One of the lounges that Raejali is said to have infiltrated. (Photo: Matt@PEK/CC BY-SA 2.0)
How did you spend late August? Probably on vacation, if you were lucky enough, and, maybe in an airport or two, coming and going.
Raejali Buntut, 32, spent it almost entirely in an airport, neither coming nor going, in an act of criminality (or genius?) that now has him behind bars.
Let's start at the beginning. Raejali, who is jobless, was initially trying to fly from Singapore to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, when, on August 21, he overslept in a Changi Airport lounge, missing his flight. It happens! Air travel is stressful.
What happened next, though, was inspired: Raejali managed to spend the next 18 days in various lounges at the airport, all by forging boarding passes that made it look like he'd spent the money to get access.
The Straits Timeshas a blow-by-blow description of each lounge he was able to patronize, including at least nine different lounges at three different terminals. Raejali was able to convince airport employees that he had the right to go in after altering boarding passes for Cathay Pacific and Singapore Airlines.
He was only caught after employees at one of the lounges called police on Sept. 7, after seeing Raejali for the fourth time in the span of 10 days—pushing his luck, it must be said. Raejali was arrested and later pleaded guilty to three counts of forgery, while being ordered to spend two weeks at a different lounge: a Singaporean jail.
Still, it was probably fun while it lasted, being the one guy knocking back drinks at the lounge who had no plane to catch.
Looking out from the Pogue's Run tunnel. (Photo: Stuart Hyatt)
There's a moment in Underground Airlines, Ben Winters' novel of an alternate history in which slavery in America was never abolished, when the protagonist has no choice but to go physically underground. An escaped slave who becomes a slave catcher after his own capture, Victor is hunting another, and his search leads him to a creek running under Indianapolis. It's called Pogue's Run, he says, and it was buried because it didn't fit into the design of the city.
Unlike much of the carefully imagined world of the novel, Pogue's Run is real. It runs under Indianapolis for two and a half miles, and it's possible to walk from one end to another. It helps to have a guide who knows the stream; Winters' was Stuart Hyatt, a local musician, who, he writes, was responsible for "inducting me into its secrets."
All underground streams have a mystery about them, but Pogue's Run has a more ghostly history than most. Its story begins with one of Indianapolis’ first white settlers, whose disappearance has never been solved, and a Scottish-born city planner with a tidy vision.
George Pogue arrived on the banks of Pogue's Run in 1819, with a wife, seven children, and a herd of horses. Back then, the stream was called Perkins' Run, after another white settler who'd lived there briefly. One morning, after some of his horses had disappeared, Pogue took off after a Native American man who’d come by the farm: Pogue thought he might know who had taken the horses.
That was the last time anyone reported seeing Pogue; though settlers sent out search parties, they never found his body. He had disappeared, just two years after he moved to the area. His name stayed, though; that stream was now called Pogue’s Run.
Not far from Pogue's cabin was the site that Indiana's newly organized General Assembly had picked, in 1820, for the capital of the four-year-old state. The assembly hired Alexander Ralston, who had worked with Washington. D.C.'s famed planner Pierre L'Enfant, to draw up a scheme for the new city. Ralston's elegant design echoed D.C's: Indianapolis would be a square grid, a mile on each side, with a circular plaza in the center and four wide, stately boulevards radiating out towards each of the square’s corners.
Except—in the southeast corner of the city, the gridded blocks tilted, askew. There was a black line snaking through the plan, throwing the grid off kilter. That was Pogue's Run, ruining the city's planned symmetry.
In the 19th century, as Indianapolis grew into and out of the original Mile Square plan, Pogue's Run troubled the city. In the rainy seasons, it would overflow its banks, flooding streets and damaging property. And as sewers dumped their contents into the water, the run became one of the city's most polluted waterways.
Eventually, city planners decided they'd had enough. By 1905, they were planning a “straightjacket” for the stream, to keep its water contained, and in 1915, they trapped the run underground.
On the newly open space, the city built its train station, its football stadium, and its highways. Like George Pogue, Pogue's Run disappeared, and after a few decades, no one thought much about the creek running underneath downtown Indianapolis.
Outside downtown, though, on the other side of the highway, Pogue's Run still flowed above ground. As a kid, Stuart Hyatt used to creek-stomp in the shallow water when he visited his grandmother. It's a substantial bit of water—not a cute little babbling brook but a wide brown road of water cutting through the land.
Hyatt is a musician and artist, and a few years ago, he started recording audio out in the field and using it in his music. When he started working on Streamlines, an art project funded by the National Science Foundation, he thought of Pogue’s Run. He knew the water went underground, but how? And how long did it travel beneath the city?
At least once before, an artist had tried to draw attention to Pogue's Run. In 2006, the artist Sean Derry mapped the stream's original course on the city's modern surface, using blue thermoplastic, which "would erode over time and change as a waterway naturally does,” he says. He imagined that over 15 or 20 years, the plastic would erode, until all that was left were cast-iron markers, planted at quarter-mile intervals, that would give people a sense of the run’s direction but also be dissociated from it. Parts of that line are still there, in some places just a drop of blue plastic.
Hyatt, though, was most interested in exploring the waterway as it ran under the city. He wanted to walk the whole length of the tunnel, but the idea scared him. The entrance is wide and intimidating. The walls are made from concrete, and just inside, the tunnel looks like a bunker built on an alien world, where a trusty blaster would come in handy. Walk some 200 yards deeper in, and the light is gone, ceding to total blackness.
When Hyatt brought Winters to Pogue’s Run, the author was in the formative stages of writing his book. “I needed a place where my hero could literally descend and find himself underground,” finding layers under layers, of both the case he was unraveling and his own identity, Winters says. Pogue's Run felt like the right place.
Before he wrote the stream into his own book, though, Winters wrote about it for Hyatt's album. On the last track, "Pogue Out Walking," Winters' short story is read in a long, slow cadence of a frontier tale. In it, George Pogue returns, centuries after his death, to the water named after him. He wanders down the river, noticing “the changed world,” gathering a crowd, until he reaches the tunnel mouth.
Then he disappears, for a second time. “Pogue walked right into the pipe, and everybody gasped, and then he was gone. They heard the footfalls getting softer as he was swallowed by darkness.”
Indianapolis, Winters found, was “not the kind of city that has a lot of big, built up myths.” The White River does not define the city in the way that the Charles River defines Boston, or the Potomac defines D.C., he says. But Pogue’s Run, in its obscurity and weirdness, has in the past decade or so become a piece of history that people want to preserve and hold onto. There’s now a Pogue’s Run Grocer, a co-operatively run store, and a Pogue’s Run porter, made by a local brewery.
Yet the story of the stream's namesake is still murky; in the two centuries since George Pogue's disappearance, no one has come up with a definitive ending. Every few decades, when unclaimed human bones turn up, there's speculation that they might be Pogue's. But most people presume he was killed by Native Americans, and that no one will ever know exactly where or how he died.
Hyatt walked the whole length of the tunnel, twice, with “an urban explorer type of dude who had been through it before,” he says. It's not entirely clear which government agency has responsibility for it, or whether they were trespassing. Inside the pitch-black tunnel built more than a century ago, the water can be deep, or, depending on the rainfall, can slow to almost nothing, leaving dry concrete pathways on either side.
The ceiling is cracked, and side tunnels, made of brick, occasionally branch off the main route. It was very quiet inside, Hyatt says, except when surface sounds echoed through the tunnel. “A car going over a grate is like a giant, huge, reverberating thunder cloud. The train track is incredibly loud. It echoes forever, and it's incredibly creepy.”
Cell phones don't get service in the tunnel; the only way to get a sense of your location is to turn down one of those side tunnels, find a grate that cracks up into the city, stick a phone out of it, and take a picture. Then, all of a sudden, the tunnel ends, and the water pours out on the other side of town, into the White River.
We spent five years planning, researching, and writing this book, and we can't wait for you to read it. It contains our most treasured wonders, from Galileo's middle finger to everyone's favorite giant flaming hole in the Turkmenistan desert. There are new maps and illustrations, gorgeous photos, and useful information on everything from preventing premature burial to not getting killed by one of Australia's many deadly animals.
Here are a few more views on the book from people who are not us:
“I thought I had seen most of the interesting bits of the world. Atlas Obscura showed me that I was wrong. It's the kind of book that makes you want to pack in your workaday life and head out to places you'd never have dreamed of going, to see things you could not even have imagined. A joy to read and to reread.” —NEIL GAIMAN, author of Sandman and American Gods
“Atlas Obscura is a joyful antidote to the creeping suspicion that travel these days is little more than a homogenized corporate shopping opportunity. Here are hundreds of surprising, perplexing, mind-blowing, inspiring reasons to travel a day longer and farther off the path. . . . Bestest travel guide ever.” —MARY ROACH, author of Stiff and Gulp
“My favorite travel guide! Never start a trip without knowing where a haunted hotel or a mouth of hell is!” —GUILLERMO DEL TORO, filmmaker, Pan’s Labyrinth
We hope you'll pick up a copy at your local bookstore, or online. We'd adore it if you came to party with us on our 12-city book tour. And most of all, we love that you're a part of Atlas Obscura. Thank you for coming on this adventure with us. Let's keep exploring.
Divers at the wreck site examining the bones. (Photo: Brett Seymour, EUA/WHOI/ARGO)
Since 1900, when Greek divers first discovered it, the Antikythera shipwreck has been one of the most exciting troves of information about the ancient world. Not long after the wreck was first found, divers came upon the mysterious Antikythera mechanism, a piece of ancient technology made of complicated clockwork, sometimes called the world's first analog computer. It's lent the wreck an aura of mystery: Who were the people on the ship? How did they use this fabulous object?
In August, archaeologists made another discovery, reported in Nature, that will help them better understand this wreck—a well-preserved skeleton of a person who could become the first victim of an ancient shipwreck to have their DNA sequenced.
Skeletons have been found at the site before. In the 1970s, a team led by Jacques Cousteau brought up many human remains, but those bones were preserved with methods unfriendly to DNA analysis. This newly discovered set of bones includes the petrous bone, the Guardian reports, a part of the skull where DNA tends to be well preserved.
The scientists are waiting for permission from the Greek authorities to actually sequence the DNA. They believe the skeleton belongs to a man who was in his early 20s when he died; by sequencing the DNA, they could find out what he looked like and where he came from. It'll one more clue to understanding the life of this ship and its precious cargo.
The methane river delta on Titan, one of Saturn's moons, as depicted by space artist Ron Miller. (Photo: Ron Miller)
In a serpentine building that snakes through the Connecticut countryside, a strange meeting took place this past July. A group of four scientists from NASA, including an astronaut, a robotics expert, and the agency’s deputy administrator, conferred with some 30 painters, sculptors and poets. Adding an extra layer of mystery to proceedings was the fact that the meeting was hosted by Grace Farms, a faith-based think-tank created by an evangelical hedge-fund billionaire.
Tea was served. Thomas Pynchon may or may not have been present.
The aim of this odd confluence was to engage an “artistic response” to NASA’s journey to Mars, the space agency’s ambitious goal of putting a human on the red planet’s surface sometime in the 2030s. To help set the mood, NASA brought some zappy toys to share—a Hololens headset that offered an augmented reality view of Mars, as well as surreal images of winds carving the Martian surface. According to those present, scientists spoke of the necessity of having “an outpost” on Mars to help solve the many riddles of the galaxy. The question they were asking the assembled artists was whether they could help communicate this vision to the public as part of a new program entitled “Arts + Mars”.
Some of the artists were left scratching their heads. Many of them, schooled in the ambiguities and anti-authoritarian verities of contemporary art, saw NASA’s open call for guileless propaganda as being entirely at odds with the art they practice. “The conversation about art was at such a naïve level,” said one attendee, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of rousing the space agency's ire. “It just didn’t seem like NASA was that interested in what we had to say.” What’s more the overtly commercial and exploitative language of the Mars boosters—their mentions of partnerships with private industry and “putting tracks on Mars”—did not play well with their youngish, liberal audience.
There is no doubt that NASA needs some help. The moon landing will celebrate its 50th anniversary soon and the number of people inspired by actual memories of that event is dwindling fast. With no “space race” to offer a geo-political impetus to the expedition NASA desperately needs to engage the millennial generation in their Martian quest for the next 15 years.
Yet when the NASA scientists asked the attendant artists to refrain from posting pictures of the meeting on social media, it seemed to sum up both a generational and a temperamental mismatch. (In an email, a NASA spokesperson said that "participating artists are free to discuss their attendance.")
From a NASA perspective, the secrecy was a budgetary imperative. In 2003, the renowned performance artist Laurie Anderson was appointed NASA’s first “artist-in-residence” with the remit of creating art about the agency’s exploration of space. Republican congressmen quickly seized on the move as a sign of wanton profligacy. “Mr. Chairman,” sputtered Representative Chris Chocola of Indiana on the floor of Congress, “nowhere in NASA's mission does it say anything about advancing fine arts or hiring a performance artist.” There has been no artist-in-residence since and the reverberations were no doubt part of the reason why NASA’s workshop at Grace Farms seemed tentative and vague.
In the not-so-distant past, though, space and art intermingled happily. Artists were crucial to NASA’s development, at times outpacing the science of space travel itself. What happened?
In 1542, the German botanist, Leonhart Fuchs, created a book replete with hundreds of extremely detailed drawings of plants. This was unusual. A pervasive prejudice dating back to antiquity had scorned the usefulness of visual images in scholarship. Writing in his introduction, Fuchs railed against such lunacy: “Who in his right mind would condemn pictures which can communicate information much more clearly than the words of even the most eloquent men?”
From the Renaissance onwards, art and science became inextricably bound together. You can see it in Leonardo Da Vinci’s sketchbooks that he used as laboratories for his thinking, and you can find it 300 years later in John James Audubon’s lushly illustrated catalogue of American birds.
However sometime in the 19th century the introduction of photography and its offspring—cinema, radiography—severed this relationship. Scientists embraced these new technologies for their clarity and dispassionate precision. Artists, meanwhile, felt liberated from having to reproduce the natural world realistically, and began infusing it with their own subjective emotions. Once bosom buddies, art and science slowly drifted apart from each other, without either seeming to mind too much. Science still needed some illustrations, but illustrations now seemed more handmaidens to science than the equal partner they had once been. It’s notable that the greatest of anatomical textbooks, Gray’s Anatomy, published in 1858, is named after its author, Henry Gray, and not its illustrator, Henry Vandyke Carter.
Nevertheless there were still some areas of science that photography could not touch. Chief among them was outer space, which was too far away to be photographed yet too thrilling to be left undocumented.
These subjects required imaginative as well as illustrative skills to help understand them. The space artist was born.
Space art can trace its beginnings to the illustrations found in Jules Verne’s 1865 novel, From the Earth to the Moon. Before Verne, tales of outer space had largely been venues for satire, mysticism and comedy. But Verne chose to portray space travel realistically using the scientific data that was available to him at the time, and his illustrators followed suit.
Sometimes, the illustrators surpassed the scientists. In the early 20th century, Lucien Rudaux, a French commercial illustrator and amateur astronomer, created countless pictures of the moon taken from his own observations. Rudaux was baffled why scientists spoke of the moon as being dominated by towering jagged peaks. He believed it should be depicted with smoother more rounded terrain, a fact that would only be verified with the Apollo moon landings more than 20 years after his death.
However the discipline took its greatest leap forward with the work of one specific pioneering American space artist. Chesley Bonestell had trained as an architect and worked as a designer on the Chrysler Building in New York—perhaps an inspiration for his subsequent pictures of space rockets. But it was a series of paintings he created for Life magazine in 1944 that caught the imagination of a war-weary public searching for transcendence. These paintings showed Saturn from the perspective of its moons, an impossible view but painted in a realistic and plausible manner. His depictions of space travel were so vivid that he almost single-handedly rid it of its Buck Rogers connotations, stirring up a torrent of public and government interest and support.
Charles Bonestell's Saturn as seen from Mimas, 1944. (Photo: Reproduced courtesy of Bonestell LLC)
“Most scientists simply don’t think visually,” says Ron Miller, one of the most well-known and prolific space artists working today. It is this ambivalence towards the visual that he sees as lying at the heart of the continued split between the two disciplines. Miller knows a thing or two about getting people excited about space. He has created space-themed postage stamps, been a production designer on David Lynch’s Dune, and painted countless otherworldly scenes for books and magazines. He believes it is the space artist’s remit not only to reveal science’s discoveries to the world but also to build enthusiasm for it, to be the educator that NASA seems to be looking for in its Arts + Mars program.
For Miller, the true precursors to the space art of today were the painters of the Hudson River School. “Back in the late 19th century when Yosemite and Yellowstone [national parks] were discovered, artists like Thomas Moran and Alfred Bierstadt painted gigantic paintings, 10 feet, 20 feet wide, that actually toured the country,” he says. Indeed if you look at Moran’s painting of Castle Geyser in Yellowstone, the image is strangely alien, the landscape singed, the lake an ungodly blue, the sky dashed grey-black as if it had been scorched by fire.
“Their purpose was to make people believe that these insane places existed," he says.
Jon Ramer, President of the International Association of Astronomical Artists (IAAA), concurs. “We seek to inspire people to want to go and see what is ‘out there’ in our universe,” he says.
It’s strange to think that while space exploration is a defining factor of the modern era, many space artists hearken back to the landscape painting of a pre-modern age to depict it. Largely this is due to space art still following Leonhart Fuchs’s dictum of communicating information clearly. But perhaps this is also a nostalgic wish to return to a time when scientists and artists took each other’s work seriously.
When Chesley Bonestell was painting his realistic planetscapes in the late 1940s, Wernher von Braun, America’s leading rocket scientist at the time, called his art “the most accurate portrayal of those faraway heavenly bodies that modern science can offer.” This was an astonishing pronouncement. It suggested that Bonestell’s imaginative renderings were as important as von Brauns’ own calculations. Certainly Bonestell felt that his art was as rigorous as the science he depicted. When von Braun sent him some sketches of possible rocket ship designs they were returned with blistering criticism of the scientist’s inconsistencies and oversights.
From the European Space Agency, an artist's concept of the nearest exoplanet to our solar system. (Photo: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI))
Enter the Exoplanet
The year was 1995 and something was making a distant star called 51 Pegasi wobble. It wasn’t wobbling much but it was wobbling enough that there were small fluctuations in the light it emitted. These small changes had been picked up by an earthbound spectrometer, a machine that analyzes the shifting spectrum of starlight, and scientists at the Geneva Observatory were now puzzling over the numbers. They eventually came to the conclusion that the only thing that could cause a star to wobble in such a manner was a planet, for just as a star’s gravity affects the movement of planets, so a planet’s gravity affects the movement of a star.
Space aficionados reacted immediately. Although scientists and science fiction writers had for centuries imagined countless planets in other solar systems, scientists had never before actually found proof of a single one.
There was just one problem: Although 51 Pegasi b’s existence as an exoplanet orbiting a sun like our own could be inferred, it couldn’t actually be seen. 51 Pegasi b lies approximately 300 trillion miles away from Earth and gives off a feeble amount of light compared to its star. So although this discovery was hailed as one of the greatest of our age, something felt like it was missing—namely, visual evidence.
At the time of this discovery Lynette Cook was a freelance scientific illustrator living in San Francisco. She was working part-time as an artist and photographer at the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academy of Sciences, providing visuals of our cosmos to the delight of children, adults and stoned teenagers. When a scientist friend suggested she try her hand at depicting this new discovery she thought, “Why not?”
Working for free, she first discussed 51 Pegasi b with various astronomers and tried to pin down its size, color, distance to its star and possible composition. Then she turned to her paints. The result, created in a mixed media combination of gouache and colored pencil, was the first ever picture of a confirmed exoplanet. Cook depicted it alongside its churning sunspot-specked star, the superheated gases in its atmosphere giving it a red luster as clouds of iron vapor streaked across its surface. From a barely-detectable inference, 51 Pegasi b was finally revealed in all its terrible glory.
Lynette Cook's artwork of 51 Pegasi b. (Photo: Lynette Cook)
Although astronomers initially seemed uninterested in Cook’s work, the media was hungry for images. Cook’s artwork was thus used countless times in documentaries, magazines and books. Indeed the painting of 51 Pegasi b proved pivotal to her career and was the first of many exoplanets she portrayed. The original was eventually purchased by the Geneva Observatory where it hangs as the sole physical embodiment of a remarkable discovery.
Work like this, says Bill Hartmann, a senior scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, can do more than just get people excited about space travel; it can help improve the very science it depicts. Hartmann was an investigator for the Mariner 9 probe that mapped Mars for the first time in 1972. He originated the now-accepted theory that the moon was formed by the earth’s impact with another planet some 4.5 billion years ago.
He’s a visionary thinker. He’s also a space artist.
Hartmann sees his artistic role as being that of a synthesizer, blending a mass of disparate and highly specialized astronomical data into a more complete whole. This is often necessary in a field that wallows in minutiae at the expense of the big picture. Hartmann remembers attending a scientific conference where the brightness of the auroral glow around one of Jupiter’s moons was announced in kilo-rayleighs (a unit of measurement). When Hartmann asked if that meant it could be seen by the naked eye the scientists giving the presentation were dumbfounded and couldn’t come up with an answer. “This question hadn’t occurred to them as something interesting to know,” he says.
An artist's impression of 10 hot Jupiter exoplanets, drawn to scale with each other. (Photo: ESA/Hubble & NASA/CC BY 2.0)
He explains how in the 1970s there was little overlap between the scientists who studied icy comets and those who studied rocky asteroids. When Hartmann decided he wanted to paint a comet as if he was standing on its surface he realized that there was “essentially no work” on the comet’s possible geology. Only asteroid structures had been studied but surely, he thought, the two must have features in common. Hartmann’s painting thus led to the sharing of ideas between two previously unconnected fields of research. “Art has long been used to clarify science, and vice versa,” he says. “Leonardo Da Vinci sketched waves to learn about wave motion but dissected bodies so he could paint better portraits.”
Since 51 Pegasi b first swam into view 20 years ago, over 3,000 other exoplanets have been discovered. They vary in size, density and absurdity with some planets believed to have atmospheres of vaporized rock and mantles of liquid diamond. As such you’d think these would be boom times for space artists like Lynette Cook but in fact it’s been quite the opposite. Her space art career has never been more tenuous.
“The budgets to hire people like me on the part of publishers and science organizations has really dwindled in recent years,” she says. Partly this is due to recent changes in print economics. Cook has watched as publishers have become increasingly willing to use inaccurate and poorly rendered “no-fee” illustrations to keep costs down. “I saw a shift,” says Cook, “from commissioning new art, to wanting me to rework earlier images, so they looked different (but didn't cost as much), to reusing older art “as is” for new discoveries.” Eventually her clients simply stopped calling, “as if they were stars in the heavens that were winking out.”
There is another slayer of space art budgets, though: the success of space photography. Over the past two decades huge amounts of photographic imagery has been sent back from NASA probes at Pluto, Ceres, and Saturn, not to mention the Hubble Telescope. These images were primarily intended for scientific research, but the fact that they were beautiful—and rights-free—hasn’t hurt in raising public awareness in NASA’s mission. The only people it has hurt are the space artists.
Outer space is getting easier and easier to see. The camera’s reach has gotten ever longer and, as the depths of the universe have become increasingly familiar to us, there appears to be less demand for the imaginative types of space art as practiced by Chesley Bonestell, that less than a century ago inspired us to strap a man to a rocket and blast him off our planet. For all the ostensible benefits of art and science working together, artists have found themselves being squeezed out of the field of astronomy, just as they had out of the life sciences in the 19th century.
In the hyperwall room at NASA’s Goddard Research Center in Maryland it is hard not to feel like God. There in front of you is the Earth portrayed in super high definition on a huge wall of video monitors. The forces and emanations that shape it ebb and flow before you—whirling ocean currents, roiling clouds of carbon dioxide, and the madly pirouetting paths of hurricanes. You can focus on a particular region or just let the whole thing wash over you as if you were in an ambient chill-out room, albeit one filled with sober men wearing laminated tags.
These animations are the work of the Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) whose job it is to turn the myriad sets of data NASA scientists produce into images that explain, entice and entrance. Using software created by the animation studio Pixar, Dr. Horace Mitchell and his team of 10 visualizers make science palatable to both the public and the grant-endowing poobahs of NASA who, overseeing such a vast and diverse enterprise, are just as likely as the public to need some scientific hand-holding.
“In the early days I think the scientists were more focused on getting their work done, getting the next paper out, getting their reputation established. They looked at this as eye-candy,” Mitchell chuckles. Climate change, Neil deGrasse Tyson and the evolution of social media have shifted this landscape. “Now I think there are very few scientists who don’t understand the value of public outreach.”
A still from the video Dynamic Earth: Exploring Earth's Climate Engine, created by NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio. (Photo: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/CC BY 2.0)
The animations SVS creates are more an alluring extension of graphs and charts than they are a subjective depiction of the world. This is what traditional scientific illustration became. It doesn’t aim to inspire new scientific ideas or help improve a scientist’s work, but it does seek to make the specialized scientific knowledge comprehensible. “Sometimes you have to show people something before they understand its worth,” says Mitchell.
As an educational tool, its purpose is tightly defined—the SVS graphics are more translation than expression. This is art on NASA’s terms, closely clinging to the data. Occasionally, however, translation can become its own form of expression.
Tucked into a cramped corner of NASA’s ramshackle visitor center is the video installation known as Solarium. It depicts the sun’s raging ultraviolet light, normally invisible to the naked eye, but here colorized and cropped. For the viewer pressed up against the images by necessity of the tiny space, the view is all-encompassing—you feel as if you’re flying over a firestorm—and the chance of fully comprehending it is minimal. One looks first, and enquires second. Transforming the data into immersive visceral thrills without heed to its practical purpose seems something of a bold move for NASA, almost a misuse of sacred data, but it suggests that the Art + Mars workshop at Grace Farms this summer might not be as much of a dead end as it seemed. Although Solarium is hidden away like a mad aunt in the attic, it’s a tentative step out of the quantifiable world of data and into one of subjective experience. In doing so it seems to get to the very essence of NASA’s mission statement: seeing the unknown with your own eyes is, after all, the very essence of exploration.
A still from the video for Symmetry, filmed at the Large Hadron Collider. (Photo: Courtesy Arts@CERN)
Dance Like NASA's Watching
People are dancing in the Large Hadron Collider. Somewhere beneath the French-Swiss border, men in blue hardhats are spinning, falling, leaping, and doing things that particle physicists don’t normally do. They are part of a dance-opera that was unveiled last year called Symmetry, just one in a long line of artistic interventions organized by the European Organization for Nuclear Research’s official arts program, Arts@CERN.
Over the past five years sculptors, photographers, musicians and filmmakers have been invited to CERN (which takes its name from the French moniker Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) to create works inspired by its science and to stimulate the minds of the 10,000 engineers and scientists who work here and at other CERN facilities. Just as the Large Hadron Collider smashes particles into one another to test different theories about the underlying structure of reality, so the arts program seeks to create similar collisions between art and science. Scientists have been surprised in the CERN library by slow-moving dancers crawling under their chairs or by having the sounds of the collider recorded and played back to them. Sound artist Bill Fontana, photographer Andreas Gursky, and the sculptor Anthony Gormley have all had residencies here, each one accompanied by a “scientific partner” drawn from CERN’s staff.
The question is what are they hoping to gain.
Ron Miller's depiction of Kepler-16b. (Photo: Ron Miller)
“We need to bring other voices inside our conversation,” says Monica Bello, the head of Arts@CERN. “Artists are the most radical thinkers in a non–systematized environment, they are really pushing new questions. They are rigorous in the way they process information and in the way they interact with other experts.” On the one hand, Bello sees the artists transmitting CERN’s extremely complex deeds to a worldwide audience in museums and galleries, but she also sees the arts programs as having the holistic aim of “supporting artists and scientists talking to each other, focusing on developing devices together, thinking how knowledge is expanding and having many other kinds of conversations.” When asked what the main aim of the program is, Bello says simply, “We’re supporting research.” It’s part of Arts@CERN’s success that she doesn’t need to say whose research they’re supporting. Scientist and artist have become one.
A growing movement seems to understand the importance of the visual to science. This is especially true in the more theoretical sciences where, free from the camera’s prying lens, an artist is needed to visualize the concepts. Take, for example, the art of Professor David Berman, an authority in the tortuous complexities of string theory, whose prize-winning collaborations with contemporary artists have thrust theoretical astronomy into the art world and artists into the world of theoretical astronomy. This is space art at its furthest, invisible frontier. Berman’s reasons for doing so are clear: “If you can imagine doing an experiment in which you have a group of scientists who sat isolated in their offices and didn’t talk to artists, or weren’t exposed to art, and then you had scientists who talk to artists and are exposed to art, and then saw what research they produced after x number of years, then I believe that the diverse scientists would do better.”
Yet there’s still some way to go. While other scientific agencies have instituted artistic residencies few are as well-integrated, or as well-funded, as Arts@CERN. CERN’s budget for artistic residencies and art activities ranges between $225,000 and $337,000 a year, and has, so far, not appeared to raise any eyebrows amongst the European nations funding it. It is hoped that the CERN model can inspire other scientific ventures to follow suit.
It’s certainly a model that Lynette Cook, exiled from the very science she helped to popularize, can appreciate. “Anything that brings artists and scientists together to collaborate in some way —and which also provides funding to said artists—is a good thing, in my opinion,” she says. Indeed Arts@CERN often seems to be striving to recreate the Renaissance mindset of art and science being so obviously useful to one another that nobody in their right mind would challenge it. Might NASA’s Arts + Mars program follow this route?
There are hopeful signs. Shortly after its inaugural meeting in July, NASA announced that it would be developing “action steps” for its Arts + Mars program in 2017. It also dropped its stipulation for secrecy from the attendant artists (although it did provide a pre-approved statement for the artists to use on their social media—old bureaucratic habits die hard). In shoring up the relationship between art and science, NASA does more than improve the odds of the popular success of the Mars mission; it takes one giant leap towards getting rid of the pervasive prejudice that art has no role in science, and science no role in art.
Cecilia Bembibre sampling the VOCs of an old book. (Photo: HMahgoub/Used with Permission)
We experience our world with five senses to guide us, but for the most part, we learn about the past with only three. We have become adept at preserving our history in audio, visual, and tactile forms, while old recipes can communicate taste, but rarely do we ever think to capture a whiff of the scents that swirl around us.
Luckily, there are scientists who think that stinks, and are doing something about it. Cecilia Bembibre, a doctoral candidate at University College London, is attempting to preserve history like very few before her. She’s cataloging the smells.
Smells "help us connect to history in a more human way," says Bembibre, whose project combines chemistry, electronic noses, and centuries-old English manor houses.
Bembibre records the smells of historic locations and objects around England, looking for sites that are both culturally significant and strongly scented. Currently, her research is focused on two locations: Knole House, an English estate that has been inhabited by the same family since it was built in the 15th century; and the library in St. Paul’s Cathedral, a perfectly stuffy room full of books and pieces of furniture that are hundreds of years old.
The room at St. Paul's is opened by appointment only, helping to maintain its heady scent. “It’s a wonderful library and it smells great,” says Bembibre.
Scent-collecting fibers set up to capture VOCs at St Paul’s Cathedral Library. (Photo: Courtesy of CeciliaBembibre)
A veritable treasure trove of historic smells, Knole House is said to contain 365 rooms. The sprawling mansion has the added benefit of an extensive family archive, which offers the researchers valuable historical context for the objects they are sniffing.
Bembibre has selected a handful of objects and atmospheres to test there, including a pair of fringed, leather gloves from the 1800s ("I think the gloves might have been perfumed"); a unique 1750s potpourri recipe found in the archives; the wax used to polish the furniture; the smell of the “Venetian Ambassador” room; an old book; and more modern smells, like a vinyl record from the family’s collection.
But how do you even go about recording a smell?
Bembibre uses several different methods to capture a smell for study. One is known as the Headspace technique, wherein an object is placed inside a clean, sealed bag that has a valve on it, sealing in the volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. Then an absorbent carbon fiber is inserted into the valve to soak up the ambient VOCs that have been isolated inside. She also uses another method, known as passive diffusion, which involves leaving a sort of carbon sponge in a space and allowing it to just soak up the nearby smells.
Once the VOC-laden sample is ready, Bembibre runs it through a gas spectrometer, which she describes as a “big nose.” In the end, she is left with a sort of electrocardiogram, but for smells, which she can use to identify the various chemicals in a smell. “It would be like having a recipe, and maybe in 100 years, someone wanted to reproduce that smell, they could look at that recipe,” she says.
The analyses can be surprising. For example, the smell of an old book is primarily made up of chemicals like acetic acid, which smells like vinegar; furfural (“It smells sweet, like bread and almonds. It’s a very pleasant book smell”); benzaldehyde (“It has a very sweet, almond-y, cinnamon-y smell even. It smells of food”); vanillin, which smells of vanilla; and hexanol, which has been likened to freshly cut grass.
Taken all together, these chemicals, many of which are a product of cellular decay, create what we think of as the old book smell. “It’s a smell that we appreciate, but it’s also the smell of the books dying,” says Bembibre.
One of her research partners, the company Odournet, has even developed a spectrometer that allows Bembibre, and other researchers, to actually smell each component as it is processed. She says that it’s a heady experience, with scents coming at you so fast that it’s hard to accurately identify them—no easy feat to begin with.
Because our olfactory senses are so closely tied to context, identifying scents just by their chemical make-up doesn’t do us a whole lot of good, when it comes to the historical record. “Smells are anchored in a time and a place, so it’s not enough to have the chemical information for a smell,” says Bembibre. “We also need to know if people thought that smell was pleasant or unpleasant, strong or weak; if it had some sort of cultural associations; if it was unique or familiar; if people thought it was worth keeping or not, and why.”
Cecilia Bembibre sniffs the smells of St Paul’s Cathedral Library. (Photo: Courtesy of Cecilia Bembibre)
Opinion plays a significant part in the analysis, too. Bembibre is far from scent-agnostic, though; she has smells she loves and odors she hates, just like the rest of us.
'There is a smell I really dislike, which is the smell of butyric acid. You find it in human sweat in a low concentration. You also find it in Hershey’s chocolate, the Kisses," she says. "I’m always going to the States and thinking, ‘How can they be so popular? How can people like them so much?’ If you grew up celebrating with this chocolate, you obviously love it."
Beyond the academic importance of smell, she's interested in sussing out "the personal associations, because they’re part of why we think smell is worth keeping," she says.
In addition to her studies, Bembibre currently leads "smellwalks" that bring people closer to the unique scents of their world. Smells are the most visceral aspects of the human experience, and yet we lose them everyday. As the technology gets better, though, hopefully we can begin to preserve our own precious scents.
Bembibre has her own special scent memory she wishes she could preserve. “I have a small child, and we’ve just been on holiday to the beach. You know the smell of skin when you come back from a day at the beach and it’s a bit salty, and there’s the sun and the cream?" she asks.
"It was just a lazy family holiday that brought me back to my own childhood. I’d love to collect that smell.”
Until last week, it hadn't hailed in Samoa since 2011, and, looking at the average temperatures in the archipelago nation, it isn't hard to see why: it's consistently, reliably, in the mid-80s there.
But on Friday, the country saw a very rare hail storm pass through, 15 minutes of precipitation that many in the nation found hard to believe. So hard to believe, in fact, that meteorologists had to produce the receipts.
“Because it was so unexpected a lot of people thought it had been invented," Luteru Tauvale, a meteorologist for the Samoan Meteorology Service, told the Guardian. "We had to release satellite images of the conditions that led to to the hail for people to believe it was real.”
The hail came down on the island of Savai’i, one of six islands in a country of around 200,000 people, producing a weather event that has only happened one other time in recorded history.
The hail wasn't large—less than an inch wide—but, even so, some islanders took it as fresh evidence of climate change, according to the Guardian.
“More like we have just woken up to the fact it had been with us for a while but we refuse to accept/believe it," one wrote on Facebook.
Danny Borzage wasn’t a great actor. Visit his IMDb page and you’ll see he specialized in parts with names like “Townsman,” “Barfly,” and “Courtroom Spectator.” While he did appear in a few landmark films such as Citizen Kane, Vertigo, and To Kill a Mockingbird, he was only onscreen for a few seconds. Blink and you’ll miss him.
But while Borzage never became a superstar, he holds a special place in Hollywood history. After all, the man was a master manipulator. He could help A-list stars relax on set, or he could make big-name actors cry on-camera, all with his trusty accordion.
In the era of silent films, Danny Borzage made his living as a mood musician. Before The Jazz Singer, the first feature film with synchronized dialogue sequences, revolutionized cinema, mood musicians were hired to play their instruments on film sets. As the camera rolled, these performers would create live soundtracks in order to evoke emotions from the actors. If a leading lady needed to shed a few tears, a musician like Borzage would play something sad to get the waterworks flowing.
While it sounds pretty weird, this was standard practice back in the day. According to Patrick Miller in his article "Music and the Silent Film," Hollywood director D.W. Griffith enlisted a brass band to encourage extras during the battle sequences of his 1916 three-and-a-half-hour epic, Intolerance. Fellow director King Vidor often relied on opera recordings to get his actors in the right headspace.
In his autobiography, Charlie Chaplin explained how he created a melancholy mood for The Gold Rush by playing “Auld Lang Syne.” On the flip side, while shooting a slapstick short called Twenty Minutes of Love, Chaplin used a catchy dance number called “Too Much Mustard” to create an atmosphere of “nonsense.”
As for Danny Borzage, he performed a wide array of hymns and early American folk songs on set, courtesy of his wheezy accordion. His music conjured up an old-timey feeling, which worked perfectly on Westerns. And Danny had quite a catalog of songs, as he’d been playing the stomach Steinway ever since childhood.
Born in 1896 in Salt Lake City, Utah, Danny grew up in a musical family. His father, Luigi, was skilled at the accordion and passed on his passion to Danny and two other sons, Bill and Henry. Together, the Borzage boys entertained audiences via radio, and Danny eventually performed at the L.A. Orpheum with his brother Lew, who was a guitarist and violinist.
In addition to their love of music, the Borzages were also big into show business. Henry worked as an electrician for 20th Century Fox, Lew was an assistant director, and Bill was a bit player. And then there was Frank, the two-time Oscar-winning director of films like 7th Heaven, Street Angel, and AFarewell to Arms. Inspired by Frank’s cinematic success, Danny packed up his accordion and made his way to Tinseltown, where he auditioned for an up-and-coming director by the name of John Ford.
Director Frank Borzage, Danny's brother, c. 1920. (Photo: Public Domain)
A four-time Oscar winner, Ford is widely considered one of the all-time great American directors. The man behind classics like Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Searchers, Ford inspired filmmakers from Akira Kurosawa to Orson Welles to Steven Spielberg. But in 1924, he was still a young man making a name for himself, and he needed a mood musician for his upcoming historical drama, The Iron Horse.
When Danny showed up for the audition, he impressed Ford with a song called “My Buddy.” And it probably didn’t hurt that Ford knew Danny’s brother, Frank. Thanks to his musical know-how and a little bit of nepotism, Danny landed the gig. It was the beginning of a beautiful work relationship that lasted over 40 years.
Even after the silent era gave way to sound, Danny remained an integral part of the Ford Stock Company (a group of actors who repeatedly appeared in the director’s films). While mood musicians had mostly vanished from Hollywood sets, Ford stuck with tradition and kept Danny around. Only now, with the advent of sound and the appearance of microphones, Danny worked most of his magic behind the scenes.
During shooting, the accordionist would escort actors away from the set and play specific songs to manipulate their emotions. While filming Cheyenne Autumn, Danny helped actress Dolores del Rio cry by performing a love song from one of her old films. In The Searchers, he played the movie’s theme to help Vera Miles prepare for a big romantic moment. John Wayne also remembered hearing Danny on the set of films like The Long Voyage Home and admitted that when Danny was playing the accordion, it gave the director a major advantage. As the Duke put it, “It’s easy to talk an actor into a scene that way.”
The poster for The Horse Soldiers, in which Borzage had a bit part. (Photo: Public Domain)
But not everyone appreciated these antiquated tactics. While filming John Ford’s Civil War segment of How the West Was Won, future A-Team star George Peppard was completely baffled when Danny led him away from the camera. “To my astonishment,” Peppard related to biographer Ronald L. Davis, “[Ford] sent me off with this accordion player, who played me sad music of the time. I was puzzled. I’d had a lot of training as an actor, and I thought I was ready to do the scene.”
Evidently, John Ford disagreed.
When Danny wasn’t taking aim at specific actors, you could still hear him squeezing out old tunes. In between scenes, his job was to create a relaxed atmosphere, one that left a lasting impression on the rest of the Ford Stock Company. When reminiscing about his experiences with John Ford, actor Harry Carey Jr. remembered that Danny “was not a particularly good accordion player,” but whenever he launched into a song, there was “a plaintive sadness that pulled at your heart, that made you feel, ‘Thank God I’m here to do a scene for that Old Man [Ford] in the chair by the camera.’”
In addition to appearing in films like The Horse Soldiers and Two Rode Together, Danny directly contributed to some of the most memorable moments in the John Ford canon. His heartbreaking accordion rendition of “Red River Valley” caps off Ma Joad’s final monologue in The Grapes of Wrath. As a group of pioneers pray over a massacred family in The Searchers, Danny accompanies the mourners with “Shall We Gather at the River?” He shows up again at the end of the film, performing an energetic version of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” at an Old West wedding. And you can hear that bittersweet accordion in films like My Darling Clementine, 3 Godfathers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Danny also excelled at cheering up his coworkers. According to Kathryn Kalinak in How the West Was Sung, Borzage would welcome particular actors to the set each day with their own specialized theme songs. Every time Henry Fonda showed up for work, Danny would launch into “Red River Valley.” John Wayne was often greeted with the theme from She Wore a Yellow Ribbon or “Marcheta,” a love song featured in They Were Expendable. And whenever John Ford made his grand entrance on set, Borzage welcomed him with “Bringing in the Sheaves,” the director’s favorite hymn.
Director John Ford circa 1946. (Photo: Public Domain)
Even when they weren’t making movies, Ford kept Borzage pretty busy. Every year, the director invited friends and family to a Christmas party at his private California hangout, the Field Photo Farm. As guests mingled in the clubhouse, an actor like Andy Devine or Burl Ives (both large men) would secretly dress up as Santa Claus. With a bagful of presents for the kids, this fake Kris Kringle would ride up to the party in a stagecoach, complete with a cowboy escort. And sitting atop the coach were Danny Borzage and Jimmy Stewart, both playing “Jingle Bells” on their accordions.
But Danny was there for the hard times as well, and he played a key role in one of the Stock Company’s most somber moments. Before John Wayne became Ford’s biggest star, the director had made over 20 movies with veteran actor Harry Carey Sr. When the elder Carey passed away, Ford pulled out all the stops to give his friend a proper send-off. According to historian Joseph McBride, Carey’s funeral was jam-packed with stars, ready to pay their respects. The Duke recited Tennyson, Burl Ives sang a Western ballad, and Danny said adios by once again playing “Red River Valley.”
Even when Danny wasn’t working with Ford, he liked sticking close to his friends. According to film historian Scott Eyman, when John Wayne was directing The Alamo, he brought Borzage along to recreate that Ford Stock Company feeling. The accordionist even appeared on an episode of The Lucy Show where the Duke meets Lucille Ball. And after John Ford finally retired from the picture business, Danny continued working as an extra, appearing in movies and TV series like Support Your Local Sheriff, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and The Wild Wild West.
Thanks to his Hollywood career, Danny became a celebrity in his hometown, and on several occasions, he was lovingly profiled by The Salt Lake Tribune. While he never achieved stardom like his brother Frank, Danny left an impact on everyone who heard his mournful accordion. Years after Danny passed away in 1975, actor Harry Carey Jr. honored his old friend with a few kind words. “I feel reverent when I say his name,” the actor said, “because he’s the most underscored, underappreciated human on the John Ford Stock Company.”
What do you see in these ghostly inkblots? Featured in Psychobook, edited by Julian Rothenstein, published by Princeton Architectural Press 2016. (Photo: Redstone Press Collection)
A signature can reveal a lot about a person. At least that’s what many believed in the early 20th century when people collected signatures of friends, family, and celebrities in autograph albums. But there was one particular book that bled the ink of an autograph into creatures, coffins, bats, and skeletons.
Titled The Ghost of My Friends, it is a book of “ghost signatures,” the well-inked swirls of a cursive autograph transformed into strange, elegant, and devilish inkblots. The smudges and splatters found in a booklet are akin to that of a Rorschach inkblot, but the linear thin tracks of a fountain pen give these ghostly inkblots a unique look. The Ghost of My Friends was a popular item in London and New York, yet its exact purpose and place in psychological testing remains a mystery.
Signatures are more easily deciphered in some blots than others. Featured in Psychobook, edited by Julian Rothenstein, published by Princeton Architectural Press 2016. (Photo: Redstone Press Collection)
Inkblots began gaining popularity around the mid-19th century, when German poet Justinus Kerner accidentally dropped ink on paper. The nebulous shapes sparked images of “hades” and “hell,” inspiring Kerner to write an entire series of poems published in 1890.
Simultaneously, people were generally interested in collecting autographs, filling albums in parlors and haggling celebrities to get their signatures. The Ghost of My Friends was a response to the fascination of inkblots and “a good way to get genuine autographs from celebrities otherwise tired of requests,” suggests Kathy Haas, associate curator at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, on the library’s blog.
The first known copy was published in London in 1905. It was compiled and authored by Cecil Henland, who had also authored other books including The Mind of a Friend and The Book of Butterflies. Not much is known about Henland aside from her marriage to Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Percival and her avid collecting of keepsakes. To set the tone of The Ghost of My Friends, Henland preludes the book with an eerie Shakespeare quote (“The best in this kind are but Shadows”) and a poem by Gerald Villiers Stuart, appropriately titled “Ghosts”:
“Shadows form in our ghostly past; Ho! Ho! young man. Ho! Ho! From forgotten graves they will rise at last; It is so, young man, it is so. You may run, you may dodge, you may Twist, you may bend, The flying phantoms win in the end; Ho! Ho! old man, Ho! Ho!”
There is nothing written on the intent of the book, only the simple instructions to “sign your name along the fold of the paper with a full pen of ink, and then double the page over without using blotting paper.” The book consists of 48 blank glossy pages—optimized for the ink to bleed instead of soaking into the paper—that have two lines to print the name and date. Slow-drying Indian ink and fountain pens gave the best result on the glazed paper.
Inky birds, duchesses, monsters, and other creatures and objects your mind may interpret are found within The Ghost of My Friends, making it difficult (and in some cases impossible) to tease out the original signatures. For example, the cover and the first ghost signature, which vaguely resembles a stretched, dilapidated frog, is of an unknown “Ghost of a Celebrated General.”
The cover of The Ghost of My Friends with the signature of an unknown, but celebrated general. Featured in Psychobook, Princeton Architectural Press 2016. (Photo: Redstone Press Collection)
A filled book looks like a homemade alternative to the projective Rorschach inkblot test that has been commonly used to analyze personality traits and emotions. However, archivists and scholars are unsure if the ghost signatures were ever meant to be interpreted as a psychological test.
“It seems likely that Hermann Rorschach was familiar with this popular parlor game where you friends would sign a page in ink and then fold the page in half to create a unique inkblot that looked, as Mark Twain wrote in 1905 ‘something that looked like a skeleton,’” says Julian Rothenstein, the editor of the recently published Psychobook which features ghost signatures from a copy of The Ghost of My Friends.
Some rare, pricey copies of The Ghost of My Friends contain high-profile autographs. As Rothenstein mentions, Mark Twain wrote a letter in 1905 to his daughter Clara describing the ghost autograph fad, even sending one of his own to her. Winston Churchill, actress Sarah Bernhardt, American bass singer and Civil Rights activist Paul Robeson, and Australian opera singer Dame Nellie Melba are even commemorated in inkblot form.
The signatures are described as "poetic, comic, and, sometimes, slightly sinister," in Psychobook, edited by Julian Rothenstein, published by Princeton Architectural Press 2016. (Photo: Redstone Press Collection)
The strange autograph book was a short-lived fad, but it was enough to distribute an ample amount of copies throughout the Northern America and England. Books have been found in Cleveland, Ohio and Ontario, Canada, while about 40 known copies are held in libraries in the United States. It’s quite easy to recreate ghost autographs of your own. Fans of the original The Ghost of My Friends, Reflections of My Friends, make and sell modern replicas of the book.
Today, the signatures found in this haunted early-19th century book can be considered true “ghost autographs,” the names and people forever immortalized. Maybe after all these years, The Ghost of My Friends could reveal something about the inscribers: “Ghost autographs might be the starting point for all sorts of discoveries,” says Rothenstein.
Object of Intrigue is a weekly column in which we investigate the story behind a curious item. Is there an object you want to see covered? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.
In another step towards the science fiction future many of us have been looking forward to, a British watchdog agency has released what might be the first set of laws regarding ethical robot creation. As the Guardian reports, the British Standards Institute (BSI) released their paper on the best practices of robot creation, addressing everything from physical safety to racism.
Since the early 20th century, Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics have stood as the theoretical moral baseline for a future where robots have much the same agency as humans. But this new paper gets a bit more detailed. Asimov’s fictional laws state that, 1. A robot cannot harm a human being; 2. It must obey the commands of human beings; and 3. That it must protect itself. When Asimov came up with these laws within his science fiction stories, such a future seemed a million miles away, but today it seems right around the corner, and his edicts a bit simple.
BSI is the decider of national engineering standards in the UK, and they decided to take a serious look at our robotic future, and get the jump on making sure it isn’t a nightmare. Working with a panel of scientists, ethicists, philosophers, and more, they developed BS 8611:2016, a document that will hopefully guide roboticists in the right direction.
Among the issues brought up by the paper, it addresses robots that could cause physical harm. As quoted in the Guardian, “Robots should not be designed solely or primarily to kill or harm humans; humans, not robots, are the responsible agents.” It also looks at over-dependence on robots and the dangers of creating emotional connections with them, especially as more automated caregiving automatons are introduced. It also warns of “deep learning” robots, which use the entirety of the internet as a knowledge base, could develop their own commands and alter the their own programming in response to their calculations, creating strange or unforeseen actions.
Maybe the most immediate and troubling point the standard explores is the robotic tendency towards dehumanization and even accidental bigotry. As facial recognition technology becomes more standard there are already issues with its ability to identify different races, and could easily be programmed, either willingly or unconsciously, to have a bias. As robotics are more seamlessly integrated into areas like medicine and policing, robotic thinking (literally) can create major issues.
For now much of BS 8611:2016 regards a future that is right around the corner, but like Asimov realized, it’s never too early to start planning to avoid killer robots.
For centuries, travelers approaching the Roman city of Palmyra were greeted by an iconic structure: a 20-foot arch, intricately carved, framing the city's markets, temples, and bustling citizens. Over the centuries, the Arch of Palmyra transformed from artful infrastructure to ancient landmark, crumbling slightly. But it still stood tall—until August of 2015, when it was dynamited by Islamic State militants during the orgy of destruction that accompanied Palmyra's seizure.
Yesterday, the Arch reappeared far from home—in City Hall Park, on the southern tip of Manhattan. This rebirth was the work of the Institute for Digital Archaeology and UNESCO, which are collaborating on efforts to digitize and occasionally recreate ancient artifacts that have been lost to time or terrorism.
The arch was carved by a crack team of Italian stone-carving robots, following a 3-D model put together from photographs taken by archaeologists and tourists before the arch was destroyed. As Artnet reports, it was brought to New York to coincide with the United Nations General Assembly, which runs through this week. Photographs show a sandy-colored, surprisingly skinny arch, standing astride a flagstone path and looking like what it is—a traveler from another time and place.
The remade arch has also stood in London's Trafalgar Square. It will be in New York City for a week before moving on for a stint in Dubai. It is free and open to the public.
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.
Books were once made by hand, one by one, with patience and perfection. In this video, you can watch each step of the process—from the setting of the type, to the application of ink, to the impression onto paper, to the folding, cutting, hammering, sewing, binding, clamping, and trimming. And all of this is still after metal type was invented, replacing painstakingly handwritten script.
Bookmaking, though it now enjoys newer and faster forms technology, is still an art. And though these days, books are much easier to make and acquire, we still think that they are objects of great value. Perhaps we're biased, since we just finished making our own book, Atlas Obscura: An Explorer's Guide to the World's Hidden Wonders. And though we may not have sewn the binding ourselves, it sometimes feels as though we might have.
Let us never forget that books are treasures.
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.
China will launch its second space lab into the sky on Thursday, the country has said, while still keeping an eye on their first space lab, which remains in space, mindlessly circling the Earth on a path of inevitable and uncontrolled destruction.
That's because, last week, China revealed what many in the space community already thought to be true: they had lost control of their space station Tiangong-1, which is now slowly, if surely, falling back to Earth.
As Popular Mechanics points out, this is not the usual order of things. The station, which was launched in 2011, had its mission repeatedly extended, but, earlier this year, China officially ended its service.
What usually happens next is a controlled burn into the Earth's atmosphere. But China has said that it no longer has control of the station, and, for now, all it can do is watch.
"Based on our calculation and analysis, most parts of the space lab will burn up during falling," Wu Ping, deputy director of the manned space engineering office, said at a press conference Wednesday.
There is a remote chance that parts of the station could survive the burn, falling to Earth and causing damage or injuring people, but when the station does begin its final descent—expected to be sometime in late 2017—there will be plenty of people watching, for just this reason.
It also promises, if all goes well, to be a pretty good show.
David Hospador, Captain of the 3rd PA Light Infantry Company, showing off a haversack. (Photo: Sarah Laskow)
The Battle of Harlem Heights was scheduled to begin around 2 p.m., and before it started, Rob Morris, commander of the 84th Regiment of Foot, needed to order a new coat. The one he was wearing, bright red, worn and dirty at the edges, had been purchased in 1995, and everything about it was wrong—the color, the buttons, the epaulettes, the trimming.
He didn't need to go far from where the fighting forces were camped in neat lines of white canvas tents, at Monmouth Battlefield State Park in New Jersey. Just outside the camp, there was a cluster of larger tents, where the sutlers had set up their shops. At the Royal Blue Traders tent, Ian Graves had spread out bolts of fabric, rolls of ribbons and rows of bonnets. Tall and gangly, he took Morris' measurements, and they discussed how Graves would source the regimental lace which would adorn the front of Morris' new waistcoat.
From afar, British redcoats might look the same, but each regiment's uniforms are distinct, with strips of lace in special patterns and colors or buttons arranged in particular designs. Once, these details might have been overlooked. Morris' late commander was more concerned with getting people out in the field than in the exacting uniformity of their jackets, he says.
But while the public at large might think re-enactments are just about playing war, within "the hobby," as it's called, there has been a heightened interest in pursuing greater authenticity in the clothing they wear and the objects they carry.
"Part of the joy of doing the hobby wasn’t just going into the field and pulling the trigger. That’s a brief thrill," says Roy Najecki, who's been involved in re-enactments since his twenties and sells period fabric and reproductions. "Part of the joy became about really replicating these items accurately. The more you got to the original item, the greater satisfaction you got out of doing the hobby in general."
Ian Graves at work. (Photo: Sarah Laskow)
Once, Revolutionary War re-enactors might have altered modern canvas painter's pants into a simulacrum of 18th-century trousers and served spaghetti and meatballs at their camps. Today, more re-enactors than ever put a premium on having pants hand-made from material with a historically accurate thread-count and cooking food that soldiers would have actually eaten, sometimes even made from the recipes they would have used.
The demand for meticulously recreated objects is high enough that there is a small group of people, like Graves, who make their living by recreating the material culture of the past as accurately as possible. They are tailors, leather-workers, and coppersmiths, who hand-make waistcoats, harnesses, and chocolate pots. There is even a one-stop shop for everything an 18th-century historical re-enactor might need.
The firm of Jas. Townsend and Son, Inc. was born in 1973, after John Townsend's father, James, became interested in muzzle-loaded guns. He first starting selling gear—candles, lanterns, and so forth—to people yearning to experience a more primitive, historic style of camping during re-enactment events; the business grew from there, and today offers hundreds of items, from stays and garters to flint pouches, tankards, washtubs, wooden whisks and sieves.
The store, based in Pierceton, Indiana, is like a Walmart for 18th and 19th century items. But these aren't mass-manufactured items: the shirts and dresses are made to order by on-call seamstresses, and many of its products requires hours upon hours of historical research as they're developed.
Graves also sells thread, wax, awls, and other tools of tailoring. (Photo: Sarah Laskow)
When John Townsend was developing a wooden whisk, for instance, he found the birch twigs he needed in Michigan, where the right kind of birch trees grow. For an 18th-century sieve, he needed to find a source for horsehair and for green ash wood. These sieves aren't the metal bowls used today, but wooden frames with a screen on the bottom.
When developing the prototype, Townsend went out and cut down a green ash tree he happened to have on his property. Creating the screen for the sieve was more difficult. Eventually, he found screens woven out of horsehair in a part of northern China where the horse culture is still strong enough that such a product can be made.
"Sometimes you have to go a long way to get what you're looking for," he says.
The skills to make some of these objects can be incredibly specialized, too: Townsend estimates the store works with 50 companies, both large and small.
Najecki casts pewter buttons in his basement. (Photo: Sarah Laskow)
Peter Goebel, for instance, is a coppersmith who has been filling orders from Jas. Townsend & Sons for years. One of his first accounts was making canteens for the company. Goebel started out making lanterns and sconces but soon expanded to cookware, and, when an injury ended his career in construction, turned to hammering copper full time. He spends his days making cups, canteens, flagons, pots and kettles—one of the most satisfying items he's made was a chocolate pot.
A historic site had sent him pictures of the original, to make a copy. "It took me almost a year and half to make the tools to make the pot," he says. "You have to study, study, and study the pictures to figure out how each piece was made, and which piece came first. It’s a horrible pot to make. It’s very simple, deceptively simple looking. It’s a taper with the big end down and small end up, with a waist, and it’s all hand-hammered."
But making a new item is more exciting that making multiples of the same item. "You can only hammer so many hours a day before you climb the wall," he says. He's more interested in making items that no one has manufactured in a couple hundred years, like cups that take even more work to build than the chocolate pot, or the little boxes where gentlemen kept sweetmeats, mints, salt, and snuff.
American militia heading to battle. (Photo: Sarah Laskow)
Exacting craftspeople like Graves and Goebel rely on pieces from history that have survived until now to hone the accuracy of their work. "It's guesswork, but very, very educated guesswork," says Graves, who has a collection of original material that he's found at estate sales.
But sometimes the details of the craft have been lost. Once-common items were recycled—Paul Revere bought up copperware to recast into sheets of copper used in naval vessels—and as these trades became less relevant, the knowledge of how they worked disappeared.
"Coppersmiths had hundreds of years of tradition behind them, and no one put it in writing," says Goebel. "We’re trying to reinvent the wheel by looking at original pieces and measuring and talking with museums," calling them dozens of times to ask more questions about details and dimensions.
Not everyone, even in the hobby, cares about that level of accuracy. It's possible to go to a historical re-enactment event and spend hundreds of dollars on gear that's made from more modern materials and machine sewn—products that look good from 20 feet away but not two feet away.
Part of the appeal of wearing 18th century clothes and using 18th century objects is feeling connected to people who lived 200 years ago. It's another way into this world for outsiders who might not be so interested in the "lining up and shooting blanks at each other" part of battle reenactments.
Townsend discovered this potential new audience after he starting making cooking videos on the store's YouTube channel. Originally, the company started the channel for re-enactors, to demonstrate how they might use the items the company was selling. Some were tongue-in-cheek and a little goofy. But the first time they posted a cooking episode, it was immediately one of the most popular videos they'd ever created. Today, the store's most viewed video is a demonstration of making 18th-century fried chicken.
This recipe, it happens, requires a bit of whisking, and for anyone who wants an authentic 18th century experience, Jas. Townsend & Son has birch whisks available for sale. They're reusable, and, at $21 apiece, comparable in price to the modern equivalent.
The image is common enough: A passenger plane with human cargo belted snugly into their seats. But look for another second and you’ll see that every passenger is a child, and each one has been bundled up inside an identical cardboard box. Most of them are babies, but some are older and their limbs spill over the edges of their makeshift bassinets. They appear marooned without any adults in the shot.
The image is one of many taken during the chaotic end of the Vietnam War when the United States undertook an operation to evacuate thousands of children from Vietnam in April 1975, just weeks before the Fall of Saigon. Supposedly all orphaned, they were slated to be adopted out to waiting U.S. families. Over 2,500 children were brought stateside on flights manned by volunteers outnumbered by infants. Three processing centers were quickly formed at military outposts on the West Coast—two in California and one in Washington—where children were received before being placed with families throughout the country.
Doubts about some of the children’s orphanhood would bubble to the surface almost immediately, but before such questions could even be posed, those tasked with manning the operation had to grapple with an incredible logistical problem: quickly transporting and caring for thousands of infants during a time of pandemonium.
Those who accompanied children on flights—including commercial flight attendants who were recruited or volunteered—used the materials on hand to turn planes into makeshift nurseries.
Flight attendant Jan Wollett told NPR that she and others lined the floor of their plane with blankets for the babies, and secured others with cargo netting.
“We constantly peeked into bassinets to make sure each baby was still breathing. I froze as I flashed my light on each little back, waiting for what seemed like hours to see a ribcage move with the breath of life.”
A nurse and babies arriving into San Francisco as part of Operation Babylift. (Photo: National Archives/23869151)
A nurse who accompanied a planeload of children to Seattle wrote that she was “overwhelmed” as she saw “the endless flow of little ones pouring into the plane filling every available space.” She did not sleep during the 30-hour flight.
Jim Trullinger was doing doctoral research in Vietnam when forced to flee the country. He secured a trip back to the United States with Operation Babylift. “When we got to the airport, I helped carry babies onto the plane, a 747 charter, and strap them into their seats,” he wrote.“There were no baby carriers, so we just had to use seat belts tightened around the babies. There were so many babies that there was no place for me to sit. Before take-off, the flight attendant told me that if there was a crash, I was to get off the plane first and she would toss babies to me.”
Catastrophe was fresh in everyone’s minds, as the first scheduled flight of Operation Babylift flight had crash-landed on April 4th, killing many of the passengers, including 78 children.
Upon arriving in the United States, planes were met by medical teams that triaged groups of children who were suffering from a range of maladies such as severe dehydration, intestinal illnesses, pneumonia, skin infections and even chicken pox. Ambulances rushed the sickest to hospitals. Around half of the children flowed through San Francisco’s Presidio. Now a lush recreation area, the Presidio was an army base at the time and a cavernous football field-sized building called Harmon Hall was transformed into a massive care facility.
Harmon Hall was turned into a care facility for the babies. (Photo: Golden Gate NRA, Park Archives and Records Center)
Michael Howe was the president of the Bay Area Health Planning Council at the time, a voluntary organization that oversaw the direction of healthcare and hospitals in San Francisco. Organizers tapped him to help, and he became a volunteer coordinator at the Presidio, working with nursing students, Vietnam veterans and others to assist in caring for the children. In 2015, Howe revisited Harmon Hall with a group of fellow volunteers as well as men and women who had arrived as children on Operation Babylift flights. He described the setting as “extraordinary”.
“How did we do this?” he wondered, “Did we really do this?”
When the children started arriving, it was a chaotic scene. “There was really no one in charge and in some way it’s kind of a misnomer to call me or anybody else a leader—we were there doing what we possibly could do in an environment where we really weren’t quite sure what to do, bottom line,” says Howe.
The hall was lined with small mattresses for the babies; when mattresses ran short, children were sometimes placed on layers of blankets on the floor. Half of the facility was devoted to support services for the children; part to feeding volunteers who worked long shifts, sometimes sleeping at the facility. The children were sick, and volunteers fell sick as well. In very rare cases, people who felt they had been promised a child for adoption would show up at the Presidio and try to abscond with a baby.
An April 6, 1975 San FranciscoChronicle article reported that there were “7,886 bottles of formula, at least 10,000 disposable diapers, 2,400 cotton tipped swabs and 750 cotton balls, 1,440 aspirin tablets, gallons of baby powder, ointment by the bushel, toothpaste and towels” on hand at the Presidio. The same article described a plane bound for Seattle “crammed with bassinets, diapers, bottles, and food including hot dogs.”
President Ford carries a baby from one of the Operation Babylift planes. (Photo: National Archives/7839930)
As they marshaled the resources to care for thousands of children, volunteers—who were not involved in the decision to receive or adopt out children—quickly began to doubt whether every child was without family
“There are unquestionably children in the airlift who are true orphans,” Jane Barton, a translator from the American Friends Services Committee told the San Francisco Chronicle on April 13, 1975. “But I talked to a number of children who said they are not orphans.”
Howe, too, had concerns.
“I felt it before we closed out our work,” says Howe. “The word ‘felt’ is important—I had no proof.”
Did the U.S. save kids—or steal them? The legacy of Operation Babylift is a deeply complicated one. Lawsuits were filed on behalf of the children including one brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights in 1975 that sought to reunite adoptees with living relatives. Some have successfully formed relationships with biological family as adults while others are still searching. Many have made the pilgrimage back to Vietnam to reconnect with their roots, reversing the flights they took over 40 years ago, scattered in the cabin of an airplane filled with crying babies.
A new retrospective box set of David Bowie’s music (Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976)) is set to hit the streets in just a few days, and for the first time ever, it is going to include his “unreleased” album, The Gouster. The album was recorded in 1974 around the same time as Young Americans, and is seen as a sort of darker version of that album. While many of the songs from The Gouster, such as “John, I’m Only Dancing (Again)” and even “Young Americans” would be released as singles or on other albums, never before have they been released in their original album.
While the box set will finally recreate the album as it was seemingly intended, the strange name itself says a great deal about the attitude Bowie wanted the record to convey. But what is a "Gouster"?
The term “Gouster” refers to an African-American youth subculture that popped up in Chicago’s South Side in the early 1960s. According to one reading of the term on the Language Hat blog, the word has Scottish roots, originally meaning, “A violent or unmanageable person, a swaggering fellow.” This origin seems to fit with what the Gousters became in 20th century Chicago, with their bad-boy attitudes, and ne'er-do-well reputations. The Gouster trend didn’t last long, and what we know about it seems to come mainly from the recollections of those who lived it.
Like almost every youth subculture from the beginning of time, much of Gouster culture revolved around fashion. Chicago’s Gousters adopted the style and swagger of the local old school gangsters of previous decades. There are scant few images of actual Gousters available online, but one of the more prominent recollections of Gouster culture, in a 2013 post to a blog called Boomacious, gives some idea of their general look. To wit:
“A Gouster’s style was dress-casual. He wore loose fitting, almost baggy clothes. His fine wool, alpaca and mohair sweater had three buttons at the neck, with a lazy, turned down collar. Pants with two pleats at the waist left a little room in the leg so that a Gouster could pimp.”
Gouster fashion shared some common DNA with the clean, but ostentatious, look of zoot suits. True Gousters could often be found sporting suspenders, fedoras, or even carrying a cane. The idea, as ever, was to look the coolest. Women could be Gousters too, and their outfits tended toward pleated skirts accented with nylons and pearls.
But it wasn’t only about the clothes. Dancing was a big part of Gouster culture as well. In an interview in BluesSpeak: The Best of the Original Chicago Blues Annual, legendary Chicago radio personality Herb Kent, said that Gousters had their own club spots like the Peps and the Persian Ballroom, as well as their own styles of dance, such as the Gouster Bop and the Gouster Walk. In that same Boomacious post, she says, “If a guy could Bop, he was king of the night.”
Of course Gousters weren’t the only crowd on the scene in the early '60s. They were directly opposed by anyone who identified as an Ivy Leaguer. In opposition to the loose, swaggering suits worn by Gousters, Ivys wore tight fitting Brooks Brothers outfits, cultivating a clean-cut collegiate look. They were the Socs to the Gousters’ Greasers. The divide was stark and ubiquitous among early '60s Chicago teens. In his autobiography, The Cool Gent, Kent says that you were either an Ivy or a Gouster and there was no in-between, although the actual conflicts were much tamer than today.
“Gousters just always tried to outdo the Ivies in everything. The Competition was there in the form of dressing, dancing, and even getting girls." he wrote. He also notes that when a fight would break out, the rough-and-tumble Gousters usually came out on top.
By the mid-1960s, both Gousters and Ivies and sort of fallen by the wayside as trends changed, but Bowie never forgot the coolness those Chicago teens exuded. As noted on Rolling Stone, in the notes from Who Can I Be Now? (1974-1976), Bowie’s close friend, Tony Visconti, shed some light on the musician’s choice to name his album after an obscure Chicago trend.“Gouster was a word unfamiliar to me but David knew it as a type of dress code worn by African American teens in the ‘60s, in Chicago," he told the magazine, "But in the context of the album its meaning was attitude, an attitude of pride and hipness.” Even if he didn’t experience it himself, Bowie seemed to understand that “pride and hipness” were what the Gousters were all about.
The new book from Phaidon, Plant: Exploring the Botanical World, features a rich collection of 300 images of various plants and flowers in the form of illustrations, photography and SEM micrographs. This depth of visuals is suited to the subject matter: images of the botanical world have existed for over 5,000 years, according to the book’s introduction, and have been an essential part of plant identification and categorization.
Not all of the contributors began as botanists, however. For example, one of the most famous catalogers was the 18th-century artist Pierre-Joseph Redouté, who became known as the “Raphael of flowers”. Redouté painted stage scenery in Paris and was discovered, and trained, by the botanist Charles Louis l'Héritier de Brutelle. Over the course of his career, as he navigated revolutionary France, both Marie-Antoinette and, later, Josephine Bonaparte were his patrons. He illustrated more than 50 botanical books and his delicate watercolors are instantly recognizable.
Plant also provides biographical information for each image, which is often as illuminating as the work itself. One illustration consists of delicate pen-and-ink drawings of plants, surrounding by small script—a letter exchanged between botanists to document species. In another, shown above, a poppy blazes bright blue. According to the book’s text, this was created for the color edition of the Honzō zufu, the “Illustrated Manual of Plants”, produced by Iwasaki (Kan’en) Tsunemasa in the 19th century.
Here is a collection of images from this beautifully illustrated book:
Erich J. Geske, Maidenhair spleenwort (Asplenium trichomanes), from National Geographic, 1925. (Photo: National Geographic Creative/ Bridgeman Images/ Courtesy Plant: Exploring the Botanical World, Phaidon 2016)
Philip Reinagle, Large Flowering Sensitive Plant from Robert John Thornton's The Temple of Flora, 1799. (Photo: Natural History Museum, London/ Science Photo Library/ Courtesy Plant: Exploring the Botanical World, Phaidon 2016)
Pierre-Joseph Redouté, Rosa centifolia: Rosier à cent feuilles, 1820. (Photo: The Art Archive/ Eileen Tweedy/ Courtesy Plant: Exploring the Botanical World, Phaidon 2016)
Nikolaus Joseph von Jacquin and Johannes Scarf, Various flowering plants, 1792. (Photo: Natural History Museum, London/ Science Photo Library/ Courtesy Plant: Exploring the Botanical World, Phaidon 2016)
Rob Kesseler, Scabiosa crenata, a hand-coloured scanning electron micrograph (SEM). (Photo: Collection of Rob Kesseler/ Courtesy Plant: Exploring the Botanical World, Phaidon 2016)
But, perhaps due to their own general lack of bodies, they cannot yet distinguish nipples from navels. Last night, a group of volunteers set out to change that, armed with a collection of about 10,000 shirtless selfies.
Torso Computer Club is the creation of Adam Milner and Ben Snell, both artists at Carnegie Mellon University. For the past few years, Milner has been collecting torsos from people he chats with on Grindr and other dating apps, creating a compendium of faceless self-presentation. "The torso image initially interested me because it seemed simultaneously vulnerable and distant or safe," he says.
After a few years of screengrabbing, he now has about 10,000 torsos. But he wasn't quite sure what to do with them until he met Snell, who thought it might be neat to use this huge dataset to train computers. "There aren't open source data sets of torsos just lying around the internet," Snell says.
The volunteers of Torso Computer Club met up last night at the Frank-Ratchye Studio for Creative Inquiry in Pittsburgh, PA, and spent the evening classifying what Snell calls "topological landmarks on the body." Milner and Snell will use their work to train computers to do the same thing.
Although they are wary of their work falling into the wrong hands—Instagram, for example, could use it to beef up their censorship tools—they plan to continue on to loftier goals. "Can we use this massive set of data to construct a single three-dimensional torso—a near-physical manifestation of modern yet classical form?" asks Snell. "We might even be able to teach a computer to 'see' nipples and navels on its own."
"We want to continue mining this collection for the potential it has, though less as a tool and more as a form of provocation and speculation," says Snell. Adds Milner: "The more we work the more questions there are."
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.
See a mysterious floating blob in the river? Most people would simply leave it be, but residents of Stockton, California recently decided to pull some up and they discovered something that could be a signal of a larger environmental issue: dragon boogers.
According to CBS Sacramento is reporting, strange gelatinous blobs have been appearing in rivers and man-made lakes in various spots along the area delta. As curious fishermen and other locals began to dredge them up and slap them down on the docks (where they looked even more vile), sharing pictures on social media, some answers about their origins began to emerge.
They were not some kind of Lovecraftian discharge, as it turns out, although they weren’t exactly locals either. The strange blobs were identified as organisms called bryozoans. Also known as dragon’s boogers or moss animals, these discomfiting blobs are actually masses of much smaller creatures called zooids, each only about a half a millimeter long. However, they can band together to form larger slime lumps, while reaching out their countless minuscule tentacles to grab food. They just don’t usually appear in Northern California.
In fact they are not normally found west of the Mississippi River. No one is sure quite how they ended up so far west, whether they were accidentally relocated or whether climate change made the waters more hospitable for them. But their presence could disrupt the existing environmental balance in the delta.
At a Florida fertilizer plant, a sinkhole 45 feet in diameter and 300 feet deep opened up in the ground—right underneath a giant pool of wastewater. More than 200 million gallons of contaminated water rushed down, into the aquifer that underlies Florida and provides drinking water for people across the state. The water is polluted with a phosphogypsum, a weakly radioactive byproduct of making phosphorous fertilizer.
The sinkhole opened up in late August; it was three weeks before the news was made public. As the Tampa Bay Times reports, the law does not require public notification until there's evidence that contaminated water has migrated off site (which hasn't happened yet).
The company says water in the aquifer moves slowly, and it's working to clean up the spill; neighbors, naturally, are nervous and are taking the company up on its offer to test their well water for contamination.
This is the second giant sinkhole to open up on this site. In 1994, a sinkhole 160 feet wide at the surface opened beneath a stack of phosphogypsum; investigators determined it was connected to an erosion cavity that went 400 feet down into the soil. It was described as "planet Earth's first moon crater."
Central Florida is home to large fertilizer production facilities because of its natural deposits of phosphate, discovered in the 19th century, in the Bone Valley region, where the land is a sandy mix of phosphate pebbles, clay, and fossils. In this area, the dirt also includes naturally occurring uranium, which remains behind in the phosphogypsum byproduct of fertilizer product.
Environmentalists have been worried for years about the danger of accumulating waste from fertilizer production; it doesn't help that Florida is prone to sinkholes. From an industrial perspective, one giant sinkhole every 30 years could be considered acceptable, but no one wants to be the neighbor who has to worry about a giant hole next door leaking uranium into the groundwater.
