A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

The Amtrak system has a problem, a uniquely American problem. And it’s one that was there from the start—the kind of thing that makes folks like one-time passenger rail advocate Anthony Haswell say things along the lines of this 1992 quote: “Twenty-five years after I set out to save the American passenger train, I feel personally embarrassed over what I helped to create.”

What would make someone say something like that about what’s effectively their life’s work?

In short: railroad tracks. More specifically: the rail service doesn't own many of them, a situation arising from the its origins, as a product of the Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970, when it was created largely because railroad companies could not make passenger rail profitable anymore. But while that law put hundreds of passenger lines under Amtrak's control, it did not give them ownership over the vast majority of country's railroad tracks, meaning that unlike nearly every other country in the world, the American government largely doesn’t own its own intercity rail infrastructure.

How much does Amtrak not own? Fully 97 percent of its route miles are run on tracks owned by someone else, a circumstance which, among other consequences, means that there's little incentive for those that do own the tracks to build new ones that might improve passengers' experience.

So why did the government do this again? Simply put, the industry was heading toward a major derailment—specifically in the case of Penn Central. The product of a massive merger between multiple regional railroads, Penn Central filed for bankruptcy slightly more than two years after it first sprung to life—the largest corporate bankruptcy of all time by that point and the very definition of too-big-to-fail. The harsh comedown for Penn Central threatened to hobble rail service, both freight and passenger, on the East Coast, which was then and now the most successful area of the country for when it came to putting people in trains. Penn Central’s failure led to the creation of what became Amtrak, and a few years later, Conrail, a federally run freight train-system that managed the remains of Penn Central and other dormant rail lines until someone picked up the mantle.

In the case of Amtrak, the move was, in the beginning, deeply controversial. During during its earliest days in 1971, it had just 184 trains running—a sharp decrease from the number of lines run by train operators prior to the switch-over, and a point not missed by Congress, where senators complained after entire states were ignored by the revamped model.

Others were uncomfortable with the precedent it set.

“This is quasi nationalization of the nation’s rail system. It will most likely lead to more government participation as time goes on,” Time correspondent Mark Sullivan said of the move just before President Nixon signed it into law. “The U.S. until now has been the only industrialized country in the world with a totally private rail system. The Penn Central debacle, if not turned around quickly, will hasten the day that this private system becomes another arm of the government.“

This scenario was the kind of stuff libertarian thesis papers were designed for. In fact, the reason it got support from Nixon and other conservatives, according to Haswell, the founder of the National Association of Rail Passengers, was because they didn’t think it would survive.

”There was no question that it would probably not pay for itself,” Haswell told the National Journal in 2015. “But the Nixon administration and other conservatives thought that once it was demonstrated that it wouldn’t pay for itself, it would be abolished.”

What ended up happening is a little more nuanced, since while Amtrak is still operating today, you'd be hard-pressed to call it much of a success. That's because while train passengers in other parts of the world whiz from city to city in relatively short periods of time, Amtrak barely scrapes by, unable to handle infrastructure upgrades, and hobbled financially by its need to cover both profitable sectors (read: East Coast and anywhere near a big city) and less-profitable sectors (read: everywhere else, especially if there’s a full-service dining car) with a tiny budget.

After 2015’s deadly Amtrak crash in Philadelphia, former Amtrak CEO David Hughes put the problem in stark terms.

“What Amtrak has is among the poorest I’ve ever seen given the level of use they get,” he told CBS News. “The accumulated deferred maintenance and lack of attention really makes it almost a Third World operation.”

And that’s on its own tracks in the most popular region for the rail service in the country, where, in places like Philly and D.C., upwards of 80 percent of its trains show up on time.

But expand beyond that, and the numbers are often depressing. The Auto Train, a bring-your-vehicle ride between Virginia and Florida, had an on-time performance rate of roughly 35 percent in March. The Empire Builder, which starts in Chicago and makes it way up to the Pacific Northwest, has a rate that’s even worse—it’s on time just 30 percent of the time.

The biggest reason? The railroad tracks, since the private companies that do own them are more likely to maximize their investment by focusing on things that make them more money, like freight, which there is more of, travels more often, and is directly within many of the companies' control.

And the industry isn't particularly shy about this.

Take this passage from a 2008 policy paper published by the Association of American Railroads, which represents freight-line owners:

Freight railroads recognize the significant potential benefits of a strong national passenger rail system and work to accommodate passenger trains when mutually-beneficial arrangements can be negotiated, as the many successful examples of passenger trains operating on freight-owned property make clear.

However, passenger service must not degrade freight railroads’ ability to serve their freight customers. Freight railroads lower shipping costs by billions of dollars each year and produce an immense competitive advantage for our farmers, manufacturers, and miners in the global marketplace. If passenger railroads impair freight railroads and force freight that otherwise would move by rail onto the highways, those advantages would be squandered. Moreover, highway gridlock would worsen; fuel consumption, pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions would rise; and our mobility would deteriorate—outcomes that are completely contrary to the goals of expanding passenger rail in the first place.

This has also proven a surprisingly fraught area in the legal space in recent years. A 2008 law meant to give Amtrak some leverage in improving on-time performance has proven hugely controversial with freight train companies, and AAR and Amtrak have been fighting the issue in court ever since. (Notably, AAR won a recent round on the issue.)

It’s a complex problem that takes a lot of forms, but it comes down to this simple point: Amtrak thinks that passenger trains should get preference over freight trains. (Passengers probably feel the same way.) The companies that manage those freight trains feel differently. And there’s a lot of competition for these limited resources.

And that’s why, if you take an Amtrak train outside of the Boston/New York/DC area, it’s probably gonna be late.

Fun stuff, eh?

A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.

It is just a few seconds, but they're probably seared into the memory of a South African diver—and he caught them on video. In the shot, a great white shark pushes out of the water and lunges toward the camera. The behavior, known as breaching, is pretty rare for great white sharks, but seeing (and recording) it at such a close range is even rarer.

Sharks typically breach when they're trying to catch a seal or other speedy prey. But hauling up to 2,000 pounds of shark body out of the water is energetically expensive, so they tend to breach only when they absolutely need to. Commercial operations that take people cage diving sometimes use fake seals to get sharks to breach, in the hopes of getting a view like this one.

"I was shooting a film for customer's cage diving with great white sharks and had this large great white breach in front of the cage, in front of my lens," the anonymous filmmaker wrote. The area where the video was shot in early April, off the coast of Gansbaai, South Africa, is known for its large great white population. Breaching sharks may be rare, but the filmmaker was in the best place in the world for catching it on camera.

In 2011, photographer Christopher Michel chanced upon an online course about ancient Egypt and signed up. What was intended to be a diversion led, some six years later, to a voyage of 8,509 miles, to the orange deserts of Sudan.

Although it's less famous than the grouping of pyramids at Giza in Egypt, the complex at Meroë in Sudan is remarkable. More than 200 pyramids, primarily dating from 300 B.C. to A.D. 350, mark the tombs of royalty of the Kingdom of Kush, which ruled Nubia for centuries. They are recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, yet they remain relatively unknown. The Nubian pyramids differ from Egyptian ones: They are smaller—20 to 90 feet on a side, compared with the Great Pyramid's 756 feet—with much steeper sides, and most were built two thousand years after those at Giza.

“When I thought of pyramids, I thought about the Great Pyramids of Giza,” says Michel. “I hadn’t known that Egypt had significantly influenced the Kushite Kingdoms of Nubia to the south—and that over 3,000 years, the Nubians would adopt aspects of Egyptian language, religion, and technology. While the ancient Egyptians basically abandoned pyramids for hidden tombs, the Nubians continued to use pyramids.”

For an archaeological site of such significance, Michel found Meroë to be remarkably tourist-free—no doubt due to the warnings about travel in Sudan. As a precaution, he bought a satellite phone and registered with the U.S. State Department. “It turned out to all be completely unnecessary," he says. "The Sudanese people couldn’t have been kinder or more hospitable.”

Most of Michel’s time in Sudan was spent camping and visiting archaeological sites. “It was pretty rough going—blazing desert heat, blowing sand, and millions of very, very annoying gnats. But completely worth it," he says. "Sunrises and sunsets over red, wind-sculpted sand dunes engulfing vast pyramid complexes. And almost no tourists. Just the occasional villagers or desert nomads living very traditional lives amidst ancient, yet advanced, artifacts of another time.”

Michel traveled with renowned Egyptologist Bob Brier, known as "Mr. Mummy," for the experiment in which he mummified a modern human cadaver. Atlas Obscura chatted with Michel about his experience and the particular thrill of retracing the steps of ancient rulers.

What did it feel like to stand in such an ancient setting, surrounded by pyramids?

Honestly, it felt like I had been transported back 2,000 years. These ancient places haven’t been commercialized. It’s just you, desert, and history—and the occasional camel, who wander unbothered through the deserts.

Did Bob Brier tell you any unusual or surprising stories about Meroë?

Archaeologist, explorers, and treasure hunters have been digging around the Meroë complex for over a thousand years. Almost all the Nubian pyramids have been plundered by tomb raiders looking for treasure—sadly causing significant damage to these sites over the years. Bob shared the story of a treasure hunter and doctor, Giuseppe Ferlini, who blew up more than 40 tombs looking for valuables in the 1830s. At the time, no one thought it was a problem. Hard to believe.

You’ve photographed in some interesting and remote locations. What stood out to you about your experience in Sudan?

I have one very specific memory of visiting a deep desert well. Above the well was a wooden frame and rusted pulley—and there was a large nomadic family there collecting water. A young girl was leading two donkeys that pulled the bucket from the well. Twenty or so camels fought to drink the well water that was poured into a wooden trough. Nearby the pulley was a rusted, wrecked electric motor. In remote Sudan, the old ways are the ones that work. I imagine that the lives of these people may not be much different than those of their ancestors who watched those pyramids being built. In Sudan, the past is alive.

What precautions do you have to take with your equipment when you’re photographing in a desert, in the heat and the sand?

I brought two cameras—a Fuji X-Pro2 and a Mamiya 7II medium-format film camera. There was a dust storm almost every day. And that Sudanese sand is some of the finest, most invasive sand in the world. The trusty Mamiya delivered for the whole trip. But, although I kept my Fuji covered most of the time, the sand absolutely destroyed that camera. Badly enough that it just stopped working altogether, and was buried in Sudan. One day, some future archaeologist will find that camera and start looking for the bones of the photographer.

In the United States today, when a doctor installs an intrauterine device, that contraceptive IUD is mostly likely to come in the simple shape of a "T." In the long history of inserting foreign objects into uteruses to prevent pregnancy, though, this is a recent development.

“If you look at any collection of IUDs, you look at these forms and think, 'Oh gosh,'” says Christian Fiala, the founder of Vienna’s Museum for Contraception and Abortion. The IUDs of the past swirled and looped into strange shapes; some were edged with comb-like teeth. “You don’t see any strategy behind the different forms or concepts,” says Fiala. “You really had the idea that it was more trial and error.”

There are reports going back centuries of the introduction of stones and other objects in the uteruses of camels, cows, and women to prevent pregnancy, but the modern history of the IUD begins in the early 20th century. At the time, devices inserted into the vagina to block sperm from reaching the uterus, called pessaries, were one of the more popular methods of birth control. In one of the more aggressive forms, the “stem pessary,” part of the device would be inserted into the cervix.

In the 1920s, though, the gynecologist Ernst Gräfenberg (perhaps best known as the namesake of the "G-spot") developed a device that was placed all the way into the uterus itself. The original “Gräfenberg's ring” was made of silk. He also experimented with silver, and a later version of the ring was made of stainless steel. “He was extremely courageous to do that work,” says Fiala. “There was no ultrasound, and most of his colleagues were very skeptical. Contraception was illegal at the time. And it worked, somehow.”

It wasn’t until the 1960s, though, that experiments in the design of IUDs really began. One of the most widely prescribed IUDs of the time was the Lippes Loop, which curves like a snake into a triangular, double-S shape, and was meant to fill the cavity of a uterus. The Margulies Spiral looked like a fiddlehead fern, with a long plastic stem and curled top. There was also the hourglass-shaped Birnberg Bow, and the ram’s head–like double coil. The infamous Dalkon Shield, which had a design flaw that rendered some of its users sterile, looks like a fringed stingray. “When plastic suddenly became available and moldable, and then you can really see an explosion of ideas of different forms that were tried at that time,” says Fiala.

As far as doctors understood, these plastic objects prevented pregnancy by keeping fertilized eggs from implanting in the uterus. Given that mechanism, they believed that covering more surface of the uterine cavity, or “filling up” the uterus with the device, was an important feature of an IUD. Chikako Takeshita, in The Global Biopolitics of the IUD, explains that many of the plastic models of the 1960s were larger than the size of an average uterus, which prompted doctors to consider, as one put it, “the interesting question of whether there is an optimum ratio between a device’s size and the variable uterine area."

“These IUDs were mainly invented by individual gynecologists and tested in their offices, and sometimes a lot of people used it. Other times, it just disappeared,” says Takeshita. “There was no patient bill of rights or anything like that, and often doctors did whatever they wanted.”

The devices were by no means perfect. Doctors experimented with form in part to decrease the rate at which uteruses expelled the devices. And it was still possible to get pregnant while using an IUD. Ectopic pregnancy, usually in a Fallopian tube, was a serious concern.

Some of the most avid boosters of the device, Takeshita writes, were associated with the Population Council and saw IUDs as a way to defuse the coming “population bomb” by controlling fertility. But for many people the devices simply provided unprecedented control over reproductive life. “This is a striking feature when you look at the history of fertility control—to what extent people were desperate, just plain desperate,” to escape the exhausting cycle of pregnancy and birth, says Fiala.

IUDs became much more reliable when spermicidal copper was added to their design in the 1970s. (Copper-containing IUDs create an inflammatory response that makes the uterus inhospitable to sperm.) They also began to take on the simple T-shape most often used today. Manufacturers later created hormonal IUDs, which eliminate some of the side effects associated with copper-containing IUDs while maintaining their effectiveness. "Hormonal IUDs have the highest satisfaction rates compared to all contraception, and women are really free—for the first time in history, women can focus on what matters most to them,” says Fiala. “To me, IUDs are the most promising approach for contraception.”

Learn more about the history of contraception with a special access tour of the Museum for Contraception and Abortion in Vienna on Obscura Day, May 6, 2017.

In Indianapolis and Muncie, Indiana, a series of golden toilets have begun popping up. There may be as many as 25—one of the original toilet finds was labeled 8/25 and another 15/25.

WRTV reports, “It’s not clear who placed the toilets or why.”

But they do have a political message: each toilet has “Take a Trump!” written on its tank.

The Indy Channel is tracking the toilets as they appear:

This is not the first Trump-related golden toilet project. Back in October, a group based in Chicago, the Birch Reincliff Art Collective, placed 25 golden toilets around Chicago. We’ve contacted the group to ask if this is part of the same project—or an independent effort to create political commentary through golden toilet art.

It's no longer good enough to just be a sewer. As The Oregonian reports, the Portland City Council recently approved a plan that will enable their poop tubes to help power the city—they're going to build a facility that can turn methane from the city's human waste into natural gas.

The city's methane is used to hard work—77 percent of it is already being repurposed at the city's wastewater treatment plants, where it is converted to electricity and heat. The extra 23 percent, though, is generally burned as waste, which is a carbon-heavy process.

This new facility will turn that extra methane into natural gas, which will be sold to outside parties as an alternative to diesel fuel. This will net money and energy credits for the city. Council members hope at least some of this gas will be purchased by other city departments, and used to power vehicles—garbage trucks, for example.

"We're going to be turning poop into power," Commissioner Nick Fish, manager of the Bureau of Environmental Services, told The Oregonian.

A win-win-win, sounds like—not least for those who love goofy government pull quotes.

Billions of years ago, one, relatively small galaxy cluster ran by the Perseus galaxy cluster, one of the largest objects in the known universe, which measures 11 million light years across. When that smaller cluster clipped Perseus, it set of a sequence that created a giant wave of gas, NASA scientists think.

The gravitational bump agitated Perseus’ gas, “like cream stirred into coffee,” as NASA puts it, and started a spiral of gas that after 2.5 billion years, formed waves that rolled out of the Perseus cluster, just like waves on the ocean.

The wave, which is simulated in the video above, is thought to be 200,000 light years across, which is two times the size of our own vast galaxy, the Milky Way. It’s enough to make a person feel small—and a little less guilty about bumping into another human on the street. At least people-to-people collisions don't create effects that last billions of years.

When Dr. John Wilkins looked out into the night sky in 1640, he was sure that in his lifetime humans could find a way to sail among the stars—and he knew how they would get there. Over three centuries before spaceflight became a reality, Wilkins had a plan laid out for space travel: voyagers would lift off of the ground in a winged, open chariot, break free from gravity as if opposing a magnet, and land delicately on the moon to meet the alien beings who lived there.

Wilkins had reason to believe that anything was possible in his time, even something that seems more like an episode of Star Trek than science. The 1600s was a century full of natural and technological discoveries; microscopes were beginning to reveal cells, Galileo studied the stars and planets using the newly improved telescope, and empirical evidence began to replace religious doctrine. Natural philosophers—the 17th-century version of scientists—began to question the world using hard evidence, and as an anatomist, theologian, mathematician, and experimenter, Wilkins was enamored with it all. But outer space, and the possibility that life—including earthlings—could exist there, was his intellectual passion.

Wilkins debuted his theories of how the moon and its possible present and future inhabitants could interact in his 1638 book Discovery of a New World; or, A Discourse tending to Prove that 'tis probable there may be another habitable World in the Moon. Science historian Dr. Allen Chapman wrote that he might have been trying to gain funding to test his ideas from this literature, which reads a little bit like a proposal to investors. In his writings, Wilkins describes an open, wheeled chariot with a vertical rotating sail sprouting from the backrest. If this chariot could lift a few men, they could pop on over to the Moon, where they would glide to a land on the same wheels that gave them their running, earthly start.

Wilkins’ ideas were both optimistic and plausible, given the knowledge of space, gravity and biology that was available to him at the time—though he excitedly embraced various hypotheses with what can look to modern eyes like reckless abandon. When addressing the potential problem of how his space explorers would eat, Wilkins posited that since the travelers would be free from the constraints of gravity “we shall not at all spend ourselves in any labour and consequently not much need the Reparation of Diet: But may perhaps live altogether without it.” He used accounts of a German who accidentally slept through the winter, and ancient Indian and Greek individuals hibernating like bears, to support his argument. “If none of these ideas convince you,” he admitted, “there may haply be some possible Means for the Conveyance of other food.”

Sleep would likewise not be a problem for Wilkins; but contemporary theories about air thinness with greater heights gave him enough pause to suggest that a moist sponge be included on the flying chariot to provide comfort. At the time theories of gravity were in their infancy, and prior to Newton’s discoveries in 1687, some people believed gravity was a uniform pull similar to a magnet rather than an interaction between two objects and some theorists, including Wilkins believed this pull could be resisted if high enough in the air. Wilkins reminded his critics that birds fly, as do angels in pictures—and he referenced the mechanics of bird’s wings and kites, which were actually used to begin air travel research three centuries later. “I do seriously and upon good grounds affirm it possible to make a Flying Chariot; in which a man may sit and give such a Motion unto it as shall convey him through the air,” Wilkins wrote. As a theologian, Wilkins also had an invested interest in other worlds having inhabitants, under the logic that a Creator would never invent a world, even the moon, without someone to live on it.

Wilkins was not alone in mixing empirical evidence with conjecture in the 1680s; maps of the moon referred to craters as oceans, which exist in name as moon features today, and he likely drew from others’ works and theories regarding extraterrestrials, which some of his contemporaries called Selenites. He regularly proposed new possibilities to the science world, including a universal language, and a cypher and signal system allowing anyone to “with privacy and speed communicate his thoughts to a friend at any Distance.” Through his math and science writings and by coining the word “cell” in biology, he gained esteem from other natural philosophers, with whom he founded the Royal Society of science in England. He had the credibility and the time to spend on flying chariots. He just needed to test his hypotheses.

Some of these extraterrestrial endeavors reportedly made their way to the experimentation phase, at his outdoor inventor’s garden of intriguing doo-dads at Wadham College at Oxford, where he was the school’s Warden. According to Chapman, Wadham’s gardens held a “collection of mechanical contrivances, including a talking statue, a rainbow-maker, and glass beehives used to study the bee colony.” Robert Hooke, a fellow natural philosopher, wrote of experimenting with flying machines in the garden with Wilkins. Unfortunately, neither Hooke nor Wilkins recorded details of their efforts, possibly because the experiments were unsuccessful. Soon after the attempt, Hooke began working on improving clocks.

This is probably for the best. Wilkins’ plans hinged on the faulty idea that Earth’s atmosphere is nearly identical to the conditions of space, and the reality would have come as a shock to the 17th-century astronaut. Wilkins didn’t entirely give up on his dream until Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke’s experiments revealed that the space was actually a vacuum, in which no human could survive. Magnetism and gravity were, he also found out, very different. A century later, some of Wilkins’ eclectic passions were the butt of small jokes; in a 1784 letter, historian Horace Walpole wrote: “I discovered an alliance between Bishop Wilkins's art of flying, and his plan of universal language; the latter of which he no doubt calculated to prevent the want of an interpreter when he should arrive at the moon."

For all his errors, Wilkins advanced research in astronomy and science, and some of his extravagant ideas—spaceflight and long distance communication—came to fruition, even if centuries later than he anticipated. In Wilkins’ own words, even the inventions of ships seemed impossible to the people who first conceived them, and “none but the bold, daring men durst venture … We have no just reason to be discouraged in our hopes of the like success.” Wilkins’ grand hypotheses might even be proved in full, if we start using a universal language and meeting aliens. Only time will tell.

The video above was shot on May 3 by a dashboard camera belonging to Guanting Li. That, indeed, is a plane hitting some power lines and then crashing onto the street in Mukilteo, Washington, about 25 miles north of Seattle.

According to the Seattle Times, there were no injuries—despite the fireballs and the aircraft ending up in a crumple that looked like this:

The plane took off from nearby Paine Field at 3:30 p.m. and lost power shortly thereafter, according to Q13. The pilot tried to land on an empty street, but instead clipped some power lines and ruptured a fuel cell. Still, everyone, including the lone passenger, walked away.

"It looks like [the pilot] did an incredible job," one witness told Q13.

In 1915, not long into World War I, the British military noticed something troubling. An unusually large number of newly recruited soldiers were developing anthrax infections on their heads and necks. At first, the outbreak, which affected both British and American soldiers, was attributed to "diabolical tactics of the enemy," according to a recent historical report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But biological warfare wasn't the culprit. Instead, it was the humble shaving brushes the soldiers were given upon enlistment, because a clean-shaven face would make a gas mask more effective.

Before the war, shaving brushes were usually made with badger hair, the preferred bristles for lathering up. When the conflict interrupted the supply of high-quality badger bristles from Russia, suppliers cut a few corners. They switched to horsehair from Russia, China, and Japan—and skimped on a crucial step: disinfection. Instead of sending the hair to France or Germany to be cleaned and sanitized, they sent the tufts directly to brush manufacturers in the United States.

The blisters and blackened ulcers on the soldiers' faces and necks are classic symptoms of anthrax, which is caused by a bacteria found in soil. Livestock and other animals can spread the disease to humans, though it's not otherwise contagious. Inhaling or ingesting anthrax spores can cause a dangerous infection, but anthrax infections on the skin are rarely lethal if properly treated. Between 1915 and 1924, 149 American soldiers, 28 British servicemen, and 67 civilians in both countries contracted the disease. The number likely would have been higher if New York City hadn't forced manufacturers to sterilize their brushes starting in 1920.

Anthrax was not uncommon in the early 20th century, especially among people who worked with livestock and animal products such as wool and leather. Today, the disease is relatively rare in the United States and northern Europe, but occasional cases crop up in cows and bison. Anthrax is much more common in places, such as Asia, Africa, and Australia, where livestock aren't routinely vaccinated against it.

If you choose to lather up today with a nice badger brush, you should be fine. The CDC cautions against disinfecting vintage brushes yourself ("the risks associated with various combinations of steam, pressure, and formaldehyde are likely to outweigh possible benefits"), but ones made after 1930 are usually safe, and all modern brushes are sanitized.

Forget highly paid surgeons, the future of drilling into people’s skulls is going to the robots, and thanks to a new type of drill developed at the University of Utah, they can now do it 50 times faster than a human with a hand drill.

According to CNN Tech, medical researchers looking to improve the process of drilling through a patient’s skull during surgery have created a new automated tool that can complete the process in just two and a half minutes. A human surgeon usually takes around two hours to complete the same process with a hand drill.

Whoa—A robotic drill could perform your next skull surgery in just two-and-a-half minutes: https://t.co/A2W4BUNWf8pic.twitter.com/rxnEj8N08x

— CNNTech (@cnntech) May 2, 2017

This dramatic improvement is not just a timesaver, but it is also safer in some respects, as it limits the amount of time the patient needs to have an open wound.

The drill charts its path through the delicate geography of the skull based on data collected from CT scans, which create a map and allow the $100,000 drill to avoid things like nerves or the sinuses. A doctor is still required to stand by and monitor the drill’s progress.

While it is not available for widespread use, the researchers are hoping it can become commercially available soon. Just one more skilled robot to fear.

Back in 2007, Walt Snyder returned to his home in Maryland and found that someone else had recently tried to get in, too. On the window of his living room, spread out over the glass, was an eerie imprint of a mourning dove in flight—wings outstretched, head down, each individual feather perfectly clear. "I thought it was some kind of message from God," he says. "But my brother told me, 'It's just a damn bird that hit your window.'"

Every day, all over the world, lots of damn birds hit windows. Although some survive these crashes, most do not—a 2014 study calculated that in the United States alone, collisions with man-made structures kill between 365 and 988 million birds per year, which averages to over a million birds per day. (This makes buildings the country's second-most-prolific bird killers, behind cats.) Many of these birds die without anyone noticing—they just tumble down to the nearest curb or group of bushes, and are lost.

As a last act, though, some leave ghostly imprints—and thus, brief reminders of how they departed the earth.

"Birds tend to hit windows for a couple of reasons," says Tania Homayoun, who manages the urban conservation team at the Texas Audobon Society. The first has to do with light—at night, strong beams from searchlights or LED uplighting can dazzle birds into flying into buildings.

The second is glass-related: the more reflective and transparent a window is, Homayoun explains, the more likely a bird is to mistake it for additional habitat. "They think, 'Oh, I can fly right through this!'" she says. "And they just crash right into that window."

This is easy enough to imagine. Looking at an imprint, though, makes the understanding visceral—you can practically hear the beak hitting the glass, and see signs of the bird rearing back as it realizes its mistake. "I was fascinated by the amount of detail I found in the imprints, and the violent nature of the strikes," says Snyder. Despite his interventions, a few more mourning doves were later brought down by his windows, and he began taking photos of the traces they left behind.

Soon after, he started contributing to the Flickr group "Bird Imprints on Glass," which contains hundreds of such photos, submitted by people around the world. Some—like the shot at the top of the article, of a pigeon imprint on a glass walkway in Duluth, Minnesota—reflect the state of our infrastructure, which, Homayoun says, is getting increasingly bird-unfriendly. "This particular bird must have hit the glass at a pretty high rate of speed," says the photographer, Tom Shearer. "If there was such a thing, feather prints could have been taken."

Others tell a story in themselves: One amazing entry foregrounds a window streaked by desperate flapping, while in the background, a crow retreats, abashed.

"Most are factual representations of what occurred—some with more detail than others," says Snyder, who is now the group's administrator. As Homayoun explains, that level of detail generally has to do with the birds' species. Imprints are made of dust from "powder down"—a type of feather that, rather than growing to a certain size and then falling out, disintegrates from the tip downwards.

"They form this oily powder," says Homayoun. Only certain bird families produce powder down, which explains why, despite the diversity of birds who meet their deaths via window, pigeons and doves tend to be the ones that leave a mark.

If you would rather your window not become a bird memoryscape, you have a couple of options. You can put up bug screening or solar screening, which tend to keep birds from getting confused. Or you can use what Homayoun calls the "two by four rule"—put a tight grid of stickers or markings on your windows, making sure each is spaced four inches or less apart horizontally, and two inches or less apart vertically.

This will ensure the birds don't see a sticker, move over a few inches, and still crash: "People will often buy one or two decals on this huge plate glass window and think everything is fine," she says. "That's like putting a potted plant in the middle of a room and expecting it to keep people out."

Or, if you'd rather, Snyder offers another solution: "You can stop washing your windows," he says. "I haven't had [a strike] in at least five years."

Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.

It's a wrap on the COSCO Development transit, the largest vessel, both in dimension and capacity to go through the #ExpandedPanamaCanalpic.twitter.com/gNvxGPIgjl

— Panama Canal (@thepanamacanal) May 2, 2017

On August 15th, 1914, the U.S. Anconbecame the first ship to pass through the Panama Canal, celebrating the completion of what was then one of the largest construction projects of all time.

Last year, after a decade of work, Panama—which gained sovereignty over the canal in 1999—opened a new, expanded version.

And this past week, on May 2nd, the new canal hosted its biggest ship yet: the COSCO Development, a Hong Kong ship that can hold over 13,000 18-foot cargo containers, and is as long as the Eiffel Tower is tall.

Photos show the ship barely slipping through the canal, pulled by a (comparatively) tiny tugboat. Next, she's off to set another record—becoming the largest ship to ever arrive on the East Coast.

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.

Around 1659, the Dutch cartographer Joan Blaeu dug into the latest records of the Dutch East India Company’s explorations of the lands beyond Asia—the coast of Australia, where Europeans first landed in 1606, the island of Tasmania, and New Zealand. Some of these islands were relatively new discoveries for the company, explored by Abel Janszoon Tasman in the 1640s.

Blaeu used these records to make one of the earliest maps of Australia—the first to include Tasmania.

Since the 19th century, the rare wall map that Blaeu created was hidden in a private home in Italy, reports News.com.au. Now, though, it’s been rediscovered and will be on auction at Sotheby’s in London, where it’s expected to fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The map, writes Sotheby’s, is, “possibly the best general map of Dutch sea power executed in the 17th century” and “extremely rare.” A spokesperson told News.com.au that it may be only “one of two known surviving copies."

The domain of Hong Kong Willie covers an odd corner just off of a busy Tampa, Florida, highway. Nestled on a stretch of road largely populated by drab hotels, the clutch of brightly colored shacks that make up Joe Brown’s artistic empire stand out like a neon lighthouse of creativity.

Brown splits his time between his Tampa outpost and the place where his heart truly seems to lie, Key West. In a bright Hawaiian shirt and shorts that show arms and legs regularly baked by the Florida sun, his look might accurately be described as something like a modern island pirate.

Nearly every inch of space on Hong Kong Willie's lot is home to some piece of art, decorated piece of detritus, or other found object. The walls are covered in old buoys, each node painted with a unique design. Under an old chair lies a pile of clip-on pagers. In the corner of the yard is a skeletal helicopter, covered with string lights; next to that towers what looks like a colossal Christmas tree made of those same lobster buoys. Even the asphalt driveway is covered in splatters of bright paint, so that it looks better on Google Earth, according to Brown. “Everything is precious,” he says, summing up the ethos of reuse, reinvention, and imagination his unique roadside attraction embodies.

If Hong Kong Willie, a moniker Brown himself sometimes takes on, sounds like like the lovechild of an art gallery and a seaside trash heap, that’s because it pretty much is. Brown, who says he was “born an artist,” has been shaped by both creativity and junk since an early age. Now in his 60s, Brown says his father once donated a chunk of their family's land to Hillsborough County so that it could be used as a much-needed landfill, but was never compensated or acknowledged for the gift. Still, Brown grew up exploring the landfill, scavenging for treasures. Surrounded by what most people consider junk, he developed a special appreciation for things that get thrown away. “I was meant to paint on boards,” he says.

At the age of eight, Brown took an art class where his teacher shared that she had spent a lot of time volunteering in Hiroshima. Learning that there was a strong local tradition in Hiroshima of turning tossed off items into art, this too had an impact on Brown. This same teacher later told him that she had left Asia out of Hong Kong, and this little factoid apparently led to his adoption of the name Hong Kong Willie. She also passed on a passion for art. Brown would eventually start a career in the technology industry, but since then he's returned to his artistic roots.

Perched on top of one of the small structures on Brown's land are large, reused letters that say “art station,” but this place really couldn’t be mistaken for anything else. When Brown first established the Hong Kong Willie site, he says there was a collective of five artists working on the project, but now the living gallery is run and supplied only by him and his wife, Kim. Inside the art station, the space is bursting. One of Hong Kong Willie's signature items are rugged pieces of locally sourced scrap wood and boards that Kim adorns with colorful painted works. There are birds, beach scenes, abstract shapes, and other designs that look unmistakably Floridian.

In addition to the boards, the space is littered with a variety of creations, including painted burlap sacks, trinkets made of shells, shaped glass bottles, and old shoes tacked to the walls. The concept that every object or piece of media is of value, and can be recycled into art, is the driving force behind Hong Kong Willie.

Nearly everything at Hong Kong Willie’s is also for sale, from random pieces of coral to the lushly decorated boards that cover the walls. Old Coke bottles filled with sand and shells, with “Beach-front Property, Tampa, Florida” written on them, go for $4.95. The lines between kitsch, whimsy, commerce, and environmentalism bleed together here. Brown says that pieces of Hong Kong Willie art have sold for $175,000 or more. One item available in their Etsy shop, painted by Kim, is listed for $98,000.

Brown says they give most of that kind of money to charity, keeping the lights on by selling "Red Wiggler" worms for use in composting or as fishing bait.

One day, Brown says, he’ll close up shop and head to Key West for good. Until then, Hong Kong Willie stands as a beacon of reckless creativity and appreciation for the treasures most people just throw away.

This fungus gnat did not have a good day. First, she was duped into laying her eggs in an orchid instead of a mushroom, then she lost a leg, and finally she died, stuck in some tree sap. But between 45 and 55 million years later, her bad day is telling scientists that they need to reconsider the age of the orchid family. That tree sap preserved for the ages a pollen sac attached to the gnat's leg, and it is the earliest known evidence of the diverse family of flowering plants.

Amber, fossilized tree sap, is really good at preserving things. In it, scientists have found ancient mammal blood inside a tick, a dinosaur feather, and plenty of insects and lizards. Orchid pollen sacs have been found in amber before, also attached to insects. But the previous oldest known specimen was found in Dominican amber that's 20 to 30 million years old. The new specimen, found in Baltic amber, is about twice as old.

"It wasn't until a few years ago that we even had evidence of ancient orchids because there wasn't anything preserved in the fossil record," said George Poinar Jr., an entomologist at Oregon State University who led the study, in a press release. The sticky pollen sac, known as a pollinia, is a common feature of modern orchids, which use a variety of evolutionary tricks to attract pollinators and get their pollen from one flower to another. But finding such an old example of a pollinia shows that the orchid family was pretty well-evolved when the gnat got stuck, back when palm trees grew in Alaska and India was just butting into Asia. That means the first orchids were probably blooming back during the Cretaceous, when dinosaurs were still at the top of the food chain.

Today there are around 28,000 species of orchid, and some of them are still up to their incredibly old ruses, fooling modern fungus gnats into picking up pollinia.

The last big purchase that William "Wild Bill" Ziegler made was a talking tree with one bum eye. He stationed it right inside the doorway of his store, underneath a mural of a clown with a light-up red nose, across from a figurine of Charlie Chaplin, a suit of armor, and a collection of knockoff antique statues and vases. Bill used to sit behind the counter with the tree's microphone and make it talk to customers. If they ignored the tree, he was disappointed. Any person who can pass by a talking tree is going to have a hard time fully appreciating Wild Bill's Nostalgia in Middletown, Connecticut.

By birthright, Wild Bill was a sideshow man, and he loved anything that could make people stop and look and wonder. The store is crowded with vintage posters and bobbleheads, nesting dolls and pennants, buttons and beads. Hidden among these gems are still greater treasures—a mummified cat, Pee-wee Herman’s bike, a giant sock monkey, a whale rib, a portrait of P.T. Barnum priced at $5,000, a mechanized clown named Laughing Louie, and the Trap Man, a sculpture made of old hunting traps. In the back, there is an old Heidelberg press, and rows of shelves stacked with posters that the shop sells wholesale. Across the cracked parking lot is his book and record store, made out of an old carnival "dark ride," in which a car on a track carried riders down a dark, twisting corridor between illuminated scenes, so the experience of browsing is more akin to getting lost in a maze. There is a funhouse, too, still incomplete, and a farm, and fields that serve as a concert venue. There are also giant sculptures and VW vans decorated at painting parties, a giant jack-in-a-box built into a silo. Oh, and there's the sheds and the side projects, too …

“There are a lot of moving parts,” says Heather Page, Bill’s daughter, who has managed the retail store for years. Her title, if she has one, is “owner, now?” In April, at 70, Wild Bill died without warning. Now his family has to figure out how to keep everything about the place going.

Before he was Wild Bill, he was Uncle Bill, of Uncle Bill's Buggy Whips, which manufactured specialized horsewhips as souvenirs for Texas tourists. He worked in intelligence during the Vietnam War, but when he realized that code crackers like him, who were sent out in low-flying reconnaissance planes, had a low survival rate, he decided to become “one of the klutzier black marketeers you could find,” says Cindy Ziegler, his former wife. Sent home from his station in Turkey, he finished his military career and earned a bachelor's degree in Texas. Living off-base, he had military friends, Texas friends, and college friends, and every weekend he had a party. “The flavor would change significantly depending on which groups showed up,” Cindy says. “I would always want to see what the heck was going on.” She and Bill married in 1971, after dating for just two weeks. He had been telling her about the bachelor pad he was going to have in Connecticut, and she told him that the only way she would see that bachelor pad was as his wife.

Ok, he said. She told him he'd have to phone her dad. Ok, he said. They were married the next Saturday, after a six-day engagement, and they stayed married for forty years.

In Connecticut, where Bill grew up, they opened a series of stores (Uncle Bill's Apple Core was once featured in a book of funny signs for its “Apple Core in Rear” placard), where they sold baseball cards, comic books, adult novelties, framed posters, helium balloons, troll dolls, and other bits of kitsch. One shop had a mini-arcade. In 1999, Wild Bill's Nostalgia settled into its permanent home, and began its evolution into an amusement park-ish roadside attraction/oddity shop/sculpture park.

Behind the store, Joe McCarthy's sculpture studio is still full-up from the claustrophobia of winter, when the store was always closed and Bill’s ideas gestated. Giant silk screens used by late artist Ford Beckman are suspended from the ceiling. To the side, a part of a VW Beetle is waiting to be turned into an actual six-legged insect. There are rows of small skulls pressed into strips of concrete, and a buffalo head that Bill wanted shaved because it had started to rot. “We'll call it an albino buffalo,” he had said. A pile of rusted keys are gathered on a work bench because Bill once called Joe up to the store and asked, “Can you make a bird out of these keys?”

Joe first started working at Wild Bills Nostalgia about seven years ago, when he came to document the creation of the funhouse, which a friend of his was working on. Joe and Bill got along, and they came up with a couple of bigger ideas. “Like the Yugos,” Joe says.

The Yugos are a sculpture in which three vintage Yugo cars balance on end on three circus balls, like acrobats. It was originally named I'd Go Where Yugo Stanley Marsh 3 because it has “a Cadillac Ranch thing going on.” (Stanley Marsh 3 and the San Francisco art collective Ant Farm are responsible for the iconic Texas sculpture, which features 10 cars half-buried in the earth.) Joe didn't know exactly where the cars had come from. Bill had one, and the two others showed up because people just bring things here. According to Heather, Wild Bill originally wanted to make a Yugo pyramid. But when Joe floated his vision, Bill immediately approved the idea—and the $10,000 or so it would take to execute. After Joe cautioned that it wouldn't sell, Bill offered to pay him for the time it would take to create it.

It seems strange to use the “patron,” but that's what Bill was to Joe, in addition to "boss/buyer/seller,” who paid him for his sculpture, let him start a silk-screening business on the property, and asked, in return, for T-shirts, creativity, and a willingness to help out with whatever. Joe built a three-story installation, which he showed at the Governors Island Art Fair in 2014, on Wild Bill's property, and together they started work on what Wild Bill came to call BoatHenge, an incomplete installation that shoots up from the field behind the record store. In its fullest execution, the boats will be surrounded by earth sculpted into waves and planted with blue wildflowers.

All of the unique sculptures at Wild Bill’s, and there are a lot of them, come from his relationships with artists such as Joe. The Trap Man and the Bear, a creature of twisted metal and bone, for instance, were created by the artist Chris Hausbeck from traps that once belonged to Bill’s father and grandfather, who taught Bill how to hunt and fish. It’s from this side of his family that Bill inherited his conservatism. He was a committed supporter of Donald Trump, which surprised people, because most men in the Northeast with long beards and hair and tie-dye-colored murals painted on their walls are not fans of the president. It’s also from that side of his family that Bill inherited his circus legacy: His grandfather and namesake, William Ziegler, was a baton twirler and clown in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. “They were die-hard Republicans and clowns,” Heather says.

Once you know to look for it, Bill’s affinity for his family’s circus and sideshow past is all over the property. Just inside the store, to the right, is a painting of Bill’s grandfather, balancing a flaming baton from his mouth while holding one in each hand, and a painted promotional spread featuring a bearded lady, a Fiji mermaid, a monkey boy, a mummy man, and more—characters that are mash-ups of classic sideshow figures and people associated with the store. (T.J. the Monkey Boy, for instance, is based on a friend who cuts down trees.) The disembodied heads on one of Joe’s giant sculptures—a demon-like, skeletal creature that squats over the heads, a VW Beetle, and scattered bricks—are modeled after an old piece of carnival ornamentation that sits in the store. A wooden wheel of chance that hangs nearby is similar to three that Bill’s father made and that are somewhere on the lot. That portrait of P.T. Barnum is priced at $5,000 in part to discourage potential buyers. The art of Ford Beckman, whose silk screens hang in Joe's studio, often featured clowns. In fact, there are clowns everywhere, including a life-size Ronald McDonald. Not all of them look friendly.

Bill’s taste, too, which Joe describes as “wilder, wilder, faster, faster,” has a showman’s gestalt. He was guided by a sense of delight and of mischief. Take the mermaid on a surfboard above the store's counter—he once arranged its shirt so that if kids stood at the right angle, they could see her boobs. He was also willing to run with an idea. “Not necessarily a good idea,” says Heather. “Anything that was an idea. It was: Is this possible? Let’s see. And he went with it.”

In her relationship with her father, Heather was often the voice of reason. When Wild Bill first mentioned the talking tree, he told her, “I had the opportunity to buy a talking tree, and I think it’s really cool.” Her reaction: We’re not doing that. He started to chuckle. He had already bought it! It was coming tomorrow! “He knew I was going to veto some of the stuff that was kookier.”

Heather has been working in her family’s shops since she was two years old, although “work” at that age might have meant putting a handful of objects into a small box to earn the right to a toy. As a preschooler, she helped customers pick out gifts for their children; she had an instinct for what a 15-year-old boy would want. Bill “fired” her two brothers for misbehavior and then ordered them to come back to the store early the next day, but he only "fired" Heather once, when she was 15 or 16. She got a job at Blockbuster. “He was devastated,” she says. "My mom had to explain to him that most people who are fired don’t come back the next day.”

She did come back eventually, and has worked with her dad on and off for her whole life. After he died, Heather’s daughter asked her, “Are you Wild Bill now, Mommy?”

She knows that she’s not, but she shares some of his qualities, including his affinity for people. “I’m hoping for myself that people will still come in, though I’m not Wild Bill, that they’ll be excited about coming and talking to me and keep that side of things going,” she says.

It's only been a few weeks since Wild Bill died, and everyone is still processing the change. A couple of days earlier, on a Sunday, there was a memorial here, and maybe a thousand people showed up to share stories. Bands that Wild Bill loved played out in the fields. However, some of his plans and projects have to be put on hold while legal and logistical questions are answered. “The general sense is ‘Let’s keep this place going,’” says Joe. “But the logistics are, you know ... no one could do it like Bill could.”

An older couple, a man and a woman, come into the store, and the man asks about the record collection. The woman tells Heather that she remembers this place from even before Wild Bill moved in. (It belonged to the Knights of Columbus and, before that, was a night club where Heather's grandfather once played the harmonica.) “I heard that you were planning on closing the store down,” she says.

“No, we’re not closing it down,” Heather tells her. And then, more quietly, “Not yet. Hopefully not at all.”

Join us on Obscura Day, May 6, 2017, for a special tour of Wild Bill's Nostalgia, including a rare stop inside the funhouse, which is not normally open to the public.

For a governmental agency whose primary purpose is to sell liquor, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario has a startlingly attractive and useful website, with recommendations on wine pairings and guides on how to make your beer dinner "fun and fabulous for everyone."

There is also, like most government websites, a section for press releases, the most recent of which contains some alarming or welcome news, depending on your point of view. Some bottles of Bombay Sapphire gin, the LCBO said May 2, had been removed from the agency's stores after the gin was found to be 77 percent alcohol—and not the 40 percent listed on the label.

On Thursday, the National Postshed a little more light on the matter, reporting that a customer in Sault Ste. Marie had alerted the LCBO of the high alcohol content, and that around 6,000 bottles were potentially affected.

They will now be destroyed.

“If it’s going to be drunk in a guzzle, it’s very dangerous,” Larry Grupp, a pharamacology professor, told the Post. This is true, though it is also true for ... well ... all liquor, properly labeled or not.

If you see the code L16304W on your bottle, the LCBO said, you can return it for a refund. Or you can take a glass and some ice and give yourself a pour and take a risk with your eyes open and, just maybe, live a little. Responsibly, that is.

Climbing through the air ducts is one of the most iconic moves in the history of heists, though it probably doesn't happen as often as it's portrayed.

Still, some try anyway, like a pair of college students who, on Tuesday, were caught trying to steal an upcoming exam after infiltrating their professor’s office through the ducts, according to the Associated Press. The two are students at the University of Kentucky, where, police say, their plan was initially successful before their professor returned and apparently caught them in the middle of the act.

Both ran, but one later returned and confessed to the attempted theft, police say. (It's unclear if the two actually got their hands on the exam.) Each now faces burglary charges, though they can at least take pride in the fact that they almost pulled off a move usually reserved for the big screen.

The Internet Archive's name can be a little misleading. Sure, it's preserving large swaths of the internet with its Wayback Machine and you can still play Oregon Trail online with its MS-DOS emulator, but it's also archiving physical media that never lived on any server, even as it transfers the contents into its massive digital bank. The nonprofit digital library has an impressive collection millions of books and about 200,000 shellac discs engraved with rare music from the early 20th century.

"We're trying to make sure the physical object is saved, as well as the digital, because we don't know which will last longer," says B. George, the sound collections curator at the Internet Archive. "When information disappears digitally, it's gone forever." If you've ever had a hard drive crash, you know this all too well. Storing and preserving the physical media behind all of that information—if it exists—is one way to future-proof the archive. We may someday lose the ability to digitally play back certain file formats (though the Archive is working on that, too), but we'll always be able to cobble together a machine with a needle and a horn that can play a record, if you can keep that record in good shape.

The shellac discs in the Archive's Richmond, California, warehouse are the precursors to the 12-inch vinyl records that became popular in the mid-20th century. Invented by Emile Berliner in 1887, the discs came in different sizes and materials, including rubber, until the industry eventually settled on 10-inch discs made of shellac that were played on gramophones (originally Berliner's patented variation on Thomas Edison's phonograph) at 78 revolutions per minute, with about three minutes of music on each side. By today's audiophilic standards, these "78s" sound pretty rough, with plenty of hissing, clicks, and crackling. The shellac, a resin produced by the lac insect native to parts of Asia, was mixed with fillers, including finely ground rock, to make the fragile records a bit more durable and affordable. The fillers don't do much for playback quality, though, and the earliest 78s sound much worse than ones produced later, when companies had refined their filler mixtures. Finding pristine 78s made with high-quality fillers is hard, but listening to them, says George, "can be quite wonderful."

Storing and preserving 78s is a big challenge. While shellac is a high-quality resin—still used today in woodworking and in food, where it shows up on labels as "confectioner's glaze"—it's also incredibly brittle. To avoid breakage, volunteers sorting through the Internet Archive's collection don't pick up more than a few at a time. The age of the records doesn't help, and neither does the dirt and dust that have accumulated on some of them over the decades.

To preserve the music of the 78s in case their grooves degrade, and to make them widely available for listening, the Internet Archive sends the discs to a digital archiving company in Philadelphia, George Blood L.P., that specializes in rare and unusual media. A turntable with four styluses—each a different size to pick up the sound in a distinct way—transfers the music to a computer, and all the recordings are then uploaded to the Archive's website. The 78s are then shipped back to California, where they're stored in special sleeves and boxes in the warehouse.

Preserving 78s is especially important because "you're capturing an era," says George. Those delicate discs contain important recordings that capture the evolution of music in the early 20th century, including rare jazz and blues, old hillbilly, and some of the earliest examples of rock 'n' roll. "The pop stuff and the big bands and all those were done in such quantities that they've usually been transferred to different mediums, but those fringe recordings usually haven't," he adds. And it's not just fringe recordings that got left behind. George points to Aileen Stanley, one of the most popular singers of the 1920s, who sold some 25 million records. Now she's not widely known, and her music can only be found on rare 78s.

The fate of Stanley's music is shared by many recordings each time a new medium overtakes another. Just as many recordings never made it to vinyl, many vinyl records never got transferred to cassette. "All of these things have about the same life," says George, and every 30 to 35 years a new technology comes along to deliver music in a more convenient form. MP3s were developed in the mid-1990s, but George isn't sure they'll be around nearly as long as 12-inch vinyl LPs have. "How we get music will go through another change," he says, and in his mind, body modification is going to be part of the future: "People will have tattoos that will give them drugs and music at the same time." How we're going to preserve those sounds is anyone's guess.

Learn more about how archivists are saving digital and physical media with a tour of the Internet Archive's San Francisco headquarters on Obscura Day, May 6, 2017. More about early recording technology can be found on Obscura Day at the Johnson Victrola Museum, and two phonograph DJs will be spinning at the Obscura Day After-Party, held at New York’s oldest club.