You may have noticed news outlets reporting that this year’s summer solstice is especially unique, hosting a rare confluence of astronomical phenomena. For the first time in nearly 50 (or is it over 70?) years, the summer solstice and June full moon — colloquially known as the “Strawberry Moon” — are falling on the same day. It’s extremely rare, as multiple news outlets will tell you, having last occurred in 1967 (or was it 1948?).
The story is one of those neat little scientific facts that you can proudly share around the dinner table. “How interesting,” your guests respond. “I never would have thought!” And it’s true: you are very interesting and you often think of things that others do not.
Unfortunately, we have some bad news. The reports of this occurrence have already become a little confused, with some outlets claiming the last “Strawberry Moon Solstice” occurred in 1967, while others insist it hasn’t been seen since 1948. Fortunately, both lunar phases and solstice dates can be calculated, and online almanacs with historical and future calculations are widely available. Let’s get to the bottom of this.
First, let’s look at the details for this year. Summer solstice is officially at 10:34PM UTC on June 20th, according to the U.S. Naval Observatory’s Astronomical Applications department. For convenience, let’s convert that to 6:34PM EDT. The moon will reach its full phase at 11:02AM UTC on June 20th (7:02AM EDT). So, we can note one thing right off the bat: the full moon and solstice aren’t occurring at the exact same time — they’re actually nearly 12 hours apart — but let’s call that close enough.
Now, we’ll verify the competing 1967 and 1948 Strawberry Moon Solstice dates. The U.S. Naval Observatory site doesn’t list solstice dates prior to 2000, but Timeanddate.com’s calculator matches the U.S.N.O., so we’ll assume it’s accurate. For 1948, Timeanddate.com lists the summer solstice at 8:11AM EDT on June 21st. And, indeed, the June full moon that year occurred on June 21st at 8:54AM EDT.
In 1967, the summer solstice occurred at 10:23PM EDT on June 21st, and the full moon was at 12:56AM EDT on June 22nd. A few hours off, but closer together than this year’s Strawberry Moon Solstice. But was 1967 really the last time the confluence occurred?
It all comes down to how close the two occurrences need to be before you consider them “on the same day.” The June full moon and the summer solstice have fallen within 24 hours of each other many times — most recently in 2005 — and fell within 12 hours of each other (like this year) in 1986. But it’s fair to say that 1967 was the last time the two events happened very close together, and 1948 was the last time they were nearly simultaneous.
Regardless of whether or not this is truly an “extremely rare event,” the Strawberry Moon Solstice promises to provide an astonishing night sky. As a NASA Science News post explained in 2005, the sun reaches its highest point in the sky on the summer solstice; since the moon is positioned opposite the sun, that means it’s at its lowest point. This makes the risen, full moon look extremely large to the naked eye, creating a stunning optical illusion.
Tomorrow, thousands across the northern hemisphere will celebrate the solstice, descending upon landmarks like Stonehenge and enjoying the longest day of the year. When the sun finally sets, they’ll be able to continue the party under a big, beautiful “Strawberry Moon” — even if it’s not quite as rare as some might claim.
In April 2012, tiny memorials started appearing on the streets of Minneapolis. Bundles of flowers no bigger than matchsticks, teddy bears the size of peanuts and even miniature portraits could be found arrayed around the bodies of wasps, cockroaches, flies and moths (depicted in both their larval and adult stages). Was this the work of a distressed Buddhist monk lamenting the loss of reincarnated souls? Or that of an obsessed insectophile sharing their grief at the incidental slaughter of their tiny friends? Alas it was not so serendipitous: The memorials were the work of an advertising agency that sought less to mourn than to create some promotional buzz.
This was, however, not a new idea. Two thousand years earlier the ancient poet Virgil was said to have held a funeral for his pet fly at his house in Rome. Eulogies were read, poetry was recited and professional mourners wailed as the fly was entombed in Virgil’s garden. However Virgil’s reasons for this public display of grief were less about garnering publicity than keeping his property safe. At the time the Roman powers-that-be were confiscating the estates of the rich. Only one exception was given: if the estate held a burial plot on its grounds. By burying his fly Virgil saved his home.
Yet as bizarre as these incidences of full-blown insect funerals might seem, they both tap into a tradition that links the funerary rites of humans to those of bugs, and vice versa.
For much of recorded history insects have been linked to death, but not in a good way. Ancient Egyptians were buried with necklaces of stone-carved flies to ward off maggots that were perceived as a threat to their spirit, or Ka. Ancient Greek cults sprung up to worship gods who could chase flies away. Flies were generally seen as pestilential pests who ruined corpses and threatened one’s afterlife; the devil is, after all, known as Lord of the Flies.
However a change in this antagonism occurred with the Moche civilization that existed in northern Peru from about 100 ADAD to 750 AD. Although best known for their saucy pottery, the Moche are also the oldest example of a people incorporating insects into their funereal process. Forensic entomologists have found Moche graves littered with insect remains (blowflies and corpse beetles), suggesting that their bodies were left to rot for three to four weeks prior to burial. Unlike the ancient Egyptians, who did everything in their power to prevent flies from destroying a corpse through talismans and embalming, the Moche seemingly venerated corpse-eating insects. It is thought that they expected the spirit of the deceased to be transferred into the maggots that feasted on the body, and then into adult flies. The soul of the dead could thus leave its old human body and be reincarnated anew. Flies thus became an intrinsic part of human burial rites.
Yet while only a handful of human cultures coopted insects into their funeral rites, much more widespread is the way that insects reflect human behavior in their own dealings with their deceased.
Of all the thousands of different animals that exist on the planet only humans and social insects—bees, wasps, ants and termites—have developed sophisticated social behaviors to deal with their dead. Most of us know of the strange caste systems that spring up in hives and nests: the queens lay eggs, soldiers fight intruders, workers construct the nest and drones do very little at all. Lesser known among the castes are the undertakers, yet their role is of supreme importance.
To understand why this is try imagining a nest of leafcutter ants. This nest may contain two million workers living there at any one time. While many die outside the nest, thousands of workers die within it every day. If these bodies were left inside not only would they block the nest with their bodies but they would also become vectors for diseases that could threaten the wellbeing of the entire colony. As such a small proportion of the populace (around 1-2 percent in the case of bees) take on an undertaking role to dispose of the dead.
The specifics of an undertaker job vary from order to order and species to species, but whether bee or termite there are some established steps in the undertaking process. Firstly a corpse is detected by an undertaker through the change in its chemical signature. Then it is thoroughly inspected by the undertaker, who gives the body a good lick. After death is ascertained the undertaker swings into action, grasping the body by its legs, mandibles, wings, head or tongue and carrying them it out of the nest.
Leafcutter ants have specific processes for removing dead ants from nests. (Photo: ell2550/shutterstock.com)
Here, there are differences. While ant undertakers lift their corpses above their heads, bees prefer to drag the bodies along the ground until they get outside of their nest at which point they fly off and dump the body far away. Ants meanwhile take their dead to conspicuous ant cemeteries located away from the nest, where the bodies are often laid in evenly spaced and neatly stacked piles.
These burial rituals have fascinated insect-spotters since ancient times. The natural historian, Pliny, was among the first to compare ant burial rites to humans. However it was in the 19th century when amateur entomology combined with the Victorian propensity for morbidity, hygiene and social convention that ant burials took on a greater importance. Dozens of studies described the process, many of them in wide-eyed terms like that of the Reverend W. F. White’s 1884 tome, Ants And Their Ways in which the good reverend terms the ants “little people” and assures his readers that ants “are most careful as to their own toilet.”
In his book the Rev. White describes a particular ant burial in terms closely akin to a human burial. "Two of the ants advanced and took up the dead body of one of their comrades; then two others and so on, until all were ready to march,” he writes.“First walked two ants bearing a body, then two without a burden; then two others with another dead ant, and so on, until the line was extended to about forty pairs, and the procession now moved slowly onwards, followed by an irregular body of about 200 ants.”
The cover of the 1884 book Ants and Their Ways. (Photo: Public Domain)
Perhaps one can see in the willfully anthropomorphic language used by Victorians the lingering traces of the insectile link to reincarnation that prospered millennia before. After all, it is a small step from being reincarnated as an insect to having an insect act like a human. For the Victorian entomologist the undertaking behavior of insects was a sign of something profound about human behavior, something that even the street bug memorials in Minneapolis gestured towards. Namely, they are exploring the idea that one of our most serious human rites is being enacted even among the smallest of creation, right beneath our feet.
This may look like an innocent drawing of a butterfly. But look closer. It's actually a map. In fact, the area around the butterfly's body contains secret military information about the whereabouts of an enemy fortress.
The drawing's creator Robert Baden-Powell, in his 1915 book My Adventures as a Spy, wrote:
“This sketch of a butterfly contains the outline of a fortress, and marks both the position and power of the guns. The marks on the wings between the lines mean nothing, but those on the lines show the nature and size of the guns, according to the keys below.”
In the image above, each marking corresponds to a different type of gun: field, fortress or machine.
In his day, the map's creator was a celebrity. The mustachioed British military hero was known for having led the U.K. army against the Boers in South Africa, his prolific writing, and most of all for the founding of the Boy Scouts movement.
In the run-up to World War I, Baden-Powell became synonymous with the mythologized civility and bravery of the plucky and gentlemanly Brit. His own books contributed to this image and reinforced his own reputation.
Baden-Powell authored many books on the subject of espionage. He published the secret insect maps in one of his most famous works, My Adventures As A Spy. The book was a collection of stories from his spying missions across the Balkans in the late 19th century. The book was a guide for would-be spies and adventurers on how to avoid detection and also how to conduct themselves in a proper fashion overseas.
Look at the moth he sketched to map an enemy location. The drawings contains intricate details about the enemy base, types of weaponry, and information about the landscape. To local officials, he claimed, these drawing were totally undecipherable.
Baden-Powell had one last tip for would-be spies: disguise themselves as entomologists. It was a trick, he said, that had worked when he conducted secret missions. He wrote:
"Carrying this book and a colour-box and a butterfly net in my hand, I was above all suspicion to anyone who met me on the lonely mountain side, even in the neighbourhood of the forts."
Out in enemy territory, who would notice a insect researcher, notebook, pen, and butterfly net in hand?
Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.
Take note of the cold-blooded killer in this video, which shows a wheel bug nymph using its razor-sharp mouth parts to bring down a much more massive caterpillar seeming to mind its own business.
The wheel bug, known by its scientific name Arilus cristatus, is a member of the family of “assassin bugs,” which are found as far north as New England and as far south as Central America. Many are known to inject a toxin into their prey to immobilize it before sucking out its inner bodily juices. Yum.
This video, posted by the YouTube account Pests and Natural Enemies in December 2013, features a silver-spotted skipper caterpillar, a plump and jolly specimen unaware of his impending untimely fate.
It’s a classic WWE takedown—except this time there’s a giant spiked beak that penetrates the opponent’s flesh and completely paralyzes it. That’s something you won’t see in the wrestling ring.
The wheel bug plunges its pointed beak into the caterpillar, who wriggles and squirms, but to no avail. In a near instant, the deed is done. The bug has made its kill (and all to the tune of a suspenseful soundtrack).
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.
Trekking along a mountain in Guanacaste Province, Costa Rica, entomologist Justin Schmidt came across a nest of the tropical wasp species Polybia simillima, better known as the Fierce Black Polybia Wasp. The agile, buzzing insect has a reputation for having a painful sting. But, Schmidt casted fear aside and approached the nest buried deep inside a dark, densely prickly shrub. He was using a pair of clippers to remove branches, when the angry wasps exploded out at him like flying shards of glass, greeting him with sharp stings.
“A ritual gone wrong, satanic. The gas lamp in the old church explodes in your face when you light it,” Schmidt later wrote about his battle with the Fierce Black Polybia Wasp.
This description is one of 78 entries of ant, bee, and wasp stings in his Pain Scale for Stinging Insects, widely referred to as the Schmidt Sting Pain Index. Schmidt, a biologist at Southwestern Biological Institute and researcher in the entomology department at the University of Arizona, willingly offered his arm to different stinging insects of the order Hymenoptera to create the index featured in his new book The Sting of the Wild. The index ranks stinging pain on a scale of 1 (Red Fire Ant) to 4 (Warrior Wasp) and recounts Schmidt’s face-off with each insect with a poetic, and sometimes humorous, description. We have depicted a selection of insects included in Schmidt’s Sting Pain Index above, scaling the insects by how agonizing their stings are.
Schmidt, who has been called "The King of Sting," stands steadfast in the presence of vicious stinging insects. He’s been stung over 1,000 times throughout his research career—his fascination growing from his childhood admiration for the fuzzy, brightly colored yellowjackets and bumble bees around his hometown in Pennsylvania.
Schmidt has little fear for menacing stinging insects. (Photo: Justin Schmidt)
He began collecting data for the pain index in 1973 after digging up sandy colonies of harvester ants in Georgia with a research colleague, Debbie, who would eventually become his wife. They were both stung, and Debbie described the episode as a “deep ripping and tearing pain, as if someone were reaching below the skin and ripping muscles and tendons; except the ripping continued with each crescendo of pain.”
“I realized [the harvester ant stings] were dramatically different from honey bees, wasps, and hornets. They are like day and night different,” says Schmidt.
He began to study the medical implications and biochemistry of the venom—the toxic compounds causing stings to often be much more painful than insect bites. Schmidt found that there was a difference in chemistry when the pain and skin reaction varied after a sting and set out to obtain a larger survey.
Collecting data on stings became Schmidt’s side project. While most people would flee, Schmidt goes out of his way to get to stinging insects. He's climbed up a tree to collect an entire nest of black Parachartergus fraternus wasps and convinced a bus filled with scientists to pull over to a bull ant colony in South Australia. He self-assesses the sting of any Hymenoptera he comes across when out in the field conducting larger studies on velvet ants or sweat bees. To bring live specimens back to the lab to study their venom, he often uses his bare hands to grab fistfuls of the insect and stuffs them into vials. If he doesn’t get stung during that process, he’ll apply one to his arm to be stung once or twice. He doesn’t carry a first aid kit or ointments to prepare for a sting, only lugging ice in a chest to keep the specimens alive and a cellphone in case there is a dire emergency.
“I don’t put on suits of armor or get myself all psyched,” he says. “When I go to the doctor’s office, if I know I’m going to get an injection, it hurts a whole lot more the more I know I’m going to get a big, fat needle stuck in me. It’s very much the same way with stinging insects.”
The sting apparatus of a fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, has a thin, sharp, needle-like stinger attached to a large venom-filled reservoir and a smaller frothy-looking Dufour’s gland. Sting Pain Rating: 1 on the Pain Scale. (Photo: Justin Schmidt/John Hopkins University Press)
He has also found that researching stings prior to encountering the insect in the wild does not always give him proper warning of the severity or lack of pain. For example, South African Giant Stink Ants, which live in volcano-shaped colonies and grow up to 2/3 inches long, were reputed to have very painful stings, Schmidt explains. When he was picking up a couple hundred ants, he thought the stings were unimpressive, scoring the pain 1.5 in the index. The Giant Stink Ants' putrid smell was perhaps worse than its sting.
“I described it as garlic oil dribbled in your wound, but they smell like really rotten, rank garlic that you never want to eat,” he says. “It could make you sick just from the fumes.”
He determines the stinging score by two components: the actual physiological harm and what he calls the “ouch factor.” While a universal definition of pain does not exist, Schmidt believes that everyone recognizes that pain comes in a variety of flavors. “Pain truth comes in two flavors, imagined and realized. With stings, our imagination is vivid and strong, even if the sting pain is not realized,” Schmidt explains in the book. He advises that if you are stung by an insect that he rates a four, that you should stop what you’re doing and seek medical aid. “They just shut you down. You can’t function in a normal fashion.”
For Schmidt, he’s lost the fear that would surface when he encountered a notoriously nasty stinging insect, but he is not numb to the pain. He recently worked on a hive of honey bees and was dressed for the over 100 degree weather in Arizona: a tee shirt and shorts under his bee suit. The honey bees pierced through his thin layer of protection, leaving him with many painfully aching stings. His scores are also similar to the pain evaluations of the few other entomologists who also document sting pain, he says.
Sample collection as part of a study in Costa Rica of the genetics of Africanized honey bees. These bees were intentionally provoked, something not recommended for the inexperienced. (Photo: Justin Schmidt/John Hopkins University Press)
What sets the Schmidt Pain Index unique are his elaborate retellings of the stings.
“These descriptions pretty much just hit me,” Schmidt says, who admits that he was never an “A” student in English. When he sits down to write a sting description, he’ll clear his head and think of memories that remind him of the sting—associating a a strike of lighting to the sting of a Tarantula Hawk and the pain of a messy divorce with the sting of an Artistic Wasp. He started off describing a few of the stings in this colloquial manner, but realized that it was an effective way to inform people about how much each sting hurt. While the numerical scale is valuable to entomologists, most people don’t identify with numbers, he explains.
“Numbers are kind of an unnatural thing,” he says. “I can’t even remember the numbers. I have to look at my notebook and see how I evaluated it, whereas the descriptions are much more graphic. I think they’re just a much better way of communicating and conveying the essence of what the numbers are really trying to tell you.”
A judge and announcer watch two Kogane spiders at Kajiki’s 2015 Spider Battle. (All Photos: Chad Cullen)
Gauzy webs crowned with large, striped spiders are a familiar sight to anyone who has spent a summer in southern Japan. A less familiar sight is the spider battle, an annual tournament on the country's southernmost island in which arachnids wrestle one another for human amusement.
In Aira City, citizens ranging from elementary school children to elders buy, capture, or rear female Argiope amoena spiders—called "kogane" locally—and register them for the Kajiki-town spider battle tournament held annually on the third Sunday in June.
The welcome banner.
According to Aira City’s website, spider battles began in this area in the late 16th century when a local warlord began using them as a way to cheer up his troops during military campaigns to the Korean peninsula.
The modern battles took shape with the help of the Spider Battle Preservation Society, founded in 1991. The day-long event is set up as a tournament, with spiders advancing as they win individual fights. With nearly 200 spiders competing, fights take place simultaneously on three judging platforms.
A judge encourages a hesitant spider as her opponent waits.
One spider (kamae) stands on the end of a horizontal, wooden pole. A judge places her opponent (shikake) a bit farther down the pole, and places his hand between them, ensuring they are both ready to rumble before allowing the fight to begin. He pulls his hand away and it’s on.
A spider can win a fight in three ways: she can bite her opponent on the abdomen; she can wrap her opponent’s abdomen in thread; or, if her opponent tries to bungee away, she can cut the rival’s thread, causing the loser to tumble to the padded platform below.
The judge has to keep a keen eye on the battle, both to declare a winner and to ensure the spiders don’t seriously damage each other. The majority of the fights are over within 10 seconds, as the judge reaches quickly into the fray to separate them and returns the loser to its disheartened-looking owner. The winner advances to the next round.
Female Kogane spider waits her turn for battle.
The spiders, all of which are female, are judged not only on their fighting skills but also on their beauty: color, patterning, and how well proportioned their figures are can all gain them points in a separate morning competition.
Between fights, spiders rest in mesh cages, in paper bags, or sit on sticks to be trotted through the crowd to the fighting poles. If you’re lucky, an owner may offer to allow their spiders to crawl on you.
While the battles certainly draw the crowds, it would be a shame to overlook the other spider-related activities on offer. You can admire paintings and drawings of spiders created by schoolchildren, have your photo taken as a spider judge in a your-face-here cutout, buy snacks emblazoned with the spider-battle logo, learn about the ecological importance of spiders, or enter a raffle to win spider-themed prizes.
Grand prize: Spider-bedecked bicycles!
Spider battles are not unique to Kajiki. Spectator events involving spider-fighting have been recorded in many places including Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and Korea. In the Philippines, spider-fighting, which involves placing bets on potential winners, has even been linked to gambling addiction and children’s schoolwork suffering. (The Kajiki battles do not involve gambling.)
In many of these places spider-fighting, like other blood sports, is officially discouraged. In Kajiki, by contrast, the spider battles were honored in 1996 by being declared an Important Folk Cultural Property in Japan by the Agency for Cultural Affairs.
So forget watching sumo matches or kabuki plays, buying ceramics, or eating sushi—if you want to learn about a true Japanese cultural treasure, just look on the web.
Who pinched the tiger pelt from the Bengal Lounge? The popular cocktail bar received its name from the full-size animal skin that proudly hung over the hearth until it mysteriously disappeared a few days ago, according to Vancouver Island’s CTV News.
The historic Fairmont Empress hotel in Victoria, British Columbia has been a fixture of the city since 1908, adding the Indian-themed Bengal Lounge in the late '60s. The bar was a popular spot among locals who were charmed by the atmosphere, which is normally dominated by the tiger pelt. The wall hanging is a single complete skin with the full head still attached, which also features a menacing growl.
As renovations to the lounge have been underway, the culprit (or culprits) have had an easier opportunity to slip and remove the rug, although there are, as of yet, no suspects. It’s unclear what someone would want with the distinctive pelt, and many people are hoping that this recent disappearance is simply a repeat of a prank that was pulled in 1980, when the pelt was temporarily stolen, only to be anonymously dropped back off in a box behind the hotel. As reported in the Times Colonist, the only clue then to the original culprits’ identities was a note included with the pelt, which was later returned. It said, “Please return to the Bengal Room at the Empress Hotel. It was borrowed. Thank you.” It was signed, “Fred and Barney.”
Whether Fred and Barney are responsible for the latest theft is unclear. This year's investigation, which the Fairmont’s manager has dubbed “Operation Tiger,” is ongoing.
The Mexican blindcat has no eyes, and its skin is so translucent that its color, a light pink, comes from the blood coursing underneath. These catfish live underground, in the Edwards-Trinity aquifer, on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande basin.
For years, they were rumored to cross over, sometimes, to the U.S. side. But no one knew for sure. Now, scientists at the University of Texas at Austin have caught and identified Mexican blindcats on the Texas side of the border.
It took about a year: a National Park Service employee who was caving in the aquifer reported seeing the blindcats in the spring of 2015, and the newly identified fish were found in May of 2016. These fish grow no longer than 3 inches, and it took a few trips underground before the scientists spotted them again.
The most intriguing questions about these fish are how they got to Texas. Under the Rio Grande, there are a series of watery caves, which have never been fully mapped or explored. It’s possible that the fish traveled from Mexico to Texas through those caves—which would mean there’s a secret connection between the aquifers in Mexico and the U.S. that’s never been discovered.
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.
Millions of mites and bumblebees will soon dominate Russian farms. (Photo: Darko Mareš/CC BY 2.0)
Farms in Russia will soon be battlefields teeming with insects. The country is being sent 500 million Israel-bred mites and bumblebees to help bolster agriculture production.
Russia hopes the swarms of pollinators and pest-fighting insects will give the country greater agricultural independence. Ever since the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Russia has been getting fewer European Union agriculture imports, including fruits, vegetables, and flowers, causing prices to rise.
In part to fight this new reality, Russia recently purchased $1 million worth of bugs from BioBee Biological Systems, an Israeli company, to support local farms and help fill the demand, The Jerusalem Post reports.
For two decades, the bug-breeding business based in Kibbutz Sde Eliyahu in northern Israel has been cultivating different species of insects as natural pesticides and pollinators. By providing more natural pesticide options, farms, commercial growing sites, and orchards can reduce the amount of chemical pesticides used on the crops.
BioBee will be sending Russia two species of large predatory mites, Phytoseiulus persimilis and Amblyseius swirskii. These mites are bred to attack the pest mites decimating crops, such as tomato, cucumber, and rose, and leave plants unscathed. The company is also sending Bombusterrestris, a species of bumblebee that is good at pollinating sweet peppers, strawberries, plums, apples, and cherries, among an assortment of flowering produce. Researchers are going to be conducting an experiment with the bees in cherry orchards, and if crop yields are a success they will use the technique to improve cherry production back in Israel.
The company has already sent its bugs to help the agricultural economy in South Africa, Chile, and India. In 2015, BioBee sent 600 million of the predatory mites to Colombia to fight the smaller mites destroying the coffee crop. But this will be the first time BioBee’s insects will be sent to the Crimean Peninsula.
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.
For years, Hekla, a volcano in southern Iceland, was active, erupting regularly—and sometimes with great force—over the past century. But it hasn't been heard from since a small eruption in 2000, when it spewed ash for nearly two weeks.
An Icelandic geophysicist said recently, though, that he thinks Hekla is getting ready to erupt again, according to the Iceland Monitor.
“Hekla is a dangerous volcano,” Páll Einarsson, a professor at the University of Iceland, told the news website Vísir. “We could be looking at a major disaster when the next eruption begins if we are not careful.”
The volcano, located in the southern part of the country, is also a popular site for hikers, but Einarsson thinks it could blow any minute. Pressure indicators on the volcano, he says, are higher than they've been before the last two eruptions, in 2000 and 1991.
Hekla is around 70 miles to the east of the capital Reykjavik, where over a third of the country's population live. One of Hekla's biggest eruptions occurred in the Middle Ages, when, in 1104, an eruption is said to have covered at least half the island in ash and tephra.
But while an eruption of that force may not be in the offing, it also probably isn't a good time for a hike up Hekla.
The Great Pyramid of Giza, the largest of three pyramids built more than 4,000 years ago in Egypt, is 455 feet tall, and 756 feet wide at its base.
But one scientist recently discovered that the base, which appears to be square, isn't quite as perfect as it looks, according to Live Science, which is significant in part because it helps suggest how ancient Egyptians built the pyramids given the tools of the time.
To make the latest measurements, scientists first searched to find the original edges of the pyramid, which have eroded over the years. They then plotted, using a statistical analysis, the true length of the east and west sides of the pyramid's original base, finding that the west was around 5.55 inches longer than the east.
Coming up short by so little on a project of this scale is impressive, Glen Dash, one of the scientists who calculated the number said, and he thinks it also shows that the pyramid was built with a grid as a sort of blueprint.
That's because the pyramid's positional axis is also off by tiny, but similar amounts. However you measure it, though, Dash said the Egyptians' achievement remains what it was in ancient times: a wonder of the world.
"We hope to eventually figure out how the Egyptians laid out the pyramid with such precision and, in doing so, hope to learn much about the tools and technology they had at their disposal," Dash said, according to Live Science.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
Do me a favor while you read these opening lines. Pick up your phone, and open up your photos app.
Scroll through the many pictures of you, your dumb friends, and your crazy family. Pick a photo—it can be any photo, really—and blow it up so it fills the whole screen.
Still with me? Good.
Now, tell me, how would you recreate this experience using physical devices alone—where you flipped through thousands of tiny images and blew up a really big one to a size where you can actually read it without (and here's the key part) destroying the original?
The answer is a tool that you'd be more likely to find in a library than in your pocket.
In 1839, Dancer, whose father owned an optical goods firm, combined his family's chosen trade with the then-new daguerreotype process of photography, and started tinkering.
Playing around, he figured out a way to shrink pictures of large objects by a ratio of 160 to 1—and as a result, created the first piece of microfilm. (To clarify terms, “microfilm” is usually distributed in roll form, like you would pull out of a 35mm camera, while “microfiche” is flat.)
But while Dancer may have put in the foundational work, it was René Dagron who put a patent on it in 1859. Among other things, the Frenchman made significant improvements to the technology and standardized the process.
But there was still just one problem: Like graphene in the modern age, the technology was a major innovation in need of a use.
Fortunately, Dagron found one during the Franco-Prussian War, a period that necessitated the transfer of information from outside of Paris back in. Being that electronic telecommunications were still in their infancy at this point, carrier pigeons were in wide use, with such pigeons being dropped out of hot air balloons outside of the city, with the assumption that they would eventually fly back in.
Messenger pigeons, from Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 1873. (Photo: Public Domain)
Of course, there’s only so much information that you can put on a sheet of paper that’s light enough for a carrier pigeon to carry, and so Dagron recommended to French Postmaster General Germaine Rampont-Lechin that they use his then-novel technique. Dragon would create tiny microfilmed photographs of documents, then put them inside tiny tubes attached to the carrier pigeon's wing. Since the images were visible with the use of a magic lantern—an early form of film projector—this allowed for the discrete distribution of messages to and from the battlefield.
The strategy nearly failed, however, when Dagron and his team were nearly caught attempting to leave Paris by balloon. Their balloons were shot out of the sky, and his team was almost captured by Prussian forces, with their equipment lost in the shuffle. Eventually, though, they made it to the city of Tours, where a chemist, Charles Barreswil, had already attempted to send tiny photographs with the carrier pigeons. There, Dagron was able to make tiny prints that were so small (11mm by 6mm) that a single carrier pigeon could carry up to 20 sheets, a massive upgrade from Barreswil's technique.
It is said that the pigeon post is gone off, with sheets of photographed messages reduced to an invisible size, and which in Paris are to be magnified, written out, and transmitted to their addresses. They are limited to private affairs, politics and news of military operations being strictly excluded. But the Prussians, it is said, with their usual diabolical cunning and ingenuity, have set hawks and falcons flying round Paris to strike down the feathered messengers that bear under their wings healing for anxious souls.
Carrier pigeons, in other words, did not have an easy job.
More than three decades later, libraries began to catch on, thanks in part, to a couple Belgians, who, in 1906, made the first argument that microfilm could be used to help save space.
But by the 1930s, publications such as The New York Times and libraries such as those at Harvard University began using the format as a way to preserve old newspapers. Quickly, the technology became common in libraries everywhere.
These days, of course, the internet has quickly usurped microfilm and microfiche, but content-wise, there are some cases where microfiche arguably does a better job. One of those is classic comic books, for three major reasons:
Low-quality source material. As you may or may not know, comic books were not originally published using the highest quality of paper or ink, and as a result, have not aged well. Microfiche that's decades old, on the other hand, holds up pretty darn well.
High cost of original copies. Old comic books are incredibly valuable, and as a result are out of financial reach for most people. And that includes libraries as well. The library at Michigan State University has a comic book collection with more than 80,000 entries. But it is no longer purchasing original copies due to "the fragility and great expense of most of these items." Instead, it's buying microfilm, which can be recreated at will.
General snobbishness. The New York Public Library has a wide collection of comic books on microfilm, but the reason much of that collection has been archived in that form wasn't out of a desire to protect it, but because comics were once deemed unfit for a library. That's because the library's original policy was to microfilm the comic books, then get rid of them.
(Considering that comic books gave microfiche a little extra life, it makes sense, then, that there's a comic book about Eugene B. Power. Power is the guy who founded University Microfilms International, the company that brought microfiche to libraries around the country, in 1938. Power's company is still going strong; you may not know UMI, but if you've stepped in a library sometime in the last decade, you've most assuredly heard of ProQuest, which makes some of the most widely used library research technologies.)
Microfiche isn't perfect. Compared to the scrolling you do on your phone, it has a clunky interface that requires a lot of scrolling before you can reach the exact page you're looking for. (To get an idea of these interface weaknesses, check out this clip of Chevy Chase using a microfiche projector in the 1985 film Fletch.)
There are other problems, too. It doesn't capture the level of detail of a high resolution photo you might see online. It does text justice, but you can't say the same for photographs, which are often grayscale at best.
And the projectors themselves that you might remember from your library days, which generally predicted the basic shape and format of desktop computers, are hard to find, let alone purchase.
But here's the secret with microfilm that will ensure its existence for generations to come; it's designed to last for hundreds of years, far longer than any hard drive or CD-ROM ever will.
In a couple hundred years, when people are trying to write the history books about our culture, they're probably going to run into a lot of 404 errors—as I did when I was trying to find the link in the previous paragraph.
But you know what they'll be able to read crystal-clear, without any issues? Microfilm and microfiche—just as Paul Otlet, John Benjamin Dancer, René Dagron, and a bunch of other experimenters might have realized back in the day.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
The Vespula germanica species of wasps, one of the most common in the world, build nests that typically reach the size of a five-gallon bucket. They’ll house one queen and 15,000 or more wasps, and will not last through the winter—the queen wasp and her workers will die, and the next generation of queens will build new nests.
In places with mild winters, including Florida, New Zealand and North Africa, nests can survive for more than a year, though. That’s when they start getting big.
In Southampton, England, a wasp nest measuring six feet by five feet was found in the attic of a pub. In New Zealand, a nest described as “the size of a small car” hung from a campsite tree branch. In Florida, one entomologist was called to a hunting preserve to handle a nest 6.5 feet tall and eight feet wide:
That’s only about half the size of the largest wasp nest ever discovered, which measured approximately 12 feet by five feet by 18 feet, and was documented at a farm in New Zealand in 1963.
A nest that lasts into its second year can host multiple queens and more than 100,000 wasps in total. Over time, the rare nest that survives winters can accumulate dozens of queens. One giant nest built in a fold-down camper in South Carolina contained 37.
These freaky, hardy nests are horrifying in their size, but they also raise a troubling question: Is there anything keeping insects' nests from growing even larger? Absent human intervention, would they just expand forever?
The scientists to whom I posed these questions were both unfazed and reassuring. “Some species of wasps are just more likely to continue their nests than others,” says Bob Brown, who studies wasps in New Zealand. Most wasps just don’t have the same instinct to upgrade and super-size their homes that humans do. Only about five to 10 percent of V. germanica nests will last through winter, and the common wasp creates multi-year dwellings even more rarely. Across all 44,000 square miles of New Zealand’s North Island, Brown has heard of only one example.
More pressing, for insects, is dealing with competition from other colonies or natural enemies. This isn’t just true of wasps; the spectrum of eusocial insects—bees, ants, termites, and their ilk—has to watch out for challengers and predators.
A termite colony can last for a decade or two once it becomes established, but most never do. Once a year, a colony releases a gigantic swarm of fertile offspring, says Scott Turner, an animal physiologist who has spent decades studying termite mounds. These homesteader termites drop to the ground, mate, and try to found new, competing colonies. “Nearly all of them die,” says Turner.
In this struggle for survival, size does help; one study of termite mounds found the largest were more likely to survive over the long term. A typical termite mound might be 6.5 feet tall, but they can grow to 20 feet, or more. Unlike your average wasp nests, termite mounds are long-term homes, and can stand for decades. There are physical limits to their growth, though. Sometimes, according to Turner, a section of the nest will be too far from water or other key resources—too much of a pain to keep up—and they'll abandon that wing.
Wasps and termites, then, have some checks on their expansionist impulses. But what about ants? One ant “mega-colony,” made of smaller, interrelated colonies, was said to stretch over 3,700 miles in Europe, and was later discovered to extend its domain across oceans, to Japan and California. Ants from these three mega-colonies recognized each other as kin: in experiments, they would attack other ants but not each other.
Given their vast terrain, is there any check on ant megalopolis growth? Well, by one measure, ant colonies are limited by the rate at which their queens produce offspring. If an ant colony is large enough, the queen will bear sexually reproductive ants who fly off to found new colonies, instead of workers who help increase the physical structure of the current colony. Still, the size of even a single underground city can be incredible:
As for the mega-colonies of interrelated ants, the only limit to their domain is time. Eventually, the geographically divided ants will evolve away from each other, and competition will begin again.
After heavy rains last week, parts of Brighton, Colorado were inundated with more than rainwater when clumps of maggot-like mystery bugs began falling on unsuspecting citizens.
According to reports by local news station 9News, a couple was walking their dog and preparing their grill when swarms of little yellow and orange worms began pelting them from the sky. The bugs nearly covered whole portions of the sidewalk, hitting people, and even landing in the couple’s grill. Once local news picked up the couple’s story, reports of similar dropped larva began trickling in from other areas in the region. Many of the bugs they discovered were already dead, but there were enough of them living to make the writhing downpour all the more unsettling.
No one has yet to concretely identify the little grubs, or even where they came from, but a local entomologist who spoke with 9News said that they were likely fly maggots that were knocked out of tree canopies by the rain and wind. So while they might not pose much threat in terms of poison or bites, it’s cold comfort that they were just piles of maggots raining down on the Brighton locals.
The Great Seal that held a listening device. (Photo: NSA/Public Domain)
In 1946, a group of Russian children from the Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organisation (sort of a Soviet scouting group) presented a carved wooden replica of the Great Seal of the United States to Averell Harriman, the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union.
The gift, a gesture of friendship to the USSR's World War II ally, was hung in the ambassador’s official residence at Spaso House in Moscow. It stayed there on a wall in the study for seven years until, through accident and a ruse, the State Department discovered that the seal was more than a mere decoration.
It was a bug.
The Soviets had built a listening device—dubbed “The Thing” by the U.S. intelligence community—into the replica seal and had been eavesdropping on Harriman and his successors the whole time it was in the house. “It represented, for that day, a fantastically advanced bit of applied electronics,” wrote George Kennan, the ambassador at the time the device was found. “I have the impression that with its discovery the whole art of intergovernmental eavesdropping was raised to a new technological level.”
Diplomats and other Americans working in the USSR had long assumed that the walls in Moscow had ears. “Russia's notoriety for eavesdropping and espionage stretches back even to the czars,” Representative Henry J. Hydetold the House of Representatives toward the end of the Cold War. “James Buchanan, U.S. minister in St. Petersburg during 1832-33 and later U.S. President, recounted that ‘we are continually surrounded by spies both of high and low degree. You can scarcely hire a servant who is not a secret agent of the police.’”
In the early 20th century, human espionage and eavesdropping was augmented by new technology like wiretaps and small, concealable listening and recording devices. Guests at Spaso House were given cards on arrival warning them that all rooms and even the garden were monitored. The Thing was one of the most sophisticated of these bugs. It was designed by Lev Sergeyevich Termen, better known to Americans as Leon Theremin, inventor of the theremin. Theremin had lived in the US for a while, but returned home to Russia just before WWII when he ran into financial problems. There, Theremin was sent to prison for “rehabilitation” and eventually put to work in a sharashka (a secret lab in the Gulag labor camp system), tasked with finding a better way to bug Spaso House.
Spaso House, the U.S. Ambassador's official residence in Moscow and home to "The Thing" for seven years. (Photo: US Government/Public Domain)
The device he came up with consisted of an antenna and a cylinder with a thin membrane that acted as a microphone. Soviet agents stationed across the street from Spaso House would turn the device “on” by focusing a radio signal on it, which then bounced back to their radio receiver. When the ambassador or anyone else in the study spoke, the sound waves caused the membrane to resonate and alter the signal that returned to the Soviets, allowing them to hear the conversation.
“The triumph of the Great Seal Bug was its simplicity,” said Robert Brown in his book on early technical surveillance, Electronic Invasion. “It had no power pack of its own, no wires that could be discovered, no batteries to wear out,” and was active only when the Soviets “illuminated” it with a radio signal, making it nearly impossible to detect.
The State Department only became suspicious that the Soviets had developed this novel bug in the early 1950s, when British and American military radio operators monitoring Soviet military radio traffic independently and accidentally picked up the voices on their receivers that appeared to belong to their respective diplomats.
Those incidents and the refurbishing of Spaso House by Soviet workers for ambassador George Kennan’s arrival in 1952—a perfect opportunity to plant devices—led to several security sweeps of the house, which turned up nothing.
“The air of innocence presented by the walls of the old building was so bland and bright as to suggest either that there had been a complete change of practice on the part of our Soviet hosts (of which in other respects there was decidedly no evidence) or that our methods of detection were out of date,” Kennan wrote in his memoirs.
In case the latter was true, State Department security technicians John Ford and Joseph Bezjian arrived in Moscow in September to conduct a more thorough search. Bezjian, nicknamed the “the Rug Merchant” by his colleagues, suspected that the Soviets had removed their bugs prior to the other sweeps and replanted them when the coast was clear. To keep them from doing that again, he posed as Kennan’s house guest. He had his equipment sent, well hidden, ahead of his arrival and spent several days hanging out, playing cards and observing the house staff while hunting for bugs at night. When they still couldn’t find anything, Ford and Bezjian suggested that they might have more luck if Kennan gave the eavesdroppers something to listen to.
One evening, the ambassador sat in the study with his secretary, going through the motions of dictating a classified diplomatic dispatch (actually one that had already been sent years ago, declassified and printed in a volume of the Department of State’sForeign Relations of the United States series), while Ford and Bezjian went around the house with their detection instruments.
Kennan recounts in his memoirs that as he “droned on with the dictation,” Bezjian picked up Kennan’s voice on his radio receiver and followed the signal to its source. Bezjian went to the study and implored Kennan, “by signs and whispers, to ‘keep on, keep on.’” He left to grab Ford and the two men returned to work their way around the room. The signal carrying Kennan’s voice appeared to be coming from the wall behind the seal. Bezjian removed the wood carving, Kennan wrote, “took up a mason’s hammer, and began, to my bewilderment and consternation, to hack to pieces the brick wall where the seal had been.” As he did this, the signal cut out. Bezjian realized that the bug wasn’t in the wall but in the seal, and took his hammer to the Soviets’ gift.
“I, continuing to mumble my dispatch, remained a fascinated but passive spectator of this extraordinary procedure,” Kennan wrote. “In a few moments, however, it was over. Quivering with excitement, the technician extracted from the shattered depths of the seal a small device, not much larger than a pencil.”
A replica of the inside of the Great Seal Bug, showing the listening device. (Photo: Austin Mills/CC BY-SA 2.0)
At this revelation, wrote Kennan, “one was acutely conscious of the unseen presence in the room of a third person: our attentive monitor. It seemed that one could almost hear his breathing. All were aware that a strange and sinister drama was in progress.”
That night, Bezjian slept with the bug under his pillow so that Soviet agents couldn’t retrieve it. The next day, it was sent to Washington to be studied and replicated by American intelligence agencies, kicking off an arms race between the Soviets and Americans to develop similar and improved versions of the bug and countermeasures against them.
In the years The Thing hung on the wall, Spaso House was full of activity, high-level guests — including General Eisenhower, White House staffers and a dozen congressmen — and information. A member of the Soviet team that monitored the house via The Thing laterrevealed that it allowed them to “get specific and very important information which gave us certain advantages in the prediction and performance of world politics in the difficult period of the cold war.”
Whatever information the Soviets may have gained from The Thing, the wooden eagle would ultimately come back to bite them. In May 1, 1960, the Sovietsshot down an American U-2 plane over Soviet airspace. At a meeting of the United Nations Security Council later that month, they accused the United States of spying and drafted aresolution to condemn the U-2 flights as aggressive acts and stop them. After sitting through several days of verbal attacks from the Soviets, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, countered by displaying the replica seal and the bug inside for the Security Council and the press as proof that the Soviets were also spying on Americans. The next day, the Soviet resolution wasdefeated 7-2.
As tense and weird as the discovery of The Thing was, George Kennan said that having the listening device in his home also provided some amusement in hindsight. He recalled that when he first moved into Spaso House, he often practiced his Russian by reading aloud to himself in the bugged study. He looked for material that covered events and people relevant to world politics and diplomacy, and the scripts for Voice of America broadcasts, full of “vigorous and eloquent polemics against Soviet policies,” fit the bill.
“I have often wondered what was the effect on my unseen monitors, and on those who read their tapes, when they heard these perfectly phrased anti-Soviet diatribes issuing in purest Russian from what was unquestionably my mouth, in my own study, in the depths of the night,” Kennan wrote. “Who, I wonder, did they think was with me? Or did they conclude I was trying to make fun of them?”
Entomologist Sammy Ramsey was initially scared of bugs as a kid, then read some books and became enthralled for life. (Photo: Julian Vankim)
Sammy Ramsey, 27, an entomologist and Ph.D student at the University of Maryland, didn't grow up with kittens and puppies, or even fish or turtles. All of his pets had exoskeletons and sadly short life spans. Still, if you ask him what bug makes the best companion, his answer comes immediately.
“If you had a permit, I would recommend getting your own little LeRoy―out of everything I’ve ever raised, he’s still my favorite.” LeRoy was Ramsey’s 15-inch-long giant African millipede. In high school, Ramsey would come to school with LeRoy around his neck and wait until people slowly noticed that his necklace was moving, then panic and freak out, and afterwards, become deeply intrigued. Ramsey loved how LeRoy gave him an opportunity to proselytize, to tell people about the wonders of bugs and debunk their fears and misconceptions
“He was a really charming creature,” says Ramsey, noting that LeRoy lived for five, full years. “He was actually really docile, like having a little puppy.”
Sammy Ramsey hanging out and reading with a few of his pet bugs. (Photo: Julian Vankim)
Like any pet, there's a lot to consider with bug ownership—time, money and space being key concerns—and there are trendy pet bugs as much as their are trendy designer dogs. Ramsey's journey began with books, and a lot of trial and error to figure out what kinds of food and living conditions different bugs required (errors oftentimes resulting in dead insects). Since his first pill bugs and earwigs, Ramsey has raised nine different species of praying mantis and several species of millipedes, spiders, and (really huge) stick insects, to name a few. Four giant silk moths currently flutter around his office space.
“Bugs are the most fascinating creatures you’ve ever stepped on in your life,” says Ramsey, who is hard at work studying the massive honeybee die-offs taking place across the globe. He points out that bugs are by far the most dominant organisms on the planet, making up three times the total biomass of human beings.
The giant prickly stick insect offers some great finger cuddling. (Photo: Greg Hume/CC BY-SA 3.0)
These days, you can buy bugs of all shapes and sizes online. The praying mantis has been growing in popularity―the ghost and orchid mantis, for example―as well as different types of tarantula and scorpion. According to Peter Clausen, who runs Bugs in Cyberspace, the most popular bugs tend to be the largest or most fierce looking.
Currently in Japan, beetles such as the stag beetle are so popular that you can find them sold in dollar stores. Be aware, however, that certain bugs are illegal to own in certain places; for example, in New York City, tarantulas, black widows, and other venomous spiders cannot be kept as pets.
Sammy Ramsey with his wandering violin mantis. (Photo: Julian Vankim)
Hollywood has a huge effect on bug demand, says Traci Roach, who handles bug upkeep, packaging, and shipping for Ken the Bug Guy, currently the largest bug supplier in the U.S., according to Roach. When the Harry Potter movies came out, for example, they saw interest in the tailless whip scorpion skyrocket. Nature shows like those on the Discovery network also spike new interest in certain critters, says Roach, while the spread of social media has made a big impact on both the hobby and the business. Roach hopes that it can spread a greater acceptance and awareness of the great diversity of bugs out there.
The brightly colored Gooty ornamental is a popular pet tarantula. (Photo: Søren Rafn/CC BY-SA 3.0)
Roach says that their customers go for the oddball and eye-catching items, such as the Gooty sapphire ornamental tree spider, a metallic blue tarantula native to India. Their store sells at least 200 species of tarantula alone, as well as 40 to 50 types of scorpions, various millipedes and roaches.
All together, Roach takes care of over 100,000 animals in their facility―monitoring moisture levels and feeding each bug a handful of crickets once each week, a painstaking feeding process that takes two people a total of 40 hours. Shipping the bugs involves checking that the critters aren’t missing any legs or otherwise damaged, and slipping them into vials lined with toilet paper which then go in padded boxes. They do overnight and two-day shipping to all 50 states (thought not for beetles―it’s illegal under state law for them to transport them over the Arizona border) and closely monitor outside temperatures. Roach currently has a folder in her email of all the customers waiting for their region to drop below 100 degrees Fahrenheit, so that their bugs can be delivered safely.
Some bugs should just never be shipped, says Ramsey. For a creature like the wandering violin mantis, Ramsey will drive to a halfway location and do a hand-off with the breeder. But not everyone can own a wandering violin mantis―certain creatures require strict government permits. A number of Ramsey’s bugs are technically not pets, but outreach insects which he uses in educational programs through the university.
LeRoy the giant African millipede "had a great life and was loved by all." (Photo: Julian Vankim)
But if you’re not lucky enough to have a giant African millipede permit, Ramsey suggests keeping an herbivore (such as a stick insect), unless you want to regularly spend time capturing stray flies. Predator bugs are very high maintenance, and Ramsey says that feeding them crickets and mealworms is like keeping them on a fast food diet; if you can’t get them the type of insects they would eat in the wild, it’s best not to raise them at all.
If you want to go really low maintenance, Ramsey says your best best would be cockroaches―for example, the Madagascar hissing cockroach, one of the world’s very few auditory insects. They’re communal and friendly, and thus can be kept in the same cage (unlike mantises), which means everyone in your office could have one of their own.
Madagascar hissing cockroaches make for easy going friends. (Photo: Husond/CC-BY-SA-3.0)
To really bond with your bug, though, you have to go beyond the cage. For the most part, Ramsey's beloved LeRoy had a closed cage at night, but during the daytime, Ramsey would let him roam around his room. (Ramsey’s freshman year roommate at Cornell was so terrified of Ramsey’s bugs that he had to live in the RA’s room for most of the first year, though he eventually got over it.) Ramsey would bring back salad from the dining hall (“a little cucumber, green peppers, and pear, and you’ve got yourself a really happy millipede”), and despite ample opportunities, LeRoy never tried to escape, not even to look for a girlfriend.
Everyone in Ramsey’s dorm fell in love with LeRoy, and when LeRoy passed away, they held a viking funeral, putting him in a shoebox with a bunch of his favorite things, lighting it on fire, and pushing it over a waterfall.
Unfortunately for the rest of us, the USDA has since put regulations on ownership of giant African millipedes in its efforts to prevent the damaging of ecosystems by non-native species. Ramsey, however, with his entomologist privileges, has just secured a permit to raise one again, and has been looking for a way to have one imported from Africa.
This is what an entomologist looks like. (Photo: Julian Vankim)
So, if you’re not ready for a dog, cat, or skink, why not consider a bug? You could even keep multiple different species―for, as Ramsey says, it’s easier to see an insect’s personality when you have a lot of them. “I wouldn’t say they would recognize you as a person giving them love,” he says, “but they can recognize you as the person giving them food.”
Of all the far-away exoplanets that NASA has been finding with the Kepler telescope, some of the most important and fascinating are young planets, which can help scientists understand how planets form.
In a new Nature paper, a team of astronomers describes K2-33b, the youngest “fully formed” planet ever discovered. In a second paper, another team of scientists describe a young “hot Jupiter.”
Both planets orbit remarkably close to the their starts. K2-33b is 10 times closer to its star than Mercury is to ours—so close that its orbit is just 5 days long. Its age is estimated to be between 5 and 10 million years, which is nothing, for a planet.
The second young planet is orbiting a star that’s just 2 million years old, and again, it’s remarkably close in. It's so close that it's characterized as a "hot Jupiter"—which is basically what it sounds like, a planet like our Jupiter that's closer to a star and, therefore, hotter.
The mystery of this planet is how it got so close to the star. As the Guardian explains, astronomers have previously thought a planet as big as this one could not form this close to a star—there’s just not enough material. Finding this planet adds evidence to the idea that planets like this one form further out and are pushed closer in.
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.
Sure, Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, the 2011 Broadway musical, might seem like it was the strangest musical adventure involving Peter Parker. It was cursed before it opened, with a notoriously troubled production that saw its performers sustain serious injuries; the most costly price tag in Broadway history; and repeated rewrites do to scathing reviews. After the longest preview period in Broadway history (182 performances), New York Times critic Ben Brantley wondered, "So is this ascent from jaw-dropping badness to mere mediocrity a step upward?"
But that would be ignoring—or perhaps forgetting—the hero's introspective 1970s rock opera, Rock Reflections of A Superhero.
This prog-rock concept album, released in 1975, revisited some of the most important moments in the life of Spider-Man and a few of his memorable villains, all held together with original narration by Stan Lee himself. Covering a wide-variety of musical styles ranging from groovy psychedelic rock, to throwback doo-wop, the album is a little-rememberedgem that continues to stand out as one of the strangest, ambitious bits of comic book ephemera ever made. It's ridiculous, and yet deeply evocative of the Lee-infused style of 1970s Marvel.
To create the record, which was originally released simultaneously on vinyl, cassette, and eight-track, Marvel got together with famous Jim Croce producer, Tommy West and his new recording label, Lifesong Records. For the actual writing and performing of the songs, West’s label enlisted members of virtuosic West Virginia rock band, Crack the Sky, who had just been signed to the label for their first, self-titled album.
Maybe because of this rock-and-roll pedigree, the album as a whole is surprisingly light on super-heroics. It's downright emo. Mainly comprised of songs from the perspective of Peter Parker as he struggles with his dual role as both high-school student Parker, and the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, titles include “Square Boy” and “No One’s Got A Crush On Peter.” To give an idea of the level of rhyming and wordplay on offer in the songs, the webslinger’s origin story is explained by this lyric poem from “Peter Stays and Spider-Man Goes”:
“And a spider’s web / flew through the air. / And it landed on Peter Parker / who didn’t even know it was there.
As Spider-Man I learned about / all those tangled webs we weave. / As Peter, I wanna live my life / and it’s either him or me!”
In the back half of the record, the songs delve into a bit more of Spider-Man’s exploits, devoting an entire song to a nightmare where Dr. Octopus has finally taken over the world. One of the flat-out strangest songs on a pretty strange album, Dr. Octopus’ rallying cry has the villain threatening Marvel heroes from the Avengers to the Silver Surfer, while what sounds like a stadium chorus of henchmen chant his name in the background. “Hey na! Dr. Octa! Dr. Octa-pus!”
As the album subjects get more action-packed, Stan Lee’s narrative interludes also become increasingly purple. Describing the iconic moment from The Amazing Spider-Man #121-122 where Spider-Man was unable to catch Gwen Stacy, he memorably intones, “Play with the fear! Roll it around on your tongue! Savor the fateful, fascinating flavor!” for peak Stan Lee.
Rock Reflections ends on a downbeat ballad called “Time Will Show Me The Way,” that is all about Parker learning to grow past Gwen Stacy’s death. Not exactly the rousing hero’s anthem one might expect from the rock-and-roll adventures of Spider-Man, but a fitting end given the shoegazing nature of the rest of the album.
The album’s artwork was a special treat all its own. Featuring original design work by comic book legend John Romita, the front cover shows Parker standing in front of a mirror that is reflecting Spider-Man in a bit of on-the-nose fictionalization of the album’s themes, but the back cover has a more playful collection of images, showing a bizarre line-up of Marvel heroes who played the backing band. There’s Thor on trumpet! Conan and The Barbarians (a licensed Marvel property at the time) on strings! And The Falcon on “handclapping.”
Somehow this innovative mix of emotion and cross-platform synergy failed to energize the masses. Rock Reflections of a Superhero was only Lifesong's second release in the mid-'70s, and didn't seem to receive much promotion beyond a full page comic book ad that touted the album as, "The Biggest Rock Event of the Decade." This ad was actually produced by a New Jersey comic store who provided the album through their mail order catalog.
But like so many flops, this bit of pop culture esoterica has been slowly collecting an audience online. Very slowly. It was reissued in 2000 for the 25th anniversary of its release, and even 16 years later it still hasn't garnered the kind of rabid cult following that other pop culture orphans like the Star Wars Holiday Special have managed to gain. The album is mainly remembered at irregular intervals when it periodically gets rediscovered by interested music or comic book nerds, before fading back into obscurity. In a way, its forlorn fate is fitting—the album's inability to hold onto any kind of sustained popularity isn't so far removed from Peter Parker's lonely sentiments in the songs.
Beekeepers and police don't normally collaborate, but on Monday, in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, the two became teammates in a bizarre case of bug crime.
The beekeepers, swaddled from head to toe in their protective white gear, navigated a massive swarm of bees escaping from the trunk of a red sedan parked along the road. The bees had been put there intentionally, police said, but no one seems to know why, according to WCVB. The scene was soon thronged by multiple cop cars and ambulances, though luckily, only one person appears to have been stung.
Many neighborhood locals, upon seeing (or hearing) the buzzing cloud of stinging insects, chose to stay cooped up inside—rather like the bees before the trunk was cracked open.
As of now, the mystery of this bungled bee crime remains unsolved. Who hoarded the hives? What were their intentions? Were they planning to unleash a few thousand bees on an unsuspecting foe?
One thing can be said for sure: it's certainly created a buzz.
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Thirty years ago, parasitologist Kostas Mumcuoglu and anthropologist Joseph Zias were examining a first-century hair comb excavated from the West Bank when they found a surprise lurking in its fine teeth: 10 head lice and 27 louse eggs.
With their “interest in lice having been aroused,” they later wrote, they began to look more closely at some other ancient combs that had recently been excavated. To their delight, eight of the 11 combs unearthed in the Judean Desert contained lice, eggs, or both.
The presence of these parasites was a major shake-up. “We had assumed that combs were used almost exclusively for cosmetic purposes,” they wrote in their report. “Now it appears that they were also used as de-lousing implements. Indeed, the combs we examined appear to have been designed specifically for de-lousing.”
Today, lice combs are a cheap, plastic affair, used in conjunction with chemical treatments to rid scalps of the schoolyard scourge. But historically—going all the way back to the Ancient Egyptians—combs incorporating de-lousing designs were used as daily implements.
“Most ancient combs are double-sided and have more teeth on one side than the other,” wrote Mumcuoglu and Zias. “The user would straighten his or her hair with the side that had the fewer teeth and then whisk away lice and louse eggs with the finer and more numerous teeth on the other side of the comb.”
Combs were most commonly made of wood, bone, or ivory, and often incorporated intricate carvings. In the medieval era, scenes of courtly love and Biblical piety were incorporated into the designs. But the double-comb layout, with very fine teeth on one side and sparser teeth on the other, has remained the same since antiquity.
The reason? It does the job so well. “[C]ombs found in archaeological excavations are artistically superior to, and at least as effective as, the ones we use today,” wrote Mumcuoglu and Zias.
In appreciation of the beautiful lice combs of yore, here is a sampling of the more striking designs.
This French wooden comb was made during the 15th century. (Photo: Daderot/Public Domain)
The openwork carvings in the French comb above, which dates to the 15th century, were inspired by Gothic windows. The inscription reads mon avis (meaning "my judgment"). The reverse is inscribed with pour bien ("for your comfort"). These phrases were printed on combs intended to be given as gifts between the intimately acquainted. Because nothing says love like a lice comb.
A French wooden comb from the 16th century. (Photo: Public Domain)
An even more intricately carved design followed in the 16th century.
The 15th-century ivory comb, above, shows, in the words of the Walters Art Museum, "typical pastimes of wealthy nobles." These include dancing in a garden, playing a portable organ, and hunting deer. While most of the comb's original paint has worn off, the gold on the hair of the figures remains intact.
Some medieval combs depicting Biblical scenes had a "liturgical function," meaning they were swiped around the heads of bishops, priests, and kings prior to their ceremonial duties.
An Italian ivory comb from the 15th century. (Photo: Public Domain)
This Italian comb, made circa 1400, depicts the Adoration of the Magi. (Photo: Public Domain)
The ivory comb below, made in England in the 12th century, crams in not one but seven scenes from the Bible.
The V&A Museum, where it is held, notes that the corners depict "The Nativity, The Flight into Egypt, Crucifixion and the Entombment, while the central space—on a larger scale—shows The Washing of the feet of the Disciples, The Last Supper (with only eight apostles) and the Betrayal."
Not pictured are the four more scenes carved into the reverse side of this very intricate lice comb.
