his name was actually Manning Farmer—and his grandson was helping him try to sell some of his seed online in 2017]. He posted something that said like, “Cocke’s Corn seed available.” And one of our Slow Food leaders, Angie Lavezzo, happened to see this post on Craigslist and was like, “Oh my gosh, I think I found some prolific corn,” and contacted him. And then she and David Shields [Southern food scholar and coauthor of The Ark of Taste: Delicious and Distinctive Foods That Define the United States] went down and collected some of the seed, and it was in fact found to be the Cocke’s Prolific Corn that we thought was lost forever.

Manning Farmer lived to be 99 years old and he had been growing it most of his life. He appreciated it as a really delicious grit and cornmeal corn.

SL: What would you do with your Cocke’s Prolific Corn harvest?

MW: Oh, I will probably turn it into hominy. I am a Latina who really loves making posole. And so I'll nixtamalize my corn and I'll turn it into hominy. And then I'll probably grind some of it into grit. You know, I love a good grit.

SL: Okay. So let's talk about this variety of sorghum.

MW: It’s a variety of sorghum that's from Malakal, South Sudan. The Shilluk people have been victimized by the ongoing South Sudanese Civil War and have been separated from their food as a result. The Experimental Farm Network has been stewarding this seed, hoping to be able to repatriate it back to the folks when they get their land back. I am really excited for it because it should be really delicious, prolific, and extremely beautiful.

It's called a grain de cane sorghum, which means that you can use the grain or you can use it for cane syrup. You can have it as a popping grain, a dry grain, you can eat it like pasta. When it's in its green, milky stage, you can eat it like porridge. A lot of people have grown sorghum as an ornamental, and it's time to just be like, “Hey, you know what, you've seen this in floral arrangement, but guess what? You can eat it.”

SL: What about Purple Karma Barley? Tell me a story.

MW: This is another one [like Coral Sorghum] that is not on the Ark of Taste, but I thought barley is an important crop with a recent resurgence.

One of our partners was affiliated with The Oregon State Barley Breeding Project and I just fell in love with OSU’s Purple Karma Barley because of its prolific nature. It's an heirloom landrace variety from the Himalayas, from Tibet. The seed was collected around 1924, and then it was just saved in a seed bank for like a hundred years. Which is like the worst place for seeds to be—they want to be growing!

It's got really wonderful drought tolerance. It's super easy to grow. It has beauty. There's so much nutrition. It's what's called a naked variety of barley. It has no hull, which means the processing is minimal. You can just harvest it and literally cook it that day.

I grind my barley into flour. I love using barley flour. It is super nutritious. It's really good for stabilizing blood sugar. The coolest thing to do with barley is to just treat it like pasta. Cook it in too much water until it’s al dente and then toss it in a salad. I'm getting a little drooly thinking about it because it's so yummy. And it's just so gorgeous! It's bright purple!

SL: When it comes to the Ark of Taste, Red Fife Wheat is a real success story.

MW: It’s the first heritage variety that was boarded onto the Ark of Taste. It's a Canadian variety that was really celebrated [in the 1900s] for its nutty flavor. Also, it can be grown in spring and harvested in summer, so it's considered a spring wheat. It doesn't need overwintering.

SL: How do we process Red Fife Wheat once we’ve grown it?

MW: So you harvest it, thresh it, and then winnow it. We explain that process in our little booklet. You harvest it when it is straw colored and dry, and then you are going to bundle it and make shocks or sheaves of your wheat and let it dry fully. If you don't have a ton of seed heads, you can just literally go out with scissors in your garden and cut the seed heads off. Then, you thresh them. Threshing is the process of getting the wheat berries out of the grain husks. There's many ways to do this on a small scale. One of my favorites is throwing all of the seedheads in a pillowcase and just stomping on it or beating it and just having a good time thrashing it about.

Once you have done that and you can see that all the grains are separating, you have to winnow. So this is where you separate the wheat from the chaff, either with a fan or out on a breezy day. You'll have two buckets or baskets where you're gonna pass all of the chaff and wheat berries from vessel to vessel while the wind blows through the wheat stream, and it'll blow away the dry chaff and the wheat berries will fall into the bucket below. And you just do that over and over and over until you have clean seeds.

SL: So if someone still feels unconvinced that they should plant grain in their garden, what would you say to them?

MW: At the very least, you're gonna get beautiful seas of grain that are inspiring for you to see. At the very least, you're gonna have this beautiful landscape to look at. At minimum, you're gonna provide a habitat for birds who will come and eat your berries. At most, you're going to be able to get out there and harvest some of these and eat them yourself and really understand what it takes to get a loaf of bread. I mean, just think about the six months of enrichment of being around these plants and having a new relationship with your food.

SL: Why should we care about these old varieties?

MW: Aw man, these guys, these old varieties are so dang sweet, man. They are so cute and they're so adorable, and they have so much to share with us and so much to teach us.

Monocropping has not gotten us further faster. It has helped us to degrade our environment and helped us to degrade our bodies by having less biodiversity in our food. At the very least, all of these plants can teach us that everyone has a role to play and every single variety has a niche. The sorghum is good in drought conditions. The sugar beet is amazing in marginalized soils. The corn is good in dry or wet conditions. These old varieties are wise. They have so much to share, we just have to listen.

You can preorder kits until April 30.

Sarah Lohman is a food historian and author. Her latest book, Endangered Eating: America’s Vanishing Foods, was named one of the Best Books of 2023 by Amazon’s Editors, Food & Wine, and Adam Gopnik on the Milk Street podcast, and has been nominated for the Nach Waxman Prize for Food and Beverage Scholarship.. Lohman has lectured across the country, from the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., to The Culinary Historians of Southern California. She is based in Las Vegas.

Japan's food world is eagerly awaiting an upcoming "flavor dictionary."

If you ever find yourself in Japan, try this little experiment. Ask a local to explain the special appeal of takitate gohan—freshly cooked white rice. Not about how filling it is, or its versatility as a complement to savory or sour dishes. Ask about the taste, the texture, and the aroma.

There’s a lot that you can say in Japanese about rice: how the grain looks, smells, and tastes, and how it physically feels from first bite to final gulp. You'll hear words like plump (fukkura), faintly sweet (amai), piping-hot (hoka-hoka) kernels with a shiny (tsuyayaka) paleness (shiroi); individual grains (tsubukan) with a springiness (nebari); the steam filling the room with the scent of home. By the end, you’ll grasp a basic truth about plain rice in Japan: It's never bland.

But how many descriptors for white rice exist there, actually? One person has counted how many expressions there are. “Around 7,000,” said Fumiyo Hayakawa, a senior researcher at NARO, Japan’s National Agriculture and Food Research Organization. But is the flavor really that complex and varied? It depends on what rice means to you, Hayakawa said. “Rice isn’t just any starch for me. It’s the foundation of our culinary culture. It’s our shushoku, the staple food of Japan."

For the past three years, Hayakawa and her colleagues Takayuki Umemoto and Yuko Nakano have worked with Itochu Food Sales and Marketing Co. to track down Japanese words and phrases describing the taste, texture, aroma, and appearance of rice. They surveyed sensory analysts, combed through food articles and research journals, and even read rice cooker catalogs. But they’re not done yet.

Hayakawa and Itochu are now whittling down their list. When they finish sometime between now and March 2025, they will have accomplished a first: a comprehensive Japanese-language rice lexicon. Think of it as a flavor dictionary for Japan’s ¥5 trillion ($33 billion) rice market. It will feature more than 100 essential terms for the features of rice, each clearly defined, with synonyms, antonyms, and supplemental notes. It will also include words describing cooled rice and ready-to-eat precooked rice. Hayakawa declined to share her current list. But she notes that “the lexicon will be freely available for anyone to use.”

Lexicons standardize the jargon for a particular food or drink. In Japanese, there are lexicons for sake, miso, cheese, coffee, whisky and soy sauce. They’re mainly used for tastings by sensory analysts and trained panelists, whose assessments help R&D labs, product developers, and marketers tweak formulas and target specific audiences. But when lexicons find their way into tasting notes, flavor maps and training courses, they can influence the way an entire industry speaks. Itochu Food Sales and Marketing is a major supplier of rice for restaurants and convenience store bento box meals, sushi, and rice balls, with annual sales of nearly ¥200 billion ($1.3 billion). The importance of rice to Itochu is why company officials asked Hayakawa to take on this project in 2021.

For years, Itochu has struggled with vague rice terminology. When trying to match customers with specific rice varietals, Mikiko Ando, who works at the company in rice quality control, regularly hosts tastings. “It takes a long time,” she said. “Even when we are using the same words, we could be talking about different things because many of the words haven’t been strictly defined. And because of that we might not be giving them exactly the rice they’re asking for.”

Ando’s colleague, Koji Yoshizawa, once fielded a complaint years ago from a sushi chef, who said that Itochu’s rice wasn’t going down smoothly (nodogoshi ga warui). Yoshizawa didn’t understand. Was the chef referring to a gritty feeling in the throat from the kernels? When pressed for details, the chef only repeated his complaint. “We had no way of clearing it up,” said Yoshizawa, a manager on the corporate planning division’s rice quality management team.

The confusion over lingo is not limited to Itochu. “Consumers think rice that’s juicy (mizumizushii) is delicious, but to a farmer that’s a complaint that he didn’t properly dry the kernels after harvesting,” said Shinichi Katayama, fifth-generation owner of Sumidaya Shoten, a neighborhood rice shop in Tokyo.

The problems are compounded by another facet of Japan’s rice market: There are far too many options. Hundreds of rice varietals exist, with brand names like Koshihikari, Tsuyahime (Shiny Princess) and Hitomebore (Love at First Sight). Each one has been bred for specific traits: extra sweetness or large kernels or a firm texture that’s best with curry or in a gyu-don beef bowl. The idea that these small differences matter—like single-origin coffees or grape varietals in wines—have been popularized in mainstream magazines and on TV shows by “rice meisters” and “rice sommeliers” who use flavor maps to offer recommendations. It’s all a bit much for most consumers, and even some chefs.

There’s a lot of excitement in the Japanese food world about the upcoming lexicon, mostly because of Hayakawa’s involvement. Among sensory-science wordsmiths in Japan, she is a standout. Over the last three decades, Hayakawa has created Japanese-language lexicons for coffee, tomatoes, jam, baguettes and pasta. She has made TV appearances and has written a weekly column for a national daily newspaper.

However, Hayakawa is best known for her work on a Japanese food texture lexicon. In a 2012 paper in The Journal of Texture Studies, she listed 445 Japanese words describing how food feels in the mouth, and most were onomatopoeia. (By comparison, English has just over 130 food-texture words, while French has around 220 and Chinese 140.) Japanese has around 2,000 onomatopoeia. They’re so much a part of talking about food in Japan that you can use some of them as search terms on recipe websites.

But there’s much more buzz over Hayakawa’s recent work about rice. Japanese newspapers, magazines and TV broadcasters have been eager for updates about the lexicon. Rarely has Hayakawa faced so many media requests. Probably because it’s about the country’s most important staple food. Plus rice is in the news because consumption of the grain in Japan has fallen to its lowest levels since the 1960s.

On a recent afternoon, Hayakawa presided over a meeting at NARO, which is located in Tsukuba, two hours northeast of Tokyo. She and five others—two from her laboratory, plus Itochu’s Ando and Yoshizawa and one other colleague—were seated around a conference table. They debated how to distinguish the idea of fresh (sawayaka) from floral (hana no yo na) and raw (nama). They connected the word roasted (baisen) to almonds and toasted soybean flour.

When Hayakawa asked what everyone thought of the word moist (shittori), someone compared it to Japan’s egg-based castella cake. Another person thought it sounded less unpleasant than becha-becha, which is a wet-sticky-viscous texture from cooking with too much water. Someone else asked: Is it the opposite of pasa-pasa (dried out and stale)?

“When we talk about juicy (mizumizushii), it’s supple and firm,” said Hayakawa, who sat at her laptop editing a spreadsheet. “Moist isn’t like that. It’s more appropriate for cooked rice that has been left out for an hour.” This continued for a while before she finally changed the subject. Two hours later, when the meeting ended, Hayakawa exhaled loudly. “I didn’t think that would be so hard,” she said.

Celebrity trees can leave a deep-rooted impression.

In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, we spend some time with some celebrity trees—one in Washington DC and one in Berlin—that have left an impact on all who visit them. Today’s stories are brought to you by Michelle Cassidy and Diana Hubbell, of the Atlas Obscura Places Team.

Our podcast is an audio guide to the world’s wondrous, awe-inspiring, strange places. In under 15 minutes, we’ll take you to an incredible site, and along the way you’ll meet some fascinating people and hear their stories. Join us daily, Monday through Thursday, to explore a new wonder with cofounder Dylan Thuras and a neighborhood of Atlas Obscura reporters.

Spike-toothed salmon grew nearly nine feet long and sported tusk-like teeth.

A Chinook salmon cuts through the clear, cold waters of the Deschutes River of Central Oregon, his iridescent red scales glinting in the sunlight. And he’s not alone. He is just one of thousands of salmon returning to the spawning grounds where they were born.

Today, Chinook are the largest living species within Oncorhynchus, the salmon genus, reaching up to five feet in length. But seven million years ago, a now-extinct species of salmon in the Pacific Northwest, O. rastrosus, would have dwarfed their modern relatives. The fish could grow up to nearly nine feet long—and that’s not even the most intimidating thing about them.

Previous research described the fearsome fish as having two enlarged teeth, earning them the nickname “sabertooth salmon.” Now, a new paper in the journal PLOS ONE shows that these teeth were more like tusks, protruding straight out to the sides from the tip of their jaws, earning them a new moniker: the spike-toothed salmon.

“I'm a little bit over six feet tall and that salmon is broader than I can reach from head to tail,” says University of Oregon paleobiologist and coauthor Edward Davis. “It's an impressive animal. Thinking about trying to wrestle one of those on a fishing line is a difficult proposition.”

In the 1970s, researchers found the first fossil of the giant salmon species in eastern Oregon. To their dismay, the skull was crushed. The team made an educated guess, based on the anatomy of modern salmon, about how the ancient fish pieces fit together, including a “saber tooth” reconstruction for two fang-like fragments.

In 2011, Davis was approached by members of the North American Research Group (NARG), a collection of fossil hunters and amateur paleontologists. At the time, the site where the fossils had been found decades earlier was privately owned and off limits. But NARG members peeking through a fence believed that they’d spotted additional fossils at the site, and enlisted Davis to help them get a closer look. “That’s the benefit of all those volunteers and amateur paleontologists who are keeping their eyes peeled,” says Davis.

The club’s hunch was right. With the property owner’s permission, Davis and his team found additional bones in 2011 and 2014, including their holy grail.

Davis remembers the day in the lab that volunteer Pat Ward, going through the 2014 material, came running up to him, excited about what he’d just found: not one but two nearly complete skulls.

“We ran downstairs and sure enough, we had two skulls and they both had these sideways teeth,” says Davis. “Neither one of us had expected that. That was the moment when we realized that we had something special.”

The unique, tusk-like teeth protrude from the sides of the snout tip, curving slightly, like a weaponized mustache. They would have been useful for defense when making the perilous journey upstream, says Davis, but he thinks there may be more to the salmon's story.

Among several modern salmon and related species, at sexual maturity only males experience structural changes to their jaws, an adaptation used for fighting competitors and defending females during spawning. However, Davis and his team found the unique, tusk-like features on both male and female giant spike-toothed salmon.

“Whatever explanation we can come up with for the teeth has to be something that would be useful for both males and females,” says Davis.

He suspects the salmon could have used the spikes “like elbows to clear out the space around them and get to the best spots.” Modern salmon behavior includes females digging nests, or redds, by pushing their snouts into the sand—if the ancient salmon did the same thing, Davis says, “By having these spike teeth, they'd actually be able to bulldoze out a wider furrow.”

Alas, the reign of these giants wouldn’t last. While modern salmon are typically considered diet generalists, these ancient fish were specialized filter feeders. It's possible that, as oceans cooled, the spike-toothed salmon were outcompeted by other, larger filter feeders, such as baleen whales. The last giant salmon disappeared five million years ago and, even as oceans warm once more, we won’t see their like again.

“Just because it warms up a bit, I don't think we're going to see spike-toothed salmon swimming around,” says University of British Columbia zoologist Eric Taylor, who was not involved in the study but is writing a book on salmon. The evolutionary processes that led to these wondrous “tusked” giants were complex and occurred over millions of years, and are unlikely to reoccur. But, adds Taylor, “There'll be something else that none of us are going to be around to see.”

A rare secret was taken to the grave in an unmarked, 100-year-old burial ground.

When the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum closed in 1935, its cemetery was unceremoniously forgotten. The plant life became tangled overgrowth, wooden grave markers deteriorated, and the thousands of marked and unmarked graves there lay untouched for decades.

By 2012, the land became part of the grounds of the University of Mississippi Medical Center. When the institution rediscovered the graves during construction on campus, it started the Asylum Hill Project to research the history of the cemetery while respectfully studying, memorializing, and moving the deceased to a more suitable location on campus. As researchers began excavating the first 100 burials, they discovered an archaeological oddity among the remains of one individual: a stony-beige colored object, about the size and shape of a quail egg (about two inches long and one inch wide), sat in the soil, right in the middle of this person’s torso. It was oddly light for its shape and size.

Initially, no one knew what it was. “Everyone just stood around and had theories,” says Jennifer Mack, the lead bioarchaeologist at The University of Mississippi Medical Center and the Asylum Project. “Someone thought it was a calcified cyst, someone else thought it was a gallstone, and I thought, ‘that's way too big to be a gallstone.’” Mack took the object back to her office. Later, a retired surgeon on the team visited her. “I said, ‘hey, we found something interesting,’” Mack recalls. “He came over, and as I was opening the bag, he said ‘I think that’s a calcified gallbladder.’ Because as a surgeon, he had seen them on multiple occasions before.”

The team later confirmed it to be a perfectly preserved calcified gallbladder, also known as a “porcelain gallbladder.” The team recently published their discovery in The International Journal of Osteoarchaeology. It’s the first porcelain gallbladder to be published in an academic journal as an archaeological finding.

A porcelain gallbladder is a relatively rare and irreversible condition where parts or all of your gallbladder, the organ that stores the bile made by your liver and aids with digestion, calcifies and hardens. It’s named that way not because the organ becomes ceramic, but because in living or recently deceased individuals, a calcified gallbladder takes on a whitish blue color. It’s entirely possible for a person with porcelain gallbladder to not know they have it—people with it are often asymptomatic and can live with the condition. Though, people with a porcelain gallbladder often have it removed, as it can be a risk factor for cancer.

Researchers haven’t come to a consensus on why or how a porcelain gallbladder occurs, but it’s thought that chronic inflammation can trigger the calcification process. Interestingly, even though there are plenty of other places throughout your body and in the gastrointestinal tract where chronic inflammation can happen, “it’s not like we get ‘porcelain esophagus’ or ‘porcelain stomach,’” says Kurt Schaberg, an anatomic pathologist at the University of California, Davis. “We don’t know specifically why the gallbladder turns porcelain, but it famously does.”

Mack and her team know that the individual with the porcelain gallbladder was an adult of middle to old age, but not much else. “The classic scenario of a porcelain gallbladder would be an older woman,” says Schaberg—statistically, that would make the most sense.

Normally after death, all parts of a gastrointestinal tract would decay and rot away. Schaberg says, “It's kind of interesting to see a part of the GI tract survive due to these calcifications.”

Danger trees meet explosives.

In this episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast, we speak with author and science writer Mary Roach, who takes us deep into an ancient forest grove on Vancouver Island, in search of the danger trees and the people who seek them out.

Our podcast is an audio guide to the world’s wondrous, awe-inspiring, strange places. In under 15 minutes, we’ll take you to an incredible site, and along the way you’ll meet some fascinating people and hear their stories. Join us daily, Monday through Thursday, to explore a new wonder with cofounder Dylan Thuras and a neighborhood of Atlas Obscura reporters.

Get a peek into what we’re obsessed with right now.

Wonder is everywhere. That’s why, every other week, Atlas Obscura drags you down some of the rabbit holes we encounter as we search for our unusual stories. We highlight surprising finds, great writing, and inspiring stories from some of our favorite publications.

The Internet Archive Just Backed Up an Entire Caribbean Island

by Kate Knibbs, Wired

Fearful that extreme weather could erase Aruba’s history, archivists have digitized and uploaded more than 100,000 documents, images, audio and video recordings, and even 3-D scanned objects—from institutions including the National Library, the National Archives, and the University of Aruba—to the Internet Archive, making the Caribbean island’s story available to people around the world.

World's Oldest Wild Bird Is ‘Actively Courting' After Losing Long-Term Mate

by Sascha Pare, Live Science

Wisdom is a female Laysan albatross who spends part of the year on Midway Atoll, a remote island off of Hawaii. She is thought to be in her 70s—decades beyond the average lifespan for her species—and she is believed to be a widow. Her life-long mate, Akeakamai, has not been seen in several years. Now, Wisdom is dating again, participating in mating dances in search of a new partner.

Can Archaic Greek Language “Heading For Extinction” Be Saved?

by University of Cambridge

In Turkey's Trabzon region, just a few thousand people still speak Romeyka, a millennia-old variety of Greek. To preserve the fading language, a professor from the University of Cambridge has launched an online effort to capture their voices, which may hold the key to understanding the evolution of modern tongues.

Something Is Killing Saint Helena’s Cloud Forest

by Kevin Gepford, Hakai Magazine

The cloud forest on Saint Helena is under quarantine. The British territory in the South Atlantic, a lonely island not quite halfway between Angola and Brazil, is battling a deadly water mold that threatens to destroy its ecosystem, including 47 species of trees found nowhere else on Earth.

Meteorites Are Becoming Harder to Find

by Katherine Kornei, New York Times

More than 60 percent of 80,000 meteorites humans have found on Earth have been discovered in Antarctica. (The ice makes spotting the dark rocks easier.) But climate change is making the search more difficult. The meteorites are more likely to melt into the snow and ice, disappearing below the surface of the continent.

Archaeologists Uncover Ancient City in the Kingdom of Tonga

by Kyle Evans and Dinah Lewis Boucher, Pacific Beat

Twelve miles from Nuku'alofa, the capital of Tonga, researchers have discovered the remains of what could be one of the first cities in the Pacific. The find suggests that urbanization existed in Tonga hundreds of years earlier than previously believed, before the arrival of Western explorers.

Scientists Discover Nearly 50-Foot-Long Ancient Snake

by Riis Williams, Scientific American

Twenty years ago, a scientist found a prehistoric fossil in a coal mine in western India. Believing the bones to be more evidence of an already identified species of extinct crocodile, he set them aside. Now researchers believe the 27 vertebrae may belong to the largest snake species ever to exist on Earth. The Vasuki indicus—named for Vasuki, an enormous serpent king in Hindu folklore—lived 47 million years ago and stretched as much as 49 feet long.

Ancient Chamorro Stone Carvings on Display at Bishop Museum

by Cassie Ordonio, Hawaiʻi Public Radio

For the first time in 30 years, the public can see the latte stones—carved symbols of the Chamorro culture of the Northern Mariana Islands—at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu. The stones, long neglected, are undergoing restoration, and a conversation about the repatriation of the enormous stones (some reach seven feet tall and weigh 5,000 pounds) is beginning.

Museum Fires Employee for Hanging Up his own Artwork

by Kelsey Ables, Washington Post

Outside the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, visitors can see the Futuro House, a rare UFO-style home. Inside, at least briefly, alongside works by Picasso and Kirchner, they could see artwork by an employee of the museum—someone who surreptitiously hung his own drawing on the wall. The museum, which removed the renegade art, would not comment on its quality.

It's a forgotten moment in American beverage history.

On May 11, 1869, America’s first transcontinental freight train set out from California. On that momentous day, its cargo was a load of Japanese green tea. Today, only 15 percent of the tea drunk annually in the United States is green, and the vast majority of that is produced in countries like China and Vietnam. But in the last decades of the 19th century, America’s tea of choice was green, and Japan was the major supplier.

“It's just so amazing how something like this can be so quickly forgotten,” says Robert Hellyer, a professor of history at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. “And this is the challenge of a historian: trying to figure out why. There's no documents that tell us ‘This is why we really [liked] green tea.’”

In his book Green with Milk and Sugar: When Japan Filled America’s Teacups, Hellyer sheds light on this little-known fact. “Green tea was the most popular tea in the U.S. since right after the Revolution, but there's different theories about why,” he says. One theory is that the green tea that flooded the U.S. in the colonial era—grown in China and imported by the British East India Company—may have been “leftovers” after the best tea went to British consumers. “But Americans started to really like green tea, and see it as more sophisticated,” says Hellyer.

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, China held a global monopoly on the tea trade, and key information about tea cultivation and production was kept secret from outsiders. It wasn’t until 1843 that Europeans found out that green and black teas come from the same plant. In the 1840s, the British covertly smuggled tea plants out of China and into colonial India, where they would eventually establish a rival tea industry. But even before British-grown tea became a major commodity, Japan entered the global tea market in the 1860s.

Hellyer cites the Meiji Restoration as the most significant factor in Japan establishing a tea trade of their own. This modernizing revolution ended the last feudal regime in Japan and resulted in a major restructuring of power. “In the new regime, there are groups in Japan who see it as important to export tea to the West in a way that they've never explored before,” says Hellyer. Some of the individuals involved in this new booming trade were Japanese samurai who became tea farmers after the Meiji Restoration, and Hellyer’s own American ancestors who worked in the tea export business.

Japanese traders took advantage of direct sea routes to Seattle and San Francisco, and the United States became the biggest market for Japanese-grown tea. “By about 1880, [Japan] had about 40 percent of the U.S. market,” says Hellyer. The Midwest was known to consume the most green tea of any region. “In the Midwest, green tea really became popular from the 1870s and ‘80s,” says Hellyer. “That's a moment where there's such economic growth in the Midwest; where you have huge cities, notably Chicago, bursting from the prairie. And the people there are becoming wealthy, but as they develop new cultures, they are latching onto the established culture of tea to show their wealth.”

Japanese merchants promoted their product in the United States with elegantly-designed labels and advertisements that presented an image of Japan as refined, artistic, and nonthreatening. Yet by the 1920s, another major shift in America’s tea habits had occurred. Black tea grown in British India started to replace Japanese green as America’s preference. In his book, Hellyer notes that this was due to a combination of socioeconomic factors and increasing anti-Japanese sentiment. Marketing played an important role, as merchants seeking to oust non-British teas from the market used racist imagery in their advertisements, portraying both the Chinese and Japanese and their teas as inferior and unhygienic.

The shift in the American tea market changed Japan’s tea market as well. While Japanese tea drinkers have always preferred green over black, “in the past, it was a lower grade of green tea, called buncha” that was the most popular in Japan, Hellyer explains. Buncha was cheaper and had a more brownish color when brewed. With Americans losing interest in green tea, Japanese merchants with a newfound surplus of expensive tea started marketing it aggressively in their home country. This created an increased demand in Japan for the fine, high-grade green tea that is still popular today.

Throughout his book, Hellyer describes a time when green tea was seen “as an everyday, not exotic, product” in the United States. And what’s more American than colorful food and drinks? Merchants often enhanced their tea’s green color with toxic additives like graphite and Prussian blue, a synthetic pigment more commonly used in paint. Ironically, the chemical colorants that made green tea more desirable to consumers in the 19th century would come to be viewed negatively in the 1920s, when advertisers promoted black tea as unadulterated and pure.

Americans of the time “wanted what would look good at the store,” says Hellyer. “Isn't the taste more important? Apparently not. It needed to look good. And you're probably adding a lot of milk and sugar to it, so hey, it's fine.”

Are you an explorer or a killer?

Scott Nicholson is trapped. He’s stuck in a submarine—and it’s sinking. Water is pouring into the room, and he needs to plug the hole before he and his crew drown. Time is ticking, and the water is relentless. Luckily, Nicholson teaches game design. In just a few short moments, he’s able to solve a puzzle that triggers stoppage of the water, saving the crew and winning the game. This is one of 200 escape rooms that Nicholson has played in the past year.

The man doesn’t do it just for the love of the game—Nicholson is a bonafide professional. His ability to solve the underwater puzzle is something he calls a “hero moment,” and they’re integral to the success of an escape room. He should know; he’s the foremost expert on escape room design and science and the director of the Game Design and Development Program at Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University. He’s been teaching an escape room design class for the past six years.

Escape rooms might seem like casual entertainment, but there’s actually science and a very serious global competition involved. Called Top Escape Rooms Project Enthusiasts' Choice Awards (TERPECA), the competition gives annual awards for the best escape rooms in the world.

Nominated rooms include games like 60 Seconds to Escape in Gurnee, Illinois, involving skeletons popping out at people down hallways, or Madness Toledo in Spain, featuring biohazard spills, unleashed monsters, and a huge Alien-esque creature taking up most of a room, ready to mow participants down with its toothy jaws. Diego Esteban, the owner of Madness, describes the competition as “the Oscars of escape rooms.”

It’s a pretty apt description. Just like all members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences can nominate movies for Oscars, all qualifying escape room enthusiasts can nominate rooms for TERPECA. “Qualifying” is the important word there; in order to nominate, you need to have played 200 room rounds (which could mean the same room 200 times, though most people spread it out some). To vote on and rank the finalists, members must play 100 rooms.

“The idea is that we're collecting input from experienced escape room enthusiasts from around the world,” says Rich Bragg, founder of TERPECA and a former Guinness World Record holder for most escape rooms played in one day. “We have a pretty strict application process. People have to demonstrate that they're legitimately an enthusiast.”

The competition whittles the nominee list from 1,000 down to just 100 top escape rooms in the world. Lately, TERPECA-winning rooms have had a certain style, one that’s dark, gritty, and grim, say David and Lisa Spira, the couple behind the website Room Escape Artist, where they review escape rooms and maintain a database of operating escape rooms in the U.S. But they do see the aesthetic starting to change.

“There's been a slow shift, adding a lot more whimsy and playfulness into the rooms,” says David. “There's a game in Kissimmee, Florida that just did well called ‘Crazy Train: The Ballad of Skeemin' Plotz.’ It's a black-and-white cartoon escape room.”

Lisa also mentions The Dome in Bunschoten, Netherlands, which took second place this year, as a perfect example of a TERPECA-style room.

“The premise of that game is that you are being administered hallucinogens and put inside of an experiment,” David says. “While they do not give you any drugs, they do make you believe you are hallucinating through set design and technology. You feel like literally anything can happen in this space, because the things that happen to you are so unexpected.”

Production value is high in the winning rooms, with extensive sets, actor interactions, fun technology, and multi-hour games.

“It's somewhere between art and mad science,” David says.

He may be joking, but there is a surprising amount of science that goes into creating them. A methodology called Escape Room Theory dictates how escape rooms are designed and built. The theory consists of a series of “rules” designers are encouraged to follow—like ensuring each item is used only once (or there’s only one answer to a specific puzzle), making individual puzzles solvable in five minutes or less, and allowing for non-linear puzzles, meaning that one item in a room doesn’t necessarily solve the puzzle you work on in another room. The goal is ultimately to not frustrate participants or lead them down a road that’s tedious or unsolvable.

Escape room expert Errol Elumir boils this down to what he calls the Escape Room Player Loop, which is the path players take toward the solution of the room. It’s broken down into seven sections (Identify Gates, Collect Clues, Select Gate to Work On, Solve Puzzle, Complete Puzzle, Input Answer, Repeat Loop) where frustration can go off the rails for players. Factoring in both escape room theory and the player loop make for a game that isn’t necessarily easy, but is entertaining and able to be solved.

Psychologically, escape rooms are all about developing an immersive story experience where people feel necessary to the success of the mission, and avoiding ludonarrative dissonance.

“Ludonarrative dissonance is where you have the players doing something that doesn't connect with who they're supposed to be playing in the game,” Nicholson explains, noting that things that don’t make sense will take players out of the experience of the game. “I'm supposed to be a good guy saving the world, so why am I ransacking this house of the people that I'm supposed to be saving? It's like Zelda: ‘I'm here to save the world and save this village, but first I'm going to break all of your pottery and take all of your money.’”

And each escape room absolutely has to include hero moments, Nicholson says. These are times during the game when a player feels like they have a specific skill to contribute.

“You want to have that moment where the person who is good at math does something that no one else does, and they have a hero moment,” Nicholson said. “Then you want to have that moment where the person that has good dexterity gets to throw something or do something physical, and they have a hero moment.”

This involves the taxonomy of player types created by University of Essex professor Richard Bartle in 1996. His taxonomy breaks down players into four categories: Diamonds, who want to win; Spades, who want to hunt around for information; Hearts, who want to empathize with and help other players; and Clubs, who want to play against other players. Alastair Aitchison, a writer for Game Developer Magazine, translated this to escape room stereotypes with the terms Achievers (Diamonds), Explorers (Spades), Socializers (Hearts), and Killers (Clubs). Ideally, an escape room would be tailored to include puzzles or clues for each player type.

Escape rooms haven’t always been this scientific, though. In the early days, the industry was more of a locked-door, escape-the-room experience. Now it’s more of a problem- and puzzle-solving expedition. And no doors are ever actually locked anymore, a rule which fully changed after a 2019 fire in Poland killed five teen girls who were trapped in the game they were playing.

The industry continues to change as well, with new developments like Boda Borg experiences, where it’s a series of rooms you have to get through, and if you mess up on any room after the first, you have to start all over again.

For now, though, escape room designers will continue to make what the Spiras call “TERPECA bait.” It costs designers upwards of $100,000 to $200,000 to fully create the room, but the end result is always a “dark, gloomy, brooding game,” David Spira says. “It's flirting with horror themes or it might cross over into horror. There is a level of polish; there might be performers involved. There is definitely a TERPECA look.”