Antarctica is a cold, harsh place. The wind and glaciers and arid climate make it difficult for plants to take hold, so they occupy just 0.3 percent of the continent. But that is changing. New research has found that as temperatures climb, moss banks are expanding.
"If this continues, and with increasing amounts of ice-free land from continued glacier retreat, the Antarctic Peninsula will be a much greener place in the future," said Matt Amesbury, a coauthor of the report and paleoclimate scientist at University of Exeter, in a press release.
Amesbury's team focused on moss banks to see at how the temperature-sensitive plants changed over time. They extracted cores from them—just as scientists do with ice and sediments. The moss banks grow in layers that can go back thousands of years, and the researchers can use radiocarbon dating to easily determine the age of a layer.
Over 150 years of data from three different sites, the team found three times in the last 50 years when moss growth was up to three times its normal rate. These accelerations in growth suggest that Antarctic ecosystems could be about to change dramatically.
In the southern Annamite Mountains of Vietnam, there are forests full of dwarf trees and rocks covered in moss, often swept through with a misty fog. They’re so evocative of a fantasy land that they’re sometimes called "elfin" forests.
It is in one of these that a team of scientists recently found a new species of horned mountain toad, which they named Ophryophyrne elfina—roughly, “elfish eyebrow toad.” Not only is the elf toad found in the elfin forests, it’s also tiny—just a little bit longer than an inch. That makes it the smallest known species in its genus.
The newly discovered creature also has little horns above its eyes. Up close, they may not be the cutest animals ever to sing through the forest, but when one is that tiny, it’s not hard to love.
Again and again, survival proves more fragile than we know. Dozens of frog and toad species are felled by a fungus. A porpoise that seems literally too cute to die is snared into near-oblivion. Bird flocks that once blocked out the sun disappear forever, shot down by an entire continent of gunmen.
This past week, the scourge of extinction crept somewhere novel: online. Two types of animal unique to the game and online community Second Life were rocked by a man-made catastrophe. Every single Ozimals bunny in the virtual world is now either sterile or asleep forever. Another species, the Puffling, is simply gone. Those who said "It can't happen here!"—read on.
If you're unfamiliar with it, Second Life is a massive multiplayer online role-playing game with no set objective—users choose or build avatars, and then basically do whatever they want. It's the largest user-generated digital world ever created and, like the physical world, it's full of wonders—cornfield art installations, neon marketplaces, massive shapeshifting sandcastles.
Like any world worth its salt, it also has a thriving bunny population—or at least it used to. Tons of subcompanies operate within Second Life, selling everything from avatar hairstyles to magic wands. As reporter Janine Hawkins explains over at Waypoint, one of these companies, Ozimals, trafficked specifically in two types of pets: bunnies that came in many textures and colors, and "Pufflings," perfectly round birdlike creatures with huge eyes.
As with real bunnies, these virtual rabbits could be bred to create bunny families, along with more color combinations. But unlike real bunnies—and to ensure that their parent company continued to reap a profit from their self-propagating creations—they needed to eat very specific, DRM-protected food sold only by Ozimals.
Sadly for the rabbits, that company has been roiled by legal troubles. Two former Ozimals employees allege that the company's current owner, who goes by the name Malkavyn Eldritch, does not have the right to use their bunny designs, due to an unauthorized transfer of company assets. Last Tuesday, Eldritch announced on his blog that, due to a legal threat from these former employees, he had been forced to shut down the servers that keep the Pufflings running and store the bunny food.
He laid out the consequences very clearly: "Pufflings will cease to function," he wrote. "Any bunny who is not Everlasting will be unable to eat and will hibernate within 72 hours." (Everlasting bunnies, which have been charmed by a special timepiece, don't need to eat—so they will stay alive indefinitely, although they will no longer be able to breed.)
Bunnies need to eat every few days, and the shutdown occurred on Wednesday, May 17—so most of Second Life's rabbits are in eternal hibernation at the time this story is being written. So far, the bunny-owners have been keeping it together. There's a support group going, as well as a fundraiser for Eldritch.
Maverick conservationists have come out of the woodwork as well, to provide interested users with bunny survival packages that include Everlasting timepieces. The situation may even create a Second Life version of Earth's de-extinction movement. In a comment, one user volunteered to "come up with a way of reviving the hibernated rabbits" by "emulating the database server." George Church would be proud.
Ozimals bunnies and Pufflings aren't "real." Their disappearance doesn't negate billions of years of gradual evolution, and their absence won't cause a cascade of unpredictable ecosystem troubles. To frame this as a truly vaquita-level event does a disservice to conservationists, not to mention the vaquitas themselves (or white rhinos or Bornean orangutans).
But for everyone who hoped that virtual life would be free of real life's troubles, let this be a warning: A lack of resources, and the inability of humans to work together to find a solution, can lead to extinction just about anywhere.
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.
At Monmouth Battlefield State Park, in Freehold, New Jersey, a group of volunteers has discovered a rare Revolutionary War artifact—a piece of canister shot with traces of human blood on it.
Last spring, on an otherwise routine dig, the Battlefield Restoration & Archaeological Volunteer Organization (BRAVO) decided to change its usual procedures. For more than 20 years the group has been working to excavate artifacts at this Revolutionary War battlefield, and in the past they have gone out with metal detectors, mapped the objects they found, washed the finds, and put them in storage or on display at the visitor’s center. But this time, Dan Sivilich, the organization’s president, asked the crew to try a different strategy. They donned surgical gloves, and instead of washing the artifacts, they extracted them from the earth and placed them directly in polyethylene bags.
Sivilich, the author of Musket Ball and Small Shot Identification, is an expert in Revolutionary War artillery, and if the crew found anything of interest, his plan was to send the artifacts off for protein residue analysis. When he examined the latest finds, he found two pieces of canister shot with intriguing patterns on them. Each one looked like it had been blasted through fabric. This could indicate that they had passed through a uniform and injured or killed a person.
As Sivilich explains, the velocity of a shot alone can leave this kind of mark after it hits its target. Canister shot was used by packing a case of musket balls into a cannon, and then firing the package as a ricochet—say, 75 yards in front of the enemy, so the case would rupture and throw the balls up into enemy ranks. This type of shot has a characteristic octagonal shape and, in this case, one piece held an impression that could have been caused by a fine weave, and the other had the impression of a coarse weave.
BRAVO sent the two pieces of shot, along with a control unlikely to have blood on it and a fourth artifact to the PaleoResearch Institute, a company that specializes in archaeological analysis. Sivilich had heard about testing for protein residue from Linda Scott Cummings, the institute’s founder and a longtime acquaintance from the world of battlefield archaeology. It had been used successfully to test Revolutionary War musket balls for blood—this would be the first test of artillery shot.
The artifact with the fine weave impression came back testing weakly positive for human blood. To conduct the test, the lab had to strip off the patina of lead carbonate that grows on the metal over time. By the time the shot was cleaned of its crust, the fabric impression was gone, so Sivilich now believes that the pattern may have come from the artifact’s proximity to a corn stalk.
In other words, it was in some ways pure luck that this piece of shot was even tested. But it remains the first to hold traces of human blood. The other find, with the deeper weave pattern, retained the impression after cleaning, but did not test positive for blood. Sivilich believes it may have gone through a soldier’s haversack and hit hard against a pewter plate or mug that he was carrying.
Right now the artifacts are in storage at the battlefield, but BRAVO hopes they’ll be put on display, perhaps next to another piece of shot that has the shape of a tooth clearly impressed into it. “It hit someone’s tooth and went out their head,” says Sivilich. “It’s one of the ones that people hate to look at but can’t look away.” It is likely that many of the 1,200 or so musket balls that BRAVO has found on the battlefield once held some trace of blood. But since those artifacts have already been handled and washed, it's impossible to know. But this newly discovered piece is one that they know, as surely as it's possible to know, hit a person—perhaps one of the 22 men who died on the battlefield and were buried there.
The mystery genre is in a boom. Eight of the top 10 fiction books on the New York Times bestseller list are either straight-ahead mysteries—detective stories, murder mysteries, propulsive crime novels—or thrillers heavily indebted to or intertwined with the mystery genre. Prestige TV shows are heavily tilted in favor of mysteries; there are two currently-running Sherlock Holmes adaptations, but Top of the Lake, How to Get Away With Murder, Mr. Robot, The OA, Pretty Little Liars, Big Little Lies, Broadchurch, True Detective, and about a billion others are littering our screens, not to mention the true crime trend.
Mysteries have always been around and always been popular, but they haven’t always been respected. Otto Penzler has had a significant hand in that transformation. He’s probably the most important figure in the history of mystery fiction who’s never written a mystery story.
You get to Otto Penzler’s New York office through a door in the Mysterious Bookshop, the world’s oldest and biggest bookstore focusing on mystery, crime fiction, espionage, and thrillers. The door is roped off with a big X made of yellow police tape reading CRIME SCENE DO NOT CROSS. Down a flight of stairs, his office is a low-ceilinged basement cube with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on all four sides, stocked with anthologies and first editions as well as a random sampling of mass-market hardcovers and paperbacks. If his office was a store by itself, it would be the second-best mystery bookstore in the world.
Penzler is the owner of the Mysterious Bookshop (founded 1979) as well as The Mysterious Press, a publishing imprint he founded in 1975, and mysteriouspress.com, his ebook publisher. He has published most of the greats of mystery and crime fiction: Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, James Ellroy, Ross Thomas, Patricia Highsmith, Ross Macdonald, Ed McBain. Any of the major authors he hasn’t published are probably at least good friends of his. (In conversation, Robert B. Parker is “Bob” and Lawrence Block is “Larry.”) He has a trim white beard and a shock of white hair, and speaks with the confidence and enthusiasm of someone who works entirely too many hours for his age at a job he wouldn’t trade. He is not the least bit shy about criticizing authors he thinks are bad; he referred to both Thomas Pynchon and Isabel Allende as “dreadful!” in our conversation. “Otto is gentlemanly, courtly, and unfailingly gracious—but, when necessary, he can be strongly assertive,” writes author Joyce Carol Oates in an email. “I do have a story or two about Otto but don’t think it would be discreet to tell them….”
The Mysterious Bookshop itself was first located on 56th Street in Manhattan, in a building Penzler owned because it was cheaper to buy. His half of the building’s cost, in 1978, was $2,000. “It was a different New York then,” says Penzler. Today the store is down in Tribeca, on a block that doesn’t suggest anything important in the literary world. It’s next to a Le Pain Quotidien and a few doors down from a 7-Eleven.
Inside, every square inch of walls leading up to what must be 20-foot ceilings are packed with any book in which someone violently dies. There is an entire section for Sherlock Holmes books, including the many spinoffs written by dozens of authors. (The copyright on the character expired in 2014, meaning anyone can now write stories involving the characters created by Arthur Conan Doyle without paying a fee.) There are copies of long-defunct detective magazines like Black Mask. There is an entire section for what Penzler calls bibliomysteries—mystery books involving mysterious books. Murdered librarians, valuable manuscripts, that kind of thing.
The bookstore is not twee. There are no props, aside from the caution tape; no pranks, no cute designs or artworks. This is a temple to the noble mystery, a place where people who can name all of Donald E. Westlake’s pseudonyms talk about one of the most enduring genres in the history of literature. For a long time, “enduring” was about as nice as critics wanted to be to the mystery genre. Penzler’s life goal has been to change that.
Otto Penzler was born in Germany to a German-American mother and a German father. When his father passed away, when Otto was only five years old, he and his mother moved to the Bronx. His first mystery, as was the case for many mystery fans, was a Sherlock Holmes story. His was “The Red-Headed League.” (A man with flaming red hair comes to see Holmes. He says that he was employed for a week or so by something called “The Red-Headed League,” in which he was paid suspiciously well to sit in an office and copy the encyclopedia. One day, he goes to work, and finds that the office is closed and nobody has any idea what the Red-Headed League is, was, or does.)
But Penzler set mysteries aside, went to the University of Michigan, and studied English literature. “I was reading what you read when you were an English major. Russian novelists and James Joyce and poetry of all sorts, including difficult people like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot,” he says. Having played baseball and handball through high school and college, when Penzler came back to New York, he started writing for local newspapers about sports, especially boxing. “I wanted to keep reading, but I didn't want to hurt my head anymore,” he says. “So I thought mysteries, I'll read some mysteries.”
Penzler started working his way through the genre from essentially its modern start: Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, mannered British writers like that. “And then I discovered Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett,” he says. “And I suddenly realized, this is literature. It's not just puzzles, it's not just telling a nice story. This is every bit as serious as Fitzgerald and Hemingway and the other great 20th-century writers.”
By the 1960s, when Penzler started getting heavily into mysteries, the genre was in a funk. Starting in the 1910s and 1920s, pulp magazines exploded in popularity. The pulps—so named because their paper was made of cheap, low-quality wood pulp—pumped out, with little regard for quality, thousands of issues. Many, like Dime Detective, True Detective, Complete Detective, and dozens more, focused on private eye and crime fiction. “And look, 90 percent of it was crap, there's no getting around it,” says Penzler. “They were writing as fast as they could for a penny a word. And it gave a bad name to pulp fiction.”
The stories were lurid, sensational, often poorly written. To be sure, those magazines sometimes published great authors, but it seems as if that was by accident. Mystery writers at that time wrote hundreds, sometimes thousands, of stories, basically anything they could do to make a dollar. Some of my own favorite writers, Donald E. Westlake and Lawrence Block, have each written several hundred books under several different names, ranging from their best-known mysteries to weird sci-fi one-offs and a pretty substantial catalog of soft-core porn.
Partly because mystery work was seen for so long as bottom-of-the-barrel entertainment, there’s been a tendency for writers to be less precious about their work; you rarely see a mystery author slave for a decade on a single novel. “One of the things I really like about mystery writers is they don't mind talking about money,” says Thomas H. Cook, one of Penzler’s favorite authors (and also the best man at Penzler’s wedding). “It's okay to make a good living, it's not a sign that you've betrayed all of God's many gifts if you try to actually make a dollar doing this.”
And then 1922 came around. Stephen King’s theory, which Penzler quite likes, is that the publication of Joyce’s Ulysses and Eliot’s The Wasteland sparked a whole new separation of highbrow and lowbrow fiction. “Both are unreadable and incomprehensible,” says Penzler. “So now critics had a role to play; they could tell you what this book was all about, they could explain it.”
Chandler, Hammett, and Cain all published their best novels in the 1930s, but critics ignored them; they were beach novels, unserious novels, guilty pleasures. They weren’t taught in literature classes. That had serious effects on the marketing of the books that would come in the following decades: mystery books from as late as the 1970s are complete garbage as physical objects. Printed on the cheapest, lousiest paper; bound with the worst glue; cover art commissioned by someone’s nephew at best. They were seen as disposable.
In the 1970s, Penzler was sort of a mystery groupie. He hung out at the giant clump of bookstores that made up New York’s 4th Avenue “Book Row.” (Those bookstores, apart from The Strand, are all gone now.) He became known in the community as someone with a real passion for this stuff, and eventually was asked to help write The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, a huge reference book for the history of crime fiction up to that point. The book did well and got Penzler even further into the publishing world, and in 1975 founded The Mysterious Press, a publishing house dedicated to proving that mysteries can be and should be considered as important as any literary fiction.
The Mysterious Press published mysteries in higher-quality packaging than they’d ever seen before. Penzler used expensive acid-free paper, then a new creation, to ensure the longevity of his books. Before acid-free paper, the natural acids in the wood pulp would naturally begin to eat away at the paper after time; the cheap pulp novels would literally self-destruct. Penzler used a more expensive woven pattern in his paper, which he says gives it a superior look and feel, and decided to sew his bindings rather than glue them. He hired top artists to create the covers for his books.
None of this was totally unheard of in publishing in the late 1970s, but it was completely new for what until then had been considered toilet literature. Penzler simply treated his books the way he thought they should be treated: he did limited editions, signed copies, slip covers, the whole thing. “It has been a professional goal for 40 years to elevate this genre,” he says.
And then around 1980 things started changing. Mystery and crime fiction had, until then, had a firm gender divide. There were male writers writing for men, like Robert Ludlum, John D. MacDonald, and Ed McBain, and female writers writing for women, like Ellis Peters and Charlotte MacLeod. The male writers, following Chandler’s lead, wrote about tough, anachronistic men, and sexy women with little to differentiate them. The female writers were in the vein of Agatha Christie, writing mannered mysteries largely set in small towns and communities.
Then things started overlapping. Sue Grafton and Sara Paretsky wrote hard-boiled, tough mysteries featuring female protagonists. Robert B. Parker’s Spenser series, probably the most popular private-eye series of the 1980s and 1990s, featured a tough male detective with a vitally important sensitive side. At least as important was Spenser’s significant other, a complex and independent Cambridge psychiatrist named Susan Silverman.
The new shades of mysteries meant that women, long underserved in the genre, started flocking to it. Today many of the most successful and acclaimed mystery writers, from Tana French to Gillian Flynn to Patricia Highsmith to Paula Hawkins, are women.
Once that change began and mysteries started dominating the bestseller lists, literary critics and authors seemed to feel free to embrace what had always been popular and entertaining. In the past 10 years, there’s been an influx of literary fiction authors, like Michael Chabon, Isabel Allende, and Thomas Pynchon, trying their hand at mysteries. (Of Pynchon’s surf-drug noir Inherent Vice, Penzler says: “It’s almost unreadable. But I always found him unreadable, so I wasn't surprised. And at least he's trying.”)
How much effect Penzler had on the genre, and how much of its change over the decades simply ran parallel with his work, is hard to tell. “Otto has been a beacon of encouragement and enthusiasm for countless writers,” says Joyce Carol Oates, who contributed a short mystery to Mysterious Press’s bibliomystery series. “It is an honor to be included in his anthologies and to appear at the Mysterious Bookshop. His presence has become legendary.”
And as the mystery genre continues to expand and gain new readers and viewers, everyone from Otto to academics to authors themselves, are thrilled, and a little proud. What makes mysteries good, and endlessly appealing, can’t die the way westerns did.
“Most people tend to be conservative,” he said. “I'm not talking about politics now, I'm talking about having a social structure that they understand and fit into and are comfortable with. And a mystery novel, there's a social fabric, whether it's a village, a group of friends, employees of a hotel, whatever it is, there's a community of some size, and a murder—other crimes too, but usually a murder—rips that social fabric. And people like to see it be put back together, be mended.” That impulse isn’t going anywhere.
It was summertime when the Ksudach volcano erupted on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia's Far East 7,000 years ago. The violent explosion propelled its ash high into the atmosphere, where it drifted over North America before landing 3,100 miles away on the surface of Lake Hajaren in Svalbard, Norway, and settling to the bottom. Just enough remains for scientists to find some of this ash in a sediment core from the lake. It's not much, but it is helping geologists reassess just how far volcanic ash can travel, as well as piece together climate conditions when Ksudach erupted, according to a recent report.
"In the end, we found and analyzed six particles with less than half the width of a human hair," said Willem van der Bilt, a coauthor of the report and a researcher at the University of Bergen in Norway, in a press release. Those six particles were found in a sediment core pulled from the middle of Lake Hajaren, separated out, and then chemically analyzed. Based on where they found the particles in the core, van der Bilt's team guessed they were roughly 7,000 years old, but did not know yet which volcano they had come from.
"Like human DNA, the composition of volcanic ash is unique. Geochemical analysis help us fingerprint this signature and match it with an eruption," said van der Bilt. The team had a few eruptions in mind, including Mount Mazama, the volcano that formed Crater Lake in Oregon, or the Kikai volcano in Japan. But the Svalbard ash was virtually identical to ash from Ksudach's eruption around that time. That makes it the farthest-traveled ash so far known.
Weather patterns, magma composition, and the direction of the eruption can all affect where a volcano's ash ends up. But van der Bilt didn't expect what they found to be of Russian origin. "This study really highlights the need to look beyond the usual suspects in this line of research," he said. When it comes to ash, think globally.
Every day humanity inches closer to the possibility of an AI-driven robot apocalypse. Now artificially intelligent machines have made one more step towards superiority over nature by creating new sounds that no one has ever heard before.
As Wired reports, members of Google Magenta, the team of researchers using Google Brain to try to create AI systems that will make art, have trained their system to create new sounds based on the mathematical makeup of preexisting sounds. Called NSynth, the program breaks down the sound of any one of a thousand traditional instruments, and melds them to create sounds that no human has ever heard.
According to the researchers, this is much more than just layering two tones on top of one another. NSynth actually turns the sounds into algorithms and adjusts them to make them fit together into one aggregate sound.
Whether it’s a hybrid of a flute and a bass guitar, or a flugelhorn and a glockenspiel, the resulting noise would be difficult or impossible for a human to reproduce. Although whether that qualifies as art is in ears of the behearer.
A dusty white bag is up for auction at Sotheby's in July, and it's expected to sell for around $4 million. The dust's origins put that price tag in perspective: It comes from the moon. Specifically, the dust was left behind after Neil Armstrong used it to carry moon rocks collected during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. Nancy Lee Carlson paid $995 the bag in 2015 and is likely to get quite the return on her investment.
Carlson's payday has not been without its obstacles, though. After she bought the bag at a government auction, she sent it to NASA so they could verify that it really contains moon dust from the mission. NASA confirmed the origin of the bag and dust, but they also claimed ownership and refused to return it to Carlson.
Even after it returned from the moon, the bag has had quite the journey on Earth. NASA originally owned the bag, but it disappeared from a Kansas space museum in the early 2000s. The director of that museum, Max Ary, was eventually convicted of theft, and the federal government allowed the sale of a few of the stolen artifacts to pay for his restitution. The bag was mistaken for one that had been on Apollo 17 and ended up in the auction where Carlson purchased it.
Carlson sued to get the bag back, and came out on top after a year of fighting in court. Now it's going on the auction block again, on the 48th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing. Only NASA is allowed to own parts of the moon, so the chance to buy the bag, and more importantly the tiny flecks of moon dust inside, is a unique opportunity.
In the early 1880s, the mapmaker Francis Galton began to imagine a series of ideal trips. Each started in his home city, London, but from there they ranged far afield—to Greenland, or Morocco, or the distant reaches of the Pacific. By figuring out how long each of these trips would take, and drawing lines grouping those destinations that could be reached in an equal amount of time, he figured he could provide a service to travelers, sailors, and those who simply wanted to know how long it would take their mail to get someplace.
Galton's calculations presumed smooth sailing all the way: "I assume the seasons to be favorable, that immunity has been obtained from political obstructions, and that friends on the spot have made preparations to avoid delay," he wrote. For each trip, he consulted steamer timetables, estimated package-shipping times, and personal correspondence from friends at the Post Office. He then sorted the destinations into different color groupings—everywhere one could get to between ten and 20 days was yellow, for example, while everything that took more than 40 days to reach was brown.
When he was done, he'd come up with a splashy yet practical one-look travel guide: the first example of what he called an "Isochronic Passage Chart."
At the time Galton released his map, isotherms and isobars—lines that group areas exhibiting equal temperature or atmospheric pressure—were already a well-established part of weather mapping. The applications of Galton's concept to travel and postal delivery times caught on quickly. Mapmakers across Europe began coming out with their own isochrone maps, based in different cities and pitched at different scales.
Many of these maps look like the insides of jawbreaker candies: a ribbon of color at a continent's coast is quickly replaced with another, and then another, as travel becomes more difficult the further inland one goes.
The above 1889 map, by J.G. Bartholomew, is also centered on London but superimposed on an equal-area projection.
Now compare it to Bartholomew's 1914 update, below, which shows a rapid improvement in travel times, at least in certain places—parts of Japan are now accessible within 20 days, and the pink-colored "five to ten days" category, which previously barely stretched to New York, now goes all the way past Chicago. (The big difference, as Simon Willis explains in The Economist, is the sudden proliferation of railroads.)
In each of the London-centric maps, Australia remains far out in the blue zone, perpetually 40-plus days away. But make it there, and you'd find they were using isochrone maps of their own. One, from the early 20th century, shows how the railroads cut down travel time in and out of Melbourne.
The map's "Minimum Railway and Tramway Time Zones" are measured in minutes, not hours, and the stations themselves are warm-colored hotspots in the middle of cooler, slower zones.
Just as contemporary readers used these maps to imagine future trips, we can use them to travel back in time—to think about what journeys looked like before there were quite so many transportation options available.
Map Monday highlights interesting and unusual cartographic pursuits from around the world and through time. Read more Map Monday posts.
On October 9, 1989, broadcasts around the world were buzzing with news heralding the end of the Soviet Union. Protests had broken out in East Germany, and over the following weeks they crescendoed with the fall of the Berlin Wall. After the evening news on Soviet television ended that night, however, the screen showed a close-up of a man’s face. He spoke in soothing tones as he gazed through the camera into the eyes of the mass audience on the other side of the screen.
“Relax,” he told them. “Let your thoughts wander free.”
This was Anatoly Mikhailovich Kashpirovsky, who has been described as a faith healer, “perestroika’s chief magician,” and the spiritual heir to Rasputin. Over the course of a few weeks in 1989, he conducted six televised séances (as these sessions were called, though Kashpirovsky was reaching out to the minds of his live audience, rather than the spirits of the dead). They were broadcast across the Soviet Union, and he attempted, essentially, to hypnotize an entire country. Ostensibly, Kashpirovsky was there to remotely heal his audience of physical ills, but he was also serving as a distraction from the news filtering in from the outside and the clues that the Soviet Union was crumbling.
“It seemed the population was slowly waking up from a kind of trance,” writes media theorist Wladimir Velminski, of Bauhaus University Weimar, in his book Homo Sovieticus, released in translation earlier this year. “Kashpirovksy’s transmission represents the last effort of Soviet power to initiate the citizenry into the mysteries of the communist apparatus that was in the course of disappearing." Kashpirovksy’s job, whether he knew it or not, was to keep the populace from freaking out about the end of their world.
Kashpirovsky was born in Ukraine in 1939, and he trained in clinical psychotherapy, which he practiced for 25 years. In 1987 he started practicing his craft on the country’s Olympic weightlifting team, which dominated the competition in the 1988 Summer Olympics, with six gold medals and two silvers. In Russia, there had been a long tradition of looking for ways to mold physical performance through psychological means—it’s one of the reasons that Michael Murphy, a founder of the vibey, spiritual retreat–focused Esalen Institute, started traveling to the Soviet Union in the 1970s, for instance. Murphy was interested psychic and transcendent experiences in sports, and people in the Soviet Union were more willing than Americans to entertain the power of psychic phenomena. As Murphy puts it, “You scratch a Russian, and you find a mystic.”
Kashpirovsky’s mental work with the weightlifting team brought him some renown, and in 1988 he became the head of the Republican Center of Psychotherapy in Kiev and started appearing on television. In these televised sessions, he attempted to demonstrate how the power of the mind can help people through physical trauma. In a series of televised séances, he attempted to stop millions of children from bedwetting, a feat he claimed to have accomplished. He also performed “remote psychological anaesthetization” on women undergoing surgery. Through the television, he talked to them during the procedure, and he claimed he was able to help them feel no pain.
In the fall of 1989 Kashpirovsky’s ministrations were broadcast to a much wider audience—across the Soviet Union and in Israel, Czechoslovakia, and Scandinavia. In the first of his six Channel One sessions, he asked everyone watching to have a container of water handy to absorb the healing vibrations Kashpirovsky was sending out.
“You can leave your eyes open for a while,” he said. “Have a look at your surroundings. There should be no pointed objects, and no fire. Your posture should be stable ... Rid your mind of everything. Get rid of all those goals and ambitions. Everyone, close your eyes. No matter what emotional reaction you have, don’t suppress them. And you will have different kinds of emotional reaction.”
Like Kashpirovsky’s earlier work, these séances were meant to heal the ailments of the people watching (as long as they weren’t too serious—Kashpirovsky warned anyone with epilepsy to turn off the television). But why was he given this massive platform of 300 million viewers to begin with?
Observers and scholars of the falling Soviet state believe this attempt at mass hypnosis wasn’t about healing so much as distraction. The head of Soviet television at the time believed that the medium was primarily a salve for an anxious population, and as Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal writes in The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, “There are indications that the Communist Party officials who ran state television hoped that Kashpirovsky’s teleséances would serve as a ‘grand diversion,’ to distract people’s attention from the plummeting economy and need the talk of an imminent apocalypse or a new Time of Troubles.”
To some extent, it worked. “The streets would empty whenever Kashpirvosky came on,” one reporter told The Guardian.“Everything was taken at face value. So if state TV presented him as possessing these incredible powers, most people believed it." In fact, he still maintains a following today and continues to give performances and speeches.
“Your silence is like a pause, a pause without words. Words don’t matter. They’re not involved in this,” Kashpirovsky told his audience. “It’s hard to understand, because all their lives people have been taught to try and understand. Forget everything … listen to the music … don’t be afraid of the process that’s starting within you.”
At the end of the broadcast, he told them to drink the water they had prepared earlier, and that it would help them continue to feel the effects of the work he’d done until the next broadcast. The state, Velminski writes, might have had ever higher hopes for its effects, that “drinking it would revive the unconscious of the land, which had fallen ill, and install the aims of communism in the popular mind yet again."
A construction crew renovating basement offices in the Rhode Island State House was peeling back 1970s paneling from the walls when they came across a giant, black steel door, the Providence Journal reports.
The door looks to be connected to some sort of vault. It’s secured with an old combination lock—but no one knows the code. The only clue to the vault’s purpose or possible contents is what is written on the door: “State Returning Board.”
This board was created in 1901 to oversee vote counts, and it became the Board of Vote Tabulation in 1935. It’s unclear how long the vault has been locked and unused. Perhaps it was covered up in the 1970s because no one knew how to unlock it then, either.
For now, there are no plans to force the vault open. That would be expensive, and in state government anything that costs as much as taking a heavy, secure door off its hinges needs special approval.
— ChicagoBotanicGarden (@chicagobotanic) May 22, 2017
To put it slightly more politely, the Chicago Botanic Garden (CBG) has moved two ready-to-bloom corpse flowers out from the production greenhouses and into the Semitropical Greenhouse, where they are now on display.
Corpse flowers, of course, are the famously odoriferous celebrity plants that—the past few years especially—have caused greenhouse sensations everywhere from London to New York. Native to the island of Sumatra, they spend much of their lives cycling between dormancy and a leafy period. Once every half-decade or so, though, they go through a flower cycle, during which they grow a human-sized, extremely rank bloom.
Botanic gardens around the world began collecting corpse flowers in the early 2000s as part of an effort to preserve the species, which is under threat from habitat destruction. These two, named Java and Sumatra, came from the same parent plant, which was propagated at the University of California, Berkeley, but they're easily distinguished. Java is tall and lean—nearly 52 inches tall and 34 inches wide, reports DNAInfo—while Sumatra is squat and powerful, at 45 inches tall and 40 inches wide.
"This is one of a few times that two corpse flowers in their bloom cycles have gone on public display at the same time," the CBG writes in their official and very informative Corpse Flower FAQ. The CBG has a lot riding on the twins. Back in the summer of 2015, the garden's then-prized corpse flower, Spike, failed to bloom at all, despite the cheers of tens of thousands of visitors.
Although they have since had two successfully smelly blooms—Alice, in September 2015, and Sprout, in April 2016—the memory of Spike's refusal has everyone on edge. "Whether the plants bloom, or when they bloom, is always an open question," the CBG writes. (If you want to stay in the know, you can sign up for email bloom alerts or track #CBGTitanTwins on Twitter.)
Regardless of what happens, the CBG has twelve more corpse flowers in the production greenhouses, waiting for their time in the spotlight. Fear not, Chicago: Your city will stink for years to come.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
Is something that seems like an obvious idea always quite so obvious?
Consider the alphabet block toy. To look at an alphabet block in the modern day suggests perhaps the most basic, general use for a wooden cube that one can find.
But this incredibly basic form of edutainment has a history and a reason for its existence and mass popularity. And it starts with dice—the similarly cube-shaped objects that, also similarly, convey different information on each side.
Dice, of course, are one of the oldest forms of gaming on the planet, with roots in ancient Egypt and ancient Greece, along with associations with the earliest board games, which date back to 5000 B.C.
Alphabet blocks, on the other hand, are a somewhat more recent invention, first conceptualized in 16th and 17th centuries. English philosopher John Locke is closely associated with the popularity of the wooden alphabet block, based on his 1693 work Some Thoughts Concerning Education, which briefly makes mention of the general concept behind alphabet blocks.
“There may be dice, and play-things, with the letters on them to teach children the alphabet by playing; and twenty other ways may be found, suitable to their particular tempers, to make this kind of learning a sport to them,” he wrote.
Locke, however, was not the first person to make the case for blocks to be used in this way—if anything, he simply popularized them. The person who perhaps deserves credit for formulating the concept is Sir Hugh Plat, the English writer who wrote of the idea in a 1594 book of inventions titled The Jewell House of Art and Nature.
The book is full of interesting inventions and discoveries by Plat, including a form of portable ink designed to be carried around in a powder form, a method of catching pigeons, a way to defend a horse from flies, and a cheap way to build a wooden bridge.
It also, most interestingly, includes an illustrated example of what alphabet blocks should look like, along with a basic description of their use case and their point of inspiration.
“Cause 4 large dice of bone or wood to be made, and upon every square, one of the small letters of the cross row to be graven, but in some bigger shape, and the child using to play much with them, and being always told what letter chanceth, will soon gain his Alphabet, as it were by the way of sport and pastime,” Plat wrote.
He added that the idea was also inspired by early teaching techniques.
“I have heard of a pair of cards whereon most of the principal Grammer rules have been printed, and the School-Master hath found good sport thereat with his schollers,” he explained.
Plat was ahead of the curve on this concept in the Elizabethan era, and he hasn’t received very much of the credit into the modern day. In fact, one of the few to give Prat credit for his work throughout history is the 19th century historian Alice Morse Earle, who wrote of Locke’s influence on the alphabet block in her book Child Life in Colonial Days, but properly gave Prat his credit for the idea.
Earle explained, while quoting a series of letters, how General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, later a military leader in the Revolutionary War, learned the alphabet as a result of the wooden blocks he was given.
“He will soon be the best scholar, for he can tell his letters in any books without hesitation, and begins to spell before he is two years old,” Pinckney’s mother, Eliza, wrote in a letter to her sister.
The blocks apparently did the trick.
Certainly, these early endeavors helped forge the existence of the alphabet block. But someone had to make a market for its wide use by young children around the globe.
Nobody was more responsible for that than the 19th-century German educator Friedrich Wilhelm August Fröbel.
In the final years of his life, Fröbel rededicated himself to hands-on education, focusing on young children, and in 1837, opened an activity-driven institute for children in the village of Bad Blankenburg.
By 1840, he had changed the name of the institute to Kindergarten (or “children’s garden”). There he perfected his early-childhood education techniques, which focused on the concepts of activity-driven play. He wasn’t the first person to think in this direction, but he was perhaps the most influential.
To help with this, Fröbel designed a series of educational toys he called “gifts,” a series of ever-more-complex materials designed to spark creativity among children. (They’re still sold today.)
“They are a coherent system, starting at each stage from the simplest activity and progressing to the most diverse and complex manifestations of it,” Fröbel explained in his writings. “The purpose of each one of them is to instruct human beings so that they may progress as individuals and members of humanity is all its various relationships.”
Many of Fröbel’s gifts took the form of square or rectangular blocks that worked together in a complex system, introducing forms of spatial play over time. It’s not hard to see the concepts of the modern toy industry in the gifts that Fröbel created.
(Nor is it hard to see how this might inspire some of our greatest architectural thinkers. Frank Lloyd Wright, famously, claimed inspiration from Fröbel’s gifts.)
But while Fröbel set the groundwork and his Kindergarten idea started to catch on globally not long after his 1852 passing, it was an American lithographer and board game manufacturer who would help carry the torch in the United States. That man’s name was Milton Bradley.
In 1870, Bradley’s namesake company came out with a set of building blocks based on Fröbel’s work called Bradley’s Original Kindergarten Alphabet and Building Blocks. The blocks were based on Fröbel’s sixth gift, which included a variety of basic geometric shapes. Bradley, however, added the additional wrinkle of letters and numbers.
“What probably seemed like an insignificant alteration to Bradley radically changed the purpose of the blocks, turning them into a didactic teaching device rather than a symbolic play material,” author Barbara Beatty explained.
Beatty noted that the growth of early education, a space inspired by Fröbel’s work, had created a quickly expanding commercial toy industry, and that industry didn’t necessarily understand the educational fundamentals of the educators that made the space viable.
“Toy manufacturers were usually more interested in selling their wares than in observing the finer points of pedagogical correctness,” she noted.
Perhaps, but they nonetheless played an important role in mainstreaming Fröbel’s ideas.
Bradley wasn’t alone in mass-marketing wooden blocks for educational purposes in the late 19th century.
“The blocks being thus constructed, and reference being had to the numerals placed thereon and the printed key,” Hill’s patent stated. “it will be found that words can be readily spelled by combining the requisite number of blocks and those words in which the same letter occurs more than once, which was not possible with the style of blocks now in use.”
The set of 20 cube blocks was big enough to spell some fairly lengthy words (as long as you had the right letters).
Although her block system probably has more in common with Fröbel’s approach than the cube-shaped alphabet block, she is often credited with the invention of the alphabet block. That’s perhaps a step too far, considering all the prior art, but she definitely deserves credit for expanding the potential of teaching the alphabet using wooden blocks.
If there’s a lesson to be taken from this—besides the ABCs, of course—it’s that it’s hard to figure out who was first with an idea or an invention, and who’s getting the right amount of credit.
References to Plat’s role in the alphabet block are rare; references to Locke’s role are common. (And, to be fair, it’s always possible Plat might have been inspired by someone else.) When someone has an idea as seemingly basic as putting a bunch of letters on a block of wood, or making a die large enough so that it’s the perfect size for a child to hold, or philosophically making the case for the use of such an object by children, these ideas add onto one another and turn a small idea into a much larger one.
Or to put it in a punnier way: A lot of building blocks were involved.
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.
From the I-Didn’t-Know-That-Was-Illegal File comes news that customs agents at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport recently intercepted a stash of contraband birds' nests.
According to a press release issued by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 63 pieces of illicit nest were discovered in a couple of jars hidden among an unidentified passenger’s personal items. Arrayed like a captured kilo of cocaine in a press photo, the crusty bits of birds' nest almost look like they might be some kind of weird drug. But they’re actually highly valued as a culinary ingredient.
The nests, made by small birds known as swiftlets, are used to make bird's nest soup, a delicacy in Chinese cuisine. Made of solidified bird saliva, the nests are high in nutritional value and extremely expensive. But they also carry the risk of spreading diseases such as Avian Flu, and thus are prohibited from entering the United States.
The passenger, who was coming from Vietnam, was fined $300 dollars for failure to declare the nests, and they were subsequently destroyed. No soup for you.
Earlier this month, workers at Washington state's Hanford Site, the most radioactively contaminated place in the United States, noticed that a section of underground tunnel at the facility had collapsed, creating a large hole roughly 20 feet across. The discovery led to a small crisis for the workers, who are tasked with clean-up and demolition at Hanford. One worker was subsequently found to have radioactive material on their clothing, sparking calls for an investigation into any further contamination from the incident.
This sort of problem is typical at the Cold War-era Hanford Site, once the source of most of America’s plutonium. Today, Hanford is an environmental minefield that continues to create unique problems for the people trying to clean it up.
“We do learn things on the fly, and sometimes we have to stop and take a look at it and readjust accordingly,” says Mark Heeter, a public affairs specialist with the U.S. Department of Energy's Richland Operations Office. There just isn’t a guidebook on how to safely demolish the site, so the project often has to stop and reassess when, say, a tunnel full of radioactive waste suddenly opens up. “We’re at the end of this 20-year effort to get this complex of buildings taken down,” says Heeter.
The Hanford Site was first established in 1943, as part of the Manhattan Project. The huge site, covering some 580 square miles of land, was selected for its remote location and its proximity to the Columbia River, which could be used to provide power and cooling. Hanford would end up producing about two-thirds of the plutonium used in America’s nuclear stockpile, including the material used in the Trinity nuclear weapons tests, and in Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki at the end World War II. During the Cold War, the site continued to grow, adding a number of nuclear reactors and plutonium processing facilities. By the time parts of the sprawling facility were beginning to be decommissioned in the 1960s, it consisted of thousands of buildings.
At the heart of the site, and its complicated demolition, is the Plutonium Finishing Plant, where fissile material was extracted, refined, and prepared for use. This central complex of four main buildings, plus dozens of smaller support structures, was also the site of one of the most infamous incidents in Hanford’s history.
In August of 1976, a technician named Harold R. McCluskey was working with a byproduct of plutonium known as americium when a chemical reaction occurred, exploding the glove box he was working in and peppering McCluskey with shards of glass, metal, and radioactive material. Doctors would eventually determine that McCluskey had been exposed to some 500 times the safe levels of radiation, a level of exposure no human being had ever before survived. He was quickly placed into isolation, cleaned, and treated. Miraculously, the radiation in McCluskey’s body eventually dissipated to safe levels, but until his death in 1987, he was known as the “Atomic Man,” and often had to convince people that it was safe to be around him.
After the explosion, the Americium Recovery Facility was closed and renamed the “McCluskey Room.” As one of the most iconic and dangerous spaces on the Hanford Site, it makes a great case study in the challenges inherent in demolition and clean-up efforts across the facility.
“It was highly contaminated, and plutonium is a flighty material," says Heeter. "The greatest threat it poses is through airborne contamination.” That means just entering the McCluskey Room required every person to be outfitted in full radiation suits. According to Heeter, workers had to first remove all of the contaminated equipment from the facility, including huge metal glove boxes like the one that exploded on McCluskey. Then they had to spray a special kind of fixative that helped bond the radioactive material to the surfaces. Only after all of these precautions were in place could the actual demolition begin.
Thanks to this constant need to make things as safe as possible for workers, work at the Hanford Site is anything but speedy. Despite having been closed since 1976, the McCluskey Room wasn't fully demolished until March of 2017. “Worker innovation and involvement was key to the deactivation, decontamination, decommissioning, and demolition of the McCluskey Room,” says Heeter.
And as the recent tunnel collapse shows, there are still years of work ahead. There are countless issues that continue to plague the clean-up effort. Chief among them are the 56 million gallons of highly toxic nuclear waste held in underground storage tanks at the site. These aging and corroding tanks have sprung leaks on multiple occasions, contaminating soil and groundwater in the area. The current plan is to create a waste disposal center where liquid radioactive material can be vitrified into a solid and buried in a permanent grave. But this facility has yet to be constructed.
Still, there are signs of progress. As Heeter says, in its broadest terms, the clean-up effort is divided into three main sections. The outlying area, called the River Corridor, has already been declared clean. Then there's the Central Plateau, a 75 square-mile area built at a higher elevation where most of the plutonium was manufactured. Finally there is the Inner Area. This 10 square-mile area inside the Central Plateau is where contamination is the worst, and where clean-up work will continue for the long term. “It’s sort-of concentric circles, and we’re working our way inward,” says Heeter.
Eventually, as more and more of the land is deemed safe, it will ideally be returned to local governance, or be transformed into some kind of protected area. “The goal is to provide as much access as possible,” says Heeter. In 2015, the site was identified as part of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park, and tours of certain parts of it are already available.
As work continues, clean-up technicians at the Hanford Site continue to learn. Heeter says that with the demolition of the McCluskey Room, workers have been able to develop a number of techniques that they will be able to use to empty and deconstruct other highly contaminated parts of the Plutonium Finishing Plant. Clean up of what has been called “America’s Chernobyl” is far from over, and the dangers involved are anything but predictable, but each new crisis is another chance to learn about the consequences of our nuclear heritage.
With her fleshy buttocks and small, rounded breasts, Venus—de Milo, de Medici, and Botticelli's version—epitomizes the idealized female form found in Classical, Hellenistic, and Neoclassical Art as well as art made during the Renaissance. For 2,000 years she has been a ubiquitous figure in the canon of Western art, yet despite art historians poring over nearly every inch of her curves, a few small parts of her body have been sorely neglected: her second toes, which stick out like sore thumbs past her shorter big toes.
If it seems ridiculous to contemplate a couple of oddly aligned long toes, it’s worth wondering why so many artists in ancient Greece sculpted them to have uneven proportions in the first place. The magnificent bronze sculpture of the Boxer at Rest and the marble Diana of Versailles, which is a Roman copy of the Greek original, each has them, as does the Barberini Faun, a masterpiece most often recognized for the satyr’s seductive pose and brazenly exposed genitalia than for his long second toes.
A couple thousand years earlier, artists in ancient Egypt sculpted toes that tapered gracefully down in size from the big toe to the pinky. Much like the Great Pyramids, where everything was measured and precise, even these small body parts appear—at least to our modern eyes—harmonious and evenly spaced.
While styles change over time, depicting a longer second toe as the ideal in Classical art might not have been a fluke, and in fact, the phenomenon may have been due to the interest of the Golden Ratio by mathematicians in ancient Greece. The Golden Ratio, which appears in geometric patterns in nature such as some of the spirals in seashells and in leaves, was also used by engineers in ancient Egypt, but the first written account of it was by the Greek mathematician, Euclid, and it was during the Classical era when it gained popularity among people within many professions. Later, the proportions Euclid described, which were often considered both divine in their provenance and also aesthetically pleasing, may have inspired the Roman engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio to write about what he considered to be the perfect proportions of humans in his book, The Departments of Architecture:
Just so the parts of Temples should correspond with each other, and with the whole. The navel is naturally placed in the centre of the human body, and, if in a man lying with his face upward, and his hands and feet extended, from his navel as the centre, a circle be described, it will touch his fingers and toes. It is not alone by a circle, that the human body is thus circumscribed, as may be seen by placing it within a square. For measuring from the feet to the crown of the head, and then across the arms fully extended, we find the latter measure equal to the former; so that lines at right angles to each other, enclosing the figure, will form a square.
Although Vitruvius didn’t discuss which fingers and toes are the ones that would touch the circle or the square, 1,500 years later, Leonardo da Vinci drew his famous Vitruvian Man—whose long second toes align perfectly with the circle drawn around him. Some art historians believe da Vinci was inspired by the Golden Ratio, but others have demonstrated that while the numbers are very close, the equations don’t exactly match.
At the beginning of the 20th century, an American orthopedic surgeon named Dudley Morton named the phenomenon of having a longer second toe “Morton’s Toe.” Morton believed that this toe, which he also called Metatarsus atavicus, was an atavism similar to color blindness, human tails, and supernumerary nipples, and that it recalled a trait our pre-human ancestors once expressed so that they could more easily swing from trees.
While swinging from trees might sound delightful, Morton’s Toe can cause a slew of uncomfortable orthopedic problems such as bunions and hammertoes. Some medical professionals such as John F. Kennedy’s personal physician, Dr. Janet Travell, have posited that the odd long toes could also cause Myofascial (chronic) pain due to body weight being shifted to the ball of the foot rather than directly behind the sturdy big toe.
Between 15 to 20 percent of humans have Morton’s Toe. Although the name of the toe refers to the second toe of the foot, it would be more accurate to call the condition Morton’s foot, as the problem is caused by the first metatarsal bone in the foot, not the toe, being shorter than its neighbor.
Today the toe—and the foot it belongs to—is often called a “Greek foot” by art historians and podiatrists. No matter what it’s called, people who share the atavism can head to many museums around the world to find ancient doppelgängers with the same feet. While it set the standard for idealized feet in many periods of Western art, hopefully podiatrists recommended corrective shoes or pads to provide some relief for the models.
Photographic film relies on light-sensitive grains of silver to capture images. Biological engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have created a new sort of photography, but it's not digital and it doesn't involve silver. Instead, it uses light-sensitive bacteria to generate images.
With modifications to just 18 genes, the researchers bred E. coli bacteria to detect and respond to red, green, and blue light. They start making these images by placing the bacteria on an agar plate (used to grow microorganisms) in a pattern. Then they shine light onto the plate. Depending on how they have been genetically modified, the microbes produce enzymes in one of the three colors, which then react with the agar to permanently print the image on the plate. The images may take a while—18 hours—to form, but the bacteria can create some fairly high-definition images of complex things, such as Nintendo's Mario, a pile of fruit, or an M.C. Escher tessellation.
This isn't the first time bacteria have been used as a photographic medium. Chris Voigt, the head of the MIT team, engineered E. coli to produce black-and-white images in 2005, with just four gene modifications. Voigt is calling the new modified microbes "disco bacteria."
Making colored bacterial film sounds like a fun project, but it's also a demonstration for some important future applications. Using light to turn on or off genes in bacteria could start or stop the creation of biological molecules or tissues. The process could even be used to create a communication system between organisms and electronics. Bacterial art is cool, but the potential of light-sensitive E. coli is even cooler.
Congratulations are in order to Cindy Dunlow of Ocala, Florida. She's officially set the new record for the world's largest pink flamingo-themed collection.
As first reported by the Ocala Star Banner, the Guinness Book of World Records recently presented Dunlow with the honor. Dunlow has deemed her collection “The Official Florida Flamingo Museum,” and placed it on display inside the custom frame shop she runs.
The collection dates to the 1960s, when Dunlow first started purchasing flamingo collectables from second-hand shops in and around Florida. Today it includes pink trinkets of just about every imaginable kind. There are coffee mugs, earrings, plush birds, classic plastic lawn ornaments, magnets, and pieces of furniture—all shaped like, or otherwise decorated with, the skinny pink bird.
To earn her title, Dunlow had to individually photograph each item and send a detailed accounting to the people at Guinness. She earned the title of world’s largest pink flamingo collection with 793 items, although it has since grown to 865, according to the Star Banner. Dunlow actually had the previous record (600 items) beat a while back, but waited to apply to Guinness so that the previous record holder could hold the title a little longer.
At the moment, Seattle's banana market is a rotten mess. They're tough to find in grocery stores, and restaurants can't seem to sell them. And it's all because Amazon has been handing out free bananas to anyone and everyone.
Amazon's community banana stands were thought up by CEO Jeff Bezos, who thought the company could help the local community by giving out healthy food. The first stand opened on campus of the online retailer and cloud computing giant in December 2015, and it was joined by another in October 2016. More than 1.7 million bananas have been given away by the "banistas" who run the two stands, Monday through Friday.
Those 1.7 million bananas have flooded the market, and now Seattleites are reluctant to pay actual money for a Cavendish. Grocery stores have stopped carrying them, and nearby restaurants and juice bars are cutting back, too. Restaurant owners have complained that patrons are forgetting their banana manners by bringing in outside fruit and leaving the peels behind. Other establishments are capitalizing on the banana frenzy and have added extra banana-based treats to their menus.
The stands have no plans to switch to other fruits anytime soon. Banistas say people have requested avocados and more, but the cost is just prohibitive. Seattle's fruit sellers—once they have fully adjusted to the new banana order—can breath easy.
In addition to ambushing rodents, birds, and lizards, Cuban boas sometimes snatch Jamaican fruit bats right out of the air. They do this by curling themselves into small cavities in the ceilings and walls of the caves where they bats live. Watching for the right moment, the snakes strike the bats when they fly by. Vladimir Dinets, of the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, wanted to know whether the snakes organize themselves to increase their chances of hunting success.
Dinets found that when many snakes hunt at the same time, they do not just choose random cavities to hunt from. They coordinate their positions and create a kind of danger zone for bats. So organized, the snakes were more likely to impede the bats and successfully grab a meal. Teamwork!
