Parisians have long been famous for their gastronomy. They invented the concept of the restaurant as we know it, and many of the dishes invented in the city’s temples of fine dining are emulated worldwide.

But for four-and-a-half months from September 1870, Parisians engaged in a kind of gastronomy few would want to copy. In the middle of the Franco-Prussian War, the allied German forces surrounded France’s capital and proceeded to lay siege, cutting off a majority of food shipments to Paris. The result was the consumption of nearly every animal in Paris—horse to rat, dog to zoo elephant.

An American doctor sojourning in Europe had the bad luck of being trapped in Paris during the whole siege. Robert Lowry Sibbet hailed from Pennsylvania, and collected his recollections of the siege in a 580-page volume, The Siege of Paris by an American Eye-Witness, published in 1892.

Sibbet’s first weeks in Paris were absorbed in describing the beauty of the museums and public buildings of Paris and the orderliness of the Parisians. But even before the German army finally cut Paris off from its supply lines, Paris was seething.

Emperor Napoleon III had gone to the front lines, and was captured in Sedan, France on September 2. By September 4, under pressure from the populace, France was declared a republic. Meanwhile, Paris prepared for siege.

Sibbet noted how the Ministry of Agriculture, in anticipation of siege, was “very active in gathering in from the adjoining departments all the produce and fuel that can be found, as well as fat cattle, cows, calves, sheep and hogs,” with livestock blanketing the Bois de Boulogne park on the edge of Paris.

The siege descended completely on September 18—"the last railroad was taken, the last telegraph line was cut, and now the postroads all around the cities are occupied by the Germans,” Sibbet recorded, leaving himself as “a prisoner in a great city.”

The first sign that all was not well with supplies was on October 10, when, in order to stem the number of sheep and cattle killed each day, the city opened its markets to horse meat.

Nothing was wasted. The horse in the abattoir was “blindfolded, struck with a sledgehammer on the forehead and bled with a large knife. The blood is caught in basins and used for the purposes of making puddings.”

While French consumption of horse meat has seesawed in the last few centuries, Parisians were skeptical enough at the time to require encouragement.

Sibbet described how the Central Sanitary Commission of the city hosted a dinner themed around horse:  horse-broth soup with toast, boiled horse with cabbage, horse haunch à la mode, braised horse flank, roast fillet of horse, finished off with beef and horse cold cuts. But horse would be a high gastronomic point of the siege.

By mid-November, rationing was in full effect. Parisians were allowed 100 grams of fresh meat per day. By meat, the authorities meant beef, horse and salt fish. But already Parisians were turning to alternative sources for calories.

On November 12, 1870, a stall was erected on the Rue Rochechouart. “On the right side of the stall was several large dogs, neatly dressed ... next to these are several large cats, also very neatly dressed ... On the left of the stall there is a dozen or more of rats stretched upon a tray, and a young woman, half veiled, is timidly approaching them with a little girl at her side. She wishes to inquire the price of the rats, and, if she has money enough, to purchase one,” Sibbet recounted.

Henry Markheim, another chronicler of the siege, summed up these new flavors as: “dog is not a bad substitute for mutton,” while  and that “cat, as all the world knows, is often eaten for rabbit.” The rich, on the other hand, “made merry over their pâtés de rat.” Rat turned out to be pricy. Sibbet recorded that cat and dog meat was anywhere between 20 to 40 cents per pound, but that a “plump rat” cost 50.

November heralded the closing of most of Paris’ famous cafes and restaurants, many being replaced with government canteens where poorer Parisians could get something to eat. The siege, however, was only half over.

Sibbet’s habit was eating rolls and hot chocolate for breakfast, but as December came he began to suspect that the milk was being adulterated. For Christmas dinner, he had “roasted horse meat, a small dish of potatoes, excellent wheat-bread and plenty of wine,” while spending a guilty thought for the working-class Parisians standing in line for thin horse-bone soup.

But on the same night in one of the still-open restaurants, a very different kind of feast was happening.

The Christmas Day 1870 menu at Paris’s long-gone Voisin restaurant is famous. Emblazoned with the words “99TH DAY OF THE SIEGE,” it is quintessentially French—many-coursed and accompanied with some of the finest wines available. But a second look reveals some discrepancies.

The starter was stuffed donkey’s head, probably served cold, with radishes, butter, and sardines. Intriguing, but not totally exotic. The soup course, however, is startling—a choice between red bean soup with croutons, and broth of elephant.

The zoos and garden parks of Paris had despaired of feeding their charges, and no one could think of a reason not to eat the animals destined for slaughter anyway. The unlucky elephant served at Voisin was likely not one of the famous siblings Castor and Pollux, displayed at Ménagerie du Jardin des Plantes, but a lesser-known zoo elephant exhibited at the Zoological Garden (Castor and Pollux were said to be killed post-Christmas). In any case, elephant meat was on stock at a city market on the 18th of December.

There were still rodents on the menu at Voisin, in the form of roasted cat flanked with rats. Kangaroo stew and terrine of antelope and truffles also feature, as well as a poetic dish of wolf dressed with deer sauce.

The blunt labeling of exotic meats was by government decree, with the government arresting anyone trying to pass their wares of dog off as beef or venison. The result is disconcerting to see—the names of zoo animals, bracketed by the cooking techniques of fine French cuisine.

The siege of Paris ended on January 28, leaving a demoralized city damaged from shelling and a starving populace. In mid-February Sibbet noted solemnly that the domestic animals of the city were gone—even of that symbol of Paris, the poodle, there was no sign.

When summing up the end of the food troubles of Paris, Sibbet quoted a darkly satirical poem he had read, detailing the extent to which the Parisians went to survive:

Kind patrons and friends you smile at this food,
But never ‘til hungry can you tell what is good,
Remember, I pray you, of these kinds of meat,
We were eating to live not living to eat.

At least 14,000 years ago, humans were trying to fix each other’s cavities. Back in 2015, a team of researchers announced they had discovered the earliest evidence of dentistry—tiny scratches on a molar tooth that were made by a flint tool.

Now, in a new report published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology, these researchers write that about a thousand years later, dentistry had advanced. People weren’t just physically manipulating teeth to treat cavities but filling them, too.

The new paper, according to New Scientist, describes small holes made in two front teeth (both from the same mouth) that contained traces of bitumen—a black and viscous material made of hydrocarbons. Basically, it looks like an Ice Age dentist filled a cavity with the same sort of material we use today to pave roads. Hopefully it helped with the cavity pain, because it must have tasted really, really bad.

7,000 Underground Methane Bubbles in Siberia Could Burst Anytime https://t.co/8Q6f5VEiuTpic.twitter.com/cyLRsnm61P

— EngLancer (@Eng_Lancer) March 27, 2017

Don't be fooled by its cute name—pingos can do some serious damage. Common in Arctic permafrost, a pingo looks, from the outside, like a small hill. Underneath, though, it's full of ice, water, and, increasingly, methane gas, which bubbles up from underground vents. As the Arctic warms, more and more of this gas is released. Under specific conditions, it can even explode, forming a massive crater.

Earlier this spring, researchers in Siberia found themselves faced with a delicate situation: a whole peninsula full of pingos. As the Siberian Times reported, the scientists used satellite imagery and field expeditions to pinpoint around 7,000 of them, some near populated areas. "We need to know which bumps are dangerous and which are not," head researcher Alexey Titovsky said at the time.

In order to begin keeping an eye on them, the scientists have just installed the first in a series of pingo sensors. This one is located near Sabetta in Yamalo-Nenets, which is home to a large port.

The sensor was installed deep in the permafrost and will keep track of oscillations, a local spokesman told the Siberian Times. If the land starts moving, that information will be transmitted to a national geology lab, and they'll decide on next steps—which hopefully will involve not being swallowed up by the earth. 

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

For a drug addict, prison can be a place to clean up and reconsider the direction of one's life—even, in Australia, at least, a snake. 

That's thanks to an animal rehab facility at the John Morony Correctional Complex in Berkshire Park, a suburb of Sydney, where prisoners care for injured animals, such as a meth-addicted python that recently came through. The snake and hundreds of other creatures arrive there as the result of court proceedings or police seizures, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

The python, which handlers said was acting "confused, erratic, and aggressive," needed more than a month of detox, according to the ABC. It acquired its addiction from its former home, a meth lab, where it absorbed the drug through its skin.  

#Ice-addicted #python just one of hundreds of #animals in #prison rehabilitation https://t.co/3WezKSeP58 (Pics: @NSWJustice) pic.twitter.com/qebJik9h0C

— ABC News (@abcnews) April 11, 2017

The rehab facility is for more than just legless reptiles, though. "Turtles, wallabies, possums, kookaburras, emus, cockatoos and wombats are also among the about 250 animals housed in the prison at any one time," ABC reports. The minimum-security prisoners who care for the animals also get some benefit—a certificate, for one thing, in addition to some lessons about "group interaction and self-motivation," a prison official told ABC. 

The snake, meanwhile, gets sobriety and, maybe, some calmer nerves.

Orchids are among the most delicate and fickle of all flowers, but they produce some of the most mind-bendingly beautiful blooms in the natural world. So it’s little surprise that some people will go to extraordinary lengths to get them to grow just right.

For David Bird of Bird’s Botanicals, those lengths involve growing his flowers in a cave located some 150 feet beneath a remote patch of Missouri woods.

Growing and tending orchids takes a remarkable amount of time and patience. Depending on the genus of the orchid (there are over 750 varieties, though the exact number is always in flux as more are created, or lost), a single flower can take anywhere from five to more than 15 years to bloom. Despite the complete lack of natural sunlight and soil, Bird says his cave offers the perfect environment to cultivate such delicate flowers.

“The cave is great because I get to control everything," says Bird. "I get to control that every day is a sunny day. I don’t have to deal with two months of cloudy weather. The humidity is always good because [the garden is] underground, and it’s pulling that cool cave air in to cool it, and it’s already humidified.” The set up is also a terrific energy saver, Bird says, since many of his components pull double duty. He uses grow lights that he says produce a good deal of heat, and he can either let that build up or lower the temperature simply by allowing some cave air in.

Of course this closed, efficient system can also pose unique challenges. A number of different businesses operate in the same underground complex, and when their needs collide with Bird’s operation, it can be disastrous. “There was one time when a guy was running a forklift, a propane-powered forklift. He was right outside my space, and I told the manager of the cave this wasn’t going to work for me because the fumes from that forklift could cause damage,” he says. “In about a week I noticed all the flowers were dying. All the buds were drying up and the flowers were falling off.” Bird lost six months of his hard-earned flowers before he and the cave manager agreed on a solution.  

Bird first fell in love with orchids when he was in his teens. “My family took me on a vacation to Hawaii, and I bought five orchids and I never got over it,” he says. Shortly after he finished college in 1981, he purchased 700 orchids from a grower, and from then on, he was in the orchid business. Throughout Bird's career he's worked with institutions ranging from the Denver Botanic Gardens to the International Peace Garden to the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden. Eventually he started his own commercial orchid farm, Bird’s Botanicals.

In the beginning, while he was only operating his business as a side project, he ran it out of a traditional greenhouse, but eventually decided he wanted to move. When he saw a sign for underground storage at the Interstate Underground Warehouse, he was immediately intrigued, thinking back to something a fellow grower had once told him. “I had a buddy a long time ago in Nebraska, and he always said, ‘Greenhouses are overrated,’” says Bird. “He said, ‘They’re too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter. You don’t have any control.’ He said you’d be better off digging a hole, putting a roof over it, and growing plants in the ground.” Bird didn’t set out to find a cave to grow orchids in, but once he saw one was available, it just made sense.

He went to the manager, bringing one of his orchids along with him, and explained that he’d like to grow the flowers in a subterranean space. The manager asked what he would need, and Bird said all he’d need was power and water. The facility is largely devoted to the storage and distribution of items that need to be protected from climate shifts or moisture. Bird’s plan to grow underground orchids was a first, but he got the space, and ever since, his underground operation has blossomed.

Today, the cave holds around 10,000 orchids at any given time. Bird also carries orchids that were grown somewhere else and brought in just to bloom, mainly the popular variety phalaenopsis, like you might see in any flower shop. But for the most part he prefers to sell his orchids in smaller settings such as farmer’s markets, orchid shows, and his own open houses. “I like to take plants to the customer,” he says. 

He also dabbles in co-growing with fellow orchid producers, and even breeding his own crossbreeds, although a purely cave-grown variety has yet to bloom. “We’re in the process. Nothing’s bloomed yet,” Bird says.

Bird’s colorful flower bunker isn’t likely to become the industry standard any time soon, but it seems to be an effective solution to dealing with a temperamental plant. It also brings Bird himself a great deal of joy. “The first thing you do when you go to work is you look through the benches, and you look through your plants to see who’s new today. What’s blooming for the first time, that you’ve never seen. And you go, ‘Look at that. That’s cool.'"

Take a tour of David Bird's orchid cave on Obscura Day—May 6, 2017—as part of our exploration of Kansas City's Sante Fe Trail.

It’s no mean feat to gather an ostrich egg in the wild. Ostriches can stand up to 9 feet tall and weigh more than 300 pounds, and a single kick from one of their clawed feet can kill a human—or a lion, for that matter. Oh, and they can run faster than you.

But ostrich eggs have long been desirable to people. In addition to their nutritional value—2,000 calories, nearly half protein and half fat—the thick, strong shells have both practical and artistic value. They’ve been used to carry and store water, shaped into arrow heads and tools, and ground into medicine. At a rock shelter in South Africa, researchers found 60,000-year-old fragments of ostrich shell etched with intricate patterns, thought to be early evidence for symbolic thought. Decorated shells—engraved, painted, gilded—have been given as tribute to pharaohs, offered in ancient Greek temples, and placed in graves around the Mediterranean for thousands of years. Even today they adorn homes in North Africa and souvenir shops in South Africa.

Now researchers from the University of Bristol and the British Museum want to know how and where ancient Mediterraneans got their ostrich eggs. "Apart from noting their presence as unusual vessels in funerary and celebratory settings,” said Tamar Hodos, an archaeologist at the University of Bristol, in a statement, “surprisingly little is known about where they actually come from or who decorated them, much less how they circulated."

Among other tests, the new study is subjecting a variety of eggshells in the museum’s collection to isotope analyses. The tests can tell where the eggs were laid, and what the mother was eating or drinking during gestation, which can, in turn, indicate whether they were collected in the wild or whether the massive birds were raised in captivity to supply the luxury trade in shells.

So next time you spot an ostrich egg—they sometimes show up in farmer’s markets and specialty stores—consider the many ways they’ve been put to use beyond making an omelet that can feed a dozen people.

E.M. Viquesney’s the Spirit of the American Doughboy memorial features a single man, dressed in a World War I army uniform, complete with a hat. He raises his right fist, which holds a grenade, toward the sky triumphantly, proclaiming victory. His other arm holds a rifle, complete with a bayonet. And he is everywhere, from Alabama to Wyoming.

These doughboy memorials, all featuring the statue and a stone or brick base, can be found in 39 U.S. states. They sit in town squares, in cemeteries, in front of federal buildings, and in parks. There are around 145 of them, and they all look very familiar—for a good reason. These statues are among the first known mass-produced memorials in existence.

Prior to World War I, if someone wanted to erect a memorial, a complicated process had to be followed. That person had to not only get permission from city hall (or the owner of the piece of property where the memorial would be placed), they also had to put together a memorial committee, raise money, hire an artist, and go through all of the steps required to create one from scratch. This was not cheap, especially once you considered the cost of the stone, usually marble, that went into the memorial sculpture. Viquesney changed all of that.

Born Ernest Moore Viquesney, the Indiana native served in the Spanish American War. He also grew up wanting to be an artist, although he was warned by his father that he would die poor, as “art” wasn’t a real career. However, Viquesney proved him wrong. He started working for a memorial company in Americus, Georgia, where he created the marble headstones for the U.S. Civil War soldiers buried in Andersonville National Cemetery. Though the headstones brought him recognition, Viquesney’s real claim to fame occurred years later, after the end of World War I, when he realized that people would want to memorialize the war in some way.   

Viquesney wasted no time in starting his doughboy sculpture, beginning work on it immediately after the war ended in 1918. He had several returning soldiers pose for him while wearing their full combat gear. While he could have had them stand simply, with both arms down, Viquesney wanted a triumphant pose to be the legacy of the war. He chose a position that mimics that of the Statue of Liberty, an important American icon.

By 1920, two years after the war ended, Viquesney applied for a patent for his design, because he planned to mass market it, thus making the memorial statue more affordable and easier to set up all across the nation. His ingenious idea? Instead of carving each doughboy out of marble on demand, he created a mold for them. When one was ordered—at a reasonable rate of $1,500 (around $20,000 today, as opposed to the tens of thousands in 1920s dollars that a personalized memorial cost) Viquesney simply ran one in either pressed copper or cast zinc and then coated it in bronze. They were lighter than marble, thus easier to ship, and the molding process took much less time than sculpting each by hand. He also created smaller versions of the sculpture, as well as one that served as a lamp base, making it possible for veterans or others to place a doughboy in their homes. So much for not making any money as an artist.

Viquesney placed ads in newspapers and magazines around the country for his Spirit of the American Doughboy. In them, he claimed to have sold 300 of the full, 7-foot-tall memorial sculptures, and that there was at least one in every state (48 at the time.) While these claims haven’t been substantiated, the doughboy iconography was so popular that plenty of small towns snapped them up. He produced the statues through a partnership with foundry Friedley-Voshardt Company up through 1934. The popularity of them soared. And then Viquesney’s competitors got involved.

One such competitor, John Paulding, actually patented his Over the Top doughboy sculpture six months before Viquesney. Paulding’s soldier looks a lot like Spirit of the American Doughboy, down to the uniform and triumphant fist. Paulding also came up with different models, each a slight variation on the others. For example, a different knee would be bent, or the gun would be held at another angle. His statues were in cast bronze without the metal underlay of Viquesney’s, making them slightly more expensive. Only 34 of Pauling’s memorials still exist today.

There are other lookalikes, produced in smaller numbers, scattered throughout the country. Some have very similar poses, but are made from different materials, including marble (although Viquesney did make three from marble himself; they are all located in Georgia), and granite. However, none of them had the spread and popularity of Viquesney’s doughboys, which helped people remember the soldiers that fought and died in World War I—the Great War of its time, soon to be overshadowed by its sequel.

One of the primary sources of nourishment for ancient Puebloans, who are indigenous to the southwestern parts of North America, was corn, which they farmed in dry conditions with great skill. Puebloans' farming skills apparently went beyond the fields, though, according to new research: it also extended to the feathers of birds. 

As reported in Nature, archaeologists studied macaw skeletons from a trio of New Mexico pueblos, in addition to other sites, including bones and feathers from macaws dating back to between 300 and 1450.

Among the wing bones, they found bumps that they say indicates feathers having been deliberately plucked by humans. According to Nature, the flight feathers of a macaw are rooted in the bone, and yanking them out could have led to the raised lumps. In addition, the remains showed evidence of malnutrition and broken bones, indicating that the birds would have needed assistance (like maybe from humans) to eat and survive.

All of the findings, in other words, make the case for what researchers suspect happened: a feather farm.

And while that sounds a little bleak, archaeologists said the incentive for handlers was to keep the captive birds happy and healthy, in part because the birds had great spiritual and cultural significance to Puebloans and in part because a happier bird has better plumage. 

“People were doing their utmost to keep them alive,” one archaeologist who studied the bones told Nature. 

Their relationship, in other words, was complicated.

When the core of the Experimental Breeder Reactor No. 1 melted down, there was no explosion. It didn’t make a sound at all. There was no smoke, no fire, no steam. Engineer Ray Haroldsen was working in his office “a short distance from the control room,” as he later wrote, and didn’t know there had been a meltdown until a technician came by to tell him.

The federal government built EBR-I, as the reactor was called, in the desert of Idaho, not far from the city of Arco, as a proof-of-concept for intriguing ideas about nuclear power. Before EBR-I started up, nuclear reactions had been used to produce only tiny amounts of electricity. On December 20, 1951, the experimental plant created enough power to light four bulbs, 200 watts apiece. The next day, the reactor was powering an entire building. It was the first peaceful use of atomic energy—the first example of nuclear power that could be used to light a house or a city. But when the press caught wind of the core's unplanned meltdown, the reactor would become the focus of intense scrutiny and described as an "out of control" experiment, and one of the first accidents associated with nuclear power. 

In addition to demonstrating that nuclear could be a viable energy source, scientists there wanted to show they could create a “breeder reactor,” or a highly efficient reactor that, in theory, creates more fissile material—the nuclear fuel that undergoes fission to create energy—than it consumes. EBR-I, for example, used uranium as a fuel source, which created an isotope of plutonium, another fissile material, as a byproduct. By 1955, the reactor had done everything it had been designed to do, but there was one more mystery the EBR-I team wanted to solve, a quirk of the reactor’s behavior: It didn’t respond to changes in coolant flow in the most stable way.

Since the reactor was nearing the end of its useful life, the scientists decided to conduct an experiment that was riskier than they’d normally have tolerated. They decided to turn the coolant off while slowly turning the power up, in the hopes of determining what made the reactor act the way it did. They knew there was a risk the core could be destroyed, but they planned to proceed slowly and back off at the first sign of danger.  

The experiment ended more quickly than they thought it would. The power produced by the reactor started rising and rapidly went off the scales. Haroldsen’s boss yelled to the technician to shut the reactor down. In this video, Haroldsen, in the EBR-I control room, explains exactly what happened next.

Outside the control room, the only sign that the experiment had gone wrong was the radiation alarm. The reactor building had to be vacated, but even then people in the nearby annex were allowed to continue working. And, after that building was ordered to be vacated, they were given plenty of time to pack up their records and belongings, according to Haroldsen.

Among the evacuated workers, “there was a lot of talk” about what had just occurred, Haroldsen says in the video above. The year before, in 1954, at the same site, researchers had deliberately destroyed another reactor past its prime, BORAX-I, to see what would happen, so they had an idea of how a burst of power could melt down the entire core. “After a few hours, we had one guy who wanted to come in and make a survey and see if he could actually estimate the amount of radioactivity," Haroldsen continues. "That could be backtracked to see tell us how much damage the reactor had.” He suited up and went into the radioactive area. 

But those initial investigations didn’t reveal enough to tell the team what had happened inside the reactor, and they weren’t allowed to look. An order had come from the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) that they were not to open the reactor and release the radioactive gas that had collected inside. The worry wasn’t the danger to EBR-I workers, but to a separate monitoring program meant to keep tabs on the Soviet Union’s progress in developing its own atomic bomb. A gas release could compromise its results.

“Given a free hand, we would have been inclined to look inside,” Haroldsen said in an interview with Atomic Insights. Instead, they had to wait months. In the meantime, they weren’t allowed to say anything publicly about the test, ever after the head of the AEC mentioned the meltdown at a conference. “Our telephones began to ring with news media wanting to know more details,” Haroldsen said. “We were still under orders to remain silent.” The media had to put together stories with little information, and in those narratives, “we were converted from people who were described by the media as 'brilliant scientists' to 'incompetent scientists.'”

Five months after the reactor was shut down, the EBR-I team was finally allowed to have a peek. The football-sized core of uranium had partially melted down and fused together at the center. To eventually solve the mystery of why it melted, they had to rebuild the entire reactor and start it up again.

However, the design was ever-so-slightly different, and they weren’t able to recreate the issue, Haroldsen writes, but that was clue enough to the cause of the incident. In the older design, the fuel rods could bend, just a little bit—enough to make the power in the reactor fluctuate as the rods moved toward or away from the center of the reactor.

For a nuclear meltdown, the EBR-I incident was not dramatic. Officially, it’s not even classified as a nuclear accident. The scientists and engineers knew they were taking a risk. They didn’t make a mistake so much as explore to the edge of knowledge, and just a little beyond.

You can visit Experimental Breeder Reactor No. 1, a National Historic Landmark, on Obscura Day, May 6, 2017, and learn more about how usable energy was first generated from nuclear material.

Yoshihiro Okada saw the design of a prawn in a vision. He saw it clearly: Out of a tangerine peel, the crustacean emerged, unfurling its many thin legs, the articulated length of its body, the fan of its tail. Near the eye—the stubby end of the tangerine stem—the prawn waved long antennae that reached out to sense the world around.

After the vision, Okada picked up a tangerine and tried to execute what he had seen. He can peel freehand, but for a design like this, with such delicate features, it helped to use a knife. It came out the way he'd envisioned it on the first try. He was amazed. “The shrimp design is one of the most sophisticated designs among all of my works,” he says.  

Okada is an unusual artist. His medium is the thin peel of a citrus fruit, which he unwinds into a variety of elegant shapes, most depicting animals from land, sky, and sea. He operates according to a principle of conservation. Each shape must use the entire peel; no part can be removed and nothing can be added. Within this limitation, he has created more than 170 designs. “I am sure that I will be able to make almost any kind of animal or bird if I am asked to,” he says. Now he is working on series of symbols—the Juni-shi zodiac, popular in Japan; the Western zodiac; the symbols of the twelve tribes of Israel.

There are a few others in Japan who have pursued the art of peeling citrus fruit, but Okada’s designs are the most sophisticated and varied among them. It is rare for a person to dedicate themselves with such care to coaxing designs from citrus. Okada may be the first master peeler in a century, since a British magazine found a "champion orange peeler" in 1899, a ship’s cook identified only as Mr. Birch, who had created his own vision of ornamental orange art. 

In 1899, when The Strand Magazine, a British monthly, introduced its readers to Birch, reporter A.B. Henn described his subject as “the one man we would wish to have as a companion on a desert island of the Pacific.” In a photo, Birch’s hair is neatly parted and his mustache carefully trimmed. He’s wearing an apron and holds a partially peeled orange in his hands. According to the article, Birch was a tinkerer and inventor who could make utensils (including an egg separator) from coconuts, and a very good cook besides—“one of those extraordinary all-round men it is one’s luck to meet with but seldom.” 

On his voyages around the world, Birch happened to be holed up with oranges, thousands upon thousands of cases of oranges. By the 1890s, the citrus industry was booming and worldwide trade in oranges was growing. Birch took the opportunity to apply his artistry and industry to his juicy traveling companions.

He developed a technique of quartering the peel and then slicing each quarter into a series of attached, ribbon-like strips. Loosened in this way, the fruit’s outer protection could be crafted into all manner of designs. Birch wove the rind into abstract, flower-like decorations that soared away from the fruit. Some of his designs show a sense of humor: He created a man’s face that looked like it might have come from an Cubist painting and a cute little boar complete with ears, tail, and tusk. He also created an Japanese houseboat and a British crown in delicate detail. His pièce de résistance was a pile of ornately peeled oranges, gathered into a towering centerpiece of tangled, twining fruit peel. (It must have smelled amazing.) 

There’s little evidence of what happened to Birch. Outside of the Strand article, he doesn’t seem to have appeared in any other contemporary media. In 1910, American Homes and Gardens published the same images that had appeared in Strand, along with instructions on ornamental orange peeling. But Birch had disappeared from the story. As ephemeral as his art was, it outlasted him. 

Okada has seen the photos of Birch’s art, and he finds it beautiful, if distinct from his own work. “My art and that art belong to a different kind of art,” he says, and compares Birch's style to that of a different, current peel artist whose work also features curling strips.

To Okada, the key to his own orange-peeling art is the self-imposed stricture that requires the whole peel to be used in every design. “One of the key words which characterizes this art is compromise,” he says. For his rabbit design, for instance, the section of peel that becomes the rabbit’s tail is wedged between the part that becomes its two ears. If the tail is enlarged, the ears shrink. “Once one part is changed, the other part is changed also,” he says. “The designs always come back to one round sphere. So in that sense, they are inevitable designs.” 

Okada discovered the art of orange peeling when he once peeled a tangerine and noticed that it had come out, roughly, in the shape of a scorpion. Earlier in life he had trained as an artist, and the visual problem of the scorpion peel absorbed him. For two weeks he worked to perfect the design—30 minutes each day, peeling fruit after fruit. After hours of trial and error, he accomplished his goal, to the extent that he could. There seemed to be no possibility of more progress. What he had was what could be. “I compromised with that shape,” he explains.

That was in 2006. Today, it often takes him less time to create a new design, as one animal shape evolves into the next. He starts with two tangerines with the same design drawn on their skin. He peels one and uses that shape to guide his revisions on the second. He moves on to the second one. He peels. He compares. He repeats.

“It takes a lot of oranges,” he says. 

A new design can still present challenges. In his series of symbols representing the tribes of Israel, he struggled with the one for Simeon, whose symbol is a sword. The long, thin blade left too much peel unused. He tried to solve the problem by making the blade wide, but that only distorted the sword’s shape.

At the time he was also working on a symbol for the Levites, which he chose to represent in Hebrew letters spelling out the name. That solution inspired him: He could incorporate the Hebrew letters of Simeon’s name into the sword. Finally it came together.

Okada is also a pastor of a Christian church. When asked if there’s any connection between his art and his work with the church, he says that the art of orange peeling can demonstrate how the instructions of the Bible can give life meaning. “If the tangerine is peeled at random, the result is random shape,” he says. “But if it is peeled according to the instruction, an amazingly wonderful art is born.” 

Okada, now 51, has published books of his designs and tried to spread the word about the practice he has developed. He’s taught classes on the art of orange peeling and would like to publish a book in the United States if he can. But ornamental orange peeling never really caught on in England or America, and in Japan it is more popular but still rather obscure. It may take another century before the next great orange artist comes along.

Ever since the completion of the Great Western Railway, in the 1840s, intrigue has swirled around the Box Tunnel, a long, steep bypass near Bath, England. Unlike many tunnel rumors, these were sweet rather than sordid. The question was this: did the railway’s creator, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, really have the tunnel carved in such a way that when the sun rose on his birthday—April 9th—it would be flooded with light?

This past Sunday, April 9th, the railway’s current engineers decided to test the rumor once and for all. They weren’t disappointed.

“When you look from the east portal, the cutting provides a lovely V-shape,” communications manager Paul Gentleman told the Guardian. “The sun rose from the left and was shining directly down the tunnel. We couldn’t see how far.”

While the west side’s view wasn’t quite so impressive, the engineers generously chalked that up to centuries of dirt and grime.

The tunnel, which stretches nearly two miles between Bath and Chippenham, was completed in 1837. The idea that Brunel had included this Easter egg began circulating soon after, in an article in the Bristol Mirror in 1842. Since then, historians and mathematicians have attempted to determine whether the trick is atmospherically and geometrically possible, and have come to various conclusions.

This year, the line was closed for construction, giving the engineers a good opportunity to see for themselves.

“It was fascinating to watch the sun as it nestled in the centre of that V as it rose,” Gentleman said. “Quite an astounding sight.”

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 Sunday night, in Val-des-Monts, Québec, just outside of Ottawa, a 28-year-old man was found driving a 1999 Toyota Tercel that was in need of some ... attention.

Police recounted its problems in a press release: three bald tires, no windshield wipers, and a rear suspension rigged with wooden logs and chicken wire, among other issues. The 28-year-old driver also had an open beer in the front seat, though he passed sobriety tests. According to the Ottawa Citizen, he was given a $481 ticket and had his car—which, again, in case this fact was not emphasized enough, had a rear suspension rigged with logs and chicken wire—impounded. 

We were initially inclined to think of this man as a jury-rigging hero before we stepped back from our desks and considered the facts: Driving a car with bald tires and a suspension made from a tree and farm surplus is indeed wildly dangerous behavior to oneself and anyone unfortunate enough to be on the road that night.

Then we stepped back up to our desks with a sense of wonder. Someone built this incomparable, incomprehensible suspension, and for some amount of time this (apparently sober) man allowed it to cushion his ride over various Canadian roadways. So we are inclined to declare it a wash. Neither hero nor zero, this young man exists in the complicated gray that is life. And, according to the police, he has "learned that it is important to drive a vehicle in good condition."

This past March, Anna Dhody got a phone call that put her day in ruins.

Dhody is a forensic anthropologist and the curator of the Mütter Museum, Philadelphia's famed collection of anatomical curios. On the line was a contractor who'd spent the day digging the foundation for what will eventually become a 10-story apartment building at 218 Arch Street, a few blocks from the Delaware River. An earlier prediction of Dhody's had come true, the caller told her—as they excavated, they had, indeed, run into more bones. How many? “A lot more,” said the voice on the other end.

Dhody and her friend Kimberlee Moran, the director of forensics at Rutgers-Camden University, had already helped these particular contractors deal with a box of bones they had found a few months earlier. Figuring they could easily reprise this roll, the two headed on over. “It wasn’t until we got there that we realized what ‘a lot more’ meant,” Dhody says. “[We found] coffins four-deep. It was very daunting.”

With the help of volunteer archaeologists from up and down the U.S. East Coast—as well as the contractors and their handy cranes—Dhody and Moran spent the next few days turning the construction site into an archaeological dig. All told, they ended up with 77 colonial-era coffins, each stuffed with bones and dirt.

Cities like Philadelphia have long, layered lives—which means they're full of hidden surprises, including bones. "I sometimes say if you put a shovel in the ground, you should expect to find a human skeleton," Janet Monge of the Penn Museum told Billy Penn last month. Over the past decade, construction projects in Philadelphia have unearthed centuries-old bottles, ceramics, and even an entire 18th-century city block. Experts say they're shocked that more remains haven't turned up.

While some of these finds enjoy automatic legal protections—for example, those found on public lands, or during projects undertaken with public money—others do not. The only relevant piece of Pennsylvania legislation, the Historic Burial Grounds Preservation Act, "is not constructed to address private activities on privately owned burial places," says Howard Pollman, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, the Commonwealth's official history agency. "There is no path for PHMC to intervene even in this extremely negative situation." 

The plot at 218 Arch Street lies within a mile-square area known as Old City, which once housed the state's original settlers. The neighborhood played an outsize role in America's founding: the Declaration of Independence was signed in Old City, as was the U.S. Constitution. The future apartment building at 218 Arch will stand on a piece of land that, for much of the 18th and 19th centuries, was the site of the city's First Baptist Church. The church originally housed a burial ground for parishioners. In 1860, as the city's real estate priorities changed, this graveyard was moved to Mount Moriah Cemetery, farther southwest.

"Removed the remains of the Dead from our Burial Ground 2nd below Arch Street and reinterred them in our new ground at Mount Moriah Cemetery," Assistant Treasurer B.R. Loxley wrote at the time, in the church's register. "Superintended the work myself."

That Loxley missed a spot (or 77) is somewhat unsurprising. In the past, people often moved graves without realizing just how many bodies were beneath them, says Dhody. It's also possible that those buried had died of a disease their still-living brethren balked at exhuming—"this population lived through, or maybe didn't live through, some very significant public health issues," including yellow fever and cholera outbreaks, she says—or that their relatives couldn't afford the posthumous moving costs.

When the remaining remains resurfaced this past fall—250 years later—those called upon to make decisions about the bones once again played hot potato. "Other governing agencies that would normally take over said 'We have no jurisdiction here,'" says Dhody. Investigating the September find, Stephan Salisbury of Philly.com reported that three different city and state departments, as well as the Mayor's office, were unable to take charge. The construction site manager says that the city simply told him to "rebury the bones" at the end of the excavation.

In other historically minded places, critics say, this doesn't happen. If you find bones in many states—and a coroner or a medical examiner confirms that they're old—a State Archaeologist will come by, investigate the site, and tell you what to do next. Some cities, including Boston, employ archaeologists of their own. (Philadelphia used to, but hasn't since the 1980s. In the U.K., each county has its own archaeologist.) 

Others have go-to companies that private contractors can hire to handle old remains. In Cincinnati, a firm called Gray & Pape successfully studied and re-interred several skeletons found during 2016 renovations of the city's Music Hall. In New York, the firm Chrysalis handles a lot of such finds, including crypts unearthed under Washington Square Park in 2015.

Philadelphia archaeologists fear that their city's bones and artifacts are suffering more inglorious fates. In a recent Philly.com article, some remembered amateur collectors pillaging a construction site for old bottles. When important historical discoveries are handled properly—as with that buried 18th-century block—it's because the federal government steps in, they say. “In the past, entire graveyards have been bulldozed into the foundations of buildings,” says Dhody. 

What Philadelphia does have is citizens who care, like Dhody and Moran, who did the best they could with a tough situation. After the surprise spring finding, “We had to really mobilize an emergency excavation project,” says Dhody. Because PMC Construction Group was waiting to get on with their project, the timeline was tight, making for a bare-bones dig—which, in archaeology terms, actually means that the bones stay covered. “Each coffin was excavated out in total, as a complete coffin, filled with dirt and remains,” says Dhody. The careful, step-by-step documentation that normally accompanies a job like this was impossible.

This means there's a lot of work ahead—work that Dhody and Moran hope to repurpose as a learning opportunity, both for archaeology students and the local and national community. Right now, the bones are spread out over three different storage spaces. Money is needed to move them to a better facility, and bring in experts to study everything from the structure of the coffins to the stresses on the bones.

If all goes well, “each of [the coffins will be] excavated out, as a mini-excavation,” and results will be shared with the public on an ongoing basis, says Dhody. The Mütter Institute, the museum's research arm, is currently crowdfunding to support these efforts. After they've learned everything they can, they plan to re-inter the bones at Mount Moriah, with financial help from PMC Construction Group. 

Dhody hopes that this will serve as a learning opportunity for the city, too. “If we hadn’t stepped in, the best case scenario [is] the remains would have been bulldozed into bags, and put in storage somewhere until someone figured out what to do with them,” says Dhody. Archaeologists fear that Philadelphia's current public park revitalization initiative will result in a whole lot more skeletons coming up. “I’m hoping this will also spur legislators to put something on the books,” Dhody says.

In the meantime, she's focused on doing what she can with what she has—namely, 77 coffins chock full of history. "Something like this only comes across an anthropologist's trowel once in a lifetime," she says. "We're lucky."

In August 1923, Marguerite Harrison sailed from New York bound for Constantinople. The 44-year-old had returned just five months earlier from Russia where she had been imprisoned, for a second time, on suspicions of espionage. A widowed mother of a teenage boy, Harrison had thought she would settle, finally, in New York, but she had a curiosity about the world that could not be satisfied by the domestic life her well-to-do family envisioned. The former war correspondent and American spy quickly joined a small expedition that planned to film the long migration of the nomadic Bakhtiari people through the politically unstable former Ottoman Empire. Over the course of the next year, Harrison trekked, mostly by horse, through modern-day Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Iran, observing a culture few Westerners had ever seen. When she returned to New York in 1924, however,  the newspapers did not want to hear ethnographic insights from the “lady explorer.”

“The reporters wanted to know if I had become enamored of a sheik!” Harrison said.

Each of the four women who gathered for tea in an apartment on New York’s Upper West Side on a blustery winter day in early 1925 shared Harrison’s complaints: They were all explorers in an age of homemakers.

Over the previous decades, the women—Harrison, Blair Niles, Gertrude Shelby and Gertrude Emerson—had collectively covered hundreds of thousands of miles across five continents. Between them they spoke nearly a dozen languages. Niles was a travel writer and novelist who traveled by ox cart through Colombia; Shelby, an economic geographer, who had lived by herself in a small village on South America’s “wild coast”—a region that includes modern-day Suriname—studying the folklore of the indigenous inhabitants; and Emerson, the youngest of the group at 34, an editor and budding activist who had traveled with and interviewed Mahatma Gandhi in 1921. Each, like Harrison, had written extensively about the cultures, geographies and economies they had encountered in their work, but their contributions went under-appreciated by the public, which saw the woman explorer as mere novelty.

Even more galling to the women was the lack of recognition they received from their male counterparts, who hobnobbed at the Explorers Club. Membership in that preeminent organization, founded in 1905, was explicitly reserved for “men who have engaged in exploration or who have added to the geographical knowledge of the world.” Harrison had watched as the men who had been a part of the expedition to film the Bakhtiari were welcomed into the Club.

The four women had met that day in Shelby’s apartment, just a handful of blocks away from the Explorers Club, for the first of what Niles called their “indignation meetings.” But over tea, the women’s indignation turned to resolve and then a decision: They would establish their own organization, the Society of Woman Geographers. Named for the emerging academic discipline, it, too, would be exclusive. It would have as members “only women who have really done things,” Harrison wrote to explorer Harriet Chalmers Adams, who became the Society’s first president.

The Society of Woman Geographers hosted its first dinner in February 1932 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It was an elegant affair, and newspapers reported that the guest list was a who’s who of women explorers, including Mrs. George Palmer Putnam—better known today as Amelia Earhart—and Elizabeth Dickey, who brought with her the mummified head of a South American Indian. (“If the other women explorers were horrified they concealed their shudder,” wrote the New York Times correspondent. “A male reporter swallowed an olive pit.”)  

Explorers Club president Roy Chapman Andrews had also been invited to the celebration, but he did not attend. The invitation had not been a friendly one. The Society wanted the prominent adventurer to answer for a speech he had recently given to the women of Barnard College. “Women are not adapted to exploration,” he told the students. Pleading another appointment, Andrew sent a letter to the Society, which was read aloud at the dinner. He had compliments for the women of the Society—“I have in mind many cases where women have done splendid work in the field and I have great admiration for the accomplishments”—but he made it clear why women explorers needed the support of the Society of Woman Geographers. “I think, however, that you will agree with me that one or two women would not fit to the advantage in a large [expedition] of men.” In fact, it would be nearly 50 years before the Explorers Club abandoned this view; the organization first admitted women in 1981.

The Society continued to grow over the decades, inducting such notable women as environmentalist Rachel Carson, cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead and primatologist Jane Goodall.

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the organization, which is still active today, Gertrude Emerson Sen, the last surviving founder, penned a letter to the membership: “I am deeply impressed by the articles and books and published lectures noted after your names, and feel humbly proud of being associated with you. There is no place in the heavens, on earth, in the oceans or under them, that some one of you had not penetrated,” she wrote from her home in the Himalayas. “I sometimes wonder, however, if your travels today to the Arctic or the Antarctic or any other remote area, when you can fly there in a few hours, can be quite as fascinating as ours were in the olden days, when we travelled by slow freighters or camel, or on horse back or on foot."

The hole in the ceiling you see above is where two industrious prison inmates stashed computers they'd built from old and salvaged parts. That's according to a state report released Tuesday, which details how the cons at central Ohio's Marion Correctional Institution managed to hide the computers— and use the prison's own network—for weeks. 

The scheme was finally uncovered in 2015, after IT employees at the prison noticed some strange network activity, in addition to a mysterious cable leading into the ceiling in a room at the prison. There, they found the two machines attached to some plywood. 

What information were the inmates trying to access? Pretty much what you'd expect. They accessed an article on how to commit tax refund fraud, applied for some credit cards in another prisoner's name, and downloaded some TV shows, music, movies, and porn, according to the report. Or, as the The Columbus Dispatch put it, an "illegal surfing spree," which must have been good while it lasted.

The world can be a dark and mysterious place, with secrets and wonders both glorious and terrible. It’s also a place where a squirrel can be given a little mini ice cream cone every day.

Fantasy Isle Ice Cream & Mini Golf in Harbor in Holden Beach, North Carolina has attracted a loyal squirrel, that they named Putter, who seems to have a taste for ice cream. Each day, according to The News & Observer, the hungry little squirrel comes down out the tree it lives in above the shop, and is presented with a tiny scoop of ice cream on a tiny cone.

Putter seems to prefer vanilla or no-sugar varieties, and has been coming by every day for almost a year, since it first showed up last summer.

And while local wildlife experts are critical of feeding the wild squirrel since it can lead to an inability to fend for itself and an unhealthy comfort around humans, the owner of Fantasy Isle, Scott Martin, told The News & Observer that it’s too late to stop now.

“She’s already got the habit," Martin said. "We are trying to control it, instead of her getting way too much food."

Tourists flock to Mosquito Bay off the island of Vieques in Puerto Rico for its light show—bioluminescence given off by single-celled creatures called dinoflagellates that swirls in bright plumes as waves lap the shore and kayaks cut through the water. And while the intensity of the luminescence at Mosquito Bay is rare (due to its unusually high concentration of glowing protists), bioluminescence in the ocean is the opposite of rare. According to a new paper in Scientific Reports, it’s everywhere.

Bioluminescence is produced by a chemical reaction involving the incredibly named molecule luciferin. Ocean dwellers use it for a variety of purposes, from camouflage and defense to communication and hunting. The recent study looked at 17 years of video from waters off the California coast, from the surface to 2.5 miles deep, for a total of more than 350,000 individual observations, to quantify just how common the trait is. They found that 76 percent of all the creatures they saw produce some form of light. That includes almost all cnidarians (jellyfish and friends), half the fish, and most polychaetes (bristle worms), cephalopods (primarily squid), and crustaceans such as shrimp.

Though it’s known that most organisms in the deep, dark sea luminesce, the researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute were surprised to find that just as many do it in near-surface waters. This means that lighting up is an “ecological trait,” nearly as natural in the ocean as swimming.

The 40 years between the American Revolution and the defeat of Napoleon gifted the world some wonderful music. From Haydn’s string quartets, through Mozart’s symphonies, to Beethoven’s dazzling works for piano—a music lover could paddle around the period forever. But one great figure of the age is often ignored: Joseph Bologne, also known by his noble title the Chevalier de Saint-Georges. This is a pity. A person of Bologne’s talents—musical and military—is impressive whatever the era. That Bologne was black, and thrived in a racist society, is remarkable.

Bologne was born in Guadalupe, a French colony in the Caribbean, in 1745. His father was a wealthy plantation owner, his mother a black slave. As a mixed-race child, Bologne enjoyed considerable freedom and eventually went to study in France, where he quickly settled into the life of a rich enlightened Parisian. “Bologne had access to everything money could buy as a young man,” explains Chi-chi Nwanoku, founder of the Chineke! Orchestra, for ethnic minority musicians. It helped that his father was from an “aristocratic family,” adds Nwanoku.  

But if Bologne’s youth was spent comfortably, bigotry was never far away. French racial laws meant he couldn’t inherit his father’s titles. Things got worse when he was 12, in 1762. New legislation forced black people living in Paris to register with the state. Still, some black citizens were able to scrabble up France’s social system. One freed slave had entered the Parisian middle classes, and opened a fencing hall. For his part, Bologne was an excellent fencer. “Due to his successes at fencing, he obtained much respect from his peers,” says Nwanoku.

But if Bologne’s talents with a sword impressed contemporaries, it was his skill with a bow that astonished them. Bologne was a superb violinist. He also composed for the instrument. “It is no accident—and tells us a lot—that Mozart copied note-for-note from a Bologne violin concerto into one of his own [pieces],” says Nwanoku. “I believe Bologne’s violin concertos are technically more demanding than Mozart’s,” she continues. After all, some of Bologne’s pieces “extend to an octave higher.” Bologne’s operas and chamber pieces are also first-rate. For William Zick, founder of a website on black classical musicians, Bologne was “a full-fledged member of the world of classical composition in the 18th century.” This opinion was held at the time. One newspaper reported that Bologne’s work “received the greatest applause.”

Given all this, it is unsurprising that Bologne became known as the “Black Mozart.” He didn’t stop there. He led a prestigious Parisian orchestra, and often performed for Queen Marie-Antoinette. On a personal level, then, pre-revolutionary France could be strikingly tolerant towards race. But to quote one biography, society was always “ambivalent” about Bologne’s success. For instance, he was unable to take charge of the Paris Opera because colleagues refused to take orders from a “mulatto.” Elsewhere, Voltaire claimed that “mulattos … have refused this impulse of feeling and genius which alone produces new ideas.” Overall, says Zick, racism limited “the artistic value of [Bologne’s] music.”

These attitudes led Bologne into politics. Visiting London, he met abolitionists like William Wilberforce. He did similar work back in France. The revolutionary chaos that swamped France after 1789 also provided new opportunities. Despite his personal attachment to the queen, Bologne joined the revolutionary National Guard in 1789. The following year, he was made colonel of the “Legion of Saint George,” the first all-black regiment to ever fight in Europe. There was a lot to do: revolutionary France was at war with all its neighbors. Bologne fought well, protecting Lille from an Austrian attack. He also stopped the town from falling to the enemy after another officer defected.

In other words: Bologne not only pioneered black music in Europe, he also pioneered black political life. But as in the cultural sphere, prejudice limited his options. Following pressure from other soldiers, his all-black regiment was disbanded. Wider political changes hardly helped. As the revolution continued, it became more paranoid and authoritarian. By mid-1793, radical Jacobins led by Maximillian Robespierre had taken power in France. The mere suspicion of counter-revolutionary sympathies could mean death. Bologne himself was imprisoned for almost a year. Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, a slave rebellion in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti) had warped into a vicious race war. France abolished slavery in 1794, but the violence in Saint-Domingue made even white liberals nervous. Bologne’s anti-slavery stance was marginalized.

Indeed, when Bologne died in 1799, the newspapers carefully ignored his radical politics. They instead focused on his musical legacy. But even that was forgotten in the 19th century. Romantic composers like Beethoven and Schubert were more popular. Racism undoubtedly played a part too. As Claude Ribbe, a prominent historian of Bologne has written: “history texts have little to say about [Bologne], or of the million slaves deported to the French West Indies,” but “Voltaire is honored as the most brilliant humanist and Napoleon as the most glorious man of state.”

This attitude is changing, though. “In France today there are classical musicians and fans who regard the music of [Bologne] as comparable to that of Mozart,” explains William Zick. Several recordings of his music are now available, and he’s often played in concert. A 1997 documentary on his life has just been re-released for DVD. A street in Paris now even carries Bologne’s name. About time: Joseph Bologne deserves to be remembered, and not just as a “Black Mozart.”

From flaming Viking funeral boats to the efficient infernos of modern crematoriums, humans have a long history of using fire to dispose of our dead. But traditional cremation practices can produce a number of toxic emissions, including high levels of mercury. Today, some funeral homes are embracing an alternative from the exact opposite end of the elemental spectrum, by using water to "cremate" the deceased. Trigger warning: things are about to get clinical.

Technically called “alkaline hydrolysis,” the process of using nothing more than water, heat, and a small amount of chemicals to break down a body is also known as “bio-cremation,” “resomation,” or simply, “flameless cremation.”

“It was our firm that coined the term ‘flameless cremation,’” says John McQueen, president of Anderson/McQueen Funeral Homes in Florida. Anderson/McQueen was one of the first businesses in the world to provide the service commercially, in 2011, and they are still one of only a handful of outfits in the world that offer flameless cremation to the general public.

The process is relatively simple. A body is placed into a machine much the same way it would be placed into a traditional cremation oven. Once the chamber is sealed, it is filled with a mixture of 95 percent water and 5 percent lye (potassium hydroxide) and heated up to over 300 degrees. After a few hours, the chemicals and heat have done their work dissolving the soft tissue, and all that’s left are bones and a brown chemical liquid. “It looks like iced tea basically,” says McQueen. As an odd side effect, the process also preserves and cleans artificial implants such as pacemakers or hip replacements.

The now-brittle bones are then pulverized, just like they would be after a fire cremation, and given to loved ones as ashes. The effluent liquid is then added to the local wastewater supply like any other sewage.

Due to the extreme heat used during the process, the effluent is completely sterilized, and the chemicals break down the soft tissue to well below the level of DNA or RNA. McQueen stresses that there are no identifiably human components left in the effluent. “The city of St. Pete has said it’s probably the cleanest thing to go down our sewer system. Because of the lipids in the body, it acts sort of like a soap,” he says.

Depending on the type of machine being used, the process can take anywhere from three to 12 hours. McQueen’s machine, a high-end computerized model that weighs the body and automatically calculates the necessary fluid levels to use, can dissolve a body in three to four hours.

Flameless cremation produces no fumes or smoke, and requires much less energy, space (“Technically you could put one of these units on the tenth floor of an office building,” says McQueen), and maintenance than traditional flame cremation. So why hasn’t this cleaner, gentler, more efficient method caught on? Well, it’s complicated.

“The funeral industry is a very slow industry to change. It’s based in tradition,” says Ryan Cattoni of the bio-cremation firm AquaGreen Dispositions. Both Cattoni and McQueen say that the funeral industry, which is largely governed by the closely held death customs of the cultures in which they operate, is often resistant to new ways of doing things. It can be hard to convince people to try something else. “In all honesty there are a lot of funeral directors out there that don’t like the idea of the bio-cremation,” says McQueen. “There’s a lot of funeral directors out there that don’t actually think it should be called cremation.”

Another major obstacle facing the adoption of flameless cremation is that it isn’t technically legal in a lot of states. “Every state has cremation and funeral directing rules and regulations that classify methods of disposition,” says Cattoni. “Some states don’t have the wording in their regulations to allow it.” Cattoni himself had to lobby to change the laws in Illinois, where his company is based, just so they could operate. Even in Europe, where the process was originally developed, it is almost universally illegal. McQueen estimates there are about 15 states in the U.S. where flameless cremation is currently legal.

Then there is the cost. McQueen says he spent $450,000 on his flameless cremation system, as opposed to the cost of a traditional flame crematorium, which he says is only around $150,000. Consequently, the flameless cremation option is more expensive than a traditional disposition, but not by much. For instance at the Anderson/McQueen facilities, the difference to the customer, no matter how extensive the overall funeral and cremation package, is just $145. 

Obstacles aside, a growing number of families are opting for the process when it is available. McQueen says that about half of his clients choose flameless cremation for its ecological benefits, while the other half choose it because they just don’t like the idea of a loved one being burned. Cattoni has seen a similar trend. “I’ve found the people who like the process are the people who like the idea of no fire or burning,” he says. “Whether it be for religious reasons, or it’s just in our DNA that when we see fire, we see danger.” McQueen says that one his former clients has been quoted as saying that flame cremation reminded her of the Holocaust.

As environmental regulations make it more and more difficult and expensive to operate flame crematories, flameless cremation may one day become the industry standard. But considering how slow the funeral industry is to evolve, and the difficulty some have in getting over the “yuck factor” of a body dissolving, it'll probably be a while. “It won’t be in my lifetime," says McQueen. "It might be when my son’s sitting in this chair.”

For ants, war is full of tiny dangers. A six-legged soldier might face snapping termite jaws, lost limbs, and lurking spiders. Luckily, they have some help: other ants, who, scientists say, will take time after a battle to carry their injured comrades back to the nest.

A new study in Science Advances details this previously unknown military strategy, which is undertaken by Megaponera analis, an African ant species that eats only termites. Scientists put infrared cameras into ant nests to see how the ants behaved after raiding a termite mound. After most battles, healthy ants carried injured ones back home, often with ferocious termites still attached to them.

As New Scientist explains, there are two types of Megaponera analis soldiers. "Majors," which are larger, break open the termite nest. Smaller "minors" then rush in and pull out the termites. These smaller ants tend to see more action, and the larger ones usually end up doing the carrying.

Many of the ants end up losing a leg, but most adapt quickly to their injuries. “At first, they kept tripping over, because they thought they still had six legs,” the study’s lead author, Erik Frank, told New Scientist. In the nest, they can safely develop new walking patterns. Ninety-five percent are back in action soon after their rescue.

Further lab studies indicated that ants found their wounded comrades thanks to a special pheromone that gets secreted after injury. When the chemical was applied to perfectly healthy ants, their friends carried them home, too. Not bad for a bunch of tough bugs.

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.