Margaret Abbott, the first American female Olympic champion. (Photo: Public Domain)

The first American woman to win an Olympic gold medal wasn’t aware of what she’d won. In fact, records suggest she went her entire life oblivious to her historic achievement—and if it weren't for one professor's decade of detective work, the story of top prizewinner Margaret Abbott would still be unknown to the world. 

The first modern Olympics took place in 1896. The Frenchman who revived the modern games, Pierre de Coubertin, wanted to restrict them to men in tribute to the ancient Olympic games. However, at the 1900 Paris Olympics, a handful of women managed to sneak or stumble into the competition—22 of them, out of a total 997 athletes. These 22 women competed in five socially acceptable, non-contact sports: tennis, sailing, croquet, equestrianism, and golf—the first and last time that golf appeared at the Olympic Games.

The 1900 Olympics were seen more as a sideshow of the Paris Exhibition, or Exposition Universelle (also referred to as the World’s Fair) than its own independent event. The competitions stretched over six months, took place at shoddy venues lacking proper equipment, and featured some oddities such as tug of war, kite flying, and pigeon racing.

To many, the 1900 Paris Olympics was mostly a sideshow to the World Exposition. (Photo: Public Domain)

Paula Welch, professor emerita at the University of Florida and member of the Olympic Board of Directors, first came upon Margaret Abbott’s name—misspelled Abbot—on a plaque in the McArthur Room at the United States Olympic Committee’s headquarters in New York City. Displayed alongside the names of all of America’s Olympic champions, the plaque listed Abbott as the winner of the ladies’ singles Olympic 1900 golf championship. However, not only had Welch never encountered Abbott’s name before, but she also couldn’t find anybody who knew anything about her.

After finishing her dissertation on American women in the Olympics, Welch, while teaching and coaching full time, spent a full decade tracking down clues about Abbott’s life. After discovering that Abbott had been living in Chicago at the time, Welch pored through old issues of the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun Daily.

Abbott won the Olympic championship on October 4, 1900, so Welch scanned for reports starting on October 1. Going back further, she found that Abbott had begun playing at the Chicago Golf Club in the 1890s, coached by several talented male amateurs. Welch notes that any mention of Abbott’s golfing always showed up in the “Society” section, rather than with the sports reporting.

Paris around the time of the Exposition. (Photo: Alphonse Liébert/Public Domain)

Every time she went to a conference, Welch would go to that city's library and look at newspapers. She looked through the city directories and bluebooks at the Chicago Historical Society and visited the Chicago Golf Club. There was no microfilm for the Chicago Daily, she would have the massive folders of the paper sent to the university, load them into the trunk of her car, and read page after page of things that Abbott did when she was a young woman. “I just looked through, picking up as much as I could, anything that would help me learn more about her,” says Welch.

One golf publication happened to mention a golf trip that Abbott and her husband had taken to St. Augustine, Florida in the 1920s. In an official report issued by Chicagoan A.G. Spalding, the Director of Sports for the United States at the Paris Exposition of 1900, Margaret Abbott was listed as the winner of the women’s golf competition, with Americans Polly Whittier and Hugar Pratt placing second and third.

Women were far too often onlookers, not athletes themselves. (Photo: Library of Congress LC-DIG-hec-30219)

The search didn’t stop with newspaper archives. Welch also ordered Abbott’s death certificate—which is how she learned that Abbott was born in Calcutta, India, before moving to Boston and then Chicago—and tracked down Abbott’s sons. “It was absolutely the most fun, interesting experience,” says Welch. 

Welch knew that one of Abbott’s sons was a screenwriter named Philip Dunne who had attended Harvard, so she wrote to Harvard for Dunne’s address. All of this, Welch points out, took place long before the internet, which meant that after hearing back from Harvard and sending Dunne a letter, she could only sit and hope for a reply.

Once Dunne sent Welch his phone number, she called him up. Partway through the conversation, Welch asked, “Did you realize that your mother won the Olympic golf championship?” He’d had no idea.

The 1900 Olympics featured Tug of War as a competitive event. (Photo: Public Domain)

Abbott was not unique in this—since the 1900 Olympics were so overshadowed by the Paris Exposition, a number of athletes were unaware of the details of what was going on. One wonders, then, how Abbott found herself competing in the Olympics in the first place.

“She showed up,” says Welch. She wasn’t listed as a member of the U.S. Olympic team, but because she was in Paris at the time—on an extended visit to study art, as was common of well-to-do young ladies—and she’d previously competed in the French golf championship, she happened to find out that there was a golf competition going on.

Her mother, Mary Ives Abbott, entered the competition as well—the first and only time in Olympic history that a mother and daughter competed in the same sport in the same event at the same time, says Welch. American women swept first, second, and third place, Abbott earning not a gold medal, but a gilded porcelain bowl, in a nod to the Exposition.

These medallions from the Exposition Universelle looked more like Olympic medals than the prizes most athletes received that year. (Photo: cgb/CC BY-SA 3.0)

Abbott passed away in 1955 seemingly unaware of the milestone she’d set. “I guess we could say that she really was a pioneer and a pathfinder,” says Welch. “It was a great accomplishment, and certainly wasn’t for any award or publicity—but for genuine love of the game in the true era of amateur sport.”

Since Margaret and her mother Mary Abbott began breaking ground in 1900, the number of female athletes has slowly increased; in 1924, over 100 women made up 4.6 percent of the competitors, and in 2012, all participating nations featured female athletes for the first time.

There’s still room to grow, but also room for inspiration—from today’s greats to yesterday’s forgotten champions—Margaret Abbott among them.

An artist's interpretation of ancient Olympia. [Photo: Public Domain]

Much like their modern counterpart, the Olympic Games in ancient Greece wasn't exactly a level playing field for women. It's true that women of all ages were allowed to enjoy the festivities and exhilarating athletic events in cities throughout the Peloponnese states, including Delos and Athens. But the Games in Olympia in the land of Elis—the city where the Olympics originated—retained its traditional, sacred ban of women. Elis decreed that if a married woman (unmarried women could watch) was caught present at the Olympic Games she would be cast down from Mount Typaeum and into the river flowing below, according to Greek geographer and travel writer Pausanias.

During these ancient times, women lived much shorter lives, were excluded from political decision-making and religious rites, and were forced into early marriages after giving birth to several children. Despite the societal inequalities and oppression, women in Greece wanted to play—so they started their own Olympics called the Heraean Games.

“Every fourth year,” Pausanias wrote in 175 A.D., “there is woven for Hera a robe by the Sixteen women, and the same also hold games called Heraea.”

The Heraean Games, a separate festival honoring the Greek goddess Hera, demonstrated the athleticism of young, unmarried women. The athletes, with their hair hanging freely and dressed in special tunics that cut just above the knee and bared their right shoulder and breast, competed in footraces. The track shortened to about one-sixth the length of the men’s was made up in the Olympic Stadium. While women were not allowed to watch the men’s Olympics, it’s uncertain if men were barred from these all-female races.

The ruins of the Temple of Hera in Olympia, Greece. [Photo: Matěj Baťha/CC BY-SA 2.5]

Historians believe this bronze statuette is of a Heraean victor due to the similarities in the costume Pausanias described, while others think the girl is a dancer. [Photo: Public Domain]

The women who won the Heraean races were crowned with headdresses of olives and awarded a portion of the cow that was sacrificed to Hera. Pausanias also wrote that there were statues dedicated to the victors with their names carved on them. However, no statues have ever been found at Olympia, Spears wrote.

There are few records about the individual athletes or the cities that sent women to compete. It’s thought that Spartan girls often ran and won the Heraean games because of the city’s nearby proximity. The only known victor historians have tracked down is the mythical Chloris, a granddaughter of Zeus and a niece of Pelops, who is said to be the first winner of the Heraean Games. There is a statuette in the Vatican that people believe may be Chloris, but the identity has never been proved. Other women have been recognized as Olympian victors including Cynisca, an ambitious woman who entered her horses in the chariot races and became the first female to win at Olympia, wrote Spears.   

Skeptics debate whether the Heraean games were even real because the little evidence that exists is based on a few documented accounts. “If numerous Spartan and other Greek girls won the Heraea over the several centuries, why do we not read about the Heraea until Pausanias?” Schaus and Wenn argue.

"Footraces" at the London 2012 Summer Olympics. [Photo: Aurelien Guichard/CC BY-SA 2.0]

The lack of documentation of the Heraean Games suggests that society saw women’s sport as insignificant, Spears reasoned. “For each vase depicting women in sport-like activities there are many, many more showing men in athletic activities or in palaestra scenes.”

These days, women rule the Olympics. Gymnast Larisa Latynina holds 18 Olympic medals, which is the second highest to be won by a single athlete. Forty-five percent of the 11,520 athletes at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro are women, this year’s games reporting the most women ever. While underappreciated during their time, the first female athletes at the Heraean games set precedence for women Olympians today.

Wild New Caledonian crows possess tool-craft talent https://t.co/Nvk4dC8fTLpic.twitter.com/mAX0ZnmwbL

— BBC Science News (@BBCScienceNews) August 10, 2016

New Caledonian crows, which are native to New Caledonia, an island hundreds of miles off the Eastern coast of Australia, are known to be smart. Years ago, one of them, a crow named Betty, was spotted making a hook out of a twig in order to dig out some food from a log in a laboratory. 

Was Betty particularly smart, or did New Caledonian crows do this all the time? Scientists weren't sure until recently, when they confirmed that, in the wild, the crows make hooks to get food, even in instances when they don't need to, according to the BBC. 

"This crow is widely accepted to be one of the most intelligent birds on Earth," Atlas Obscura wrote last year. "Very rare for any animal, it can make tools out of materials it’s never seen before and would likely never see in the wild, like bending metal wire into shapes to retrieve food, and it’s also capable of using tools to retrieve other tools."

The birds, in other words, are crafting tools spontaneously. They are the only non-primate species able to both create new tools and uses for the tools, and also to teach their peers how to use them.

In 2002, Betty's original tool was the first time such behavior had been observed in the animal kingdom, though the latest study, published in Open Science, suggests the crows been doing it for a long time in the wild as well. The researchers observed the New Caledonian crows "snapping thin branches off of the shrubs, holding the twigs down with a foot, then bending the end into a hook—just as Betty had done with the wire," according to the BBC. 

Which means that humans aren't the only animals willing to do almost anything just to get some food. 

Left, a common garter snake and right, a rough-skinned newt. (Photos, from left: Sharon Day/shutterstock.com; Yuval Helfman/shutterstock.com)

On the West Coast, newts and snakes are locked in an arms race—a tit-for-tat battle of adaptations for better weapons in the former and stronger defenses in the latter. It’s a textbook example of coevolution, and it came to light because of an urban legend. 

Three friends, the story goes, went hunting in the Oregon Coast Range one weekend and never came home. Police later found them dead at their campsite with no signs of violence or struggle. They also found a fourth body: a rough-skinned newt (Taricha granulosa) that had been accidentally boiled with the water used to make a pot of coffee.

Edmund “Butch” Brodie Jr. first heard about the mysterious deaths in the 1960s as an undergraduate at Western Oregon University. He’d gone to his biology professor looking for a research project to work on, and the professor told him the tale—which he’d heard growing up—and suggested Brodie look into whether or not the newts were poisonous.

A rough-skinned newt in Oregon. (Photo: Elias Gayles/CC BY 2.0)

Brodie quickly showed that they were, and very much so. After trapping newts in buckets, he ground their skin with a mortar and pestle, mixed it with water, and injected or force-fed a variety of animals with different concentrations. His first subject, a house mouse, died in his hands before he could even put it back in its cage, and he found that even just a tiny amount of newt skin—0.0002 ml—could kill a mouse within minutes.

He tested more than two dozen species—reptiles, birds, amphibians, and mammals that were potential newt predators. All of them showed similar symptoms of poisoning, like muscular weakness, vomiting and paralysis. Most of them died, as well.

The poison at work, other scientists discovered, wastetrodotoxin, or TTX, a neurotoxin also found in pufferfish and familiar to some people as the poison that nearly didHomer Simpson in. It’s 1,000 times more toxic by weight than cyanide. Based on the doses that killed the other animals, if the newt in the coffee pot did indeed kill the hunters (which seemed almost obvious at this point) it had enough TTX in it to kill around 100 more. This led Brodie to another question: The newts’ largest natural predators are raccoons and coyotes, so why would they pack enough poison to kill a bigger animal 100 times over?

A close-up of a common garter snake, or Thamnophis sirtalis. (Photo: SDeming/shutterstock.com)

To find out, Brodie had to get a little uncomfortable. Brodie’s son and frequent research partnerEdmund IIIdescribes his dad as “mildly ophidiophobic” and not pleased with the fact that he often found “big ugly” common garter snakes in his newt traps. The snakes (Thamnophis sirtalis) usually sprang from the buckets as Brodie approached and darted past him, but one day he caught one in the act of eating one of his newts and showing no ill effects.

Brodie started collecting garter snakes and subjecting them to the battery of TTX doses he’d given the other animals, and got much different results. The snakes resisted the toxic wallop. Some snakes, the younger Brodie says, were unaffected by TTX concentrations that were thousands of times higher than those that would harm people. They couldn’t even quantify the resistance of other snakes because they couldn’t get their hands on enough TTX to make an impact.

A predator with that kind of resistance to TTX would explain, and indeed select for, the evolution of the newt’s toxic overkill. Over the last few decades, the Brodies—the older focusing on the newts and the younger on the snakes—and a string of collaborators have documented the battle between the two animals. They’veshown how the two species evolve in response to each other in a coevolutionary arms race.

The newt's skin contains tetrodotoxin, which is lethal when ingested. (Photo: Peter Pearsall/USFWS - Pacific Region/CC BY 2.0)

The snake’s resistance to the poison drives increasing toxicity in the newts, and that new potency drives increased resistance in the snakes, which drives the newts to become even more toxic, which…you get the picture. The scientists have alsouncovered the adaptations that allow the snakes to resist TTX and chow down on newts that can kill animals hundreds of times their size. To protect their babies from predators, newts even put TTX in their eggs.

With their latestdiscovery, they show that one of the arms used in the arms race predates the conflict—and even the creatures that are fighting it. The snakes can resist TTX because they’ve altered the shapes of their sodium channels, proteins that form pores on the surfaces of cells. This keeps the toxin from jamming the channels up and interfering with the cells’ functions. One channel-changing mutation is relatively new, and only found in some populations of garter snakes that eat the newts. Two others, though, are much older and more widespread. These altered channels provide some TTX resistance to all common garter snakes, evolutionary biologistJoel McGlothlindiscovered, even those that have never been anywhere near a toxic newt.

To find out just when the snakes gained those resistance mutations, McGlothlin, the Brodies and their team recentlysequenced the genes that encode the sodium channels in 78 snake species and a handful of other reptiles, figured out what kind of protection the different versions provide, and mapped them on the snakes’ evolutionary family tree. They found that a mutation that makes a channel on nerve cells resistant to tetrodotoxin was inherited by all snakes from their common ancestor.

A rough-skinned newt peeking out of some water in Oregon. (Photo: Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife/CC BY-SA 2.0)

They also found it in a lizard, suggesting that it originated in a common ancestor of snakes and lizards—likely for reasons having nothing to do with poisons—around 170 million years ago. That was well before the origin of either snakes or newts, which evolved around 140 million years ago and 50 million years ago, respectively. When snakes branched off from lizards, by happy accident they were partially resistant to TTX right from the get-go, prepared to eat toxic prey that had yet to evolve, and primed to develop stronger resistance.

The snake-newt arms race was set into motion before the two combatants even existed. From there, it was just a matter of a slightly toxic newt and a slightly resistant snake crossing paths a few million years later to really get the race ramped up. The original, ancient resistance mutation facilitated new ones. Resistance in a second nerve channel arose in a few snake lineages right around the time newts evolved. Later, more extreme resistance developed with changes to a channel found on muscle cells.

The whole situation—cartoonishly toxic newts that can ruin a hunting trip and snakes with a suite of resistance mutations—started millions of years ago with a mutation to a protein in the snakes’ ancient ancestor. It’s an example, the researchers say, of a historical quirk opening up novel evolutionary pathways. Which is only fitting, since a story about dead hunters and a boiled newt opened up the path to all these discoveries.

A hand axe with rhino all over it. (Photo: April Nowell)

When April Nowell, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Victoria, sent off a stone tool for protein residue analysis, she didn’t expect to find anything. The stone tools she and her colleagues had uncovered in Jordan were 250,000 years old, and it seemed impossible that any of evidence of animal tissue would still be there.

But the results came back positive: the test had found the residue of a horse on the stone tool.

Powell immediately sent off dozens more tools to be checked, and 17 came back positive. The tools still had traces of the blood and tissue of ducks, camels, cattle and rhinos on them.

Before these bloody hand axes, the oldest sample of protein residue ever found was 11,500 years old, which makes this result all the more surprising. The animal tissue residue was preserved all those years in microfissures in the tools.

There’s still a mystery to solve, too. The test didn’t identify all the proteins that were present on the tools. Nowell is now working on developing a test to identify those mysterious residues, she told the CBC. She thinks they could have come from elephants or ostriches.

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. 

Spy vs. Spy cover by Peter Kuper. (Photo: Courtesy of Peter Kuper/Spy vs Spy © E.C. Publications Inc.)

One of the greatest rivalries of all time has been raging since 1961 between two figures who don’t even have real names.

The pro/antagonists of the long-running gag strip Spy vs. Spy have been trying to one-up each other for decades, and it’s all thanks to a Cuban expatriate who was once accused of being a spy himself.

The creator of Spy vs Spy, Antonio Prohías, had already enjoyed a successful career as an illustrator in his native Cuba before he created the legendary strip. Born in Cienfuego, Cuba in 1921, Prohías picked up illustration at an early age thanks to a sympathetic teacher, then went on to study briefly at Havana’s San Alejandro Academy before leaving after a year to become a full-time newspaper illustrator. After working his way up through some smaller publications, and receiving a number of awards for his editorial cartoons— including Cuba’s highest newspaper honor, the  Juan Gualberto Gomez medal—Prohías achieved national fame while working for Cuba’s (at the time) largest newspaper, El Mundo, beginning at the end of the 1940s.

His style was defined by clear, bold lines, and exaggerated comic forms which would eventually evolve into the characters of Spy vs. Spy. Award-winning artist Peter Kuper, who currently creates Spy vs. Spy for MAD Magazine described the spies, saying, “They have this very strange look to them, that I’m now used to, but their shape is so odd.” Kuper, a lifelong political illustrator and author, whose latest book, Ruins, recently won the Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album, took over Spy vs. Spy duties in 1997. “Which is kind of wonderful because they create this surreal universe just by their appearance.”

From Spy vs. Spy: The Complete Casebook (Watson-Guptill, 2001/Spy vs Spy © E.C. Publications Inc.)

Back in Cuba, years before he he would make the Black and White spies (and later the female, Grey Spy), Prohías created a number of popular characters, which he used to comment on both the government, and life in the country. His most famous creation prior to Spy vs. Spy was a comedically vicious character known as El Hombre Siniestro. This agent of chaos, in his wide-brimmed hat and exaggerated snout, was an early, more grim, iteration of the spies. The “ Sinister Man” took part in a series of wordless capers where he rained down hilarious misfortune on unlucky passersby. While many of the gag strips weren’t outwardly political, in a quote recounted in the introduction to Spy vs Spy: The Complete Casebook, Prohías described the character as being, “born out of the national psychosis of the Cuban people.”

By 1959, Prohías was not only enjoying a successful run at El Mundo, as well as in magazines including the political Bohemia, but he had also become the president of the Cuban Cartoonists Association, making him possibly the most famous cartoonist in Cuba.

Prohías’ cartoons did not escape the notice of the government itself. Many of Prohías’ cartoons had an anti-Batista bent before the Cuban Revolution in 1959, so Fidel Castro initially welcomed him. In Prohías' New York Times obituary, the paper notes that Castro himself handed him a cartoon of the year award.

The artist soon became fed up with Castro’s strong arm policies regarding the press and many of Prohías’ cartoons started taking aim at Castro. “He was attacking any form of hypocrisy, and no doubt there was some hypocrisy going on with Castro as well as with Batista,” says Kuper. Once the Castro regime got wind of Prohías’ satirical attacks, it began to filter down that Prohías was thought to be working with the CIA, and he was labeled a spy. He began being fired from many of the publications he worked for, and in May 1960, he’d had enough. Unable to continue finding work, and fearing for the safety of his fellow El Mundo workers, Prohías, unable to speak a word of English, headed for New York.

From Spy vs. Spy: The Complete Casebook (Watson-Guptill, 2001/Spy vs Spy © E.C. Publications Inc.)

In New York, Prohías took work in a factory during the day, while working up his illustration portfolio at night. Taking inspiration from his supposed spy status, Prohías altered the look of El Hombre Siniestro, and gave him a counterpart, creating what we now know as Spy vs. Spy. In 1960, just months after moving to the city, Prohías, along with his daughter Marta who acted as an interpreter, walked unannounced into the offices of MAD Magazine. The editors were skeptical of the artist, but his silly spy gags won them over, and he had sold three of the strips to the magazine before leaving that day.

From that initial meeting on, Prohías’ Spy vs. Spy cartoons became a fixture in the magazine, the pointy-nosed Black Spy and White Spy, getting the better of one another in some outlandish way or another, every few months. Most of the jokes were simple turns of fate, a button meant to blow up the White Spy would blow up the Black Spy instead, etc, but through them all, there was an underlying subversiveness. “He really did something original with Spy vs. Spy, that was a comment on the bigger world of the Cold War, and the futility of war,” says Kuper. “He made it a very, very flexible strip, that had political commentary in it, or could sometimes just be surreal. And always come back to the basic futility of war.” Based on the simple, but strong foundation of two spies who can never truly win, Prohías went on to create the cartoons for decades, both as published in MAD, and in separate books where he could experiment with longer narratives.

All throughout, Prohías kept his cartoons wordless, a fact that Kuper believes was a key part of their success. “You can be preliterate, and get them. That’s one of the powers of why Spy vs. Spy is so popular in MAD. It’s the first thing everyone looks at. You read it before you even intended to. It was a brilliant choice on Prohías’ part to do a wordless comic.” That same use of wordless humor that had benefitted Prohías in Cuba was just as effective, if not more, in the U.S. “It’s no doubt [also] because he spoke Spanish. He would have had to deal with translating his work.”

One of Kuper's latter day Spy vs. Spy strips. (Photo: Courtesy of Peter Kuper/Spy vs Spy © E.C. Publications Inc.) 

Despite its seeming simplicity, Spy vs. Spy became a phenomenon, inspiring video games, cartoons, a board game, commercials, toys, and more. Prohías would continue creating Spy vs. Spy comics until the late 1980s, when he retired due to poor health. However his iconic spies lived on. The strip was taken over for a time by MAD mainstays Duck Edwing and Bob Clarke, before finally being taken over by Kuper in 1997. “I had done a fair amount of wordless comics and the people at MAD saw that and asked me if I wanted to try out for it, and I almost said no immediately,” says Kuper, who quickly rethought his stance. “When I sat down to work with it, I realized rather quickly what an important influence it had been on my own work over the years. MAD certainly, in general, but how I had really focused on Spy vs. Spy. It’s probably one of the reasons I did wordless comics.”

Prohías passed away in 1998. He was living comfortably in Florida, and still spoke next to no English. Unfortunately Kuper never got to meet Prohías, but he keeps working on the cartoon, which he describes nowadays as “more Road Runner than it is Kennedy and Khruschev.”

This is not to say that Kuper has lost the political edge that Prohías embedded in the strip. In fact, in addition to the open-endedness of the gags and characters, it is part of what Kuper finds most appealing about the comic. “The parameters are so wide in the way he created the strip. I’ve added to the line-up, I’ve made them cavemen. I can put them in outer space, or I can have them doing very mundane things,” he says. “Unfortunately we keep developing new, insane weaponry, so I have new things to pick up.” The Black and White Spies keep killing each other, but Spy vs. Spy may never die. 

Norwegian shipwreck from 1916 uncovered at Blakeney as sands shift https://t.co/qCDraHRNeC

— carole (@Carolewhy) August 11, 2016

As the sands off the coast of Blakeney Harbour in Norfolk, England continue to shift under the passing tides, a century old shipwreck is slowly being unveiled. According to the Eastern Daily Press, the haunting ghost (more like a zombie) ship is beginning to interfere with shipping traffic in the area.

The 976-ton SS Hjordis wrecked in 1916, while transporting a shipment of coal. The disaster cost the lives of ten crew members, and the ship ran aground near the entrance to Blakeney Harbour, in the same spot it still sits today. The wreck was eventually completely swallowed by the tides and sand, but as the channel entrance to the harbour shifts, it has once again been unearthed.

As seen in some recent drone photography, the creepy wreck now sits smack in the middle of the harbour channel, which has moved over half a mile to the east over the past year, as the sandy seabed repositioned itself. Locals have taken to posting buoys around the wreckage so that incoming ships can steer clear of the wreck, but given how quickly the tides are shifting the channel, it is somewhat tough to keep up with. However, this also means that the wreck of the Hjordis will not lay in the entrance of the bay forever. Eventually, it will get swallowed up by the sands once again.

Lit toilet paper sparks forest fire in Spain https://t.co/05sNHU0cfjpic.twitter.com/9u2IPQS0n9

— Sky News Australia (@SkyNewsAust) August 7, 2016

Last week, an expat living in La Palma, one of Spain's Canary Islands, was taking a walk past a forest reserve when nature called. The man was carrying toilet paper, and he used it. Attempting to be extra fastidious, he then lit the toilet paper on fire.

Then he watched, presumably horrified, as the toilet paper began to light the whole forest on fire. "Sparks from the burning toilet paper caught dry vegetation," explained a source from the ensuing investigation, according to the Local. Within days, the island was ablaze.

Everyone makes small, bad decisions, but this one has had truly horrific consequences. As of Tuesday, about 7% of La Palma had been burned, the Associated Press reports. Hundreds of thousands of acres of forest have been consumed by the blaze, and thousands were evacuated from their homes. At least one person has died, and yesterday, a firefighting helicopter crashed into the side of a mountain. 

The fire is now under control, but recent reports say it's still burning. Campers, pack out your toilet paper. Entire islands will thank you.

Swimming at the 1904 Olympics. (Photo: Public domain)

On April 20, 1844, two men from North America jumped into the Bath in High Holborn, a 130-foot pool in London. They were there to show how fast they could go.

The British Swimming Society had invited the two men, Wenishkaweabee and Sahma, Ojibwe people from Canada, to compete against each other for a silver medal. Both times that the two swimmers raced the length of the pool, Wenishkaweabee won; in the first race, he was seven feet ahead. But the contest between the two men was less significant than the speed with which they both crossed the pool, in under 30 seconds.

Far from being wowed by this very impressive time, though, the British press found the two swimmers’ movements “grotesque.” The Ojibwe men hit the water “violently,” one paper reported, with their arms thrashing, “like the sails of a windmill,” as they “beat downward with their feet.”

The real contest that day was not between the two swimmers, but between their style of swimming—what we now call front crawl, or freestyle—and the breaststroke favored by the British.

There’s no clear beginning to the history of swimming: art going back millennia shows people moving through the water. But from the earliest representations of swimming, there has been a clear contest between two major swimming strokes. Either people are doing a dog-style paddle or the front crawl.

Why haven't they invented a new swimming stroke yet it's 2016 and we know so much more about the human body

— jay caspian kang (@jaycaspiankang) August 10, 2016

Today, there are just four competitive swim strokes—breaststroke, front crawl, back stroke, and butterfly. In the past, swimmers sometimes used sidestroke to race, too. Although the breaststroke and front crawl have probably been around since prehistoric times, they are changing as elite athletes and their coaches study how bodies move through the water.

"The breaststroke and the freestyle that you see today are different than 100 years ago," says George Edelman, a physical therapist, who's worked with the USA Swimming Sports Medicine and Science Network for 16 years.

Breaststroke, in particular, keeps being refined. The butterfly stroke was originally an innovation in breaststroke, and earlier in the 20th century, breaststroke swimmers tried to spend as much time as possible under the surface of the water, before competitive rules were changed to require the swimmer's head to poke out of the water periodically. More recently, says Edelman, breaststroke swimmers figured out how to swim higher in the water, reducing drag. 

But in essence these strokes have stayed the same. The task of a swimmer is twofold—maximize propulsion forward, minimize drag against the body—and while tweaks in design can improve efficiency on the margins, there are a limited number of ways to send the human body quickly through water.

Just as cars retain more or less the same, most efficient aerodynamic shape, so do swim strokes. Humans' breaststroke is essentially just a refinement of the basic survival paddle that we learned from animals—it keeps your body moving and your head above water. Front crawl, though, is designed to move fast.

Swimming in the 19th century. (Image: Le Supreme Bon Ton/Public domain)

When using a front crawl stroke, a swimmer constantly has one arm pulling against the water, propelling the body forward. Most of the forward motion comes from that work in the arms, but a freestyle swimmer can kick constantly, too. The swimmer is buoyant on the surface of the water and their body streamlined—limbs and torso stay in one straight line.

Breaststroke, by contrast, is wide. The swimmer’s hips are dropped lower into the water, and the arms move not just forward but out, on a horizontal plane. The kick, too, brings the swimmer’s thighs forwards, increasing the surface area of the body that’s moving against the water. All that adds up to increased drag—and slower movement.

Plus, in an efficient breaststroke, the swimmer is neither constantly pulling nor constantly kicking. "It’s pull, kick, pull, kick," says Edelman. The nature and mechanics of the stroke make it slower.

One of the earliest depictions of Europeans swimming, found in Greece, shows the breaststroke. But by 500 B.C. or so, artistic images of swimming indicate that Greek people had learned to front crawl. By the 19th century, though, Europeans had lost that skill.

The British were just starting to swim for sport, using the breaststroke, backstroke, and sidestroke, and they were amazed at reports coming from around the world of people in the Americas and the South Pacific moving quickly through the water using an entirely different technique. 

Swimming at the 1900 Olympics. (Photo: Public domain)

In 1844, the British were not ready to admit that an “un-European” style of swimming could beat theirs. After the second race between Wenishkaweabee and Sahma, a British competitor, Harold Kenworthy, challenged them to another race, the third in 10 minutes. He won—but probably only because his competitors were tired out.

By the end of the century, the British had learned that the front crawl was faster, although they would only accept the lesson from one of their own. In 1875, a British swimmer named John Arthur Trudgen took the prize for the 100-yard race in a major British swimming competition, using a stroke that combined the arm movements of the front crawl with the frog kick of the breaststroke. He had learned to swim in Brazil, and he combined the speed of the front crawl’s arm movements with the accepted kicking style. His stroke was less “un-European,” and his time to cover 100 yards was 1 minute and 16 seconds.

Today, top freestyle swimmers can cover 100 meters in about 47 seconds. The world record time for the breaststroke, set at the Rio Olympics by the British swimmer Adam Peaty, is 57.13 seconds. The question of which stroke was faster might have been settled all the way back in 1844 if British people were less blinded by their own cultural norms, but now there’s no doubt: if you want to go faster, front crawl.

In honor of Rivals Week this week, here are five relics of the bloodiest family feuds in the Atlas.

Tewksbury vs. Graham - Flying V Cabin of John Tewksbury

PHOENIX, ARIZONA

The Flying V Cabin of John Tewksbury, Sr. (Photo: Marine 69-71 / Wikipedia)

There was very little pleasant about the Pleasant Valley War. The Tewksbury-Graham family feud started like so many others before it. Two neighbors, friends at first, slowly fell into a dispute. It was family patriarch John Tewksbury Sr., who lived in the above cabin, who invited his friend Tom Graham out to Arizona to begin ranching. Soon however, even the vast expanse of the Southwest began to feel cramped. Both families started accusing the other of stealing horses and cattle. The accusations soon turned to arrest warrants. 

In 1885 a Basque sheepherder working for the Tewksbury family was killed by a member of the Graham clan and suddenly the entire valley exploded. For the next three years it was all out war involving multiple other ranchers, hired hands, and the investors of both rancher families. A group of cowboys called the "Hashknife outfit" got involved. They were known as the "thievinist, fightinest bunch of cowboys” in the U.S. People were beheaded, ranches were burned to the ground, an assassin was hired, and lynchings, murders, and shootouts became commonplace. The feud played like a super-cut of spaghetti Westerns climaxes.

The war lasted six years and had the largest death toll of any family feud in US history. By the end of the battle nearly every male in both families, save a single remaining Tewksbury son, was dead.

The Regulators vs. Moderators - Centennial Marker

SHELBYVILLE, TEXAS

In 1839 when Texas was still its own Republic, on its border with Louisiana, in a lawless patch of land, all hell broke loose. In Shelby County, a small memorial marker tells the tale.

Running along the western edge of Louisiana and eastern edge of Texas was a strip of land that no country claimed. Known as the No Man's Land of Louisiana, for fifteen years from 1806 to 1821 it was outside the legal jurisdiction of any country due to a disagreement over the borders of the Louisiana Purchase. Criminals, political refugees, swindlers, deserters, and exiles of all stripes flocked to the no man's land. In 1821 the border was settled but the land was still lawless. 

The "Regulators" formed to regulate these illegal activities. The "Moderators" did not care to be regulated and sought to moderate the Regulators into an early grave. It was such a mess that president of the Republic of Texas Sam Houston thought that perhaps it would be best to just to stay out of it and let the area descend into all out warfare. As he put it "I think it advisable to declare Shelby County, Tenaha, and Terrapin Neck free and independent governments, and let them fight it out." Ultimately the two sides were forced to disband but by the end of the Regulator-Moderator War over 40 people had been killed.

Three years after the supposed settlement of the war, a moderator invited a number regulators to his daughter's wedding as a peace offering. He had poisoned the wedding punch which sickened 60 and killed 10. The poisoner was lynched. So much for the truce.

Wyatt Earp & Doc Holiday vs. Cowboys - Graves of Earp and Holiday

COLMA, CALIFORNIA & GLENWOOD SPRINGS, COLORADO

Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday took part in what is perhaps the most famous feud-driven gunfight of all time, the infamous Gunfight at O.K. Corral.

Despite it's fame, the fight only lasted a total of 30 seconds and did not in fact take place in the O.K. Corral but instead on the side of a photographic studio about six doors down. However, within that 30 seconds nearly 30 shots were fired by gunmen as close as six feet away from each other. The feud that produced the famous gunfight was extremely complex, but can largely be boiled down to the Earp family and Doc Holiday vs. all cowboys. Following the gunfight, which left cowboys Tom McLaury, Frank McLaury and Billy Clanton dead, the feud simmered on, and the Earp brothers were attacked a few days later, with one maimed and the other killed. 

Despite being such towering figures in Western mythology and both having been involved in numerous gunfights and disputes, they both died peacefully. Doc Holliday died of tuberculosis in a Glenwood Springs sanitarium and Earp died at the age of 81 with his wife Josie Marcus at his side. They also remained friends throughout their lives. Earp had this to say about Holliday:

"Doc was a dentist not a lawman or an assassin, whom necessity had made a gambler; a gentleman whom disease had made a frontier vagabond; a philosopher whom life had made a caustic wit; a long lean ash-blond fellow nearly dead with consumption, and at the same time the most skillful gambler and the nerviest, speediest, deadliest man with a six-gun that I ever knew."

Capone vs. Moran - St. Valentine's Day Massacre Wall

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

Mob Museum (Photo: Atlas Obscura / Rachel James.)

The snare that brought the bloody feud between two Chicago mobster titans to a head turned out to be quite simple. Step one: Invite the North Side Gang out in their Valentine's Day best. Step two: Line them up against a wall like sitting ducks. Step three: Pull the trigger and hold it down. 

The 1929 massacre of seven members of the North Side Gang horrified the nation with its brutality and careful execution. Bugs Moran of the North Side Gang and Al Capone of the South Side Italians had been trying to bump each other off for years, fighting over turf, dog tracks, and hooch, and the community was in constant fear of getting caught in the crossfire. It seemed both men were untouchable, but a failed assassination attempt by Bugs on a Capone mobster named Jack "Machine Gun" McGurn proved to be a fatal mistake, one that in retrospect seems obvious—if you shoot at someone named "Machine Gun" you'd better make sure he's dead.

The details are disputed by historians and gangster enthusiasts, but the essential story is that seven men, dressed to the nines, entered the warehouse to do some business. The next thing they knew, a police car had appeared and two coppers had pulled their weapons and told the gangsters to face the brick wall, with their hands up. The men, thinking this was a routine shakedown by the fuzz, did as they were told and turned their backs to the gunmen, hands in the air. Like fish in a barrel, a sizable chunk of the North Side gang was then mowed down by four (some say five) gunmen when the "police" opened fire, and were joined by their plain-clothed co-conspirators. After slaughtering their enemies in an extravagant volley of bullets, the "police" walked their fellow gunmen out to the stolen patrol car at gunpoint, leaving gawking citizens with the impression that two crooks had just been taken off of the streets by the boys in blue, completely unaware of the carnage left behind.

What appeared to be a seamless plan went off without a hitch, except for one thing – Bugs was not among the men now piled in a bloody heap at the foot of the brick wall. Running late, Bugs had seen the police car and turned back, assuming a sting was going down. The lookout who had given the go-ahead had confused one of Bugs' men, Albert Weinshank, for the mob boss, who shared a similar build. Today the wall itself can be seen in the Mob Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada 

Joe Gallo vs. The Colombo Family - Site of Joe Gallo's 1950 Headquarters

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

Gallo HQ (Photo: Unknown / Wikipedia)

When the docks are full of opportunities to make a buck, why let one mob boss reap all the riches?

This was the question asked by a group of Gallo brothers and local thugs working for Brooklyn’s waterfront crime circuit in the 1960’s. As the Gallo brothers ambitions grew, they tried to strike out on their own to terrible effect. It was in his house in Red Hook, Brooklyn that Joe Gallo lived with his pet lion and a stockpile of arms, and it was from here that he lead his brothers in an all-out war against mobster Joe Profaci.

After working for Profaci’s rackets for several years, Gallo's gang elected to kidnap his sister to show they were serious about breaking away from his influence to start their own extortion operation. This was the first of many plans by the brazen Gallo lot which backfired. To retaliate for the kidnapping of his sister, Profaci’s thugs attempted to strangle Larry Gallo and Joseph Magnasco of the Gallo gang was shot and killed in the encounter. The next year saw 12 more casualties, dozens more attempted assassinations and well over 100 arrests in the first open gang war in Brooklyn since the famous 1931 Castellammarese War.

The war ground to a halt in 1961 when Joe Gallo was convicted of conspiracy and extortion. After his release, he was gunned down in a Little Italy restaurant while celebrating his 43rd birthday. Though the local Catholic church refused to perform an official service, Gallo was laid to rest in Green-wood cemetery. A sort of mafia folk hero, Bob Dylan’s song “Joey” was inspired by Joseph Gallo’s death. "I never considered him a gangster. I always considered him some kind of hero...An underdog fighting against the elements," Dylan once said of him. 

In 1975, while trying to replace a sewer line, a cave-in killed a city worker and forced the city to demolish 33 buildings, including Joe Gallo's old haunt. Today, what remains on the site is simply the memory of a young, ruthless and ultimately foolhardy mafioso.

David Blaine suspended in a box by the Thames, London, in 2003. (Photo: james.spector/CC BY 2.0)

On September 5, 2003, magician David Blaine stepped into a clear acrylic box and was hoisted into position above the Thames River. There he would dangle for 44 days, in full view of passersby. He would eat nothing. He would drink only water. In the course of his ordeal, he was taunted by onlookers who hurled rotten eggs and hamburger patties at his transparent prison.

Others blew horns and beat drums to keep him awake at all hours; a radio DJ named Bam Bam exhorted listeners to shout his show's "ring-a-ding" jingle from Tower Bridge nonstop for 24 hours. Specialists looked for the hoax: surely, Blaine's water was supplemented with glucose or thiamin and other nutrients. Maybe he had a double. Maybe he was a hologram. Even after Blaine emerged from the box, thin and shaking, doubts remained.

Hunger artists were once a type of sideshow performer as well-known as sword swallowers, horse divers, and snake charmers. By the late 1800s, they were prevalent enough to inspire category splitting along the lines of mods-versus-rockers. Hunger artists weren't human skeletons—people who ate but looked like they didn’t. Nor were they "fasting girls"— young women who claimed not to need food thanks to prayer or fairies—or ascetics seeking spiritual enlightenment through deprivation. Instead, they were men (almost exclusively) who went without food for weeks at a time to prove it could be done.

Henry S Tanner, before (left) and after (right) his 40 day fast in 1880. (Photo: Wellcome Images, London/cropped/CC BY 4.0)

Public fasting was very much an endurance sport that demonstrated physical prowess, kind of the inverse of weight lifting. That's part of why it was thought of as a manly thing to do. It had a lot of similarities with extreme long distance running; the marathon is, after all, based on a legend in which Pheidippides collapses to the ground and dies immediately after running such a long distance.

The hunger artists’ heyday coincided with the Victorian fad for mountaineering and a half dozen attempts to launch the modern Olympics; all three blossomed during an extended European and North American peacetime when newspapers were eager to fill their pages with new feats of strength and persistence, piped in through newfangled telegraph machines.

When Henry Tanner performed a 40-day fast in New York in 1880, under the supervision of the U.S. Medical College, spectators were admitted for 25 cents a ticket, the 2016 equivalent of about $6. They came in throngs, spurred by breathless newspaper coverage, to watch Tanner in his rocking chair, mopping his face with damp cloths that were sometimes inspected to ensure they didn't secretly contain soup. Those who couldn't attend sent 300 to 500 pieces of fan mail a day.

On the final day of the fast, admission was raised to 50 cents a ticket, for a box office take estimated at $2,000 ($44,000 in today's dollars); Tanner also received a $1,000 reward from William Hammond, a former U.S. Surgeon General convinced that surviving more than 30 days without food was impossible. After his 40-day fast, Tanner went on to open a successful health clinic in southern California, where he mentored other fasters pursuing both medical and performative excellence. 

Giovanni Succi being examined by physicians after his 30 day fast. (Photo: Internet Archive/Public Domain)

Tanner wasn't even the highest achiever in the field. That honor belonged to Italian superstar Giovanni Succi, probably the most direct inspiration for Franz Kafka's short story "A Hunger Artist," which many modern readers presume to be an allegory along the same lines as the cockroach in The Metamorphosis. But Succi was perhaps even stranger than his fictional counterpart: His fasting career began at the age of 32, and included more than 30 public fasts in the space of 20 years—five of them in 1888 alone.

Although today Succi is better remembered for his collaborations with physiologist Luigi Luciani, which established a lot of what we know about the physiology of starvation and its effects on the central nervous system, his contemporaries viewed him as more of a wildly eccentric pop star. Succi's most rational explanation for his obsession with fasting was that he'd suffered from liver disease which had made him temporarily unable to eat, and had been fascinated to discover how long he could go without food. However, he also sometimes claimed to have the spirit of a reincarnated lion and access to magical potions. He was committed to two mental institutions, but given the public appetite for starvation art, it was hard to claim there was anything wrong with him. He was released without diagnosis.

He drew crowds across Europe and America, who he regaled with stories of his days as a commercial trader and traveler in Africa—a way to pass the time during increasingly lengthy fasts: first 30 days, then 50, then 66 days long. To further demonstrate his vivacity, he added horseback rides, gymnastic exercises, and fencing bouts mid-fast. In 1907, when the first cinema in Bologna opened its doors, Succi was there in the lobby, fasting in a glass cage, his entertainment value a surer thing than newfangled moving pictures.

A newspaper article about British suffragette Marion Wallace Dunlop who went on hunger strike in prison. (Photo: Arizona State Library/Public Domain)

Public interest in hunger artists tapered off once the 20th century got underway. As with any multi-decade fad, it's hard to point to a single terminating factor, but it's probably not a coincidence that in 1909, imprisoned British suffragette Marion Wallace Dunlop went on hunger strike. This tool of political protest was quickly adopted by other suffragettes in both Britain and the United States, to the outrage of both governments, and spread to Irish Republicans.

In the face of these widely-reported battles against political repression and force-feeding, not to mention anti-imperialist protest fasts by Mohandas Gandhi and other Indian revolutionaries throughout the 1920s and ‘30s, it was hard to view aimless displays of extended starvation as light amusements. (Indeed, when David Blaine embarked on his 2003 stunt, he was criticized for his insensitivity to the families of Irish hunger strikers.)

By the 1920s, the remaining hunger artists were less like sideshow performers and more of a footnote to a record-setting mania that included flagpole sitters and dance marathons. In 1926, a German who billed himself as "Herr Jolly" made $35,000 from 300,000 observers as he completed a "record-breaking" 44-day fast in a traditional glass cage, but successors like Signor Venteg and the fasting double act Fastello and Harry barely broke even. A new Succi-surprassing record was eventually set by another German, "Heros the Hungerer" (real name: Willy Schmitz), an ordinary looking middle-aged man in a skinny tie and button-down shirt, who spent 78 days without food in 1953.  

Franz Kafka, author of The Hunger Artist. (Photo: Bodleian Library/Public Domain)

Although Guinness refuses to track the world record for performative fasting, there's been a small competitive resurgence since 2003, as Chinese and Russian challengers have surpassed David Blaine's 44-day starvation stunt "record," seemingly unaware of the higher 78-day bar set by Schmitz. As Kafka says of the diminishing commercial success of his fictional hungerkünstler, "we live in a different world now." But if it's harder now to accrue wealth and fame as a starvation professional, it's not because the public lost interest; it's because there's too much competition.

Today, we can watch the modern variation of stunt fasting through the glass boxes in our living rooms, thanks to shows like The Biggest Loser and Celebrity Fit Club. While we engage in a centuries-old debate over whether it's healthy, whether it's fake, and how high the numbers on our personal fitness-tracker wristbands might go, perhaps we can take inspiration from another Kafka quote, from "Investigations of a Dog": "So long as you have food in your mouth, you have solved all questions for the time being."

Local lobsterman hauls in a rare blue lobster off Plymouth https://t.co/XCysiz9iXTpic.twitter.com/urO9BnTrnN

— The Boston Globe (@BostonGlobe) August 10, 2016

Catching a blue lobster is rare. Very rare. Out of every two million lobsters, according to some estimates, there is just one blue one, which turn that shade because of rare genetic mutations. 

Sixteen years ago, Wayne Nickerson, who catches lobsters off Plymouth, Massachusetts found one. And on Monday, Nickerson found another, according to the Boston Globe, marking two blue lobsters in his 35 years in the business. 

“It was more brilliantly blue than the bluest hydrangea you’ve ever seen,” Wayne's wife, Jan Nickerson, told the Globe. 

This lobster, unlike millions of others caught each year off New England, will not end up on someone's dinner plate, though. The Nickersons, who have named the lobster Bleu, have taken it to a secure location, and it will likely live out its days like Wayne's first—safe in a display tank, far away from a boiling lobster pot.

If you and a friend mess up a celebratory high five, you give it another go. The loud clap of the perfect high five is a satisfying feeling.

Sadly, the two wobbly arms in this video never get that enjoyment. This machine continuously loops in circles, conducting round after round of pathetic high fives.

In July 2010, Turkish artist Deniz Ozuygur set up this temporary installation with Chashama, an arts organization that helps transform unused property into one-time gallery spaces. For about two weeks, the apparatus was showcased in a Manhattan window space at 266 West 37th Street.

Ozuygur created the self high five machine to reflect on the symbol of popularity and acceptance during her grade school days. The two arms are made from rubber casts of her own right arm—one anchored to the wall and the other slowly spinning on a motor that completes a full rotation once per minute.

Observers of Ozuygur’s creation would watch in suspense as the rotating arm approached its height, only to be let down when the two arms missed. However, people stayed, hopeful that the two arms would eventually connect to make a good high five. It never happened.

While the self high five machine is a display of art, there has been at least one legitimate attempt to create a simulated hand-slapper. In 1993, inventor Albert Cohen submitted a patent for a high five simulator. In the patent, Cohen said he aimed to address the fact that "a solitary fan is unable to perform a 'high five' to express excitement during a televised sporting event."

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.

(Photo: Marie-Lan Nguyen/CC BY 2.5)

Fencing is a very precise sport. Two fencers battle each other with one of three weapons, a foil, épée, or sabre, which in practice are three very thin rods, with which fencers use to slash, jab, thrust, or otherwise touch their opponent. 

It's like a sword fight—minus the casualties. It is also one of five groupings of sports to be in every Olympics since 1896. But in the modern era, and after the advent of protective gear in the 19th century, there remained the complicated and controversial question of scoring. Fencing resembles nothing more than a traditional sword fight, but in a traditional sword fight the scoring is done brutally and truthfully. Seeing your insides open suggests that there's little doubt a thrust connected; that gash that's opened up on you right arm suggests the same. 

How then to detect a blade entering human flesh, while not actually doing it?

Electricity, of course. But it took awhile, and in some versions of the sport, electric systems of scoring weren't widely used until the 1990s, even while other fencing disciplines had been using electric systems for decades. That's in part because the design challenges of fencing can be surprisingly difficult, even if the solutions turned out to be quite elegant. 

In the sport's early years all it had to rely on weren't wounds but each fencer's honor. A successful touch against an opponent was to be met with the opponent saying touché, self-acknowledging the hit, before continuing. Short of that, early fencing also had judges, who would try and discern from the sidelines who's riposte landed, or, if two fencers simultaneously thrust, who hit first. 

None of this, however, was very satisfactory. Humans, of course, are capable of lying, while judges were never going to be able to determine, with much precision, if the tip of one's foil actually hit their opponent's belly first. The tip is small and the sport is fast and the fencers' own movements can be obfuscatory. 

Or, as an 1896 article in Britain's Daily Telegraph andCourier put it: "It is necessary for the judge to possess the eye of a hawk and the agility of a tiger in order to keep the lightening-like movements of both points well under observation."

Girls in Washington, D.C. fencing in 1930. (Photo: Library of Congress)

In that same article that the paper reported a possible, radical solution. It was the work of some enterprising fencing enthusiasts who, then, were using a new technology: electricity. Alerting judges when fencers had been hit was as simple as closing an electrical circuit. 

The system, developed by a fencer the article refers to as Mr. Little, consisted of an electrified foil, which, when struck against an opponent, completed an electrical circuit, ringing a bell. 

A contemporary demonstration of the suit, the Daily Telegraph and Courier said then, "proved an unalloyed success," even if that success was, apparently, fleeting, since an official electric apparatus wouldn't be formally adopted by governing fencing bodies for nearly 40 years. 

And that system, known as the Laurent-Pagan electric scoring apparatus, proved to be the earliest version that stuck. It was first adopted for fencers battling with épées, and first came into use at the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936. 

That épée fencing was the first to get electric scoring wasn't an accident: the rules of the sport, dictating that any part of your body can be a target, are relatively straightforward, meaning that an electric system wouldn't have to be much more sophisticated than sensing whether the tip of one's épée made contact with any part of the opponent's body. 

But foil fencing, which did not get electrified for another 30 years, and sabre fencing, which wouldn't be electrified until 1988, presented designers with more complicated problems. 

A body cord for foil and sabre fencing. (Photo: Emerson bb/CC BY-SA 4.0)

That's because in foil fencing—which is the oldest, most classically-cherished form of the sport—some areas of the body are off-target, meaning that an electrified metal rod trained to signal at the moment it touches any part of the body would be functionally useless. So designers had to find a way to help the foil differentiate between the target and off-target parts of the body.

They did this through the use of lamé, a fabric weaved in part with an electrically-conducive metal, like copper. Fencers wear this fabric over the parts of their bodies that are targets in foil fencing: their chests, their necks, their backs, and their groins. The scoring apparatus was developed to work in concert with the lamé, registering it as a different hit than if the foil hits either the opponent's foil or a part of their body that isn't covered in lamé.

Whereas in épée fencing the system could set off two potential signals—hit or not—foil needed to accommodate three: a hit, an off-target hit, and no-hit. 

Sabre fencing is even more complicated, in part because touches with the entire blade—not just the tip—count. In addition, a touch to the the mask needs to register as a hit, while off-target hits, which stop the action in foil fencing, need to not register, allowing the fencing to continue. 

It wasn't, in fact, until the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona that electric sabres were widely used—a year when the world's first smartphone was introduced. Fencing technology, in other words, takes a little bit longer to evolve, even if the sport itself has been practiced since time immemorial. 

(All photos by National Park Service)

Late Wednesday night, after some storms in Zion National Park in southwestern Utah, park officials noted on Facebook that they had a problem: a "house-sized" boulder had come crashing down on the park's main road. 

"No photos. No boulder," one user commented.

So, about 16 hours later, the park came back with the evidence, with several shots showing the full extent of the damage. 

There was this large boulder, which may not have exactly been "house-sized" (yet still significant). In addition to that, there were several others: 

The East Gate of the park, which is known for its massive Zion Canyon, is still closed as crews try to clean up, and a geologist assesses the damage, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

And that clean up may take some time. The asphalt road, the photos clearly show, didn't stand much of a chance. 

No one was hurt in the incident, which proved, as nearby caution signs suggested, that falling rocks at Zion are more than just a hypothetical. 

(Photo: Department of Energy)

A version of this story originally appeared on Muckrock.com.

In February, I filed a few requests to different agencies asking for their “hardware inventory reports,” after having some slight success with this language in previous requests. Unfortunately, most replied that my request was either too vague or they didn’t maintain that kind of record.

A few weeks ago, however, I did receive a response from the Department of Energy, listing all the computer hardware they currently have in their headquarters office. Although it took the agency about half a year to respond to my request, I’ll give them a pass. Not only did they return a complete listing of all the computer hardware they currently have in their headquarters,

but they even sent me an Excel version of the data after I asked for it.

To be clear from the outset, this spreadsheet doesn’t just include computers. It also includes hardware like “Facsimile,” “Drive, Jazz, External,” and “Organizer, Electronic.”

So with that in mind, let’s jump into the data.

With this digital copy, we can ask some simple questions against their inventory and get answers very quickly. For example, what’s the oldest computer in their office? According to the data it’s an IBM PS/2 Model 70acquired on January 1, 1945.

I find this very hard to believe for a couple reasons. For starters, this computer wasn’t released until 1988.

Additionally, a computer acquired in 1945 would break the previous record for the first commercially purchased computer, set by the Census Bureau. So, let’s start counting at the first date we know for sure: 1991.

From ’91 to ’94, there’s only a few machines still on hand. That number jumps up in ’95 (perhaps coinciding with the release of Windows 95?). Post-’95 the acquisition numbers fall off again and don’t bounce back up to a significant value until 2002. Overall, however, this paints a picture of a surprisingly modern bureaucracy. The vast majority of machines have been acquired between 2009 and 2015, meaning they’re running fairly modern software (Windows 7 released in 2009) and inoculated against most malware.

How do I know they’re mostly running Windows? Well, looking at the data by manufacturer tells a predictable tale of enterprise computing. Acquisitions from Hewlett Packard and RIM/Blackberry make up just about half of all the hardware they have on hand. Another quarter is shared between Dell and Cisco. The last quarter is a blend of other vendors, including a significant number of Apple machines.

When looking at acquisitions by manufacturer by year, a little more detail comes into focus. Most Apple acquisitions occur from 2011-15, growing 50% from 27 in 2010 to 132 in 2011. The number of Blackberry acquisitions peaks in 2013 at 713 and falls to 124 in 2015. Hewlett Packard acquisitions grow at a steady clip each year, with 1903 made in 2015.

I’d be interesting to see what contracts or purchasing systems the DOE has set up with Hewlett Packard, as well as if any have been cancelled in the last few years with RIM/Blackberry. But that’s a FOIA for another day.

What did I learn from this? Well, I learned that this is an agency that’s reasonably up to date, although they do still have a few hundred machines that are more than a decade old. In technology time, that stuff is ancient. The oldest computer in government by no means lives here, but it’s interesting to catch a glimpse at what an ordinary agency’s current inventory looks like. And, if any government agents are reading this on that one clunker, I feel your pain.

Want to take a crack at the data yourself? Fork it on Github. I’ve included the data in CSV and JSON formats, the script I used to process it, and the JS to render the charts above.

Simone Biles, mid-move, during the August 9th team competition. (Photo: Agência Brasil Fotografias/CC BY 2.0)

Like most fans, gymnastics-heads speak in a dense tangle of slang. Spend time with them, even just on Twitter, and you get the sense that anything that happens out in the stadium can be summed up using some arcane series of hyphenated words. Gabby Douglas doesn't get to compete in the individual all-arounds, despite scoring higher than most of the people who did? She got 2-per-country'd. Brutal. (When I asked fans on Twitter to tell me their favorites, they seemed more excited to spontaneously invent new ones.)

But some of that slang refers to straight-up moves. In gymnastics, the first person to pull off a new move during a World Championships gets to christen it with their own name, and it is forever known as such in the International Gymnastics Federation's Code of Points. Thus, American champ Simone Biles has given us the "Biles"—a double layout with a half-twist. Essentially, she flips twice with her body fully extended, then twists around and lands without looking at the ground (a "blind landing"). It's crazy. 

If you want to watch gymnastics with a truly critical eye, it helps to study up—you've got to know the point tiers, and be able to spot flaws in routines that are basically imperceptible to a mere mortal.

But if you just want to be able to toss off a worldly "woah, did you see that sick Produnova," you can just use this guide. Read on for some of the most interestingly-named common gymnastics moves, helpfully illustrated with gifs.

Thanks to Jessica Price of the Gymternet and the fans of the Gymanstics Wiki for their invaluable resources!

Amanar

Named after Romanian gymnast Simona Amanar, this super tricky vault move involves doing a roundoff onto the springboard, a back handspring onto horse itself, launching into 2.5 backflips, and landing on your feet. Not a lot of people can pull it off, but the USA's Aly Raisman did in the qualifiers, and she'll almost certainly go for it again in the finals.

BHS/Flic Flac

These two terms are just new words for "back handspring," which is cool no matter what you call it. 

The Dick

 

Although this wasn't my best meet due to dislocating my rib the day before in training, I'm thankful I was able to push through and have a pretty great meet... Behold..... The Dick

A video posted by Marisa Dick (@marisadick) on Oct 28, 2015 at 8:01am PDT

One of the sport's newest moves, the Dick, was recently invented by Marisa Dick, of Trinidad and Tobago. It involves leaping onto the balance beam and landing in a full split. She welcomes any and all jokes. “I’ve just made it so easy for everyone,” she told the Wall Street Journal.

Endo
 

If you look closely, you'll see that this gymnast's hands are reverse-gripping the bar. Her legs are in what's called a "stalder" (bonus word!) which means they're spread apart and tucked behind her head. Add in a swing around the bar, and you've got a classic Endo, named after Japanese gymnast Yukio Endo.

Jaeger 

The Jaeger, named after German gymnast Bernd Jaeger, means letting go of the bar, flipping, and grabbing on again. There are different species of Jaeger, depending on what your legs are doing—piked, layout, straddled, even tucked. This one is straddled. If you mess up on a Jaeger, it's probably not called a Jaeger Bomb. 

Produnova

The Produnova is another vault move—this time a full-tilt sprint into a front handspring and 2.5 somersaults (coincidentally, somersaults have their own name, "saltos"). India's Dipa Karmakar will likely go after this one in the vault finals. 

Rudi

The Rudi, a forward, twisting somersault, can be performed on the floor or on the beam. Indeed, it can be performed wherever you please—in your yard, on your living room carpet, on the subway. Just kidding, you almost definitely can't do a Rudi. 

Shaposh

Shaposh is short for Shaposhnikova, as in Natalia Shaposhnikova, a Soviet gymnast who took home two golds at the 1980 Moscow Games. It's what is known as a "transition element," in which a gymnast hops from bar to bar. A Shaposh involves going from low to high, essentially defying gravity by swinging entirely around the low bar.

Sheep Jump

Your average sheep would likely be jealous of this move, which is a leap that involves touching your toes to your head—thus losing sight of the beam—and then landing again. 

Wolf Jump

Where there are wolf jumps, there are obviously sheep jumps. A "wolf" move involves extending one leg perpendicularly outward—there are wolf jumps, wolf hops, even wolf turns. The wolf turn on beam is tricky enough to occasionally trip up Simone Wiles.

That big colorful rectangle is made out of flowers. (All photos: Copyright Wim Vanmaele)

On your average day, the Grand Place in Brussels is fascinating in its own way—its UNESCO World Heritage Site description calls it "remarkably homogenous," full of serious edifices. But once every two years, for about four days, the stony square gets all dressed up. With the help of the people of Belgium, it covers itself in 600,000 flowers—the famous "Brussels Flower Carpet."

The flower carpet is a tradition dating back to 1971. This year's celebrates Belgium's diplomatic relationship with Japan, and was designed by Fuji Suzuki, a young Japanese artist. It was constructed over the course of eight hours by hundreds of volunteers, who, following a color plan laid out on the ground, hand-placed each begonia, dahlia, and bark bit.

People in Brussels can visit the carpet at the Grand-Place through Monday. Everyone else can enjoy internet photos, which, although they don't smell like anything, at least will never start to wilt.

Before: boxes of flowers outside the square.

Volunteers carefully place hundreds of thousands of flowers.

After: the square becomes a box of flowers.

A detail of the finished carpet.

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that's only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

A groomer applies hairspray to a competitor. (All Photos: Cait Oppermann)

The dog, a German shorthaired pointer with a white and brown coat, stands tall next to his proud owner.

Nearby, in large purple letters against a yellow background, are the words “BEST IN SHOW.” This is CJ, and he is the winner of the hotly contested 2016 Westminster Dog Show. 

Approximately 2,800 dogs participate in this annual competition of breeding, training and grooming. The costs of preparing a dog for the event can run up to $100,000, so perhaps unsurprisingly, photographer Cait Oppermann found the backstage atmosphere frantic. “The whole place is constantly bustling with energy in the competition areas as well as the designated grooming areas," she writes in an email. “That's what I loved about the show in its entirety. It was high energy through every minute.”

For Oppenmann, it was a dream assignment. After being asked to cover the show for a friend, she found she enjoyed it so much she spent as much time there as she could. Her photos are testament to the amount of effort (and hair spray) it takes to get the dogs green-carpet ready. “The dogs respond to the grooming aspect better than I imagine most humans would. This is so such a big part of their lives that they sit patiently until they're ready to go.”

For the groomers, who crouch face-to-face to perfect every hair of their four-legged subject, and the handlers, who will enter the ring next to their primped pooch, the social aspects are limited. “For the most part, the groomers and handlers kept pretty focused leading up to competition," she says. It was only afterward, she notes, that groomers, handlers, owners and canines would mingle.

For Rivals week, Atlas Obscura has a selection of Oppenmann’s behind the scenes photos.