Imagine the most perfect square meter of white sandy beach you can. It is powdery and warm in the sun, but cooler once you burrow a hand into the wetter sand beneath. Now take 671 separate bits of plastic—buoys, scraps of fishing nets, water bottles, every manner of unidentifiable junk—and cram it into the sand before you lay down your towel.
That’s what researchers from the University of Tasmania and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds recently found on Henderson Island, at 14-square-mile fleck of sand, jagged coral, and palm trees in the middle of the South Pacific. They estimate the entire island's current total at 38,000 pounds of plastic, all in a place that, according to Henderson's Wikipedia page at the time of this writing, “is one of the world's last two raised coral atolls whose ecosystems remain relatively unaffected by human contact.” This is what relatively unaffected looks like now. And this is why we can’t have nice things.
Henderson is one of the most remote places in the world, more than 3,000 miles from the nearest significant population center. It has some human history—a few generations of Polynesians, some explorers, the wreck of a whaler, visits from timber harvesters from Pitcairn Island—but nothing to suggest the tide of garbage all over it. We’re on the hook for that, all of us, as it comes from the South Pacific Gyre, a current that sucks in floating debris and keeps it on a perpetual tour of the better part of a hemisphere. Henderson Island is unfortunately right in the path of this current, so it filters the debris out of the ocean. This has made it the trashiest beach ever documented, and there are some trashy beaches out there. Also alarming is just how quickly it all seems to have accumulated. Researchers estimate that 3,570 new pieces of litter washed up on just one beach in a single day.
"It's likely that our data actually underestimates the true amount of debris on Henderson Island as we were only able to sample pieces bigger than two millimeters down to a depth of 10 centimeters, and we were unable to sample along cliffs and rocky coastline," said study leader Jennifer Lavers, of the University of Tasmania, in a statement.
As if this story couldn't get worse. Geez, we need to use less plastic.
Wolf Blitzer—Emmy winner, frequent cameo-maker, anchor of Wolf and The Situation Room—is a busy man. But on May 14, just before 11 a.m., and to the probable delight of his 1.15 million followers, he took a little time out to tweet.
"Always nice to see a turtle," he typed, above a slightly blurry picture of a pond slider (Trachemys scripta).
Turtles may be a little shy, but the humans who love them are bold. As soon as he saw the tweet, ecologist and science communication devotee David Steen leapt into action, posting another turtle for Blitzer to see. "Hi @wolfblitzer this is a Loggerhead Musk Turtle. Highly aquatic and from the SE USA, they like to eat aquatic invertebrates." He then added an excellent hashtag: #ShowWolfATurtle.
Steen is a genius of hashtag herpetology. His previous hits include #ReignTheSwamp, which aims to save the ecosystem's reputation from Trumpian metaphors, and #NotACopperhead, which is dedicated to snake identification.
— David Steen, Ph.D. (@AlongsideWild) May 15, 2017
"I'm always on the lookout for ways to reach new people and get them thinking about wildlife conservation," he says. "It didn't take me long to realize this could be something that people might have fun with."
After Steen followed up with a few more offerings—a pair of European pond turtles from Azerbaijan, a Florida softshell with a surprisingly pointy nose—others plunged in, like turtles slipping off a log. "The hashtag went crazy among science communicators," says Tim Akimoff, the social media coordinator for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Reptile lovers are chuffed. "In general people tend to think turtles and tortoises are slow rocks that aren't worth their time," says Nicole Agusti, who runs Tort-Time, a tortoise and turtle blog dedicated to giving the opposite impression. "I think sharing this moment with Mr. Blitzer, acknowledging that it is nice to see a turtle, is a great way to show people how amazing they are."
— Watershed Ecotherapy (@watershedeco) May 15, 2017
Although it is, indeed, always nice to see a turtle, learning about them can be a bit more emotionally fraught—it is the anthropocene, after all. Sam Evans-Brown, the host of NHPR's "Outside In Radio" podcast, put up a Blanding's turtle, pointing out that it is "one of four species of concern here in New Hampshire."
Many of the pilers-on hoped, Yertle-like, to reach a critical mass. "[Blitzer is] in a great position to reach a lot of people who might not normally follow scientists on Twitter," says Niki Dykstra, a biology Ph.D. student, who offered a photo of her grinning son holding a turtle.
Steen agrees: "I would love for Mr. Blitzer to consider whether he should dedicate more time and energy to talking about wildlife conservation on CNN," he says. (Blitzer, who at press time was in the Situation Room, has not responded to a request for comment.)
At the very least, the anchor will have fodder for a few more Twitter breaks. "If my feed were to be inundated by turtles, I would be delighted," says Akimoff.
The Kingshighway Bridge in St. Louis has been under construction for nearly two years—so when it finally opened this past weekend, there was cause for celebration. About 200 excited citizens, including a bagpiper, showed up to watch the ribbon cutting and to march across the nearly-finished bridge for the first time.
There was just one surprise: it was less finished than expected. Near the north side of the bridge, an unpaved spot remained, on top of which sat a small blue Kia hatchback. Apparently, as the Riverfront Times reports, "they simply paved around the Kia, leaving the vehicle on a sunken rectangular island."
Appears this car got in the way of final paving for today's opening of Kingshighway bridge. #stlpic.twitter.com/8nBrFJ0SmQ
According to prior reporting from RFT, the city's pavers were working down to the wire to get the asphalt poured after several bouts of rain caused delays. When they came across the car, they must have figured they didn't have any time to waste, and skipped that patch.
As for the Kia's driver, she came forward and explained herself—she was returning from a trip, and met her boyfriend in the area for drinks. When they left, they took his car, and left hers.
"Obviously I wouldn't have parked there if there would have been a sign," she says. But there wasn't, and she did, and now her car has left its mark forever on the streetscape. (Until they come back with more asphalt, at least.)
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.
In the past few months, the street artist who goes by Mows (pronounced “mouse”) arrived in Minneapolis and started installing tiny doors all around the city. These little pieces have included a Prince-themed door, a panda door, a Pac Man door, a bunny-face door and many, many others—Mows has created about 60 in total.
Now, maybe tiny doors aren’t your thing; maybe you find them just a little bit twee. Most people would take such an opinion and moan a bit to their friends and family. But one man in Minneapolis has taken it upon himself not just to complain about the tiny doors but to get rid of them.
As City Pages reports, a man who has posted under the Instagram handle “urstreetartsux” (the account is no longer active) went around the city with a screwdriver and hammer and took down about a dozen of Mows’ doors. The man called himself the “graffiti task force” and referred to Mows’ installations as “the rat infestation.”
Who could this monster be? Recently a Minneapolis business apparently caught him on surveillance tape: The suspect is, reports City Pages, “a white guy with a black shirt, slate grey pants and dark hair” and has a “noticeably belabored gait.”
In the 1860s, Jane Stewart was married to a Bengal Engineer, who served in the British Army in India. Stewart and her husband came from Scotland, towards the beginning of the British Raj, which began in 1858. The East India Company had governed large swaths of land for about a century before a 1857 rebellion threatened its power. In the wake of the quashed rebellion, the company transferred it power to Queen Victoria.
Under British colonial rule, Stewart traveled to places in India and Egypt that would have still been rare sights for a British woman. In her travels, she collected photos made by local artists—photography was the still the realm of professionals in those days. Her albums are full of images of India, from Calcutta to Delhi, the pyramids of Egypt, Cairo streets, Jerusalem, Beirut, and European cities from Greece to Norway.
Stewart died in 1898, but her family kept her albums for more than a century. For the past 30 years, they have languished in an attic, but now the family is selling them at auction—offering a glimpse into the world that colonial power opened to a white woman in the 19th century.
The space where the University of Louisiana at Monroe housed its natural history collection was embarrassing. About five years ago, the biology department had to move its extensive collection of Louisiana plants and fish, one of the largest and most complete in the state, from a dedicated space in a campus building to an old print shop under an old stadium. It was cramped and gloomy, without nice working space for researchers. It was only supposed to be there for a year, before returning to an academic building.
But then one year turned into two, which became four, until this spring, when the school told the collection’s managers that they needed to find a new home for it, so the stadium could be renovated for the track team. They were given 48 hours to find a space on campus. After that, they would have a few short months to find some other institution to take over the collection, permanently. After hearing this news, the curator of the museum’s herbarium, Thomas Sasek, wrote on Facebook: "We were told that if the collections are not donated to other institutions, the collections will be destroyed at the end of July."
Locally, there had already been protests when the collection was exiled under the stadium. Now, the science community across the country—and the world—raised a much louder outcry over the possible destruction of close to 500,000 plant samples and six million fish specimens. In the wake of this anger, the school reversed itself, and said it had never intended to destroy the collection. But its ultimate position was firm: The collection needs a new home, and that is not likely to be on the Monroe campus. Another institution would need to adopt it.
While the fate of Monroe’s collection played out more publicly than most, this story is a depressingly common one. Back in 2009, Sasek started coordinating 12 Louisiana plant collections (also called herbaria) in an effort to digitize their collections. Since then, three or four of the smaller collections have closed, two or three curators are nearing retirement and are unlikely to be replaced, and Tulane’s herbarium—“a famous, wonderful collection,” says Sasek—is being consolidated with the one at Louisiana State University. Across North America, more than 100 herbaria have closed in the past two decades. In the United Kingdom, at least 64 museums have closed since 2010, and though not all of those are natural history museums, “we think that natural history is getting cut disproportionately,” says Jack Ashby, a trustee of the Natural Sciences Collections Association.
These collections are more than just samples under glass for field trips and sketchbook-toting artists—they're critical research tools. Any expertly curated and collected set of specimens is essentially a snapshot of a certain place and time, of which animals and plants lived where and when. “The whole reason we have collections is so people can go back to them for more information,” says Barbara Thiers, president-elect of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections and director of the Steere Herbarium at the New York Botanical Garden. “They’re like the chemist’s notebook. If you have questions or disagree with their conclusions, you go back to the original item those findings were based on.” Scientists use these collections to discover unknown species hiding in their drawers, understand how biodiversity is changing with the climate, and document the impacts humans have on local environments. Individual specimens can be valuable for their uniqueness, too, but a collection like the one at University of Louisiana at Monroe tells a story in its entirety.
Today, it's easy to overlook this value and to consider these collections dusty relics of a time before digital databases, but, as Thiers says, "I've never seen a dusty natural history collection." The people who manage these compendiums are now fighting to demonstrate this relevance in the 21st century and figuring out what it will take for them to survive.
For all their value, natural history collections can be a headache to maintain and manage. “Everything is organic, and everything is dangerous,” says Ashby. Living bugs love to eat dead bugs, or birds or mammals or plants, and pests can eat through drawers of specimens before anyone even notices a problem. Today, collection managers use integrated pest management strategies, but in the past the more common option was poisons, including arsenic, which linger in the collections, a hazard for anyone handling old specimens. There’s also the problem of specimens preserved of jars of ethanol, which evaporates through imperfect seals and needs to be topped off at regular intervals. Plus, "if you’ve got thousands of specimens in jars, you’ve got hundreds of liters of extraordinarily flammable liquid,” says Ashby. “You can’t just lock them in a cupboard and forget about them.”
In addition, even the management of natural history collections requires specialized knowledge about the laws and safety requirements that govern the movement of specimens. To share a sample with a researcher or another collection can require working through a byzantine series of state- and country-specific laws regarding plants, animals, or human remains. And when these processes go wrong, they can go very wrong: Just this month, Australian officials incinerated a specimen used to originally describe a plant species because of a biosecurity paperwork mixup. And again, ethanol carries the risk of explosions. Any specimen preserved in it has to be packed specially so that it stays moist but isn’t floating in a jar of flammable liquid.
All of this is expensive and space-intensive, which makes it hard for budget-strapped institutions to justify keeping natural history collections, especially since they’re perceived to have less monetary value than art collections. As budgets have shrunk, so has staffing, which exacerbates the challenges of care and management. At University of Louisiana at Monroe, for example, Sasek became the herbarium’s curator after the person hired to do that job left and there was no money to hire a replacement. Sasek, a biology professor, stepped in to the role of curator as, essentially, a volunteer. Even at the largest institutions, collections staff have had to become evangelists and engage the public—both to advocate for the collections’ survival and because there are fewer staff to take on those responsibilities.
One way that natural history curators have demonstrated the relevance of their collections is to digitize their specimens, which makes the collection more widely available for research and accessible even to the general public. Sasek started digitizing the Monroe herbarium specimens because “it’s a huge collection but we’re out in the middle of nowhere,” he says. By collaborating with a consortium of institutions across the Southeast, he can combine his data with others’ to map the biodiversity across the region—and showcase the collective value of the drawers and drawers of dried leaves.
“When the data are unlocked in digital form, they have a new relevance, but it’s basically like creating a second collection,” says Thiers. “As we see changes in the biota, due to climate change and development, there’s a huge, huge need for continued field surveys and building collections. It’s constantly a question of having to do more with less. Digitizing, education, and outreach—all that with the same or fewer resources than we had before.”
Even getting rid of a natural history collection can be resource-consuming. “You can't just pour hundreds of liters of formaldehyde down the drain,” says Ashby. Disposal of anything in a natural history collection was once considered entirely taboo, but in recent years there’s been a move toward judicious pruning. “It would be dishonest to say that every specimen in every museum is of world-class research value,” Ashby says. At the collection where he works, he adds, “We have hundreds of rabbit legs, which presumably is a remnant of some dissection anatomy class from the 1960s. It’s unlikely that they’re going to be of huge research use to the world.”
In the United Kingdom, accredited museums that want to move on from a collection must follow a hierarchy of possible new homes—public museums, private museums, research institutions, schools, and so forth—before they can dispose of anything. It’s inconvenient, but it’s meant to avoid the fate that some collections have met over the years. “In the '80s and '90s and earlier, particularly in university museums, collections were literally being skipped. Thrown in the dumpster,” says Ashby. “I’ve heard of dodos going in skips. It’s just because some one person has made the decision that this isn’t valuable.”
The organizations that Ashby and Thiers work with try to save endangered collections when they hear about them. In one case, the Liverpool Museum was about to throw away an older plant collection, but the Natural Sciences Collections Association helped convince the museum to keep it. It was later revealed to be the missing collection of a pioneering botanist who studied northern India—and is now considered one of the museum's most important. In other cases, they might help find new homes for endangered collections, but there are limits to this solution. In the three decades she's worked at the New York Botanical Garden, Thiers says, they've taken between 10 and 15 orphaned collections. "But we are running out of room," she says, "and most other herbaria are running out of room, too."
Sasek and his colleagues have been working to find a new home for their collection. Right now, it looks like Louisiana State University, which has recently built a new herbarium and absorbed Tulane’s, could be a likely destination. Even if the collection is not destroyed, though, it might have to be split up. Since the collection covers the whole state, one institution might be interested in the parts that are locally relevant, but not the whole. It could simply be a question of space. There may not be one place with the capacity to take the whole collection. If it is split up, it will require even more management and coordination to preserve its value. But the decision to split up the collection, like the decision to put in storage in the first place, might become a self-fulfilling prophecy. When these collections aren’t valued as a whole, they lose any value at all.
The mystery of the origin of 22 iron beads discovered in an earthen mound in 1945 has been solved. The adornments were found among more than 1,000 shell and pearl beads just south of Havana, Illinois, when the Illinois State Museum excavated a group of Native American mounds dating to around 2,000 years ago. The Hopewell culture that made the mounds didn't have metallurgy, and analysis soon revealed that the beads' structure is characteristic of iron that cools in the core of an asteroid. They clearly come from a meteorite, but there are just three known iron meteorites in North America, and none match the exact chemical composition in the beads. The Hopewells' source, it was thought, is either exhausted or undiscovered.
A piece of one of those three meteorites, the Anoka meteorite, was first discovered in 1961, next to the Mississippi River in what is now Anoka, Minnesota. Its surface didn't show evidence of people trying to remove bits and pieces of it, and its chemical makeup was just different enough from the beads to convince scientists it wasn't the source. Another chunk of the Anoka turned up in 1983. A new analysis of that piece, which was found just across the river from the original, showed the researchers, from the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., the same internal structure observed in the Havana Hopewell beads. Mass spectroscopy then confirmed that the two pieces of iron have the same chemical composition as well. One mystery might have been solved, but another popped right back in its place.
The beads were found more than 450 miles away from the site of the meteorite impact. So how did the iron wind up in Illinois? For one, the Hopewells in the Havana region probably didn't extract the iron from the meteorite themselves. They did, however, have trading connections with the Trempeleau Hopewells to the north. Researchers now think that the Trempeleau likely chipped off the raw material from the meteorite, and that the iron was then traded to the Havana area, where where the local Hopewell crafted it into beads. The chemical composition of these cosmic beads is helping to reveal cultural ties among the Hopewell—who ranged from Ontario to Mississippi.
Animal smuggling is a persistent problem across the world, with birds, monkeys, and eels all among the victims.
Customs agents in Kuala Lumpur recently found some more, in the form of 330 of turtles hidden away in boxes identified as containing stones, according to the Associated Press. The boxes contained a mixture of Indian Star tortoises and endangered Ploughshare tortoises, which were being brought into the country illegally. The estimated black market value of the critters is somewhere around $275,000.
The animals came from Madagascar into a country that is thought to be a central transit hub in the trade of endangered animals. No culprits have been identified, but animal smuggling in Malaysia can carry a sentence of up to three years behind bars, in addition to fines.
It's also unclear what will become of the tortoises at this point, all of which were found alive. According to the AP, they are frequently kept as pets.
The man asking this has been in California since 1969. Originally from Mexico, he is a mariachi. He has spent his life playing traditional Mexican music all over Southern California. We are standing in Mariachi Plaza, in the predominately Latino neighborhood of Boyle Heights, just east of downtown Los Angeles.
This unassuming plaza, with its coffee shop, metro station, gazebo, AA meeting room, and faded murals, is the epicenter of mariachi music in America. In the world, it is only topped by Mexico City’s famed Plaza Garibaldi, the historic square that mariachis have called home for decades.
Men in charro jackets sit with battered instruments, chatting and laughing, waiting for a gig to appear. Every now and then a car drives up. Someone is looking for a group of mariachis to play for a wedding, quinceañera, funeral, or even a divorce. A cluster of men pile into a van, and off they go to their next gig.
Mariachi music, with its stories of love and loss and joy, is considered essential at any major Mexican event in Los Angeles. “For every Mexican, and I mean every Mexican, whether you live in Mexico or not, mariachi music is no less than the cry of your soul,” Boyle Heights native Evangeline Ordaz-Molina wrote in the book Hotel Mariachi: Urban Space and Cultural Heritage in Los Angeles. “When we hear that first strum of the mariachi guitar, our hearts literally flutter, and when the violins and trumpets come in, our lungs fill.”
The men (and a few women) who populate Mariachi Plaza are understandably suspicious of outsiders, but speak of a life filled with waiting, interspersed with moments of artistic fulfillment. They stand around a van, out of which an older mariachi—unable to perform anymore due to the long hours of standing during a gig—sells mariachi boots and belts, and water for the hot days in the unshaded plaza. He also sells CDs, so mariachis can teach themselves new popular songs that they may be asked to perform.
Many of them are in the plaza almost every day, year-round. Some only come up to Los Angeles from Easter to Christmas—when there is the most work. There is competition among the mariachis, and many of the old timers believe that there has recently been an infusion of less skilled performers, who simply dress the part and attempt to undercut them. Left to their druthers, the mariachis would play the old songs, but the newest trend is banda music, and big bands featuring 20 or so wind instruments. Bands are often fluid, and leaders search the plaza and the area around it for the musicians they need for a given gig.
Saturday is a day of celebration in the plaza. Groups of celebrants, be they weddings or birthday or anniversary parties, come to the plaza to be serenaded by the mariachis.
Most mariachis have been playing since they were children. Like many artists, they work other jobs to support themselves, often avoiding heavy manual labor that could affect their hands. “The business of selling mariachi music is conducted much like other day labor is transacted in Los Angeles,” Ordaz-Molina wrote. “Mariachis wait for customers at the donut shop, turned plaza, turned metro station, on the corner of First and Boyle in Boyle Heights, and when the customers arrive they negotiate a price, get an address, and four or five musicians get into a car and go.”
According to longtime residents, mariachis have called this intersection home since as far back as the 1930s. Originally it was just a traffic triangle in a quiet middle-class suburb of Los Angeles. By the 1960s, it featured a donut shop that was the mariachis’ unofficial headquarters. In the 1990s, the triangle was turned into a plaza dedicated to the mariachis, complete with a performance kiosk and a statue of their patron saint, Saint Cecilia. In 2009, the L.A. metro’s gold line extension opened at Mariachi Plaza, sparking well-founded fears of encroaching gentrification.
Throughout all this change, the mariachis have remained a constant. Ordaz-Molina recalled coming back to Boyle Heights after law school and being comforted by their continued presence. “I would drive by the hotel and donut shop (the plaza was still just a traffic triangle with a donut shop sitting on it),” she wrote, “just to catch a glimpse of the romantic figures in their tight black suits with silver buttons running up the sides of their pants and white embroidery decorating their short black jackets.”
Over the decades, commercial enterprises catering to mariachis have sprung up all around the plaza. There are instrument stores, performance spaces, and restaurants. At dinner theaters like the legendary El Mercadito Mariachi Restaurant, mariachis play nightly, whether to a table of one or a packed house.
Tailor Jorge Tello, known as “el maestro,” is a friendly man with a large smile, who has dressed the mariachis of Boyle Heights for over 30 years. In his tailoring shop La Casa del Mariachi, just across the street from the plaza, he shows off beautiful custom-made suits, some as expensive as $4000. “They are all handmade,” he says cheerfully.
Many mariachis also live in the neighborhood directly surrounding the plaza. Since the 1960s, the most famous of these residences was the Boyle Hotel (also known as the Cummings Block), often called the “Hotel Mariachi.” This beautiful Queen Anne Italianate building was originally built in 1889, by L.A. businessman George Cummings and his wife, Sacramenta Lopez, on land she had inherited from her family. The hotel had fallen into disrepair by the second World War and became a place where mostly single mariachis could live inexpensively. “They could be right there, at the Plaza,” Catherine Kurland, author of Hotel Mariachi, says, “so that if one of the mariachis got a gig he could just call up to the rest of the musicians and say, ‘Come on down, let’s go!’”
Kurland, a direct descendant of Sacramenta Lopez, rediscovered her family’s old hotel one day in 2003.She and her niece were having lunch in Boyle Heights when they decided to look for the Boyle Hotel. They saw that a door to the dilapidated building was open. “My niece and I sort of impulsively ran up the stairs and the door opened and we found ourselves on this landing,” she says, “and we looked around and were surrounded by men, in these black suits, or some states of undress, and we realized, it dawned on us that these are mariachis!”
She soon became immersed in the living history of her family’s former hotel. “When I first saw it, about 80 percent of the residents—there were maybe 110 residents- in about 60 units, were mariachi,” she says. “Two of them could live cheaply in a little room with a little hot plate and a bathroom down the hall.” She worked to have the building declared a Los Angeles Cultural Historic Landmark, partially to save it from being torn down by developers. She also produced the book Hotel Mariachi, along with Enrique R. Lamadrid, Evangeline Ordaz-Molina and photographer Miguel Gandert, her professor at the University of New Mexico. They spent hours speaking with and documenting the lives of the mariachis, including men like Luisiito García, called Don Luis, who had lived in the hotel since the 1960s.
In 2007, the East L.A. Community Corporation, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing affordable, up-to-code residences in Boyle Heights, bought the hotel for around $3.1 million. The group, headed by Maria Cabildo and Evangeline Ordaz-Molina, consulted the mariachis to ascertain what they needed—a place to store instruments, a computer room, and rehearsal space were at the top of their list.
By the time the hotel was renovated to the tune of $24.6 million in 2012, many of the mariachis who had lived there had already found other housing or had been priced out of the hotel by rising costs.
As Boyle Heights becomes trendier, mariachis continue to be priced out of their homes neighboring Mariachi Plaza. In April of 2017, LA Weekly writer Jason McGahan reported that many mariachis were in danger of being forced out of their apartments, with some of their rents being raised this year by as much as 80 percent.
Despite the continuing threats to their way of life, the mariachis of Mariachi Plaza endure. “I enjoy it,” one man says. “It’s my culture. It’s…” He puts his hands to his heart and smiles.
Courtrooms of this era might have been even more exciting, though, if law enforcement officials had taken the advice of one Helene Adelaide Shelby of Oakland, California. Shelby's innovative idea: what if someone besides an ordinary detective oversaw criminal justice-related interrogations? What if, for instance, the questioner was a giant skeleton with glowing red eyes and a camera hidden in its skull?
U.S. Patent #1749090, a.k.a. "Apparatus for obtaining criminal confessions and photographically recording them," was filed by Shelby on August 16, 1927. Her goal was to cut down on retracted confessions: "It is a well known fact in criminal practices that confessions obtained initially from those suspected of crimes through ordinary channels, are almost invariably later retracted," she explains in her patent application.
Her invention, which she describes as a "new and useful apparatus," is designed to "produce a state of mind calculated to cause [a criminal], if guilty, to make confession thereof," as well as to record that confession.
Straightforward enough, right? The twist is, as always, in the execution. Shelby's invention works like this: first, the suspect is confined in a small, dark chamber. (In the accompanying illustration, this ne'er-do-well is a bemused-looking man in cuffed pants, standing upright—all very suspicious.) The examiner, who is in charge of eliciting information from the suspect, sits in a second, attached chamber, and asks his questions through a megaphone.
The suspect cannot see his human questioner, though. Instead, as soon as the examiner flicks a button, a curtain lifts within the chamber, and the unlucky interrogee is suddenly faced with "a figure in the form of a skeleton," surrounded by a "diaphanous veiling" and illuminated from both above and below by "a plurality of electric lights." This light-and-curtain scheme is designed to make the skeleton seem like an apparition, as though it has spontaneously arisen inside the confession booth.
The skeleton's eye sockets contain red lightbulbs, "for the purpose of importing… an unnatural ghastly glow," and the megaphone is positioned "in such a manner that the voice of the operator appears to come from the mouth of the skeleton." (It also blinks.)
Effective? You bet. These "illusory effects… of a supernatural character" Shelby writes, will "work upon [the suspect's] imagination." Convinced that he is speaking to a true ghost skeleton, the bandit in the chamber will spontaneously confess his most secret crimes.
But that's not all! While the suspect is spilling his guts to the skeleton, the skeleton is recording the suspect via a film camera installed in its skull. Said camera is a nifty machine that, as Shelby explains, can "photographically and simultaneously record both scenes and words," in the form of pictures and a corresponding audio recording. The examiner operates the whole shebang via a handy switchboard.
Later, if the criminal attempts to retract his testimony, the pictures and audio, which "depict [his] every expression and emotion," can be marshaled as evidence.
Who was the woman behind this twisted piece of genius? A search for Shelby's name in newspaper archives reveals only a few hints about her life: she was a bit of a real estate maven, selling and leasing properties in Oakland, Santa Cruz and San Francisco. She occasionally bet on horse races, and she died in 1947, leaving behind a husband, Edgar. Invention-wise, she was a one-hit wonder—she has no other patents on file. It doesn't seem as though anyone ever built her skeleton-based interrogator, either.
That's probably for the best. In 1961, the Supreme Court ruled that coerced confessions are not admissible in court—although, as the legal scholar Saul Kassim wrote decades later, "there is no simple litmus test" for what counts as coercion. If anything qualifies, though, a secretly surveilling, dramatically lit skeleton might just be it.
The Toronto Islands, just south of the city in Lake Ontario, are currently flooded. Open to the public in dryer times, they might be closed for another two months because water levels in the lake remain stubbornly high, city officials said.
Still, an enterprising imgur user recently managed to gain access to the islands—presumably with a boat of some sort—and found that some carp were happily living on what used to be a baseball field.
While this is bad news for people who enjoy playing baseball on the Toronto Islands, it is great news for the carp, who now have an expanded habitat in which they can reproduce. And there is even better news: The carp are not Asian carp, which are threatening to invade the Great Lakes, where they could possibly do irreparable damage, according to blogTO.
So enjoy the sight for now, and maybe give the fish a thought later this year, when you're rounding third and heading for home.
The Stuttgart 21 railway project is billed as the city's transport future—a 35-mile track and tunnel extension that will connect citizens to the rest of of Germany, as well as Europe at large. But not everyone sees it that way. Concerns over the project’s high cost and environmental impacts have led to near-constant protests, including a 2010 demonstration against tree felling, during which police injured over 100 protesters with tear gas and water cannons.
Now, anti-Stuttgart 21 activists have found some scaly, highly effective comrades: two species of lizard, whose very presence in the railway’s vicinity is enough to delay construction, and to drive up costs even further.
“Thousands of sand and wall lizards have been found along the route of the project,” the Guardian reports. The two species are protected in Europe, and in order to move forward with the project, Stuttgart 21’s developers are legally required to get them out of the way.
While the lizards will not be sacrificed to the railway, they will be displaced. “Experts are being brought in to catch them in nets,” the Guardian reports, and they will be resettled in Untertürkheim, about six miles away.
The cost of this setback is estimated to add up to about 15 million Euros—between 2,000 and 4,000 per lizard—and the relocation will have to wait until the end of spring, when the breeding season is over. Next time you find yourself caught in an infrastructural dispute, better hope the sexy lizards are on your side.
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.
Like a modern reenactment of The Neverending Story, in which a horse slowly drowns in the Swamp of Sorrows, a New Jersey man had to save his SUV from sinking into the beach on Tuesday after staging an ill-advised photo shoot.
Video shows the vehicle’s owner futilely trying to dig out the back wheels of the SUV with a shovel while huge waves pummel the opposite side of the vehicle, forcing it deeper into the sand. Christopher Gillich, who shot the video, told NJ.com that he tried to help the 20-year-old but said that he insisted that the truck was waterproof. The driver left the SUV running during the entire ordeal.
Eventually, both State Park Police and a tow truck arrived. After the SUV was freed, the owner simply drove away, despite the fact that the engine was “grinding and cracking, and sizzling, smoking and steaming," Gillich told NJ.com.
In Carova, North Carolina, on the skinny islands of the Outer Banks, Jeff Kelly was walking the beach at high tide when he came across a series of strange objects, unlike any beach trash he’d seen before, Coastal Review Online reports. They were large, round disks, made of multicolored plastic—the Virginian-Pilotdescribes them as "tabletop-sized."
They looked to be partially melted, and they smelled. As Kelly walked the coastline, he counted the disks, and in the next three miles, he found 26 in total, with more strewn on the beach farther north.
He had “no clue,” he told Coastal Review Online, what the disks were or where they had come from.
But one contained a clue—a document encapsulated with the plastic, face side up. It said “Commander Naval Surface Force Atlantic.”
The disks, it turned out, were of the type that the Navy uses to store plastic trash on its ships while they’re at sea. The trash is compacted into disks and sealed in odor-barrier bags for safe and non-disgusting storage. The disks reportedly included: "Welch’s Fruit Snacks, Pepperidge Farm Goldfish, Cup ‘O’ Noodles, Crystal Light drink powder, gummy worms candies, Lay’s potato chips, containers of coffee creamer, granola bars, plastic bottles and soda cans."
They’re not supposed to be thrown into the ocean, but somehow dozens of these trash discs made it into the sea. (Perhaps in a game of trash frisbee?)
Suriname is nearly 5,000 miles from the Netherlands, and in the 17th century, it must have seemed even farther—the perilous journey across the Atlantic by ship took more than grueling two months. Such a voyage would have been almost unheard for a woman to undertake accompanied only by her daughter, were it not for Maria Sibylla Merian. In 1699 Merian traveled across the ocean on an expedition to study insects and plants in their natural South American habitat.
In a time when women had limited career options, Merian made her own profession. At 13, encouraged by her stepfather, she began to paint insects and flowers. As a girl in Frankfurt, Germany, she was fascinated by insects, and found a particular talent for translating their physical forms to paint and paper with both artistic skill and scientific accuracy. By 28, she published her first volume of illustrations.
One of her later volumes was even more significant. It illustrated the process of metamorphosis, which was, in the 17th century, still a theory. In the book, Merian depicted the life cycles of butterflies and moths, alongside their food sources, which helped to rebut the generally received notion that insects spontaneously generated from decaying matter.
After this publication—in between getting divorced, living in a commune, and moving to Nuremberg and then Amsterdam—Merian began her “long dreamed of journey.” Accompanied by her daughter Dorothea and sponsorship from the city of Amsterdam (a rare achievement for a woman) she decamped for what was to be a five-year stay in Suriname, then a Dutch colony on the north coast of South America. However, she returned to the Netherlands after just two years, at the age of 54, after contracting malaria.
But over the following four years, Merian produced 60 engravings from her time there. In 1705 she self-published Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname), which cemented her status as both a leading entomologist and a nature artist.
Merian’s work—both innovative and beautiful—languished, forgotten, for centuries following her death in 1717. Later scientists generally dismissed her work because she was a woman and lacked formal education. Fortunately, the 20th century was kinder to her contributions. She has been immortalized on a German bank note and in a Google doodle. Her vivid illustrations are held in museums around the world. In celebration of her pioneering work, Berlin’s Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings) has an exhibition of her work on display until July 7, 2017. Atlas Obscura has a selection of her detailed, ornate work.
Rumors, like most forms of gossip, are usually rooted in half-truths and outright falsities. Yet, during World War II, these insatiable tidbits of hearsay threatened to undermine civilian morale and even cause unrest within the military community when they nearly spiraled out of control.
“Of all the virus that attack the vulnerable nerve tissues of a nation at war, rumor is the most malignant,” reported LIFE magazine in 1942. “Its most dangerous carriers are innocent folk who love to tell a tall tale.”
Rumors snowballed in pubs and on factory floors, and other places where chatter was high, despite the government urging Americans to “avoid loose talk.” The most common rumors attacked U.S. war efforts and involved so-called crimes committed by and against U.S. soldiers. Others were outrageous claims, gaslighting techniques and psychological warfare waged by Germany and the Axis powers, meant to cause doubt, panic, and fear among the American public.
For example:
No U.S. Navy vessels survived Pearl Harbor.
A mother in Minnesota received a box from Japan containing the eyes of her captured soldier son.
Men and women were being killed at shipbuilding corporations for supporting military efforts.
A bomb containing "bubonic plague germs" was dropped in Curry County, Oregon.
The WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) were considered property of Army officers and the officers could do with them what they pleased.
The rumor mill churned.
Recognizing the potential for widespread distrust and damage to civilian morale, President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order creating the Office of Wartime Information (OWI) on June 13, 1942. OWI consolidated several agencies, and was designed to be a central repository for overseeing and disseminating all wartime information that circulated in the United States. The office’s objectives were to subdue the falsehoods and promote only “positive” information on the progress of the war effort and activities of the U.S. government. Along with patriotic radio broadcasts and Voice of America, a government-funded news source that operated as radio broadcast during WWII, OWI’s grandiose plans included the “Rumor Project,” which was first proposed in January of 1942, before the establishment of OWI.
When Axis-inspired rumors became problematic, the Rumor Project was suggested as a way of informing and educating the American public on how to identify fact from fiction—real news from fake news, by today’s standards. The proposal for the project recommended that “Rumor Clinics” be instituted at colleges and universities across the United States, consisting of specialized groups of volunteer professors and students who researched well-known rumors and reported back to OWI.
Eight potential clinics were initially identified, including one in Boston to be run under the direction of psychologist Robert Knapp, an early researcher in the psychology of rumor. Twenty more clinics were proposed. But the program fledged and stalled under government bureaucracy. Officials were uncomfortable with social scientists having any level of information control, and social scientists could not work within the politics of the “establishment.”
The American public had also grown to mistrust the Roosevelt administration. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the government did not immediately provide details on the number dead and how the United States would respond. It took three weeks for them to release an official statement. The delay, combined with previous mishandling of public information related to the war, caused public confidence to drop to an all-time low and rumors to proliferate.
Knapp’s clinic was already up and running, despite the government considering scrapping the Rumor Project altogether. He formed a collaboration with the Boston Herald, and on March 1, 1942, the Boston Herald Rumor Clinic was established. Using a listening network of “morale wardens,” each Sunday, in a column also called Rumor Clinic, the newspaper refuted a common rumor. The rumor was placed in italics, followed by the word FACT.
Rumor: “Soldiers are being charged exorbitant prices in Army canteens for cigarettes and beer, etc.
FACT: Army Public Relations says, “False! Post exchanges are operated to the benefit of the soldiers. Soldiers are able to purchase commodities at the exchanges at GREATLY REDUCED RATES!”
The weekly refutation of a rumor that had been sent in by a reader often included how the rumor could have spread and where it likely originated. The text of the columns was attached to paystubs, posted on bulletin boards at factories, and dispersed in other ways for widespread circulation. According to The Jewish Veteran, Volumes 10-12, experts at the Boston clinic agreed that it was better to “drag a false rumor into the open, reply to it, disinfect it, than allow it to fester and spread like a poison.”
In addition to the newspaper and its listening network of 300 morale wardens (bartenders, factory workers, waitresses, and countless other civilians who reported and tracked down rumors), the Boston Herald Rumor Clinic included the Division of Propaganda Research, set up within the Massachusetts Committee on Public Safety. Knapp ran the division, along with Harvard psychology professor Gordon Allport.
Reader’s Digest and American Mercury ran feature stories about the Boston Herald’s pioneering efforts. The articles encouraged readers:
Send in your rumors! What wild, damaging, morale-eroding stories similar to those described in this article are current in your community? Readers who wish to help the Boston Rumor Clinic, and further the organization of similar clinics throughout the country, are urged to put such stories in writing and send them to Robert H. Knapp.
Soon after the articles ran, other clinics began cropping up across the United States. At one time, there were at least a dozen clinics in operation, in cities such as San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Syracuse. Some clinics were set up by social scientists. Others were operated by women’s groups, students, and university clubs. Rumor clinics became a new way for civilians to get involved in the war effort.
The Roosevelt administration frowned upon these independent initiatives. It had established OWI to control the flow of information. For a brief time, OWI coordinated with Knapp and Allport at the Boston clinic, as well as various other clinics in the U.S. The Boston relationship deteriorated after Allport criticized a report released by OWI, which attacked local clinics and their methods for researching rumors.
Eventually, the government went on the warpath, launching a campaign against the local clinics. A set of guidelines was issued in October of 1942, outlining how the clinics should run. Groups that wanted to set up new rumor clinics were sent an extensive questionnaire. For those who managed to get through the labor-intensive process, they were then sent a “rumor bible.” The bible outlined an organizational structure, requiring each clinic to have a project director, research director, an educational director, analytical assistants, field reporters, and a general advisory council. Most groups lacked the time and resources to meet OWI’s extravagant requirements, and the concept became entangled in a web of bureaucracy and red tape.
Aside from detailing the processes, the “bible” also criticized how the Boston clinic researched rumors and used examples from the Boston Herald column to demonstrate the various “mistakes” that were being made by Knapp and his team. But OWI didn’t stop there. They went on to condemn the clinics in a 1943 New York Times feature story, stating that the attempts to thwart rumors actually helped spread them. By the time World War II ended, the nation’s Rumor Clinics had vanished.
What might be thought of as an extreme use of resources today was viewed as a necessary public intervention back then. Knapp likened a rumor to a torpedo. “Once launched,” he wrote, “it travels of its own power.”
LIFE magazine even tested the theory in 1942, when the clinics were still in operation. They had a man tell a random stranger on the street that the chimneys in Boston could hide anti-aircraft. Not long after, rumor spread that Boston’s rooftops were bristled with guns.
Knapp wrote in his 1944 thesis that rumors "express and gratify the emotional needs" of communities during periods of social duress. They arise, in his opinion, to "express in simple and rationalized terms the uncertainties and hostilities which so many feel." In other words, one man’s rumor is another man’s reality—until refuted and replaced with FACT.
Pufferfish are best known for turning into balloons when threatened—and for being a potentially poisonous delicacy. But there are plenty of other quirks to them. They can move their eyes independent of one another and some species can change colors. Their four teeth form a strong beak that allows them to pop open clams and mussels or scrape algae off rocks. According to a new study from the University of Sheffield and the University of Tokyo, we share some common but interesting genes with these bizarre fish. Some of the genetic code that allows pufferfish to keep growing their four teeth, as they grind down through use, is the same genetic code responsible for the regeneration of human teeth.
"We’ve discovered the stem cells responsible and the genes that govern this process of continuous regeneration," said Gareth Fraser, a biologist and coauthor of the study, in a press release. "These are also involved in general vertebrate tooth regeneration, including in humans.”
Humans only regenerate their teeth once, and any teeth lost after that are gone forever. Pufferfish, on the other hand, constantly regenerate their teeth in layers that fuse to form their beaks. The frequency of regeneration and the number of teeth may be different, but the underlying stem cell process is identical. Fraser pointed out that understanding how pufferfish dental stem cells work could "provide clues to how we can address questions of tooth loss in humans." We won't be growing clam-openers, but this research might help restore smiles someday.
King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands has been on the throne since 2013 and, since he was a child, interested in aviation. This isn't exactly a secret, since he once publicly appeared as a guest pilot on a KLM commercial flight. The secret is just how into it he truly is.
This week Willem-Alexander revealed that in fact he's been secretly copiloting passenger flights for 21 years, including several during his reign. "I find flying simply fantastic," he told De Telegraaf, according to the BBC.
The king never tried to hide his presence in the cockpit. He said he just never identified himself explicitly to KLM passengers, even if some may have recognized his voice during announcements.
What has the king been flying? Mostly Fokker 70 aircraft, which look like this:
But Fokker, the Dutch company that made the model, went out of business in 1996, meaning that the 70 is being phased out. Willem-Alexander says he will now try his hand at flying the Boeing 737, which is much bigger and has a cockpit that looks like this:
Imagine living in a country whose head of state doesn't have the attention span of a larval fly, and can operate complex machinery with grace and poise and without bringing attention to himself.
A group of cyclists in the Omaha neighborhood of Aksarben wants a safer bike lane, so they decided to take matters into their own hands by gluing over a hundred plungers to the street.
The group, which is calling itself “PSA,” or "Plungers for a safer Aksarben," recently attached 120 standard household plungers (handles wrapped in reflective tape for greater visibility), to the painted bike lane on one of the area’s more dangerous streets. According to KETV, the road where the plungers was installed is especially dangerous, and has been the site of multiple accidents, including one fatal collision in 2015.
PSA installed their plungers without asking permission from the city in the hopes that they could show drivers what a protected bike lane might look like. They hoped the plungers might stay in place for at least 36 hours, but city officials were on site to pluck them off the street in just three.
Still, PSA did manage to get their point across, if ever so briefly.
"Get people's attention," one cyclist told KETV. "Let them see what a protected bike lane looks like and how it can work and how it can actually slow traffic down."
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
When you think of dark sandwich-like cookies with a creamy white center, you probably think of Oreos, in part because Nabisco is so good at marketing.
But if you take a look off to the side in the grocery store you might see one brand in particular that, in fact, was invented four years before Oreos—a cookie brand that looks remarkably similar. That brand would be Hydrox, the second banana of the cookie aisle, which these days simply can't compete against the marketing juggernaut that is Oreo, even if it did get a bit of a head start.
The problem, you might've guessed, is its name.
In 1882, the entrepreneur Jacob Loose bought a biscuit and candy company that would eventually be known as Sunshine Biscuits (after the company's baking plant designs) and, in 1908, launched the biscuit sandwich known as Hydrox.
The name, they thought, would be reminiscent of the sunlight that glimmered through its factories, in addition to speaking to a basic purity of product.
The truth was a bit more complicated, however. Intended to imply hydrogen and oxygen—the two chemicals that make up water—the result has a more clinical, less roll-off-the-tongue convention to it, and instead evokes hydrogen peroxide, a chemical you probably don’t want to drink.
And it didn’t help that that there was an existing Hydrox Chemical Company on the market, one that sold hydrogen peroxide andwas caught up in a trademark lawsuit at the time over the use of the word “hydrox”—a lawsuit that noted the term was used for coolers, for soda, even for brands of ice cream.
Long story short, it was a weird name for a cookie. But the cookie’s design, which was initially sold with an exotic “English biscuit” twist, was pretty interesting for its era: With an industrial press from a mold, the cookie took on the look of a flower.
And, for a minute, it felt like a game-changer for Sunshine Biscuits, only it turned out, four years later, to be a game-changer for Nabisco's Oreo. Oreo was one of three cookies introduced by Nabisco on April 2, 1912, with the other two—the Mother Goose biscuit and the Veronese biscuit—being lost to history. Oreo, which the company described as, “two beautifully embossed chocolate-flavored wafers with a rich cream filling" survived.
The rest, as they say, is history. But while Oreo ascended to become something of a cultural touchstone, Hydrox retained its partisans, in part also because the slightly-more-bitter cookie was also kosher. The legacy of Sunshine Biscuits also didn’t suffer too badly, and Jacob Loose died a rich man. (Two words: Cheez-It.)
Still, it was Oreo that, as it approached its 75th anniversary in 1986, inspired The New York Times to write at length about the cookie’s cultural value.
“The Oreo is a cookie that embraces contradictions,” wrote architecture critic Paul Golderberger. “Not only is it dark on the outside and light on the inside, but it is lavishly ornate in its exterior design while being utterly simple within. In an even more fundamental fashion, however, the Oreo’s form leaps across stylistic boundaries.”
Golderberger had some thoughts on the Hydrox, too.
“The Hydrox’s ornamental pattern is at once cruder and more delicate than the Oreo’s; the ridges around the edge are longer and deeper, but the center comprises stamped-out flowers, a design more intricate than the Oreo pattern,” he stated. “Still, it is the Oreo that has become the icon.”
The problem, of course, was probably the name. When Keebler took ownership of the Sunshine Foods brands in the late ‘90s, most people thought Hydrox was the Johnny-come-lately, when it was really Oreo that had entered the market second. And the name proved such a huge turnoff that Hydrox only had 4.2 percent of the sales of Oreo in 1998—just $16 million compared to Oreo’s $374 million takeaway.
Keebler realized this was a problem and quickly attempted to rename the cookies Droxies, a sort of softening of the name to discourage people from thinking of chemicals.
“Not only does it cue back to ‘Hydrox,’ but it’s a fun, whimsical name that really works with the Keebler imagery.” Keebler marketing director for cookies Carolyn Burns explained to Fortune in 1999.
But the shift wasn’t enough; in 2001, Kellogg’s had bought the Keebler brand, putting Hydrox under yet another corporate owner, and by 2003, it had stopped selling Hydrox altogether—sans a brief reprieve in 2008 after enough consumers complained that it briefly changed its mind.
“This is a dark time in cookie history,” one Hydrox partisan, Gary Nadeau, wrote, according to the Wall Street Journal. “And for those of you who say, ‘Get over it, it’s only a cookie,‘ you have not lived until you have tasted a Hydrox.“
Nadeau was probably pleased, when in 2015, Hydrox made a comeback. Ellia Kassoff, a Jewish kid who grew up on the kosher cookies, had gained some knowledge on how to gain access to a trademark that was sitting unused, and as a result, he was able to pick up Hydrox for his own company, Leaf Brands—itself a dormant brand that Kassoff had revived.
“You’d be surprised how many companies are hoarding trademarks,” Kassoff told The Consumerist in 2014. “To be blunt, they lie to the Trademark Office.”
He figured out that, since Kellogg’s admitted it wasn’t interested in doing anything with the cookie brand, he legally would be able to cancel the trademark and re-use it. He had to do all the hard work of reformulating the snack, but once he had figured that out, it was off to the races.
Not only are the cookies kosher these days, but they’re made with real sugar and without GMOs. And even if they’ll always be the second banana compared to Oreo, they have a spot in the grocery store again.
Try one. You might like it.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
