In late 1883, a 15-year-old girl from Polk County, Georgia began a fast climb to national prominence through her exhibitions of a physical strength that appeared to be entirely out of proportion to her willowy frame. She claimed to have gained this seemingly supernatural strength, which she referred to as "the Power," "the Force" and "the Great Unknown," during a violent electrical storm.

Within months, Lulu Hurst had progressed from local exhibitions to the vaudeville circuit. Promoted as the "Georgia Wonder" and the "Magnetic Girl," she soon became a top-billed performer, sometimes earning more in a single show than most Americans made in a year.  At a time when the standard vaudeville fare largely consisted of singers, dancers, comedians and the occasional juggler or acrobat—and when women were widely believed to be weak and delicate—the spectacle of a teenage girl apparently hurling stalwart men around the stage made for a diverting evening's entertainment.  

The following description of some of Hurst's feats is taken from a report by the Augusta Chronicle. The audience and participants in this case were members of the Mercer University faculty, including Dr. A.J. Battle, the president of the University and a Baptist minister:

Professor Battle brought in a new umbrella. Miss Hurst then took the umbrella, and, as she touched it, the article flew about the room, and Professor Battle was forced to release his hold. Miss Hurst then picked up the umbrella and it immediately flew to pieces.

She then took a large stick, Professor Battle, Dr. Brantley, and others endeavoring to hold it; all were necessitated to jump about the room like jumping-jacks. Professor Willet took hold of the stick, but was immediately forced to let loose his hold. Miss Hurst invited all in the room to hold the stick; she could, by her touch, force them all to dance around.

Audiences flocked to see Hurst exhibit these feats, including skeptics who analyzed her act and drew their own conclusions. These had less to do with mysterious electro-magnetic energies and more to do with subtleties of physics and psychology.  

Professor Simon Newcomb's article for the February 1885 edition of Science thoroughly debunked the Georgia Wonder phenomenon. Newcomb characterized the success of Hurst's act as "a striking example of the unreliability of human testimony respecting the phenomena of force and motion.”

The "Balance Test," for example, required Hurst to seemingly resist the strength of one, two or even three large men, all pushing with both hands against a sturdy wooden pole held horizontally, while Hurst herself stood opposite them, one or both hands pressed against the middle of the pole, sometimes even balancing on one foot.  Although the men appeared to be throwing all their combined strength and weight into the task, Hurst never budged.  

Her secret, Newcomb proposed, lay primarily in the principle of the lever and fulcrum. As Hurst's opponents were being given their instructions by her manager, she would begin to exert a slight upward pressure against the pole.  Meanwhile, the men were told to press forward in an attempt to push Hurst off her balance. As they braced their stances and tensed their muscles, Hurst sustained her upward pressure, invisibly deflecting and redirecting their force.

While it appeared to spectators—and even felt to the men themselves—as if they were truly exerting all their power in trying to push her backwards, in reality they had been tricked into fighting to simply keep the pole level in space. If Hurst suddenly shifted the direction of her pressure, her opponents would stagger off-balance as they strained to co-operate in keeping control of the pole; another shift could send them tumbling around the stage.  

Ingenious variations of the same principles explained the rest of her feats with props such as umbrellas and wooden chairs; in each case, Hurst's opponents were essentially set up to lose, but the set-up and leverage trickery were so artful that only a few astute observers were able to spot them, and fewer still could explain them.  

Of course, neither Professor Newcomb's academic exposé nor the several that followed it received anywhere near the same attention as Hurst's vaudeville performances. Her audiences were generally more interested in occult spectacle than in science. The Georgia Wonder's earnings approached the equivalent of one million dollars when, one night in November of 1885, she abruptly announced her retirement.  

Perhaps young Hurst was tired of life on the road and simply felt that she'd made enough money. In any case, two years later she had married her former manager and was living a quiet life of relative luxury in Madison, Georgia.

The "Magnet Act" still had the power to attract audiences, however, and it was soon back on the vaudeville circuit, performed by numerous imitators, including Mattie Lee Price, Annie Abbott and (somewhat later) Matilda "Tillie" Tatro. In some cases, the mimics out-shone the original. So it was that, in 1897, Hurst wrote (or at least lent her name to) a best-selling memoir titled Lulu Hurst (The Georgia Wonder) Writes Her Autobiography, and For the First Time Explains and Demonstrates the Great Secret of Her Marvelous Power.

The book positions Hurst as an innocent who'd had no idea how her Great Unknown power worked while she was performing. The first section includes a short autobiography and a description of the mysterious electrical storm, then moves into a city-by-city account of her vaudeville adventures, liberally quoting from newspaper reports about her act.  

The second section, which was independently copyrighted, explains all her signature feats much as Professor Newcomb's article had, with the addition of diagrammed photographs showing subtle lines and angles of counter-leverage. These insights, she claimed, had only come to her long after the end of her career as the Georgia Wonder.

It seems unlikely that Hurst really was as naïve about the physical principles of her act as she later professed to have been. Her experience as a professional "mystifier" did, however, grant her a unique perspective on the gullibility of the general public and on the power of the ideomotor effect, which describes the influence of expectation and belief upon muscular action.  

Hurst noted that her opponents' faith in her "supernatural power" often caused them to unconsciously exaggerate the effects of the Great Unknown. 

"[This] is, to my mind, a psychological problem of vast importance," she wrote in her autobiography. "It shows the absolute sway of the imagination over all the faculties and mental and physical powers of the human being, and in this case it illustrates it on such a stupendous scale!"

In her first months at the Velankadu Gas Fire Burial Ground, a crematorium in Chennai, Praveena Solomon thought she could hear ghosts. There was once a sound of someone rushing about in the empty yard outside her office, which, upon inspection, turned out to be dry leaves. Another day, a small closet mounted on the wall fell to the ground with a startling crash.

“It is written in the Bible that ghosts exist, but I don’t know whether to believe it,” Solomon, the crematorium manager, says one day in early February. “I haven’t seen one.”

Ghosts are Solomon’s lowest priority at the moment. The 34-year-old is part of a remarkable social experiment: the Velankadu crematorium is among the first in India to be run by a woman. By accepting the job, Solomon has unwittingly joined a cadre of Indian women who are entering spaces from which they have traditionally been excluded.

The new wave of feminism follows the brutal gang rape of a young woman in 2012 in New Delhi that horrified the nation. In the past year, Muslim women entered the Thazhathangady Juma Mosque in Kerala, which had barred from for 1,000 years; Hindu women entered ancient temples that had ostracized them; they reclaimed public spaces and loitered nonchalantly in the male gaze.

But a burial ground is unlike a temple, a mosque, or a dodgy bus stop. Even men try to avoid Hindu crematoriums, which are considered an abode for troubled souls en route to their next lives. Almost all Hindus—except children and the enlightened—are cremated so the soul can relinquish its attachment to the body and move on. Women are thought to be particularly susceptible to possession by the displaced spirits.

Velankadu is at the northwest fringe of Chennai, a conservative city of 4.2-million in South India. It is discreetly set back from the road and marked by funeral notices pasted on a gatepost. A cemented pathway leads visitors inside, past murals of a decapitated leopard, a skeleton speeding on a motorbike and a pair of angel wings. To the right is an overgrown burial yard; to the left, a children’s graveyard and three abandoned, soot-covered chambers where bodies were once cremated manually. Further down is the main building, where Solomon sits behind a table in a tiny office situated below a cavernous cremation chamber.

Solomon’s fortitude comes from decades working tough jobs in some of Chennai’s seediest locales. Previously, she educated sex workers on HIV/AIDS prevention for the non-profit Indian Community Welfare Organization (ICWO).

She would visit crowded bus stops that are influx points for travelers and truck drivers and find women wearing crepe saris, long fingernails and makeup. She would chat with them to confirm their occupation and take them to nearby motels where she would remove from her handbag an anatomical model of a penis and condoms and help the women practice. Once, police raided the motel during a session. After Solomon had convinced the chief constable that she was not a sex worker, he said in a pitying voice, “What kind of job is this, madam?”

Prior to 2014, government-run crematoriums in Chennai were badly mismanaged, says A.J. Hariharan, the founder of ICWO. An official at the city health department decided on reform and asked ICWO take over the management of Velankadu as a pilot.

According to ancient Hindu scriptures, a person who arranges funerals earns as much merit for the afterlife as an ancient King performing a ritual sacrifice to the Gods. Hariharan saw a way to earn merit in this life and spark social change by having a woman run the operation. At the next meeting, Hariharan pitched the idea to his female field workers and Solomon volunteered.

A group of men with puffy faces and reddened eyes loiter at Velankadu’s entrance. They are “Vettiyans”, graveyard workers whose ancestral job is tending to the dead. Until a decade ago, they manually cremated bodies on wooden pyres and stoked the fires for up to 24 hours to ensure a complete burn. Given the rigors of the job, many turned to alcohol. Vettiyans today have a reputation as alcoholic wards-of-the-dead who might be possessed. In public, they are usually avoided and, if not, they are greeted with, "Who died?"

Some Vettiyans were hostile to Solomon at the beginning as they sensed change they could not control. Prior to her arrival, a few Vettiyans and graveyard managers had demanded bribes for cremation, a service that is supposed to be free of charge.

Solomon set ground rules for the Vettiyans: They could charge for organizing a funeral, but not for the cremation itself, which she would handle.

The men agreed to the terms once they realized she would not interfere with their core businesses of funeral organization. Vettiyans are highly skilled at arranging the final moments of the dead. They pose the body in either a seated or prone posture as dictated by custom, decorate it with flowers and transport it to the crematorium on a cane-and-bamboo stretcher, accompanied by drumming and singing of ancient dirges. It is said the lyrics and melody can move the most stoic offspring to tears. The deceased’s sons perform the final rites before the body is pushed into the furnace. Solomon oversees that final step.

“We do all the rituals, but only the educated can fill the paperwork and that is the job that she is doing,” says Rajesh K, a Vettiyan. “There is no problem because of her.”

In the three years since Solomon took the job, the crematorium has become less ominous. Pots filled with red and pink flowers dot the campus. There are bright yellow benches on the walkway, newly planted bamboo trees, and three small fish puddles.

Accompanied by her 28-year-old assistant and protégé, Divya Raju, Solomon returns to the office, where the third cremation is set for 3:00 p.m., but the body—Solomon calls it an “accident case”—is late. A balding man, a friend of the deceased’s family, walks in and gives the backstory. A 21-year-old youth riding a moped inexplicably fainted, fell off and hit his head. He died on the spot. His friend, who was riding pillion, escaped with a slight leg injury. The boy was brilliant and was to go to the United States next month for graduate school, the man says.

The deceased’s brother walks in with a nervous energy, like he could jump out of his skin. Solomon quietly guides him through the paperwork.

She finds handling the grief of the living the hardest part of her job. She cannot easily forget such sudden-death cases. On New Year’s Day, she cremated a young mother and her newborn infant. She also remembers a young man who died in a railway accident. It seemed like his entire village descended on Velankadu that day for the funeral. His pregnant wife and 200 other women beat their chests and wailed, Solomon recalls.

“It made me feel strange to hear so many women crying at once,” she says.

A fleck of charcoal floats onto the table.

Three weeks later, Solomon gets into a moped accident herself and is admitted to the hospital with a head injury. During her fortnight-long absence, Velankadu appears dismal. Some Vettiyans lounge under a Copper Pod tree. There is a dead rat on the walkway that no one has cleared. The bamboo trees are yellowing in the blistering heat without adequate watering by the gardener.

A middle-aged man is waiting to collect the ashes of a deceased relative. He observes Divya Raju, who is filling in for Solomon, and opines that women are not allowed in crematoriums for good reasons. According to Hindu custom, the soul, deprived of the body, remains on Earth for 10 days after death. The most troubled of these spirits are more attracted to women than men because they menstruate, he says.

“These are places where ghosts roam,” he says. “I know, because I’ve seen them.”

When he was a young boy, his sister was briefly possessed and underwent an exorcism, he says. A priest sat her sat in the middle of a passageway in their house and recited incantations. She swayed and banged her head against a wall until her forehead bled. Then she fell limp as the ghost left her, the man recalls.

“Kids these days don’t believe it, but ghosts are real,” he tells Raju. “I’ve seen them. You should not be here.”

Raju smiles, nods and walks back to her office.

Leaky. Smelly. The Sniffer.

These were all nicknames for one of the more unusual figures in New York City's history, James Kelly. For decades, “Smelly" Kelly walked the tracks using his seemingly superhuman senses, plus a handful of homemade inventions, to track down hazards, leaks, poop, and eels in New York’s sprawling subway system.

Today New York's subways are equipped with high-tech machines that sample the air, looking for potential warning signs of dangerous gas build-up, or even biological and chemical agents. But in the early days of the subway, which opened its first underground line in 1904, such detection efforts were left to the keen watch of rough-and-ready subway workers. And there was no one better at ferreting out leaks and problems than Kelly.

According to the 1959 book by Robert Daley, The World Beneath the City, which devotes a whole chapter to Kelly, the man with the legendary nose began his sniffing career at the young age of 16. Born in Ireland in 1898, Kelly’s uncle worked as a well digger, and as a kid, he took to helping him divine for water. After a stint with the British Navy, where he turned his ear to manning a submarine hydrophone, Kelly ended up in New York and began working as a maintenance engineer for the Transit Authority in 1926.

Almost a cartoon of a gruff New Yorker, Kelly was described in the July 26, 1941, issue of The New Yorker as “a hardy, red-faced, Kilkenny Irishman.” His recorded quotes come off in a stern, affirmative staccato. In Daley’s book, Kelly says that all it takes to be a good underground leak detector are “quick ears, good nose, better feet.”  

It only took a few years before Kelly gained a reputation for his uncanny ability to locate leaks that no one else could find. As retold in Daley’s book, Kelly was once called to the Hotel New Yorker to investigate a rotten stench. Engineers had located a sewage leak behind one of the walls, but couldn’t pinpoint it. As the story goes, Kelly walked in, confidently announced that he could locate the broken pipe within a half an hour, and got to work. He flushed a staining agent, uranine, down the toilet, and before long, a portion of the wall began to take on a yellow color, indicating the busted pipe was behind it. Daley quotes Kelly as saying, “After that, I was in leaks for keeps.”

Kelly rose to the official position of Foreman in the Structures Division of the Board of Transportation, and was given a small team of assistants (reports differ as to whether he had five or six on his team) who were available around the clock. Kelly and his team were tasked with walking New York’s underground, looking for signs of leaks. Kelly’s exploits soon became the stuff of local legend.

In that short 1941 profile of Kelly in The New Yorker, titled “Leaky Kelly,” he and his team were said to walk ten miles of track each day, looking for damp spots or other signs of leaks, and using some unorthodox tools of Kelly’s own design to track them down. Kelly was known for a handful of gadgets he had built to help him in his work.

Most notable was the “Aquaphone,” a standard telephone receiver with a copper wire attached to the diaphragm. He would touch the trailing end of the wire to fire hydrants and listen for a hiss that would let him know a leak was near. Another of his creations was a doctor’s stethoscope to which he’d attached a steel rod, which he would touch to pavement to listen for leaks. He is also said to have carried around a map of Manhattan from 1763, which gave him an indication of natural springs and other pre-existing sources of water.

The New Yorker piece shares another common story about Kelly, which was his knack for finding eels and fish that clogged up pipes. In the early 1940s, it wasn't uncommon for fish to be drawn into the city’s water system from the reservoirs, ending up trapped in pipes and generally mucking things up. Among the creatures Kelly claimed to have pulled out of various parts of the system were a school of 40 killifish that he discovered in a subway bathroom on 145th Street; a two-and-a-half foot eel he’d fished from a sink pipe in a 42nd Street station; and as The New Yorker put it, “a spanking ten-inch trout, which would have been a noteworthy fish, even if it hadn’t been found splashing gaily in a two-foot water main in a Grand Concourse lavatory.” In Daley’s book, Kelly states that all the fish he ever found had been dead, but he otherwise confirmed his strange catches. A New York Times piece about Kelly, published in July of 1950, says that his underground fishing career was cut short once mesh grates were installed to keep large creatures from getting into the water system.

The later Times piece focuses on what Kelly is most commonly remembered for, his nose. In addition to finding water leaks and plumbing issues, Kelly was also responsible for detecting dangerous gas and chemical leaks. From invisible gas fumes that could be ignited by a random spark, to gasoline draining into the system from above-ground garages, Kelly was there to find them out using his allegedly hypersensitive nose.

The most sensational tale of Kelly’s sense of smell was the time he was called to a 42nd Street station to suss out a stench that had overtaken the platforms. According to Kelly’s own account, the smell was so bad it almost bowled him over, but as he got his head back in the game, he pinpointed the source of the reek as... elephants. Amazingly, he was correct. The station in question had been built beneath the location of the old New York Hippodrome, which had been torn down in 1939. The Hippodrome had often featured a circus, and layers of elephant dung had ended up buried at the site. A broken water main had rehydrated the fossilized dung and subsequently leaked into the subway. Until, that is, Smelly Kelly was able to identify it.

In Daley’s book, which captured Kelly at the age of 62, he writes that the infamous sniffer had walked almost 100,000 miles of track, and trained 50 to 60 junior subway smellers in his time. Still, Kelly didn’t think they were as good as he was. Daley writes, "If the New York Subway System has never had a significant explosion or cave-in, part of the reason is Smelly."

History tells us that the outlaw known as Billy the Kid (aka Henry McCarty, aka William Bonney) was gunned down—at the ripe old age of 21—by Sheriff Pat Garrett on July 14, 1881, in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. He was buried, it is said, in Fort Sumner Cemetery, with his “associates” Tom O’Folliard and Charlie Bowdre, and the epitaph “Pals”—though none of them are likely directly under the tombstone there today. He’s since been romanticized in print, and on stage, television, and film as an emblem of the lawless West. 

“As a society back then, people were tough, strong, and fearless, and yet this little guy is known as the most deadly outlaw of them all,” says Daniel A. Edwards, author of Billy the Kid: An Autobiography. “He is either a folk hero that single-handedly stood up against a corrupt government system, or he is a ruthless outlaw and cop killer that left a wake of terror in his path.” 

Whether his story actually ended in 1881, however, is another matter. People in Hico, Texas—population 1,379 and home to the Billy the Kid Museum, tell a slightly different version. 

In 1948, a paralegal named William V. Morrison was investigating a man named Joe Hines, a survivor of the Lincoln County War, the feud that helped make Billy the Kid’s name. Hines told him a whopper of a tale: Billy the Kid had not been killed in New Mexico, but was alive and well and living in a town called Hico in Hamilton County, Texas, as one Ollie “Brushy Bill” Roberts. Morrison approached Roberts who, perhaps sensing the end of his life was near (if he had been Billy, he’d have been 90 at the time), made a confession. He hoped that Morrison could help him claim the pardon that New Mexico Governor Lew Wallace supposedly promised Billy the Kid back in 1879. 

“Brushy Bill was very well known around these parts,” says Jane Klein, historian at the Billy the Kid Museum. “He would tell people around here, ‘You know, I have a secret and one of these days you’re going to find out what it is.’ He didn't want to tell his story at first. After he thought about it, though, he told [Morrison] that he was Billy the Kid. All he wanted to do was to get that pardon that he'd been promised, and I believe he felt this was his last chance to get it.”

In November 1950, Morrison filed a petition on behalf of Brushy Bill. But it wasn’t to be. Roberts died a month later, and neither Billy the Kid nor Brushy Bill Roberts ever received a pardon. Since that time, debates have raged over Roberts’s claims, and whether he was truly one of the West’s most notorious gunmen or just an old man looking for attention. 

In researching his book, Edwards analyzed photographs of Billy the Kid and Roberts, and dug into the details of Roberts’s account of his life and comparing them with known facts about Billy the Kid. “Before I made the discoveries I made in my book, I did not have an opinion on Brushy Bill,” says Edwards. “I now believe without a doubt that Billy the Kid was not killed by Pat Garrett in Ft. Sumner. I believe he lived, had many more adventures ... before he finally died in Hico in 1950.

“When you listen to his real story, he talks about how he wasn't an outlaw, how he never robbed banks or stagecoaches, how he resented the fact that Governor Lew Wallace reneged on his promise of a pardon in 1879 and left him to die,” Edwards says. “Now these are strange things for someone that is a fraud to focus on. They are personal things, and things that make complete sense for him to be upset about if his story was true.”

The Billy the Kid Museum opened in Hico nearly 40 years after Roberts’s death, and the city actively celebrates the connection. In Hico Billy is everywhere, from a statue downtown, to the standee in the Chamber of Commerce, to the monumental arch over Roberts’s grave. There is no doubt there that Billy the Kid is one of their own, and they’re happy to tell the world. 

“From what I've heard, [Brushy Bill] told a pretty credible tale,” says Hamilton Historical Commission Chairman Jim Eidson. “I believe all communities are built on legends, and in Hamilton County Brushy Bill’s stories connect us to those wild days of the frontier.”

Eidson’s “official” position on the story echoes that of the rest of the Historical Commission—we keep an open mind. We’re not trying to deceive anyone. It’s all just part of the area’s mythology.

“Brushy Bill and Billy the Kid, the whole story, that’s part of who we are now,” Eidson says. “I think people really like being associated with it now. Outlaws have a romantic air about them and I think the people in Hamilton County really enjoy having this as part of the history."

When John Fitzgerald Kennedy married Jacqueline Bouvier at St. Mary's Church in Rhode Island in 1953, the building itself was already very old, and plenty historic. 

It was designed by Patrick Keeley, one of America's most preeminent and prolific church architects, and finished in June 1849. It had served as home to the first Roman Catholic parish in the state for over 100 years before JFK and the future First Lady chose to say their vows there. 

But despite all that time—and the decades since—the church still has secrets, such as the carving of a woman's face in the picture above, which was recently uncovered during restoration of the church's organ. The carving is a bit mysterious, Fr. Kris Maluski, the church's pastor, told the Associated Press, because she is placed on the same level as carvings of the 12 apostles—and therefore probably depicts someone "significant." Church officials just don't know who, though the pastor has a theory: Mary Magdalene, the early follower of Jesus later canonized by the Catholic Church. 

Maluski is now looking at other Keeley-designed churches for similar carvings. Whether he uncovers her identity or not, the carving itself won't be hidden for the next generation of parishioners. The new organ will be designed to provide a view of the woman, who is part of the church's rich history and, now that she has been revealed, its future as well.

When we asked paleontologist Jack Horner why we never see dinosaurs have sex in the movies, his response was to the point: “Have you ever seen a bird having sex?”

But now in part thanks to the discovery of a new type of tyrannosaur named for Horner, we are discovering a bit more about dinosaur sex: mainly that Tyrannosaurus rex might have liked to kiss.

Researchers found recently that the new tyrannosaur, named Daspletosaurus horneri, had a snout that was as sensitive as a human finger and possibly used for a number of things, including what amounts to a dinosaur make out, according to The Guardian. 

Modern alligators and crocodiles—whose snouts share a similar sensitivity—vigorously rub their snouts together before mating, and the researchers said that tyrannosaurs, including Tyrannosaurus rex, might have engaged in much the same behavior. 

With modern crocs and gators, the researchers also said that the activity can often lead to “overstimulation”; they did not speculate to quite how hot it might have made tyrannosaurs.

And in addition to the kissing, the snouts might have also been useful in building nests and handling their young.

Those terrifying maws, in other words, might have also had a more domestic side.

One evening recently, Steve White was going out for an evening walk near his home in western Pennsylvania. He came across a scrap of laminated paper, dated May 1987. The note had a message from Brenda Walters, a third grader—the note had been attached to a balloon and asked that if it was found, the finder get in touch with her elementary school, in East Leroy, Michigan.

East Leroy is near the center of southern Michigan, more than 300 miles from western Pennsylvania. The balloon that was released with Brenda Walters' note three decades ago must have floated to Pennsylvania; the note lay there waiting for someone to find it.

White posted his find to Facebook, naturally, and the close-knit community of East Leroy started dredging up memories. Many people remembered the schools’ tradition of releasing balloons into the wild and Mrs. Bennett’s third grade class in 1987. Brenda Walters was a little harder, though. “I kind of remember the name,” one former student wrote on Facebook. “It sounds familiar to me too, but I can’t place her,” said another.

Soon, though, they were able to locate Brenda—her son showed her the note. “She thinks that [it’s] awesome that you had found it,” he wrote.

The Oregon Department of Transportation and the Oregon landscape engaged in two high-stakes games of modified Rock, Paper, Scissors last night. In the first game, rock beat road:

New BIG ROCK (12 feet tall, 200 tons) pictures from Oregon 138E, east of Glide. Stay tuned to https://t.co/SsqxkwoOBg& 511 for updates. pic.twitter.com/uqLiTIPBMj

— Oregon DOT (@OregonDOT) March 30, 2017

In the second game, though—as you can see above—dynamite obliterated rock. "Cleaning and paving work will persist through at least the weekend," writes Oregon Live, which posted the video. Take that, nature.

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 1909, a section of Woodward Avenue in Detroit was paved, a one mile stretch that was not the first concrete pavement in the United States, but was by far the longest. The paving presaged the era of the automobile, but it was also the culmination of a long fight for better roads undertaken by a perhaps surprising constituency: cyclists, who had coalesced into the so-called “Good Roads” movement, a brief but effective nationwide campaign that came together around the turn of the century.

That’s because by the late 1800s, the bicycle had assumed its modern form, being both easier to ride and safer than the old penny-farthing. They were also more affordable and easier to maintain than horses, which meant that, for awhile, their popularity exploded. But these ‘poor man’s horses’ did have one significant drawback: They were close-to-useless on muddy or rutted roads—conditions that impeded, but did not necessarily halt, horses and wagons.

Enter the League of American Wheelmen, a cycling organization founded in 1880, which led the campaign for not just better roads, but better administration of their design, construction, funding and maintenance.

“It is one of the striking facts of bicycling experience,” read an article in the 1885 issue of the Bulletin, a League publication, “that the moment any person becomes a Wheelman, he is instantly and ardently convinced of the necessity of improved highways.”

From 1889 into the 1900s, the League regularly published technical articles on road construction as well as descriptions of relevant patents and case studies. No idea seems to have been too outlandish. One article, for example, suggested hiring tramps to act as road inspectors. More conventionally, they also solicited the addresses of civil engineers, surveyors, and road officials, in addition to trying to get their publications in the hands of influential citizens.

Their efforts paid off in places like Detroit, where the cause was led by a peripatetic merchant named Horatio S. Earle, whose involvement was so extensive that he eventually ended up with the nickname “Good Roads Earle.”

Born on a farm near Mount Holly, Vermont, in 1855, Earle took night courses in drafting, before taking charge of two foundries. He then, for a stretch, was a traveling salesman for a Massachusetts implement company, before moving to Detroit in 1889 to start his own firm.

It was in Detroit that Earle was introduced to cycling and, later ended up the leading the Michigan chapter of the League of American Wheelmen (the organization survives today as the League of American Bicyclists). Earle was chiefly an advocate, but he also organized things like a “Good Roads” festival in Port Huron, Michigan, over Independence Day weekend in 1900. At first, the central attraction was a model road intended to demonstrate new construction methods; however, Earle later assembled a 40-car “train” from construction equipment for spectators to ride, mostly to increase attendance. The festival also served a political purpose, as the organization had put forth several candidates for public office that year. Among them were Aaron Bliss, who was elected governor, and Earle himself, who was elected to the state senate.

And it was there that Earle pushed for a law establishing a board to oversee and improve Michigan’s roads. He also proposed the first interstate highway network, a nationwide network connecting every state capital to each other, as well as Washington, D.C. Closer to home, he also helped establish the Wayne County Road Board in 1906, nominating fellow wheelman, Edward N. Hines to the board. Hines went on to invent the painted center line separating traffic onto opposite sides of the street. He was inspired, so he said, by seeing milk running out of a leaky wagon.

It wasn’t just Detroit, of course. Across the U.S., there was a strong albeit latent desire to see something done about the roads, which had been cared for outside city limits mostly by farmers, who often worked under poorly-trained roads supervisors. Railroads were also willing to support better roads, to assure a steady flow of crops during harvest, rather than a glut of deliveries when the roads were finally dry enough to haul grain over.

But it was the League of American Wheelmen that were among the first to help the idea along, since for bicyclists, good roads were one of their only concerns.

Which brings us back to Woodward Avenue and 1909, also, coincidentally, the first full year of of production for the Model T, an automobile that would eventually make road improvement a concern for hundreds of thousands of drivers, too.

In hindsight, that development isn’t so surprising, of course, especially since, in Detroit at least, some of the seeds of the coming sea change were already there. The Wayne County Road Board included one of the architects of the changes to come. 

His name was Henry Ford.

Excarnation, an ancient ritual of leaving corpses exposed to the elements, has long been believed to be a sacred method of interment. In this traditional practice, bodies are left outdoors atop towers or mountainside platforms, where they can decompose in the open air and carrion birds can feed on the flesh until only the bones remain.

While this may sound extraordinary to some modern ears, defleshing was considered a natural and efficient means of disposing of the dead for thousands of years. It's been practiced in Zoroastrian communities in Iran and India, and in certain Buddhist regions of Tibet, China, and other nations throughout Asia.

As populations have grown in these regions, excarnation sites have became more scarce, and more modern forms of burial have gained in popularity. There are only a handful of remaining sites around the world where outdoor burial rites are still practiced, or where the remains of these traditional structures can be seen, long since abandoned.

Chilpik Tower of Silence 

NUKUS, UZBEKISTAN 

Situated on the banks of the Amu Darya river in the Chilpik region of Karakalpakstan, an autonomous territory of Uzbekistan, is an ancient dakhma believed the first one ever built. Constructed somewhere between the 1st century BCE and 1st century CE, this Tower of Silence is especially significant as local legend has it that Zarathustra began writing the ancient Zoroastrian scriptures in this region. 

In the Zoroastrian tradition, an ancient religion that has a strong following in some pockets of Asia, a corpse is considered impure and should not be allowed to pass on its impurity to the elements around it, especially the element of fire, which is believed to be holy. Thus, dakhmas, or Towers of Silence, were built for laying the dead to rest.

Dakhmas are raised, rounded structures, with a central well. The body of a deceased Zoroastrian is placed on depressions in the circular platform and exposed to both the elements and birds of prey, which feed on the flesh, leaving behind the bones. The use of these towers was first documented more than 2,000 years ago, though the English term "Tower of Silence" didn't come into use until the 19th century, when it was coined by a British translator stationed in colonial India.

The Chilpik dakhma has become a popular symbol in Karakalpakstan, even appearing on the republic's coat of arms. While it has not been used for burial rituals for centuries, the structure is a vital part of local lore and history in the region. 

Yazd Tower of Silence

YAZD, IRAN

The Tower of Silence in Yazd, Iran, is another example of an ancient dakhma no longer in use—though until just 40 years ago, corpses could still be found on top of the structure, slowly disintegrating or being picked apart by desert vultures.

As Iran developed and urbanized, dakhmas became located increasingly closer to city limits, which severely curtailed their use as a purification process. In the 1970s, they were deemed illegal, forcing orthodox Zoroastrians to adapt to new burial methods. Many in the Zoroastrian community have moved to burying bodies beneath concrete to keep out contaminants.

Mumbai Tower of Silence

MUMBAI, INDIA 

The Zoroastrian faith travelled to India between the 8th and 10th centuries, when its followers migrated to the country to avoid persecution after the Arab invasion of Persia. Today, India is still home to a small but affluent Parsi community, as the Zoroastrians came to be in called in the country. Mumbai has one of the largest populations of Parsis.

The Mumbai dakhma is located within city limits, but set deep inside a 54-acre forest, a complex locally called the doongerwadi and still used by Parsis in the city. The Tower of Silence in Mumbai is facing problems, though, due to the fact that the local vulture population has dwindled in recent years. Without sufficient birds of prey to feed on the corpses, the excarnation process is delayed or even left incomplete. 

Drigung Monastery

LHASA, TIBET

In the mountains of Tibet, and in some provinces of China, Bhutan, Mongolia, and Nepal, a ritual similar to the Zoroastrian Towers of Silence takes place: the tradition of jhator, or sky burial.

This form of interment is a part of the Vajrayana Buddhist tradition, dictated by both religious traditions as well as practical concerns—in mountainous regions, sky burials were a more convenient form of burial when fuel for cremations was scarce, and the terrain was too rocky to dig graves.

The sky burial practice was briefly banned in the 1960s but later came back into being. But logistical and sanitary concerns have triggered the slow decline of the jhator custom in favor of cremation, and today active sky burial sites are incredibly rare. 

The Drigung Thil monastery in Tibet is home to one of the few remaining and most famous sky burial sites, and bodies from the surrounding valley are sent here. The death ceremonies are performed by the monks every afternoon, and the following morning the bodies are carried to the site, which is situated at 14,975 feet, high on the mountaintop, surrounded by small stupas and temples. Himalayan vultures are invited to feed on the flesh and anything that remains is burned and offered to the sky in another ritual.

Trunyan

TEMBUKU, INDONESIA 

One community in Bali does sky burials slightly differently, placing the bodies below a sacred banyan tree to decompose in the open air.

The walk up to the Trunyan cemetery in Tembuku is littered with skulls and human bones that have been set into stones. The villagers who adhere to this practice belong to a group known as the Bali Aga, people who have descended from the original Balinese natives. Their unique interment traditions are believed to go back hundreds of years.

When English theologian and retired schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott wrote his eccentric, satirical novel Flatland in 1884, he created a world populated by flat shapes: squares, lines, circles and hexagons forever trapped in horizontal lives, only able to escape through dreams or otherworldly transport to a third dimension.

It’s an unexpected critique of Victorian class distinctions and constraints, and one that inspired modern-day photographer Aydın Büyüktaş to explore his own understanding of escape, in a series of collage images called Flatland and Flatland II.

As an artist based in Turkey, Büyüktaş saw something in the colors and planes of the American West that spoke to his own view of overcoming constraints. Using his skills in 3-D animation and visual effects to assemble multiple overhead shots into seamless photographs, he does away with the horizon while simultaneously expanding and constricting the landscape.

That the Western terrain can have an otherworldly quality has long been documented—in film, memoir, novels, and photography—but in Büyüktaş’s eyes and hands it’s transformed into another dimension, pulling the viewer up and out, hoping to see what’s just above his disappeared horizon.

Aydin Büyüktaş is based in Istanbul, where he is studying photography at Miman Sinan Fine Arts University. You can see more of his work from Flatland and Flatland II here.

In Terry Bisson’s classic 1990 science fiction short story, “Bears Discover Fire,” humans find that bears have come to use fire as a tool. These days, though, if a short video shot by a Montana man is to be believed, bears might have moved on to laptops. 

According to MTN News, Whitefish, Montana native Michael Potter began recording the bear wandering near the side of the road, and after zooming in the camera, realized that it looked to be carrying a black laptop in its jaws. While the picture is somewhat unfocused, Potter says that he has gone over the footage again and again, and has identified a small logo mark on the back, and the crease where a laptop would fold down the middle.

Here's video of the incident, which you can use to decide for yourself: 

Wildlife officials have been trying to lure the bear—which the Daily Inter Lake identifies as a cinnamon black bear—from it’s den inside of a culvert beneath the highway, both for the safety of the animal, and the safety of drivers. But so far it has not taken the bait.

Still, laptop or not, Potter said the sighting was, "what makes Montana great."

The dams of Germany’s industrial Ruhr Valley made for obvious targets for the Allies during World War II. In addition to hydroelectric power, they provided water for manufacturing, canals, and drinking. But despite being major pieces of infrastructure, the dams were surprisingly hard to take out, requiring multiple direct hits in the face of enemy fire.

A smaller bomb right up against the dam, underwater, would do the trick—if one could get it past the torpedo nets. So a bomb designer named Barnes Wallis came up with an ingenious solution: a drum-shaped bomb, dropped from an insanely low altitude and rapidly spinning backward, allowing it to skip across the water like a stone. It would hop the torpedo defenses before meeting the wall, where its leftover spin would then take it down the face of the dam.

Various tests and experiments were planned, including at Herne Bay in Kent, England, where café owner Lisa Clayton recently spotted a piece of one of the “practice” bombs (fortunately not live) along the shore, The Telegraph reports. "It's quite exciting after all these years for this one to turn up, I'm pretty astounded by it,” Alan Porter, trustee of the Herne Bay seaside museum, told reporters. "We're not quite sure what to do with it—it's so heavy that we might leave it there, I like the idea of keeping it as a public sculpture.”

Operation Chastise, as the “dambuster” project was known, was a smashing military success. In May 1943, two dams were breached, the valley flooded, and both power stations and factories destroyed.

TY @thewcs Cambodia for working w/community to rescue 11
Asian Elephants from mudhole in Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary. Avoided real tragedy! pic.twitter.com/j6QEB8seFy

— John Calvelli (@JohnCalvelli) March 28, 2017

In the last days of March, a family of elephants living in Cambodia's Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary headed over to a large mud hole to splash around. But after they jumped in and got nice and muddy, they faced a classic children's-book conundrum—they couldn't get out again.

As ScienceDaily reports, the mud hole started as the remnants of a Vietnam War-era bomb crater, and has since been enlarged by farmers, who use it for water storage. When the farmers came to fetch water and saw the elephants stuck there, they called the Department of Environment—who, in turn, dialed up the Wildlife Conservation Society.

A rescue team soon mobilized, made up of farmers, government employees, and conservationists. Some volunteers fed and watered the stuck pachyderms. Others constructed an escape ramp. In an area where humans and elephants often clash over crop destruction, "this [was] a great example of everyone working together," WCS director Ross Sinclair told ScienceDaily.

One by one, the elephants used the ramp to pull themselves out of the mud, with help from the other elephants, who pushed from below. When the very last one—a small baby—couldn't quite make it, the people all worked together to haul him out with a rope.

Video footage shows each elephant trotting away from the crater, as if to say, "I thought I was never going to get out of that one!" Nice job, humans.

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.

Hundreds of years ago, in North Yorkshire, England, there was a small village called Wharram Percy. There were two rows of houses, one shorter than the other, and church, with a churchyard, but they’ve long since disappeared. By the 16th century, the village was abandoned.

In the 1960s, when archaeologists worked to excavate the village, they found a strange group of human bones. These bones were buried outside the churchyard, near the end of one row of buildings. There were 137 bones in the excavated pit, belonging to at least 10 people, ranging in age from 2 or 3 to 50.

For many years, no one knew exactly what to make of these bones, but now a team of archaeologists from Historic England and the University of Southampton have published a new theory about them: these bodies were burned and mutilated after death to keep them from becoming reanimated corpses.

In a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, the archaeologists examine the burn and cut marks left on the bones. Most often, the bones with burn marks were cranial bones; the bones with cut marks usually came from the upper body. Most of those cut marks were fine lines—cuts made by knives, rather than chop marks of swords or axes. Some of the corpses may have been decapitated.

The people buried in the pit died over the course of many years from the 12th to 14th century—over a range of more than 100 years overall. Previously, archaeologists thought the bones may have belonged to strangers to the village, but the new report includes analysis of teeth suggesting that these people came from the same area. Sometimes cut marks indicate that people died in battle, but these marks weren’t consistent with that kind of death. So what was going on here?

The archaeologists zeroed in on two possible theories. Perhaps the cut marks and burns on the bones were evidence of cannibalism; perhaps they were mutilations intended to keep the bodies in their graves. In the paper, they argue that the marks they studied are not consistent with cannibalism; most likely, they argue, the marks were made by people trying to keep “revenants”—walking corpses—from their nightly rounds.

“Belief in revenants was widespread in Mediaeval northern and western Europe. Revenants were usually malevolent, spreading disease and physically assaulting the living,” they write. “Reanimation arose as a result of a lingering life-force in individuals who committed malign, evil deeds and projected strong ill-will in life, or who experienced a sudden death leaving energy still unexpended.”

There’s textual evidence and folklore showing that people at this time in England believed in the walking dead and would resort to mutilation and burning to stop them. The belief was that corpses could only reanimate for a short time after death, so these practices were a way of hastening the destruction of the corpse.

But previously there hasn’t been strong archaeological evidence for this practice. In folklore, revenants were most often men, so the presence of the bones of women and children in the pit weighs against this explanation. Right now, though, it’s the strongest one. “If we are right, this the first good archaeological evidence we have for this practice,” Historic England's Simon Mays told The Guardian.

Brian Thompson's new podcast starts straightforwardly enough. "Welcome to Whatever Happened to Pizza at McDonald's?," he intones at the beginning of the first episode, "a podcast where I ask the question, 'Whatever happened to the pizza at McDonald's?'" After introducing himself, he cuts (or slices) directly to the chase: "Let's call McDonald's and see whatever happened to their pizza."

Something did, indeed, happen to pizza at McDonald's. In the late 1980s, in an attempt to grab a piece of the burgeoning pizza market, the franchise introduced personal and family-sized pies. From about 1989 through the early 1990s, in select restaurants, you could get a fresh, hot McDonald's Pizza, straight out of an oven invented especially for the purpose. After that, though, the restaurant quietly phased out the innovation in almost all locations, citing various issues—lack of interest, slow cooking times, boxes that didn't fit through drive-thru windows.

Fans, though, never forgot. Neither did a new generation of fast food aficionados, who, although they may never have tasted this particular pizza, would desperately like to. Thompson, an L.A. resident who grew up in Monroe, Louisiana—where, he says, "the main street was nothing but fast food places"—belongs to this second group. Thanks to Whatever Happened to Pizza at McDonald's?, he has now, somewhat accidentally, become the lost menu item's standard-bearer.

Like many worthwhile quests, Thompson's started as a late-night joke. "[The demise of McDonald's pizza] is something I've always had in the back of my mind," he says. "Every few years it would pop up and I would think about it." One night, discussing the recent wave of true-crime podcasts, he decided it might make a good topic for a satirical investigation. So he opened his laptop, plugged in a microphone, and dialed up his local McDonald's. The resulting, fruitless calls became Episode 1.

Thirty-four unlikely episodes later, Thompson has chased his titular question through complicated corporate dial-up menus, across gulfs of conflicting information, and finally all the way to Pomeroy, Ohio, one of only two locations in the United States that still has a pizza oven fired up. (The other is in West Virginia.) He has spoken to McDonald's representatives in various states and on three continents, and he doesn't plan on stopping anytime soon. "The actual investigation is now kind of a real thing, and is branching out in all kinds of interesting ways," he says.

Tonally, Whatever Happened to Pizza at McDonald's? remains resolutely satirical, poking fun at more sincere investigative podcasting efforts such as Serial or Criminal. Ebullient in regular conversation, Thompson's hosting voice is deep, deadpan, and somewhat pained. Along with more traditional on-air reporting strategies—interviewing small-town journalists, reading Reddit threads out loud, keeping listeners apprised of his emotional ups and downs—he has called in some less common sources, including private detectives and dial-a-prayer hotlines.

Apart from one obviously staged "listener call" about halfway through Season 1, "nothing is fake," says Thompson. "It's just maybe the way I'm going about the investigation is not the way you should be." In one episode, he contemplates suing McDonald's for withholding information; in another, he attempts to join the White House Press Corps. He routinely asks McDonald's employees if the company has forbidden them from speaking about its pizza-filled past, and ends innocuous lines of questioning by stating, gravely, "thank you for your candor."

The show wouldn't work, though, if the question at its center wasn't at least somewhat appealing. As with many huge, long-standing corporations, McDonald's esoterica offers up a heady blend of familiarity and mystery. Finding an all-but-dead menu item feels like discovering an extinct species, or digging up a rare B-side in a dollar record bin. McDonald's Pizza in particular seems to be having something of a moment. Just this past week, three men from Canada made headlines when they road-tripped sixteen hours to West Virginia, to try it themselves. (Their verdict: "Mediocre.")

For the Season 1 finale, released on March 1, Thompson successfully Kickstarted a trip to Pomeroy, Ohio. There, he and his girlfriend-slash-producer, Agnes, explored the town, and interviewed McDonald's employees and patrons. The owner of this particular location, Greg Mills—who also helms the West Virginia location—didn't want to get rid of pizzas, a manager named Laurie explained to Thompson. Now, she says, they serve so many that headquarters just lets them keep going.

Eventually, Thompson ordered a family-sized pepperoni, a personal-sized cheese, and a personal-sized deluxe (which features sausage, peppers, mushrooms, and onions). "McDonald's pizza is everything I hoped for," he pronounces on air, after sampling each kind. "It tastes good."

Whatever Happened to Pizza at McDonald's? isn't breaking any podcasting records—it averages about 10,000 listeners per episode. But Thompson says that, compared with other shows he's been involved with, audience engagement is very high—he's constantly getting Tweets, emails, and Facebook messages from fans who remember the pizza, or who have specific questions about it. "There's a lot of minutiae to dive into there," he says. There is also a growing movement to get the podcast—which is produced entirely by Thompson, and funded partially by fans—picked up by a distributor. (In another running gag, Thompson pretended to be a part of Slate's Panoply network, until he received a decidedly real-world cease-and-desist letter.)

Thompson originally figured his podcast would last one season, that after he made it to Pomeroy and tried the pizza, the story would be over. But the audience response has encouraged him to keep going. Plus, he says, the more details he gathers, the more inconsistencies arise. Now, he wants to dig harder. "It's starting to take more and more of my time," he says.

First of all, in Thompson's view, McDonald's brass keeps changing their pizza-nixing rationale. "Sometimes they say it's because it took too long to make," he says. And yet the most-cited turnaround time, 11 minutes, is at odds with testimony Thompson gathered from a former McDonald's employee, who put it at about five and a half minutes. "Other times they say it's because it wasn't successful, or because they couldn't fit the boxes through the drive-thru window," he says. "It is strange to me how little they want to talk to me about it."

Another line of potential inquiry is that the Pomeroy McDonald's claims to serve the chain's original pizza recipe. Thompson has his doubts. "People email me and contact me on Twitter all the time about having had McDonald's pizza when it was in its heyday," he says. "Almost all of them describe [the crust] as being crispy and covered in cornmeal." The crust Thompson tried was, instead, bald and soft. "So I want to get to the bottom of that."

As existing mysteries deepen, new ones crop up, too—mysteries that, to Thompson, invite even more unorthodox investigative methods. For Season 2, a journalist from Pakistan is helping him tap into what Thompson calls the "fast food black market" in Southeast Asia, where some restaurateurs operate unlicensed KFCs and Burger Kings, and deduce and trade the chains' various proprietary spice mixes and secret sauces. (The hope is that the original 1980s McDonald's Pizza recipe might be floating around.)

Eventually, he may head to Vancouver to investigate the famous McBarge, a floating novelty McDonald's that was shuttered in the late 1980s and remains frozen in time. "It's possible they still have pizza paraphernalia," Thompson says. Or maybe he'll go to Adak, Alaska, where throughout the 1980s, a listener told him, the McDonald's on the local Air Force base "only served pizza."

"I have this growing document of leads to follow," Thompson says. And maybe, someday, someone from McDonald's Corporate will even call him back.

If you had landed in Venice during the mid-15th century, you might have been accosted by a monk with a prominent nose and baggy, smurf-like hat. Ignoring your exhaustion and atrocious body odor after a long sea journey, he would have dragged you to a nearby tavern and cross-examined you about your travels. What was the weather like? What kind of precious gems were mined? What animals did you encounter, and how many heads did they have?

The monk was Fra Mauro, a 15th-century version of Google Earth. Famous for his cartographic skills, he had been commissioned by King Alfonso of Portugal to produce a map of the world.

The Portuguese were eager explorers and wealthy clients, and in the days before satellite imagery, Venice was a cartographers’ heaven. Arab traders and world explorers passed through the port, giving Fra Mauro an incomparable source of gossip and tall tales about the world. The fall of Constantinople, occurring a few years before the map was finished, would also have provided a rich source of well-traveled refugees, presumably willing to swap their stories for some bread or beer.

Crowdsourcing a map had never been easier, and Fra Mauro took full advantage. He interrogated these travelers with an inquisitiveness verging on belligerence, cross-checking their tales against the extensive library in his monastery in the Venice lagoon. He used their information to draw the map itself and pepper it with almost 3,000 annotations.

Fra Mauro loved a good story, and his map is packed with pictures of amber, rubies, pearls, diamonds, manna, and “other notable things”. He was also fascinated by exotic animals and practices. Seven-headed serpents roam the province of Malabar in India, troglodytes run wild in East Africa, and the Barents Sea near Norway harbors fish that can “puncture the ships with a spike they have on their backs”.

More exotic treasures include a lake on an island in the Indian Ocean that can turn iron into gold. In the accompanying annotation, Fra Mauro hastily explained that he didn’t believe a word of this story, and included it “just to do justice to the testimony of many people." Given that he repeated this particular tale in three different places and drew a spectacular gold lake in the middle of the Andaman Islands for good measure, his skepticism seems ambiguous to say the least.

To modern eyes, the monsters, lakes of honey-wine, and cannibals suggest credulity. In fact, however, the annotations on the map are full of doubt and skepticism. In both India and Africa, Fra Mauro gives no credence to the wild tales of “human and animal monsters,” noting that none of the travelers with whom he spoke could confirm the stories. “I leave research in the matter,” he concluded sarcastically, “to those who are curious about such things.”

Fra Mauro was also exceptional in his rejection of religious and classical authority. Europe was not a haven of religious tolerance at the time; the Spanish inquisition started just 20 years after the map was completed. Mapmakers, consequently, focused on keeping the Church happy rather than worrying about minor geographic details. Medieval maps showed the location of Noah’s Ark, discussed the depravity of pagans, and illustrated the hideous giants Gog and Magog, lurking in the far North and eagerly awaiting the apocalypse. Fra Mauro, by contrast, took a rigidly empirical approach. The Garden of Eden was relegated to a sidebox, not shown in a real geographic location. He sternly noted that the tradition that the Gog and Magog lived in the Caucasus Mountains “is certainly and clearly mistaken and cannot be upheld in any way,” since plenty of people lived in and traveled to the mountains, and they would have noticed any monstrous giants living nearby.

Fra Mauro also criticized various classical authorities. Like a cheeky schoolchild—or a commentator on an online forum—Fra Mauro prefaced his criticism by saying that he didn’t want to seem contrary but couldn’t help it that everyone else was wrong. Ptolemy got the size of Persia wrong, mislabeled Sri Lanka, and didn’t realize that you could sail all the way around Africa. Regarding the circumference of the Earth, Fra Mauro cited a couple of expert opinions and concluded dismissively that “they are not of much authenticity, since they have not been tested.” His robust skepticism marked a transition away from medieval traditions towards the intellectual excitement of the Renaissance.

As a result, Fra Mauro’s map was the most accurate ever made at the time. It wasn’t just his piercingly accurate national stereotypes; the Norwegians were “strong and robust,” while the Scottish were “of easy morals.” He was the first to depict Japan as an island, and the first European to show that you could sail all the way around Africa. The latter finding drew on reports from unfortunate traders blown by a storm ‘round South Africa, learning that it was circumnavigable and liberally endowed with 60-foot birds, capable of picking up elephants. Through depicting the riches, navigation routes, and people around the world, Fra Mauro didn’t just describe terrain, but played a part in encouraging further exploration and analysis, leading up to the famous Age of Exploration and the discovery of the Americas.

Modern interest in Fra Mauro’s map was sparked by Placido Zurla, a monk at the same monastery, who published a lengthy study in 1806. Since then, it’s been widely recognized that Fra Mauro was way ahead of his time for his accurate geographical knowledge, willingness to challenge authority, and emphasis on empirical observation.

The map is accurate enough to guide researchers to as-yet undiscovered archaeological sites. For example, Fra Mauro’s contacts in the Ethiopian Church allowed him to map medieval Ethiopia in surprising detail. He accurately portrayed a number of geographical features; the Awash River, mountain ranges surrounding Addis Ababa, and the Ziquala mountain and monastery (which is still there, 500 years later). Alongside geographical features, Fra Mauro plotted ancient cities that for centuries scholars assumed never existed. This assumption is challenged by archaeologists today, who have found unmistakable signs of past habitation in the sites that Fra Mauro indicated. Although no excavation has started, obsidian shards and pottery pieces litter the landscape, and small walls, old grindstones, and worn foundations are visible under moss and bushes.

If he were alive today, Fra Mauro would probably be disappointed to know that lakes of gold and wine existed just in the imagination of the travelers he interviewed. He would, however, be happy to know that his map is proving more accurate than skeptical cartographers gave it credit for, and that it still acts as a starting point for research and discovery.

Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.

The Arctic's Svalbard Global Seed Vault, last seen in these parts getting some seeds back from Syria, just got a new neighbor: a doomsday data vault, designed to secure information, like seeds, in case of Armageddon. 

The new vault is located in the same mountain as the seed vault, on the archipelago of Svalbard, about 1,000 miles north of mainland Norway. It opened March 27, according to Live Science, and, for now, is pretty empty, though its creators, a Norwegian company named Piql, said that they have already begun to make deposits: documents from Brazil and Mexico. 

"In their case, [the deposit] is documents, different kinds of documents from their national histories, like, for example, the Brazilian Constitution," the company's founder told Live Science. "For Mexico, it's important documents, even from the Inca period, which is a very important historical memory."

The vault will store the data on photosensitive film, in a format that the company compares to QR codes. The film is capable of being preserved for up to 1,000 years, according to the company. 

And while the first deposits might include a lot of government documents, the vault is very much a capitalistic endeavor, meaning that anyone can pay to store their information for the long-term future—what Piql calls the "ultimate digital insurance."

Still, the essential problem of a doomsday vault is something the company is unlikely to be able to solve: What use will any of this be when we're all dead?

On the night of January 17, 1881, a would-be body snatcher by the name of Dipper was killed by a blast in a Mount Vernon, Ohio cemetery. The attempted grave-robbery was a three-man operation, according to the Stark County Democrat. The explosion broke the leg of the second thief. The third—tasked with keeping watch—was allegedly left unscathed and hoisted his wounded friend into a sleigh.

Another win for the coffin torpedo.

Keeping the dead buried was a matter of grave concern in 19th-century America. As medical schools proliferated after the Civil War, the field grew increasingly tied to the study of anatomy and practice of dissection. Professors needed bodies for young doctors to carve into and the pool of legally available corpses—executed criminals and body donors—was miniscule. Enter freelance body snatchers, dispatched to do the digging. By the late 1800s, the illicit body trade was flourishing, and salacious accounts of grave robberiespeppered local papers across the country, historian Michael Sappol, Ph.D., chronicles in A Traffic of Dead Bodies.

At least 12 body-snatching scandals were reported in 1878, including that of Ohio congressman John Scott Harrison, the son of ninth United States president William Henry Harrison. (Harrison’s body was found at the University of Cincinnati and his remains were ultimately returned to the family tomb.)

Capitalizing on the public’s funereal anxiety, inventors got to work. Their solution? Explosives.

Philip. K Clover, a Columbus, Ohio artist, patented an early coffin torpedo in 1878. Clover’s instrument functioned like a small shotgun secured inside the coffin lid in order to “prevent the unauthorized resurrection of dead bodies,” as the inventor put it. If someone tried to remove a buried body, the torpedo would fire out a lethal blast of lead balls when the lid was pried open.

Another Ohioan, former Circleville probate judge Thomas N. Howell, patented a grave torpedo of his own on December 20, 1881. Unlike the Clover torpedo, Howell’s gadget was a shell buried above the coffin and wired to it. This worked like a landmine and would detonate when thieves ran into the wiring.

“Sleep well sweet angel, let no fears of ghouls disturb thy rest, for above thy shrouded form lies a torpedo, ready to make minced meat of anyone who attempts to convey you to the pickling vat,” read an advertisement for the Howell torpedo.

“It's a period in which people devoted a considerable portion of their savings to funerals, and the development of a funeral industry around that,” Sappol says. “For many working people, if you saved any money at all, it might be for funeral expenses for you and your family. People felt that it was desperately important to have a ‘decent burial.’”

Lore of coffin torpedoes and graves loaded with them spread in patent catalogs and newsprint.

A particularly gossipy 1899 issue of the Topeka State Journal claimed the late Mrs. W.C. Whitney’s grave was “sown with powerful torpedoes” and fiercely guarded by watchmen at all hours. The report referenced the case of A.T. Stewart, a gilded-age tycoon whose body was taken from its grave in 1878 and held for ransom. “There is no secret about the torpedoes,” the Journal claimed. “All the village talks of them.”

Despite all the yellow rag chatter about graveyard artillery, there is little to suggest coffin torpedoes were widely manufactured or commercially successful.

“For the most part, these devices seem to have been used very little,” says anthropologist Dr. Kate Meyers Emery. “They were definitely oddities designed to make money off of the widespread fear about body snatching. The truth is, most of the time you really just needed someone to watch over your grave for a few days or weeks to make sure that the body had time to decay and wouldn't be of use.”

Doctoral candidate Megan Springate, who authored the book Coffin Hardware in Nineteenth-century America is similarly unconvinced that coffin torpedoes made it out of patent catalogs. According to Springate, these news clippings probably reference “general explosives” placed around graves rather than inventions specific to the funeral industry.  

“Other aspects of the mortuary industry in the U.S. would have also deterred body snatching, including burial in sealed shipping crates as makeshift vaults, the use of hidden locking mechanisms on casket lids, and the use of cast iron coffins,” she says. “All of these have been recovered archaeologically.”

By the early 20th century, the controversy around resurrection men and the body trade had died down considerably—though not due to “grave ghouls” going out with a bang. Anatomy laws gave medical schools access to bodies of the poor in most states by 1913, curbing the black market for cadavers. Improved refrigeration technology also allowed corpses to be stored and preserved in medical institutions, so there was less of a premium on the newly deceased. Microbiology, advances in the surgical field, and early X-Rays relegated anatomical dissection to the sidelines of medical innovation. Anatomy continued to be taught in medical schools, but it primarily served as an introductory course, rather than the central focus of the medical curriculum.

Though there is little archaeological evidence of grave torpedo use, these inventions provide a peculiar window into the curiosity, horror, and unease anatomical practice inspired among 19th-century society.

"It's a lost world, and part of it is the politics of death, the importance people attached to having a decent burial and the strong meanings they attached to narratives of death,” says Sappol. The industry that arose in service of that incorporated “casket and mausoleum manufacture, but also funerary clothes and trinkets, hearses, gravestones, post-mortem photography, and embalming post-Civil War.”

“Then there's the tinkerers culture, people making goofy devices for perceived need or non-need," Sappol says.  

Addressing a coffin torpedo patent, Scientific American boasted: “In consequence of the increasing number of graveyard desecrations, the genius of the inventor has been incited to devise means of their defeat.” This clipping was reprinted in various local publications during the late 1870s and early 1880s.

Some accounts of coffin torpedoes and the tinkerers who thought them up take note of their impracticality. The Pittsburg Dispatchdedicated part of an 1890 round-up of “Rattle Brain Ideas” to cemetery explosives, locating them within the larger culture of invention and its esoteric, ill-conceived byproducts.

“There's a premium on novelty and ingenuity,” Sappol says. “People in their barns have their tools, and they're making stuff. Sometimes they make brilliant inventions and make fortunes, and sometimes they just make stupid things.” 

Occasionally, they also made good punchlines.

The joke column of an 1882 Montana paper described the detonation of “one of the patent Ohio grave torpedoes.”. The device was being tested on a mule. At the point of explosion, the animal picked up a single hoof and continued grazing.

If you, like many people, have a fear of the open ocean and the many, many alien creatures it contains, prepare to be validated in the video above, which shows one squid's attempt to feed before another, angrier squid attacks. 

The video, which was recorded by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), shows a long pole or line that can be seen dangling food in front of the camera. Then from from one side a small white squid speeds into view to eat it, but no sooner does the first squid wrap its tentacles around the bait, than a bigger squid envelopes the smaller squid out of nowhere, dragging it into the depths to be devoured.

The video, which was posted to CSIRO's Facebook page Monday, was captured by CSIRO’s deep sea research vessel, Investigator. Various types of squid are known cannibals, but it’s still shocking to see their aggressiveness and speed in the open water.

CSIRO did not immediately identify the variety of squid on display in the video, but it can be assumed that it's the bloodthirsty kind.