There are so many small mysteries left in the world. Today’s evidence—a hammerhead shark and a ghost shark, both new discoveries. One is small and, dare we say, cute? For a shark? The other is the largest species of ghost shark ever discovered and, to the human eye, really ugly.
The new species of hammerhead shark was discovered in Belize by a team studying bonnethead sharks. These smallish sharks are plentiful in the Caribbean Sea and were thought to be one big happy family of sharks.
But when a team of scientists analyzed the DNA of bonnethead sharks captured in Belize, they discovered that these sharks were a different species from the ones that live around Mexico, the U.S. and the Bahamas. Even though all the sharks look quite similar, the DNA of the Belize sharks showed they hadn’t interbred with those other groups of sharks for several million years.
Here’s a close up of one of these sharks:
Yeah, the shark has eyes on the side of its head, but check it out in context:
It’s pretty small and cute! Unlike this newly discovered ghost shark, which the scientist who discovered it describes as “chunky in the front.”
Ghost sharks aren’t technically sharks (though they’re related) since they move themselves with their fins rather than their tails. This is the 50th named species of ghost shark, Live Science reports, and is three feet long, making it the largest ghost shark yet discovered.
Fishermen working in the region around South Africa, where the ghost sharks live, have known about them for awhile and suspected that they weren’t quite like other ghost sharks. They were just too big.
There's no easy way to say this, so let's get right to it: As recently as yesterday morning, a minivan filled with dozens of copies of the film Speed has been spotted parked in Brooklyn.
The minivan is black and, judging by the duct tape on its wiper cowl, somewhat beat up. Emily Hughes is the latest to spot the unusual vehicle, which has been tooling around Greenpoint and Williamsburg.
In the 1994 film Speed—as you doubtlessly remember—Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock team up to thwart a domestic terrorist who has planted a bomb on a Los Angeles city bus. If the bus falls below 50 miles per hour, the bomb will explode.
If this is a 2017 meta-remake, the plot appears to be quite different. The van is generally stationary and, although there are receipts scattered across the dash as well, they do not appear to be speeding tickets.
According to Twitter reports, the van has been around since summer of last year, at the very least. Based on photos, it seems to be slowly but steadily accumulating tapes, but that could be an optical illusion caused by an overdose of staring Keanus.
Oddly, this is not the Speed-iest van in the world—according to Vice, a collector in Idaho has over 500 copies in a repurposed Care-A-Van.
Which is to say, this particular disease appears contagious. Brooklyn residents, remember—if you see something, say something.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
A tunnel the length of almost two football fields separates the hustle and bustle of Tirana, Albania’s capital, from one of the country’s largest nuclear bunkers.
In the communist days, this five-story, 106-room bunker, located at the base of the one-mile-high mountain range that dominates Tirana from the east, was known as “Facility 0774.” Built in the ‘70s, it was designed to protect Albania’s communist dictator president, Enver Hoxha, and his government officers in the event of a nuclear attack.
This long-forbidden military facility was first opened to the public by the Ministry of Defence in 2014 during the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the country’s liberation from the Nazis. It remained open for just two months.
Now the bunker has been transformed into Bunk’Art, a cultural center that mixes contemporary art and history exhibitions about Albania’s tumultuous 20th century.
Non-profit organization Qendra Ura, an association founded in 2008 for the promotion of culture and artistic activities, runs the place, but the bunker itself is still owned by the Albanian state.
As Eva Haxhi, manager of Bunk’Art, puts it, “it is sort of an ‘artistic bunker’”.
To go inside is to take a trip to the paranoid mind of Hoxha, who ruled the country from 1941 to 1985.
In the early ‘60s, hardline Stalinist Hoxha broke relations with the U.S.S.R. after Moscow denounced Joseph Stalin. Under his command, Albania became one of the most hermetic states in the world.
Hoxha’s obsession with a potential foreign invasion led him to order the construction of some 700,000 bunkers around the country. Most of them were just small, egg-shaped concrete structures suitable only for one of two people. Many still dot the Albanian landscape.
The massive Bunk’Art bunker is different. It was a key part of Hoxha’s escape and resistance plan. Hoxha and his prime minister at the time, Mehmet Shehu, had their own apartments inside the bunker. Each of them had a reception room for their secretary, an office, a bedroom and a bathroom. There was also a room for cabinet meetings, an intercommunications room and a chief officer’s room.
Many in Tirana still believe that a network of secret tunnels linked the bunker with the president and his ministers’ residences in the city center, three miles away. But regardless of how expansive the hidden infrastructure was, it didn’t end up being used. Hoxha died in April 1985 and his regime only managed to survive for a few more years. In the early ‘90s, Albania became a capitalist country: the long-feared foreign invasion did not occur and the bunker never served its original purpose.
The original facilities, though, are almost all intact today. All the furniture dates back from the bunker’s original era: the armchairs, the cracked maps of Albania, the Chinese-made air purifiers with red five-point stars on them. On Hoxha’s desk, an old radio plays one of his speeches on loop. His bed is still covered with a red bedspread.
On the sides of the corridors, rooms alternate art installations with history exhibitions about the hardship and repression in Hoxha’s Albania. One of the displays recreates a classroom of a primary school during the communist era. Another one highlights the importance of sport during those times. There, a bust of Enver Hoxha hangs in the net of a basketball basket. There is a place for nostalgia and irony at Bunk’Art.
The main room of the bunker, an assembly hall, has been transformed into a concert hall. From the walls, black-and-white portraits of Hoxha and other politicians of his time are forced to look at and listen to jazz—the music they banned for so many years.
From the bespectacled bust of James Joyce in St. Stephen’s Green to the busty bronze of Molly Malone off Grafton Street, Dublin is a city of icons. But if you venture out from the winding cobblestone and Georgian brick of the city center, something very different may grab your eye.
She bares the full length of a leg, sensuously arched at the knee. A wrap slips from her shoulders, falling down her chest and between her thighs. And she gazes out, seductive yet aloof, from the windowsills of countless Dublin homes. She’s a white plaster statuette many call The Lady on the Rock. Once you notice her, you’ll spot everywhere. Who is she? Why is she all over Dublin?
The Lady on the Rock answers to many names. Some dub her the White Lady or theLady in the Window. Some root her in particular neighborhoods, like the Lady of Cabra or Crumlin, north and south, respectively, of the River Liffey, which bisects the city. Others claim her for an entire swath of town: Our Lady of the Northside. A number of natives don’t know she has a name, but they recognize her as a phenomenon seldom found outside Dublin.
The statuette started cropping up in working-class pockets of Dublin, including Cabra and Crumlin, during the late 1990s. As she multiplied over the 2000s, so did the myths about her. There was a shipwreck, one tale goes, off the west coast of Ireland. It killed all aboard, except for one lady who washed up on the rocks, naked. Another spins a more modern nautical yarn. A freighter lost a crate of the statuettes, purportedly mass-produced in China, to the Irish Sea; they were later hawked in discount stores. Could she represent the Virgin Mary or Mary Magdalene, Catholic imaginations have wondered? Or that same Molly Malone, a 17th-century beauty of many a myth, sung as a fishmonger but slandered as a lady of the night?
That the Lady on the Rock tends to populate inner-city working-class areas has spawned suspicion, nasty if flippant. Urban legends claim she’s a secret sign that drugs or sex are for sale where’s she housed. One taxi driver elaborated on this theory: Only if she’s pointed to the left does it mean you can buy drugs there. In some houses, you’ll see her perched on every available windowsill. The more statues in the windows? Well, the more ladies in the brothel.
The Lady on the Rock, though, has far less sensational origins, as Jessie Ward O’Sullivan uncovered in her 2010 short documentary, The Lady on the Rock. Harold Gardiner, a local artist, conceived the idea in the early 1990s; a craftsman, Edward Loughman, helped make her plaster mold. Gardiner sold statues to the occasional friend before passing away, and she would have passed into oblivion if Vincent Doran, a professional plasterer, hadn’t bought her off Loughman when clearing out Gardiner’s workshop.
Doran’s shop, Dublin Mouldings, showcases busts of Shakespeare and Elvis alongside the Lady on the Rock. In a few hours, Doran and his son construct her from silicon fiberglass using a two-piece mold. They clean up her joints and sell her for 20 quid. Sometimes a painter will even dress her up with some color. “People like seeing them in the windows. They look well,” Doran says.
A person buys one, some neighbors fancy their own, others want to fit in, a trend emerges. I visited some houses with Ladies in their windows; all declined to talk, my curiosity, perhaps, seeming as suspect as others have viewed their taste in interior design.
And, indeed, not everyone thinks the statuette looks well. “Absolutely disgusting,” the same taxi driver said. He didn’t buy the Lady’s lurid lore, but nor did he think highly of her—or her owners. “If someone presented me with these, I would break them up,” he says. “They think they are classy, but that’s nonsense. Keeping up with the Joneses? More like keeping up with the junkies.”
“It’s garbage. Snobbery,” Fergus O’Neill, a commercial artist, says of such sentiments, which often divide Dublin’s north and south sides. “She’s a working-class badge of honor.”
O’Neill began crafting White Lady Christmas ornaments four years back after noticing the Lady in the Window, as he calls her, around town. Other Dublin artists have embraced her, too, on t-shirts, theatrical posters, even as the focus of a high-school art project.
Originally, O’Neill wanted to make a punny desktop version: the Lady in the Microsoft Windows. But his project lead him to some extraordinary discoveries. In the early 20th century, Dublin’s grand Georgian homes were divided up into squalid tenements, whole families squeezed into single rooms. But if a family displayed matching objects in multiple windows, even floors, O’Neill says, it signaled they could finally afford multiple rooms. The Lady on the Rock follows in this tradition: “It’s fashion and it’s marking one’s territory,” O’Neill says, proudly adding he keeps one in his own home.
Dublin experienced a similar trend in the 1960s. Families displayed white horse statues in fanlights over Georgian doors. But, according to O’Neill, these families were posh and Protestant. The Lady on the Rock, then, could be the working-class—and Irish Catholic—answer to the trend.
For some, the Lady on the Rock’s identity will ultimately be just that: a trend. “She’s a real-life meme,” says Ruth Keating, who sells O’Neill’s ornaments at a local gallery. “An interesting thread in Dublin’s day-to-day,” but only a short-lived icon in the end.
Not for O’Neill. The Lady on the Rock is “a real symbol of Dublin,” he says. And a fitting one, too: A simple white plaster mold, reshaped and colored in by Dublin’s many stories, by Dublin’s many identities.
Double-decker buses have been a staple of London streets ever since the first engine-powered one appeared there in 1923.
But double-deckers, like all things, some day must die. Above, you can see what happened in 1959 to one such soon-to-be-deceased bus in London.
"On this occasion," the narrator intones, "the proud giant is being propelled—almost against its will it seems—by a bulldozer, and the reason is, is because this is the end of the line."
Workers then proceed to smash windows and, with torches, rip the bus apart. Each weighs around 10 tons, with some eight tons of that being salvageable metals. The rest had a worse fate.
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.
In 1830, Stephen Preston Ruggles—an engineer and craftsman, and soon to take charge of the print shop at Perkins School for the Blind, in Watertown, Massachusetts—took on an unusual project. He got a map of Boston, pasted it to a thin wooden board, and began to cut. He traced around the city streets, slicing out Boston Common, the Charles River, buildings, and houses, but leaving in the city's roads, bridges, and squares.
Eventually, he had a kind of skeleton of the city, the streets separated from their surrounding environment. He glued this to a second board, which he had painted green. After what must have been hours of labor, he had what he wanted—a map of the nearest city that students at Perkins could actually read.
For centuries, people who were blind had no dedicated way to learn geography. But starting in the 1830s, at places like Perkins, educators repurposed existing technology—and invented new types of maps—in order to bring the world to their students' fingertips.
The Perkins Archives are filled with tactile maps from various eras. Many are like the Boston one—existing tools rejiggered for new needs. One has the Great Lakes cut out, pasted on a board, and heavily shellacked; another, a pastel map of Australia with borders and braille labels pressed into it. "You couldn't buy them in a store, so a lot of them are very experimental, says Jennifer Hale, the school's archivist. "They're very homemade, and very hard to date."
Others are more deliberate. In 1837, tired of what he considered to be partial solutions, Samuel Gridley Howe, the school's Founding Director, decided to take matters into his own hands. Enlisting Ruggles—who was doubtlessly eager for a way to map-make that didn't include painstakingly cutting out many square feet of bare space—he invented a new method of embossing maps, and released a book, the Atlas of the United States Printed for Use of the Blind.
Like the writing systems of the time, these maps were raised above the paper, so that borders and contours could be easily felt. Textures denoted different geographical features, like lakes and seas. The maps contained labels and plenty of supplementary information, printed in Boston Line Type, Howe's preferred writing system. "It has been found a source of great pleasure and useful knowledge to the blind, who can study it unassisted by a seeing person," wrote Howe in the introduction to a later edition. This method was later used for mapmaking projects across the world, and the Perkins Archive is full of embossed maps.
That same year, Ruggles, who was in charge of printing at the school, undertook another big project—the Perkins Globe, a spherical tactile map made of 700 flawlessly glued pieces of wood. Likely the first globe in America made for people who are blind, the Perkins Globe is 13 feet in circumference and includes a set of moveable meridian lines. "The land is raised by a composition of emery firmly embedded in the wood; [and] the boundaries of countries, rivers, towns &c. have a very natural appearance," the Trustees of the Perkins School—then the New England Institution for the Blind—wrote in their 1837 Annual Report. "We believe this is the most perfect article of the kind in the world."
The Perkins Globe has undergone several restorations, the latest of which took place in 2004, when it was resurfaced and given a better support carriage. It is now on display in the Perkins Museum.
Puzzle maps, or "dissected maps," worked by a similar principle: students could take apart countries, continents, and hemispheres and piece them together again, learning how different states and regions fit together. While many of them were originally made for sighted students—the genre dates back to the late 18th century, and they were popular throughout Europe and the United States—they proved useful to blind students as well. "The best of all contrivances for imparting a knowledge of natural and political boundaries to the blind is the dissected map," the American Social Science Association reported in 1875, because "we cannot learn the shape of objects by touch alone unless we can embrace them or completely encircle them with our hands."
In the picture above, from 1893, two students in the geography room at Perkins are putting America together, state by state. The Mid-Atlantic, in pieces, waits patiently on the chair.
As anyone who has tried to freehand a map of their state knows, reading an existing map can only teach you so much. There's nothing like drawing your own to familiarize you with the placement of a capital city, or the ins and outs of a coastline. According to a contemporaneous account by educator Amelia Sanford in The Mentor, "map drawing" was invented in the 1890s, by the students and teachers of the Philadelphia School for the Blind. Noticing that her pupils loved making patterns on their leftover schoolbook pages, one teacher provided her class with blue denim cushions, different-sized furniture tacks, and wire. Taking her dictation, the students would mark out the outlines of states, countries and continents, and connect them with wire.
Familiar geographical shapes quickly emerged. "As the details were filled in, tacks of different shapes and sizes were used to locate cities, rivers, railroads, and mountains, and strings to mark limits of vegetation and productions," Sanford writes. "The class then journeyed in imagination through the different continents, filling in the details as they went along." The above map—made by Arthur Beckman, then a seventh-grader at Perkins—features Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont on maroon cloth, with green-pin mountain ranges, and the Penobscot and Merrimack Rivers in string.
Students also sculpted maps, which allowed for explorations in geology, topography, and even engineering. Nineteenth-century photos of the geography classroom show a sandbox, perfect for recreating an Andes-ridged South America, or sculpting a volcano. Some enhanced existing maps with 3-D borders and symbolic additions—like this "Production Globe," from 1927, which features imports, exports, flora and fauna. Others modeled new infrastructure proposals, like this bridge over Lake Champlain.
While there are many pictures of these sculptures and map additions, the actual items were probably wadded up and reused. "I haven't run into anything that has survived that is clay," says Hale.
These days, much map innovation for the blind is focused on inventing and enhancing navigational aids—making smartphone-savvy tactile subway maps, or personalized, 3-D printed building and neighborhood layouts. But these contemporary inventors are relying on technologies, such as embossing and sculpting, which were first brought to bear decades or even centuries ago by dedicated students and teachers. Looking through the map archives, Hale says "just impressed by the innovation of it all." "They're excellent examples of universal design"—just what you want when showing people their place in the universe.
A rattlesnake in a toilet is high up on anyone's list of living nightmares, but for one family in Abilene, Texas, there was a bit more to worry about it.
That's because there were 23 more snakes hiding beneath their home—a family of their own, perhaps, that, until they were discovered last week, might have just been trying to get along.
The first snake was found by four-year-old Isaac McFadden, who spotted it while he "was starting his day as usual, by going to the restroom," according to KXVA.
He told his mother, Cassie McFadden, who promptly texted her husband Jason.
"Oh my gosh!" Jason replied. "Kill it. Get yard tools from the shed."
Which is exactly what Cassie did, with the help of a garden hoe, shovel, and branch cutters, according to the Post.
What happened next was a bit more horrifying, after a snake removal service came to the McFaddens' home for further inspections. Big Country Snake Removal found 23 more rattlesnakes, posting their findings on Facebook, in part as trophies, part cautionary tale.
In Stockholm, Sweden, one of the most prominent attractions is the Vasa Museum, which houses a warship built and sunk in 1628 and rescued from the sea, still intact, in the 20th century. The Vasa has been the only warship preserved from that age, when Sweden’s power was ascendant, but now marine archaeologists have found the wreck of another 17th century warship, the New Historian reports.
The new ship, the Blekinge, was found near Karlskrona, a city created in 1680 to serve as a hub for the Swedish Navy. The ship was the first built in the new shipyard and was launched there in 1682.
The Vasa famously had a design flaw that caused the ship to sink after traveling for less than a mile. This ship is about the same size, close to 150 feet long, and similarly armed, with about 70 cannons.
Unlike the Vasa, the Blekinge was in service for decades. It sank in 1713, perhaps on purpose. Marine archaeologists found the wreck after getting a tip from the Swedish Navy this past fall. Using old maps, the archaeologists were able to establish that it was likely the wreck of the Blekinge.
The new ship will not be salvaged from the floor, but the archaeologists plan on exploring the interior more thoroughly.
One look at a centuries-old mechanical silver swan, and Nico Cox was set on her path toward a career in tinkering with antique cogs and fixing chirping metal birds.
Cox grew up collecting clocks and watches as a kid; had she known she could grow up not only to help mend the Silver Swan, but to become a full-time antiquarian horologist, she would have started pursuing the career a lot earlier.
A pristine automaton now nearly 250 years old, the life-size Silver Swan now resides at a museum in northern England. Believed to have been built by inventor and mechanical polymath John Joseph Merlin, it has over 113 articulated silver rings in its neck, all detailed to look like feathers, above an array of silver that simulates the movement of water with tiny swimming fish. “In a way, it’s very vulnerable like a real swan—as a mechanical object, there’s nothing else like it,” says Cox.
Cox gained her skill set in the south of England at West Dean College, a horological conservation school, where she learned the ins and outs of 18th-century clockmaking seven days a week, from morning until late evening. (There is nowhere in the United States that offers any type of conservation horological training, she says.)
Making a clock from scratch is very, very difficult, requiring extensive training and mastery of many different elements, says Cox. Conservators are constantly borrowing from all different fields in science and technology to identify new forms of technology as well as use and reuse of materials, from Pyrex to fish bladders.
Cox, originally trained as a jeweler, studied the philosophy of metaphysics in college. It was then that she learned about art and technology of the Renaissance period, such as beautifully detailed automatons—“kind of the first artificial intelligence,” she says. It was a hands-on approach to metaphysical problems.
Part of the magic of automatons is the mechanical optical illusion—a ship moving in waves, a deer drinking water—all created through a network of tiny inner gears and disks. Recently, Cox has noticed a renewed interest in this historical, analog form of magic—and in particular, its tangibility. “People are needing a more grounded association with what they can see and feel,” she says. “They are craving that experience of holding something, looking at something.”
People come to share a feeling of stewardship, she says—a need to be part of the preservation of cultural heritage. “I definitely think that when people come to my studio, they're encountering a space they don’t think exists anymore—it’s a reminder that this is still here, and this is still relevant.”
Cox often introduces guilloché, also known as ornamental turning or engine turning, which is the mechanical engraving of metal that uses different gearing systems to generate complex drawings. (She even created a coloring book of designs created by guilloché.)
We asked Cox to describe some of her favorite pieces she’s worked on. Here’s what she showed us.
Pagoda clock
“Say I’m working on a chronometer pocket watch—that’s much more straight-forward than a pagoda clock.” In the case of the pagoda clock, recently documented to be from 1770, Cox was dealing with over 600 pieces—and that was just the outer case. Each of these pieces was photographed, measured, and documented, then entered into a spreadsheet, meticulously cleaned, wrapped, and stored away until everything could be put back together and the object’s movement restored.
The pagoda clock, a project for the National Trust, had been taken from China and returned to England at some point in history. Cox explains that there was a lot of evidence that the clock had been altered from its original state to play music the Chinese emperor would have liked; larger springs had been put into the mechanism so that music would run much faster to give it a jauntier rhythm and tempo.
When the clock came back to England, a clockmaker weighted down the fly (another name for a governor, which is used to govern the speed of a mechanism), which created two opposing forces and caused the wearing down of everything in between. Such research and clues allow experts like Cox to figure out the timeline of events for historic objects—and decide how to maintain the objects’ identity and integrity.
Tiny mechanical ship
One piece that Cox particularly enjoyed working on was a tiny mechanical ship. When she first received the ship as a project, the music box inside was so quiet you could barely hear it. Once she was able to resolve the issues causing the lack of sound, she discovered that the ship played a version of "God Save the King," the former national anthem of the United Kingdom. Since this melody was ever so slightly changed when each new monarch came into power, Cox was able to trace the age of the ship back to 1810 through its music (and a trip to the British library). She learned, too, that it was a commemorative piece made for the Battle of Trafalgar.
The tiny ship pitches and rolls in the waves, sitting in the center of a ripply plane of isinglassin front of a cliff. (Isinglass, which is made from the swim bladder of a fish, is often used in confectionary, brewing, as an adhesive.) Cox made a case for the delicate piece out of sterling silver. “It’s the only one we’ve seen like it,” she says.
Singing bird boxes
When you see a singing bird box, it simply looks like a tiny decoration—you’d never suspect that inside is a mechanism that allows the bird to pop out and actually sing a song to you.
Some of the earliest bird boxes go back to the late 1700s, though some very complex automata—mechanical ship galleons—go back to the late 1500s. Each tiny, individual feather (taken from hummingbirds) on the bird is trimmed, lacquered, and applied one by one to the body—for Cox, this constitutes an eight-hour job. Because there is still no convincing artificial substitute for bird feathers—and sometimes, the original materials are inaccessible (for example, ivory for a beak)—creativity and improvisation are constantly required.
The bellows are the lungs to the bird, supplying air to a slide whistle, articulated by levers that run along something called a “song cam”—which requires disks with very specific cutouts and profiles that dictate the pitch of the whistle and trill of the bird. The motion of the bird is mechanized to match its song to an exact degree—its body and head rotating left and right, its beak opening and closing, tail bobbing, wings flapping. Cox is currently writing a treatise on the bird’s bellows, the most complicated and intricate component of these boxes. While there exist two books dedicated to singing bird boxes, in general, the bellows themselves have not received much attention.
These bird boxes are Cox’s favorite small objects to work on. “They seem to delight people in a way that pretty much nothing else does,” she says. “Everyone loves the birds.”
Speaking of birds—that brings us back to the Silver Swan, the holy grail of automatons, and a bird that Cox has, since entering the world of antiquarian horology, touched with her very own fingers.
“It was just the most unbelievable thing—I actually got to go underneath it, laying on my back, seeing these little fish and glass rods,” says Cox, describing when she and her college tutor uncased the Silver Swan to check on the fish within the pool of glass water. “I know that doesn’t sounds like a huge job, but for me, having the privilege of being able to touch that, knowing that my hands were on that particular piece—that is something I will never forget,” she says. “It was the most meaningful moment in my whole horological career.”
Brittany Nicole Cox currently works as a horological conservator in Seattle, Washington. In addition to her private conservation studio, she has a workshop in South Seattle where she teaches classes and does new-making. This month in Seattle, Cox offered several Atlas Obscura workshops to demonstrate the technology and technique. See more here: Mechanical Magic: Intro to Engine Turning.
In the preface of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the narrator describes meeting a mysterious man on a castle tour. As they walk through the hallways, his new friend begins talking about the Knights of the Round Table, speaking of ancient events as if they were yesterday.
Suddenly, the narrator feels he is walking back in time, too. "I seemed to move among the specters and shadows and dust and mold of a gray antiquity," the narrator says. "How old, old, unspeakably old and faded and dry and musty and ancient he came to look as he went on!"
Unfortunately for Twain, no matter how fresh and lively his words remain, the trappings of his life are getting old, faded, shadowy and dusty. And now, according to the conservators at Hartford's Mark Twain House & Museum, a whole bunch of them are moldy as well.
The mold problem centers on the Mark Twain Museum, which was built next to the historic house in 2003. Thanks to subpar HVAC systems and a leaky roof, mold snuck into the museum's storage room sometime in 2015, the Hartford Courant reports. By now, it has crept into thousands of artifacts, including furniture, “metal, glass, and leather items,” and some Twain first editions. The house itself—where Twain and his family lived from 1874 to 1891—is relatively unaffected.
Thanks to insurance, state bonds, and grants from the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, the museum is embarking on a million-dollar mold removal project. They've already fixed the HVAC and the roof, and the next step—the big wipeoff—begins next week. Six people will take on the task, which will probably last three to four months. No word on whether they'll come after the shadows and specters next.
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.
Last night, if you lived near Lake Michigan, and were awake at 1:30 a.m., and you looked up at the sky, you might've seen a bright flash and, also, at some point, heard a distinct boom.
Dashcam footage from a police car (seen above) captured the scene pretty clearly: A meteor, descending from the night sky, burning up in the Earth's atmosphere at a very high rate of speed.
According to the Associated Press, it's unclear what happened to the rock—whether it crashed into the lake or simply disintegrated in the sky.
But meteorologists tracked it for a time on radar, including one who told the AP that it also gave off a sonic boom, a fiery ball that turned out to be a fleeting wonder instead of the apocalypse.
Artist Roxanne Fonder Reeve never imagined that she would find herself dumpster-diving in the industrial areas of Seattle, Washington.
On drives around the city, she’ll pull over when she sees interesting objects people have cast away, collect them, and use them as building materials for a futuristic, architectural experiment.
She’s building a miniature Earthship in her driveway in Columbia City.
Earthships are a self-sufficient alternative to the conventional home. Instead of relying heavily on outside organizations to receive utilities, they allow people to live off-the-grid, independent of the economy and government.
“I’m not a hardy, outdoor construction type of person,” says Fonder Reeve, who calls herself 'the Queen of Trash Fairies,' “so all this collecting of old tires and pounding dirt with sledgehammers was unexpected.”
Since 2012, Fonder Reeve and volunteers in the community have been building Trash Studio, a sustainable, zero-waste structure made out of recycled and natural materials. It’s the first Earthship structure of its kind in Seattle. Inspired by the work of American architect Michael Reynolds in New Mexico, Fonder Reeve’s 120-square-foot driveway serves as a laboratory to showcase elements of Earthship architecture and bring awareness to the self-sustaining lifestyle.
“I think now, with climate change and economic insecurity, people—especially young people—are realizing we need to live differently, tread more lightly on the planet, and be much more capable and self-sufficient,” says Fonder Reeve. “Earthships embody that in every way.”
The concept of the Earthship was first described by Michael Reynolds in 1971. In Taos, New Mexico he began to build homes out of empty aluminum soda and beer cans, bottles, and tires. He completed his first Earthship home in 1988, and has continued his quest in spreading his sustainable living ideals globally.
While some may perceive Earthships as an outdated practice born out of 1970s environmentalism, Fonder Reeve believes the idea has never faded.
“I would say that the Earthship community is actually much stronger than it was in the 1970s,” she says. “I think it’s consistently grown because the design has changed from the ‘70s. It’s gotten better and better.”
Today there are Earthships in every state in America and in more than 20 countries, appearing as homesteads in Guatemala and an emergency shelter in post-earthquake Haiti. And people live in these Earthships. There’s an entire Earthship community in Taos that supports 70 residences and allows overnight visitors.
Earthship enthusiasts can attend the four-week Earthship Biotecture Academy in Taos. Over 1,300 students have been educated on the design principles, construction methods, and philosophy of Earthships. Founder of Earthship Seattle, Florian Becquereau, attended the academy in 2013 and spent six weeks living in an Earthship.
“You’re more in touch with the natural world,” he says. “You rely on what you get from nature so you have to be more conscious of what you use. You can’t leave everything on, like all your electric appliances, all the time. It’s wasteful anyways.”
In addition to being built entirely out of natural and recycled materials, these structures are powered by thermal, solar, and wind energy. Earthship architects have created systems to harvest water, produce food, and maintain sewage. Some Earthships now have vents to allow for air-conditioner use and greenhouse space that creates better temperature regulation, says Becquereau.
The creativity and ingenuity involved in creating these self-sustaining structures have given way to diverse architecture that is both functional and artistic. Windows perpendicular to the winter sun and roofs that can catch water are all design features that help make an Earthship work, while glass bottles and sculptures give a futuristic, alien aesthetic.
“The design has evolved over time, but the concept and philosophy is still the same,” says Becquereau. Now, Becquereau is leading the design of Trash Studio.
Becquereau and Fonder Reeve are building the Trash Studio without any money, using only materials left behind or donated to them. The added challenge forced them to find creative ways to construct the shed-sized Earthship, from packing 150 old tires with dirt to collecting clay unearthed from a housing project. The Trash Studio has a thick, curving two-foot-wide wall made out of 150 old tires packed with dirt. Each weighs between 200 and 300 pounds.
For insulation, Becquereau came up with a plan to use 400 old phonebooks in the two-foot-wide curving wall constructed out of the tires. But when they could only find five, Becquereau had to improvise. Instead, they used Styrofoam boxes that were being discarded by a medical facility.
“It’s a little bit of planning and making requests, and a little bit of just creatively using whatever happens to be around,” says Fonder Reeve.
The Trash Studio is an on-going construction project. Currently, Fonder Reeve is designing an intricate mosaic for the exterior of the structure, coming up with different ways to attach objects to the cob walls. They are also hoping to install an oven to accompany their biochar stove to cook for the volunteers. However, the size of Fonder Reeve’s driveway limits how much they can build.
“It would be nice eventually to have a full-on Earthship, maybe a 2,000-square-feet center well-placed in Seattle,” Becquereau says, but for now projects like Trash Studio is a first step in the right direction.
“Our current housing system is not sustainable, so I don’t have a lot of faith that it will be in tact in 50 years,” Becquereau says. ““I know that Earthships are gaining more and more popularity. More and more people are looking for alternatives and Earthships play a big part in that.”
The first of many myths involving a divine grail was written more than eight centuries ago. People have been fascinated with the potential whereabouts of the holy treasure every since, making it one of history’s most enduring legends. As the stories evolved and fractured over time, the lure of the Holy Grail persisted and expanded, muddying historical events with religious beliefs, Arthurian literature, wild conspiracy theories, and pop culture epics.
While the Holy Grail is generally thought of as mythology, some believe the vessel is a real object that still exists today. The question is, where?
There’s no way to know the answer to that age-old curiosity, especially since there’s no consensus on what the Holy Grail even is. The sacred object has variously been described as a vessel, dish, chalice, golden bowl, platter, and silver basin, imbued in Celtic myths with miraculous powers. Some camps define it as the cup that was used to collect the blood and sweat of Christ during the Crucifixion. More often it’s conflated with the Holy Chalice used to serve the wine at the Last Supper.
Over the centuries there have been copious religious treasures claimed to be some form of the coveted grail, from the time of the Crusades, when such holy relics were a highly lucrative trade, up to present day, when even a rumored trace of the famous cup can attract grail-seeking tourists to a locale. One of the most popular stops on the grail hunt today is Spain’s Valencia Cathedral, which displays an ancient relic that historians and treasure hunters alike believe to be the most likely contender for the Holy Grail, if it does indeed exist.
Kept in the golden Chapel of the Holy Grail and guarded behind glass, the Valencia Chalice doesn’t look like something from the first century. The holy part is specifically the cup at the top, carved from a chocolatey-red agate. (The base, handles, and jewels were added centuries later to add a medieval flare).
In this theory, the holy cup used at Christ’s Last Supper was taken by Saint Peter to Rome, and some time later by a Vatican soldier to Spain, where it landed in Valencia’s Gothic cathedral. This possible history is based less on literary tales and more on archaeological authenticity: The chalice was carbon-dated to the period between the third century BC and second century AD, and manufactured in the Middle East, making it possible it could have been in the possession of Jesus and his disciples.
Before the cup made it to Valencia, however, it had a stop-off at the ancient monastery of San Juan de la Peña, “Saint John of the Cliff”.
Built between 920 and 1190 CE, the highly fortified monastery has remained one of the safest, most secure places to store booty of any sort for well over a millennium, due in no small part to the extremely inconvenient cliffside the structures were built directly into. The story holds that the Roman soldier that acquired the Holy Chalice took it to Spain where it was hidden at this monastery to protect it from an upcoming Moorish invasion.
Yet another school of thought as to the Holy Grail’s whereabouts stems from medieval literature, most famously the tales of King Arthur and his valiant Knights of the Round Table.
The first literary mention of a wondrous grail was by the poet Chrétien de Troyes in the late 12th century. But it became connected to Christianity, and thus holy, in a slightly later legend by Robert de Boron, which centers around Joseph of Arimathea, the disciple said to have collected the blood and sweat of Christ on the cross before burying him in Joseph’s own tomb.
This is the story that first equated the grail and the Last Supper chalice, which Joseph is said to have taken to Glastonbury, where he established the first Christian church in Britain. De Boron’s legend was incorporated into the Arthurian romances (the Knights’ Round Table was modeled after the Grail Table that Joseph built in remembrance of the Last Supper) and elaborated on.
According to the tales, Joseph hid the grail in a secret place at Chalice Well, an ancient spring at the foot of Glastonbury Tor. Some believe the red color of the water that flows from the well, also known as the Red Spring, represents either the blood of Christ or the rusty iron nails used at the Crucifixion.
Throughout the Middle Ages, myth and reality started to blur as the grail romances were repeated as historical fact. Today, Glastonbury’s history is steeped in legend. The Tor itself is sometimes claimed to be the mythical Avalon, and the burial site of King Arthur and his Queen Guinevere, though some archaeologists say this latter claim was created by the abbey monks in the 12th century after a financial crisis.
The fascination with questing for the elusive grail took hold in the Arthurian legends, with heroes like Lancelot and Galahad traveling around Britain in search of the holy cup at the mysterious “Grail Castle.” The Grail Castle in these literary tales is entirely mythical, but that hasn’t stopped speculation over what real-world medieval structures it may be referencing. One such candidate is the castle at Montségur, which today is a gorgeous mountaintop ruin perched 3,900 feet high in the mountains of France.
The fortress ruins at Montségur today are located on the site of a former 13th-century castle that was once the center of the Cathar church, a Christian sect with dualist beliefs—meaning they considered there to be one good god and one evil god. It is said to have temporarily housed sacred treasures including the Holy Grail. Montségur is believed to be the Holy Grail castle mentioned in Wolfram Eschenbach’s grail epic Parzival (“Percival”), in which the grail was taken from the castle when it was conquered by the royal French army.
The medieval legends of Joseph and Arthur also became entwined with the mysterious Knights Templar, the ancient religious order that has long been rumored to be the guardians of the Holy Grail.
The order formed in 1120 as a small group of monks in Jerusalem, headquartered at Solomon’s Temple, not far from where Jesus was entombed. It’s believed the knights dug around the temple looking for religious artifacts, and one theory is that they discovered the holy cup in the process. It’s thought the Templars then squirreled it away to Britain when they were persecuted after the first Crusade, and have been hiding it ever since in various secret locations throughout Europe and North America.
The centuries-long mystery surrounding the Templars has been perfect fodder for grail-seekers over the years, leaving room for speculation, stories, and conspiracies. Some believe the Knights themselves may have encouraged the lore by promoting or even writing many of the Arthurian legends about the quest for the Holy Grail.
After the Renaissance the grail stories fell out of vogue—temporarily. The legend was brought back into popularity by Richard Wagner’s dramatic opera Parsifal in 1882, paving the way for a new flood of grail fascination in the modern era, which materialized in everything from Nazi rituals to Monty Python to Indiana Jones to Dan Brown’s bestselling book and subsequent film The Da Vinci Code (which draws heavily from the 1982 book “Holy Blood, Holy Grail.”)
The Da Vinci Coderesuscitated the myth that the Knights Templar secretly hid the Holy Grail under Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland. (Although in this alternative history the grail is interpreted as the remains of Mary Magdalene, who, in Dan Brown's universe, was Jesus’ wife.)
This tiny 15th-century chapel is a hotbed for conspiracy theorists and occultists. It had been linked with the Templars, Freemasons, and Illuminati, in part because its interior is full of mysterious sculptural carvings that range from Nordic pagan figures to Christian images to the apparent seal of the Knights Templar, making up an iconography that’s one of the more puzzling of the European Heritage.
The myth goes that a small group of Templars flocked into Scotland with the coveted treasure, then hid their gold and holy relics, the Holy Grail among them, in several locations including the vault of Rosslyn Chapel. Though this has been debunked by skeptics, it’s one of the most popular grail theories today.
It’s worth wondering, though: What if the Knights Templar never did find the grail in Jerusalem? While less enticing, this reasonably logical course of events could mean the holy cup is still buried somewhere in the extensive network of tunnels and sewers stretching underneath the holy city.
One of these ancient tunnels, built more than 2,000 years ago to support the height of the Western Wall surrounding the Temple on the Mount, was only unearthed as recently as the 19th century. Archaeologists are still excavating the tunnels under the wall, discovering some ancient artifacts in the process. Some even believe the Ark of the Covenant is still hidden beneath the Temple Mount and—who knows—maybe the Holy Grail as well.
Of course, even if the cup is out there somewhere, there would likely be no way to prove it is the Holy Grail. And that’s part of the beauty of it: As long as the fascination holds, the myth, and the quest itself, may continue indefinitely.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
Back in 2010, Graham Barker, an Australian librarian, announced that after spending 26 years collecting belly-button lint —basically because he was bored and curious—he had set a Guinness World Record.
Barker's collection (you can see it in pictures here) is pretty gross, but his long-running experiment does speak to a basic human interest in our navels, which are one of the few things that separate us, from, say, androids. Or, as Barker put it: “The raw material is worthless but as a unique world record collection and a piece of cultural heritage, of debatable merit, it has some curiosity value,” he explained then in an interview with the Daily Mail.
But belly buttons are more than just a physical quirk, they are also one of the few body parts to have inspired a phrase, and perhaps even a philosophy: navel-gazing, or the act of contemplating yourself too much.
Navels are all about lint and self-interest, in other words, something Barker, for one, managed to combine into the same pursuit.
Barker’s experiment might have been amateur, but actual scientists have devoted a fair amount of energy to uncovering the mysteries of belly buttons, like why, exactly, all that lint gets stuck there in the first place.
It turns out, for example, that men are more likely than woman to get belly button lint, according to research done by Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki, a popular Australian scientist who won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2002 for a far reaching study of nearly 5,000 belly buttons. The reason? Men are more likely to have hair on their stomachs. Kruszelnicki also adds that there’s a certain reason why specific colors usually pop up. “The reason it is usually blue is that we mostly wear blue or grey trousers, often jeans, and when these rub against the body, the fibers often end up finding their way to the navel,” Kruszelnicki told the Telegraph in 2009.
Which also means, if you buy a new undershirt, plan for a little extra belly lint. A University of Vienna researcher figured this out by analyzing his own belly button. Seems like a reasonable use of his time.
On the more useful research front, a 2013 study in the British Journal of Surgery finds that if you’re going to get an appendectomy, the best spot to get one could be through the navel, because the end result limits the amount of noticeable scarring.
And, finally, one Duke University study said that the placement of a navel can be a key to whether you’ll be successful or even any good at sports, since the placement of the navel acts as your center of gravity.
Still, a body's belly button—essentially an umbilical scar—might just be a physical oddity without a widely known cultural concept tied to it, which, in this case, is omphaloskepsis, or navel-gazing. The word itself has roots in Greek, and while originally it was seen as something like meditation, it's now something much more banal, even disparaging—shorthand for overthinking, thinking of nothing in particular besides oneself (like, perhaps, this article.)
But how did belly buttons get involved at all? A large part of the reason can be blamed on Robert Alfred Vaughan, who made the first printed reference to gazing at one's navel in the 1856 book Hours With the Mystics. In a section of the book highlighting monks around Greece’s Mount Athos, he wrote:
“It seems that some of the monks (called, if I mistake not, Hesychasts) held that if a man shut himself up in a corner of his cell, with his chin upon his breast, turning his thoughts inward, gazing towards his navel, and centering all the strength of his mind on the region of the heart; and, not discouraged by at first perceiving only dark- ness, held out at this strange inlooking for several days and nights, he would at length behold a divine glory, and see him- self luminous with the very light which was manifested on Mount Tabor. They call these devotees Navel-contemplators. A sorry business! All the monks, for lack of aught else to do, were by the ears about it, either trying the same or reviling it.”
So basically, because some guy mocked a bunch of monks for focusing on their navels in a religious sense, we’ve got a phrase about staring at one’s belly button.
Elsewhere, though, belly buttons get more respect, like in yoga, where one's navel chakra—a spot on the spine directly behind your navel—is considered an important energy center. Which is certainly a better fate than the target of all your self-absorbed thoughts.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
The Arno, a river that connects the northern Italian city of Pisa with the Mediterranean Sea—and, going inland, Florence—has been a thoroughfare for commerce for centuries.
Over the past month, it's also been a thoroughfare for a dolphin.
Residents in Pisa have spotted what's assumed to be the same dolphin several times on the river, with the first such sighting on New Year's Eve, according to the Local.
For a while, the sightings were infrequent, but, lately, the dolphin's been seen more frequently as it's traveled farther and farther inward, getting closer to Pisa's city center, which is about five miles from the river's mouth.
Officials said they would keep an eye on the dolphin, but that it appeared to be in good health. They also noted that the noise from bridges overhead and the decreased brackishness of the water (compared to the Mediterranean) had not scared off the animal yet, suggesting that, whatever it's doing, it's doing intentionally.
"This is a very rare event and such a dolphin sighting has not been recorded in Tuscany before," a regional environmental agency said, according to the Local.
Maybe then, like the rest of us, the dolphin just decided it needed an extended break.
In the years leading up to the Second World War, isolationist sentiment coursed pretty strongly throughout the United States. Some Americans feared that immigrants were a threat to the country. Sound familiar? Then you'll have no trouble understanding the reasons why the map below, titled America–A Nation of One People From Many Countries, waspublished in 1940 by the Council Against Intolerance in America.
“With the exception of the Indian, all Americans or their forefathers came here from other countries,” the illustrator Emma Bourne inscribed on the map. The Council Against Intolerance commissioned Bourne's work in an effort to remind Americans that the U.S. had always defined itself as a country of varied national origins and religious backgrounds.
Bourne illustrates America's unique ethnic and religious diversity by erasing state borderlines and showing the nation as one unit. Long red ribbons weave through the landscape to show clusters of immigrant groups and where they settled, from Japanese in the West to Italians in the East. At the bottom left is an inset scroll listing famous Americans in literature, science, industry, and the arts alongside their ethnic backgrounds, including George Gershwin and Albert Einstein, who became a U.S. citizen the year the map was published. At the time, the map served as an educational poster in line with the Council Against Intolerance’s argument that prejudice could undermine national unity during wartime.
The map is “a relatively early example of an idea that’s become popular in recent decades,” as Dara Lind writes over at Vox. “That diversity itself is what makes America strong, and that difference is something to be celebrated rather than eliminated.”
“Maps of this kind were not particularly common and especially not at this scale,” says Ian Fowler, the director of Osher Map Library at the University of Southern Maine, who notes that the physical map itself is quite large. “While this map does borrow stylistic elements from pictorial maps produced during the 1920s and ‘30s, it is very unique in its emphasis and display of information.”
Between the late 1930s through the mid-1940s, the Council Against Intolerance’s educational department produced an array of materials, including books, manuals, and posters used in adult reading groups. Founded by the left-leaning Jewish author James Waterman Wise, the New York City-based organization fought against“prejudice by calling attention to American ideals, heroes, and traditions.”
“The map accomplishes these objectives by showing a United States without state boundaries,” says Fowler. “It uses the history of immigrants to heighten awareness of the strengths of cultural diversity and to show visually the diversity present in the country.”
Bourne also emphasizes the range of religions present during this era, along with staple industries in each state, including a giant potato in Idaho, a huge fish in Washington, and large lobster in Maine. Detailed figures of people at work are meant to show how immigrants are active in creating a prosperous America, explains Fowler.
“It’s important to note that everyone on the map is engaged in industry or labor, which I conjecture is on purpose to show that immigrants are not ‘lazy,’ which was (and unfortunately still is) a damaging stereotype used by nativists and isolationists,” he says.
For all its strengths, the map struggles to represent African American populations, and leaves no space for Native American populations. This aspect of the map compelled the poet Langston Hughes to annotate his copy with a burning cross and a reference to the Ku Klux Klan near the cotton workers in the South. The map and the Council Against Intolerance’s activity also caught the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt, who later wrote about both favorably in her newspaper column, My Day.
“Unfortunately, the depiction of the immigrant as evil and as a scapegoat for the problems facing the United States is something that has persisted throughout our history and still pollutes our social and political discourse,” says Fowler.
Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.
Have you ever made yourself a big batch of pancakes, settled down in front of your plate, uncorked a big bottle of maple syrup—and severely overpoured, drowning your breakfast and setting you on a weeklong sugar high?
That's a little like what happened on Interstate 91 yesterday. According to USA Today, an entire barrel of maple syrup fell off a truck and spilled into the road late Monday afternoon, necessitating a massive cleanup.
On Twitter, the Vermont State Police reported that the spill was at exit 27, and that the fire department was hosing off the sticky stuff. Jealous Twitterers responded quickly. "It's like the most Vermont thing to happen in Vermont," said @AssignGuy. "Did anybody put out an amber alert?" asked @SmartAssStehmey.
For whatever reason, no one volunteered to go out there and help. Maybe they hadn't had breakfast yet.
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.
On January 27, President Donald Trump signed a sweeping executive order that, among other provisions, barred all refugees from entering the United States for 120 days (and banned Syrian refugees indefinitely). As the ban, currently stayed by order of a federal judge, makes its way up through the U.S. court system, refugees all over the world watch closely, their futures hanging in the balance.
The current refugee crisis is the largest the world has ever seen—but it's far from unprecedented. Back in the 1920s, civil war in Russia and genocide in the Ottoman Empire left millions of families stateless, seeking asylum in countries already stretched thin by the ravages of war. Charged with preventing catastrophe, an idealistic explorer named Fridtjof Nansen changed hundreds of thousands of lives with a piece of paper: the Nansen Passport. Although it stopped short of granting citizenship, the Nansen Passport allowed its holders to cross borders to find work, and protected them from deportation. Some experts are calling for a similar solution today.
Born in Norway in 1861, Nansen was an unlikely diplomat. A zoologist by training, he made a name for himself as a polar explorer—in 1888, he led the first team to cross Greenland by foot, and four years later, he traversed the Arctic Ocean by purposefully freezing his ship into an ice floe. When he aged out of constant adventuring, Nansen brokered his considerable fame into a political career, initially representing Norway in disputes with Sweden, and later serving as the country's ambassador to Britain.
At the end of World War I, Nansen threw himself into existing efforts to create an international peacemaking body—what would eventually become the Paris Peace Conference, and then the League of Nations. In 1920, the League put Nansen in charge of a particularly tricky post-war problem: figuring out what to do with those displaced by conflict.
As the new High Commissioner for the Repatriation of Prisoners-of-War, Nansen negotiated for the return of hundreds of thousands of POWs held in Germany and Siberia. While working to secure their release, Nansen's eyes were opened to another horror of war. "Never in my life have I been brought into touch with so formidable an amount of suffering," he told the League in November of 1920, urging his fellow members to "prevent for evermore" the type of conflict that originally led to it.
But those gears were already in motion, and another displacement crisis loomed. In December of 1921, it hit: Vladimir Lenin, whose Bolshevik army had shocked the world by winning the Russian Civil War, revoked citizenship from Russian expatriates who had fled the country during the conflict. This left some 800,000 people stateless, dispersed throughout Eastern Europe. "The legal status of these people was vague and the majority of them were without means of subsistence," wrote Fosse and Fox. "It was considered unacceptable that in the 20th century there should be such a huge number of men, women and children living in Europe unprotected by any system recognized by international law."
Once again, the League of Nations put Nansen on the case, appointing him High Commissioner for Russian Refugees. He quickly began breaking down the problem. Neighboring countries, especially those who were dealing with their own conflicts, balked at the prospect of taking in tens of thousands of poor, stateless people. But if the refugees were sent back to now-Soviet Russia, they could face political persecution, imprisonment, and even execution.
Nansen's instincts initially leaned toward repatriation, figuring that states should be made to accept their own citizens. But when he began investigating the problem personally, his opinion shifted. After one small group of refugees was sent back to the U.S.S.R. from Bulgaria, many were shot by Soviet authorities.
This did not stop Bulgaria: fearing Communism, they began forcibly deporting people, beginning with a group of 250, which they shipped off over the Black Sea in a small boat. When the ship reached the U.S.S.R., it was not allowed to land, so the refugees turned towards Turkey, which also rebuffed them. Panicked, many began leaping into the sea. Everywhere he went, Nansen was met by stories like this—of frightened countries, who feared foreign influence and their own dwindling employment, and of even more frightened refugees, who just wanted someplace to live.
At first, Nansen brokered individual arrangements. He sent some groups to Czechoslovakia and the United States, ensured that refugee camps had clothing and provisions, and made universities in those countries that belonged to the League of Nations promise to educate Russian students. But the problem outstripped this pace of action. What refugees really needed was a way to make lives for themselves—to travel, so as to find opportunity, and to work, so as to establish themselves in their new homes. They needed some kind of identity document.
In March of 1922, at the Council of the League of Nations, Nansen proposed such a document: a "Nansen Passport," which would allow refugees to travel and protect them from deportation. The passport was simple—it featured the holder's identity, nationality, and race—but it served its purpose well. Its holder could move between countries to find work or family members, and they could not be deported. "This was the first time that stateless people had any sort of legal identity," wrote Annemarie Sammartino in The Impossible Border: Germany and the East, 1914-1922.
This solution was by no means perfect. Unlike a regular passport, the Nansen Passport did not confer upon its holder the rights of citizenship—for example, it didn't guarantee the right of return to the country that issued it. But as it slowly gained credence, it became more and more helpful to those who held it. By 1923, 39 governments recognized it. Two decades later, that number was up to 52, and the passports were issued to Armenian, Assyrian, and Turkish refugees as well. Sales of "Nansen stamps," required annually to renew the passport, paid into refugee relief funds.
Nansen died in 1930, of an influenza-induced heart attack after going skiing against his doctor's wishes. Immediately afterwards, the League of Nations set up the Nansen International Office for Refugees, which continued his work until 1938, when it was absorbed into a larger committee. That same year, the Office received the Nobel Peace Prize. By then, they had provided Nansen passports to about 450,000 stateless people, including writer Vladimir Nabokov, composer Igor Stravinksy, and ballerina Anna Pavlova. "There is no doubt that by and large, the Nansen certificate is the greatest thing that has happened for the individual refugee," wrote journalist Dorothy Thompson, also in 1938. "It returned his lost identity."
Today, global conflict, human rights abuses, and climate change have created tens of millions of refugees worldwide. Although Nansen's legacy lives on in the form of the United Nations Refugee Agency, and in the Refugee Travel Documents currently issued in 145 countries, some experts think these provisions are not enough. "Only a rapid effort to revamp global refugee laws will permit a peaceful and managed transition from chaos — and the xenophobia and violence it can generate — to a semblance of world order," wrote Michael Soussan, a former UN humanitarian worker, in Pacifc Standard in late 2015. "Refugees need and deserve real passports … The world body must live up to the challenge."
Scientists knew, just by looking at them, that geckos of the newly discovered species Geckolepis megalepis were probably distinct from other fish-scaled geckos. Their scales were just that big—larger than any other gecko’s.
But no one had proven they were a separate species, in part because it was so difficult to catch these geckos without their scales falling off.
Many lizards let go of part their anatomy (tails, etc.) in order to escape predators. But geckos in the fish-scale genus have scales that are adapted to tear off with exceptional ease. Touch one of these lizards, basically, and their scales will fall off. One 19th century researcher resorted to catching lizards with cotton balls—and still lost some scales.
There were a number of species already identified in this genus, but though scientists had observed a number of geckos with particular large scales, they had not yet established officially that they were a distinct species. As a team of researchers reports in a new paper in PeerJ, their suspicions were correct—these geckos are a species of their own.
The scales grow back relatively quickly, with a few weeks, but in the meantime the lizards are (fair warning—this image is not for everyone) showing a lot of gooey skin.
There is another problem with these lizards losing their scales all the time. Often species are identified by the unique patterns of their scales, but because these geckos lose their scales so frequently, the pattern is blurred. The researchers instead had to identify this large-scaled lizards as a new species by identifying unique characteristics in their skull.
As dramatic as it is to lose all your scales so easily, it does seem like an excellent escape strategy. If someone with bad intentions was trying to grab you inappropriately, wouldn't it be great to just slough of your scales and run free?
If you go deep into the Amazon, in the Brazilian state of Acre, and you look in the right spot, you'll eventually find lots of geoglyphs: shapes dug into the dirt that are recognizable from high above.
Archaeologists have known about these geoglyphs, some of which are estimated to be up to 2,000 years old, for decades. But this week, a group of scientists shared a remarkable new finding about them: the ground beneath the Amazon's geoglyphs, and the forests that surround them, had likely been altered by humans a couple of millennia before that.
The discovery could upend our understanding of how the rainforest developed, whether it did so largely on its own—as some have argued—or whether humans (perhaps inadvertently) assisted, by clearing large swaths of forest for their own ends.
"There's been a very big debate circling for decades now about how pristine or man-made the Amazonian forests are," Jenny Watling, a co-author of a study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, told Live Science.
At two geoglyph sites, known as Fazenda Colorada and Jaco Sá, Watling and her colleagues found 4,000-year-old charcoal samples after digging five-foot holes. And while that might not be particularly unusual—forests naturally burn and catch fire regularly—the researchers said that the charcoal's age coincided with the time humans first moved to the area.
Why would humans of that era burn down the forest? One possibility is that they were trying to encourage the growth of palm trees, which are among the first to grow after a forest burns. Palm trees have long been sources of both food and sturdy building materials for humans.
It's probably not a coincidence, Watling told Live Science, that when humans left these sites some 650 years ago, palm trees again declined. The forest, in a way, was returning to its natural state.
