Canada turns 150 years old this summer. To celebrate, the Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) Botanical Garden in St. John's planned far ahead: Last October, they planted carefully selected red and white tulip bulbs, some in the shape of a maple leaf.
One local resident got a bit greedy, though, and wanted to enjoy the celebration alone. Last Thursday morning, May 18, staffers arrived to find the beds stirred up and the plants half-eaten. The culprit? A hungry moose.
"The moose munched on the entire red and white tulip display—Canada's 150th maple leaf design and all!" MUN Botanical Garden posted on Facebook last week. Photos show several ransacked flowerbeds, with bulbs yanked up and leaves chewed to the ground. (One bed, slightly protected by stakes and netting, seems to have been spared.)
"It won't be as magnificent as it should have been," staff member Quinn Burt told the CBC.
The good sports found a way to celebrate anyway, though: "How bloomin' Canadian is that?" they wrote.
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
On the night of December 8, 2013, demonstrators were gathered in Kiev’s Bessarabska Square. For two weeks there had been protests across Ukraine against President Viktor Yanukovych’s pro-Russian government, and on that wintery Sunday, some dissenters found a symbolic target for their frustration. Primarily aligned with the nationalist Svoboda party, the protestors tore down the 11-foot-tall statue of Vladimir Lenin that had loomed above the square since 1946, and battered it with sledgehammers.
The toppling of the Bessarabska Lenin led to a phenomenon that has become known as Leninopad, or "Leninfall"—the removal of Lenin statues from around Ukraine. Of course, it wasn’t the first time Soviet monuments had been brought low, as statues had been destroyed as early as 1990. But in the following months the intensity increased—so much so that in February 2014 alone, a total of 376 statues were torn down.
Ukrainians had a lot of statues to work with, but their efforts were diligent and comprehensive. In 1990, when Ukraine declared its independence from the Soviet Union, there were 5,500 Lenin statues around the country, more than in any other former Soviet republic. With the country's 2015 decommunization laws, which outlawed communist symbols including statues, flags, and Soviet-era place names, there was a mandate to remove the last of the Lenin monuments. Today, none still stand. But they haven’t disappeared.
The afterlife of these statues is the subject of the new photobook from Fuel Publishing, Looking for Lenin. Photographer Niels Ackermann and journalist Sébastien Gobert started the project by searching for the remains of the Bessarabska Square Lenin, and they ended up photographing toppled Lenins across the country. Their goal was not just to see where the physical embodiments of the Soviet past had ended up, but also to discover how Ukrainians felt about the ongoing process of decommunization.
“We met scores of people who wanted to discuss the subject,” writes Gobert in the book. “The name ‘Lenin’ loosened tongues: for, against, indifferent, nostalgic, vindictive—everyone had an opinion about Dyadya Vova (Uncle Vlad).”
The Lenins that Ackermann and Gobert found—figures that had previously towered on plinths as a mark of Soviet authority—now fill car trunks, are hidden in the woods, or are stashed in cleaning rooms. Here is a selection of images of the physical and symbolic remains of Ukraine’s past.
Just an hour’s drive out of the south Indian city of Bengaluru, a green overhead signboard welcomes visitors to the “Land of Toys”—Channapatna. The wide highway to Mysuru that cuts across the town is lined with small shops with dozens of wooden rocking horses outside that beckon shoppers with their cheerful colors. The interiors of these stores overflow with a dazzling array of lacquered toys of all shapes and designs.
All these are made in this very town, Channapatna, where local artists have been keeping the Persian art form of toy-making alive for over two centuries now. The craft was brought to this region by the local ruler Tipu Sultan in the 18th century; he was so charmed by a toy he received as a gift that he invited Persian artisans to train his people. Many houses in Channapatna still double up as workshops, where entire families—both Hindu and Muslim—are involved in the process of making and selling the toys.
Turning off the main highway into the town, the workshop of the Karnataka State Handicraft Development Corporation comes into view. Inside the hot and dusty workshop, six machines are in full whirl, the fine sawdust and splinters from the wood flying in the air and falling in heaps everywhere. Most of the dozen-odd artisans at this government-sponsored workshop are shirtless, in a nod to the sweltering afternoon of an Indian summer.
Ignoring—or immune to—the dust and noise, the craftsmen carry on with practiced ease, cutting, chiseling and lacquering a variety of products, from bangles and hair clips to animal figures and spinning tops.
Channapatna toys are made from the wood of a local tree called Haale Mara (Wrightia Tinctoria), too soft to be used in furniture. The wood is dried under the sun for nearly two months to remove all traces of moisture, and then chopped up into uneven blocks. These slowly take on shape and meaning at a mechanized lathe at the hands of these skilled craftsmen, who then spread lacquer till the product assumes a glossy finish.
Mohammad Shariff, 49, has been in this trade for over 35 years now, starting out as an apprentice under his father, who in turn learned the skill from his own. When things got tough in the market, his father shut down the home production unit, while Shariff found work at this small factory. Today, apart from the local shops, he has dedicated buyers across India.
The Channapatna toys range was initially limited to animal and human figures, and simple games for children, popular mainly in the southern parts of the country. But over a decade ago, competition from the China—whose inexpensive, machine-made toys flooded the Indian market—left many of these toy-makers in dire straits. Combined with a lack of knowledge about marketing, and middlemen who did not pay fair prices to the producers, the industry began to flounder.
The situation improved soon enough on its own, when the imported Chinese toys, with toxic dyes and cheap materials, were found to be unsafe for children.
The good thing about the brief slump was that the Channapatna artisans, with the help of a few not-for-profit agencies and product designers, started creating more sophisticated and contemporary toys and puzzles, home décor items like napkin rings, salt and pepper shakers, and storage jars. Another boost came in the form of a GI (Geographical Indication) status given by the World Trade Organization, a recognition of the uniqueness of this region’s craft.
Shariff is among those who benefitted from this. He says over the unrelenting din of the machines, “Earlier there were limited designs, and everyone used to make and sell the same things day after day. Now, there are new designs we are taught every few months, so there is more demand outside (the country).” He is just one among the thousands of experienced and skilled toymakers in Channapatna today, each with similar life stories.
Apart from the unique and delightful designs, Channapatna toys (as all products coming from this town are informally called) have the advantage of being completely eco-friendly. Even 10 years ago, all of the work used to be done by hand, but now most of the basic production is done on machines operated by hand. The lacquer is created with totally natural dyes, such as turmeric for yellow, indigo for blue and vermillion for red, all of which lend themselves to a rich and alluring finish.
There has been a growing demand for Channapatna toys overseas, with significant exports to countries as far away as Japan and the United States. Michelle Obama, in her 2010 visit to India, bought some from the National Handicrafts and Handloom Museum in New Delhi, suddenly shining the spotlight on the town. And Microsoft India is one of their largest regulars, sourcing mathematical and logical games and puzzles for use in their education projects in rural India and other developing countries.
In this town of just over 70,000 people, more than 1,000 families are involved in the trade in some form, either from home or small collective workshops. However, despite all the interest shown by the outside world in this traditional form of toy-making, there is no sense of hope or optimism among the Channapatna artisans.
There used to be a time when three generations of craftsmen worked together at home. Increasingly though, artisans no longer want to introduce their children to this work, with the younger generations preferring to study or find easier employment in the big cities. For instance, Shariff (who has no formal education) made sure his two sons completed high school, and is proud of the fact they now work outside Channapatna. Like many other indigenous crafts in India, Channapatna toys are on the brink of fading out in the next couple of decades.
But for now, plump Santa Claus figures, sunglassed drivers inside snazzy racing cars, pull-along cutesy turtles, winding trains with interlocking coaches, stackable counting aids and stylish chess sets: Channapatna offers up something for everyone.
Around 10,000 B-25 bombers took to the skies during World War II, on missions all over the world. Some made it home and now sit in museums. Others never returned, their whereabouts still unknown. More than 70 years after the end of the war, lost warbirds are still found on the ocean floor, but many don't look like planes any more. They may have broken up when they crashed, and many are so encrusted with sea life that they're more reef than plane. New technology is making it easier to find these hidden aircraft, including the two B-25s surveyed off the coast of Papua New Guinea earlier this year.
Project Recover, a partnership between the University of Delaware, the University of Southern California, and the BentProp Project, is dedicated to finding lost planes, using a combination of historical records, interviews, dives, and mapping tools. They've searched off the coasts of the British Isles, New Caledonia, and Palau. The waters around Papua New Guinea are a good place to look as well, since the island saw plenty of military action following an invasion by Japanese forces in 1942.
The B-25 bomber, manufactured by North American Aviation, is an iconic WWII plane with distinctive square rudders and a long nose that was often paneled with glass windows. It's such a distinctive shape that wreckage from these planes can be easily spotted and identified on the seafloor. One of the two bombers found is mostly intact, and was known to locals and divers for years. Project Recover's survey is the first official documentation of the site.
The other B-25 studied was a bit more difficult to identify. “People have this mental image of an airplane resting intact on the sea floor, but the reality is that most planes were often already damaged before crashing, or broke up upon impact. And, after soaking in the sea for decades, they are often unrecognizable to the untrained eye, often covered in corals and other sea life,” said Katy O’Connell, Project Recover’s executive director, in a press release. Debris from the second bomber was found only after a search of nearly six square miles of seafloor.
A video shows just how difficult it can be to pick out pieces of the plane when marine life has had a 70-year head start.
Information about both planes will be used by the U.S. government's Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, which recovers and repatriates the remains of the 73,000 WWII servicemen still missing. Project Recover plans to return to Papua New Guinea later this year to look for more aircraft.
“Your move, creeps,” is probably what police officials in Dubai are saying after unveiling the world’s very first robot police officer.
As the BBC is reporting, the Arab city has taken yet another step toward being the most futuristic city in the world (in the strangest ways), by adding an autonomous mechanical police officer to its law enforcement ranks. The friendly looking robot will patrol the malls and popular attractions around Dubai to provide people with a point of contact for reporting crime, getting information, and even paying fines via a touchscreen in its chest. While it does not have a trusty Auto 9 hidden in a pop-out compartment in its thigh, the robot can prevent crime by broadcasting what it sees directly to the nearest police station, according to a representative from the Dubai Police. At launch, the robot will be able to speak in English and Arabic, but there are plans to have it speak other languages—presumably so that it can say “Dead or alive, you're coming with me,” in Russian or French as well.
The robot cop (for clarification, it is not a “robocop,” as it does not contain any unreliable biological components, or former human memories that might send it inconveniently spiraling into an existential quest of cyborg self-discovery) is a version of the full-size REEM robot built by Pal Robotics. Similar ones have been put into service as customer service agents and informational guides at places ranging from airports to museums. But this will be the model's first foray into law enforcement.
The Dubai Police said that they have no intention of replacing their traditional meat police, but would like to have a quarter of their force be made up of robots by 2030. Detroit had better step up its game.
Like many people who love cooking, Tom Brown tries to master a new recipe every week. He's done dumplings, and shepherd's pie, and mushroom-based vegan "steaks" with Brussels sprouts. Now that it's summer, he's working on chocolate-swirl ice cream from scratch, complete with homemade waffle cones. He even makes his own potato chips. It's never enough, though: You could probably eat all of his goodies in one meal, and still come back for more.
That's because Brown cooks tiny. His kitchen—which he built himself, and is outfitted with an oven, a sink, and a stove burner—is about the size of a briefcase. His utensils—handmade spatulas, wooden spoons, and knives of all shapes and sizes—look like they were made for mouse gourmands. Each doughnut is like a glazed Cheerio; each salt-encrusted chip like a baby's toenail.
Brown has made miniatures ever since he was a child. When he enrolled at the Calgary College of Art and Design in 2009, he got even more serious about the practice—it was there that he built a working guitar the size of a matchbox, and a weatherbeaten lighthouse barely a foot tall. "When you walked around it, you felt like a giant ship," he says. "I was like, 'How can I take this further?'"
In 2014, for his graduation project, he began working on his answer: tiny food, made in a tiny kitchen. "I thought, 'If I take this thing that’s so close to us, and transform it in this weird way, when people interact with it, the implications for their own life will be stronger,'" he says. "The next time they eat food… they'll be like, 'Hey, this is actually an interesting thing I’m doing right now.'"
Brown considers public performance a vital part of his art, and whenever weather permits, he takes his miniature kitchen out to the street. He sits down on a cushion, fires up the stove, and gets to work, carefully cooking his tiny treats and handing them out to passers-by, who are generally delighted. "I've done burgers, empanadas, corn dogs, spring rolls, doughnuts," he says. "Everything is possible."
Unlike other small-scale, presentation-focused chefs, who may heat their stoves with tea lights or incorporate pre-made foods, Brown prides himself on authenticity from start to finish. The miniature stove, which has gone through 37 incarnations, is self-contained, fueled by an eyedropper's worth of alcohol. He cleans up after himself in the kitchen's tiny sink.
When he cooks, say, dirty fries, he starts from scratch, chopping onions on a cutting board the width of a postage stamp, and pushing raw potatoes through a tiny French fry punch mounted on the wall of the kitchen.
Watching the video, it does seem magical that the tenets of cooking still hold at this scale—the onions caramelize in their coin-sized cast iron, and the fries gain a crispy, golden outer layer. By the time he places them on a tiny plate, adds an extremely small dollop of cheddar sauce, and tops everything off with truly infinitesimal bits of scallion, it's like alchemy has taken place. Most importantly, it's delicious. "It's part of the process, having everything taste good," Brown says.
Although he works small, many of Brown's concerns are the same as any chef's. He has dreams and aspirations: right now he's working on the components of a charcuterie board, with vegetarian salami, cheese, and preserves. (All of his "meat"-based dishes are made from soy, for safety reasons.) He also puts his fans first—every week, he posts a new recipe video on Instagram, often based on an audience request. (This week's was an apple pie.)
And although many of his in-person customers scarf down the bite-sized food immediately, it's important to him that they have something to take home, whether it's a petite, hand-stamped pizza box or a centimeter-long pair of chopsticks. "My signature right now is the miniature paper bag," he says—great for corn dogs and other greasy street foods.
He's even suffered from every chef's nightmare: last January, a seam burst on his stove, and the whole thing went up in flames. "It was a very large kitchen fire in a very tiny kitchen," he says. He has since fixed the problem, but if you look closely, you can still see scorch marks on the kitchen walls.
Brown has an ever-increasing stash of gadgets, which he builds in his studio. Some of them, like the french fry punch, were inspired by his time working in full-sized restaurant kitchens. Others—like a lattice cutter for pie crust, or a double-decker woven steaming basket for dumplings—were necessary to fulfill requests. "I try to keep expanding the repertoire of tools for the kitchen, and for cooking live," he says.
Still others are whimsical, or aspirational. One tiny knife set is modeled after hammered, hand-forged Japanese chef's knives, which Brown calls "objects of extreme accomplishment," and which are out of his price range. "I really want to own all of them, but I can't—so instead, I make them in miniature," he says. And while his early knives are all forged from nails, he has started making some out of sterling silver, simply because he can.
Working small opens up other possibilities, too. The kitchen is extremely mobile. When Brown traveled to Capetown for an artist's residency in 2015, he brought it along, and made samosas and sushi alongside other street vendors. The tiny food made cultural and language barriers less relevant, he says: "It opened up a door that otherwise didn't exist for me."
He makes extras of his mini-cutlery, and every Friday he hides a piece around the city and posts a hint about where it is—a game he calls Finder's Keepers. "One person found a knife that I had made that just happened to be an exact replica of a knife she already owned," he says.
Later this year, Brown plans to take the whole shebang on tour, where he'll offer the works: tiny street cooking performances, tiny cutlery scavenger hunts. "I'll be trying to hide some stuff in National Parks as well," he says. If you want to see if he's coming to your hometown, you can keep track of past and future appearances via his Instagram. Until then, stay hungry—but not too hungry.
A full, standard keg of beer weighs just over 160 pounds and is pretty unwieldy. So it's no surprise that the folks at the Wacken Open Air music festival in Wacken, Germany, are sick of schlepping them across fields every year, and have decided to do something about it. Come August, they'll be able to pour 105,000 gallons of beer at stands around the festival grounds thanks to four miles of underground piping.
Music fans at the heavy metal festival are a thirsty bunch. According to Deutsche Welle, the 75,000 attendees each drink, on average, more than a gallon of beer over the course of the festival's three days. Keeping up with that demand has been a struggle in past years. The new pipeline will provide enough pressure to pour six beers in six seconds.
When metalheads aren't taking over the sprawling fields, they're home to crops, so the pipelines are buried deep enough that plows won't disturb them in the off-season. Conduits for fiberoptic cables, along with pipes for fresh and waste water, were installed too.
The festival organizers wrote that the pipelines are "a lasting investment in the infrastructure of Wacken." Fans of Wacken Open Air will be set for years to come.
They’d long heard the rumors—somewhere outside of the St. Petersburg, in an abandoned mine, the Russian government had buried piles of money. Recently, a group of historians and explorers of abandoned places decided to find out if it was true, the BBC reports.
They traveled about five hours, through forest and field, and across a river. Locals had told them about a site where the money might be found, but the same informants also warned that the site was contaminated with radiation. As they approached, the group pulled out their Geiger counter to check. The radiation turned out to be a rumor—but not the money.
Before long they came across piles of cash spread across the boggy ground. Many of the bundles were still tied together and had their original bank seals, according to Russian news reports.
The money was dumped after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the government wanted to get rid of old Soviet rubles, but burning it seemed like a bad idea. (They worried, for example, about the toxicity of the bills’ materials.) Before the collapse, the pile of money—said to be a billion rubles in all—would have been worth $33 million.
This is just one site of at least three where the government is said to have dumped cash.
Police in Phoenix, Arizona, are on the hunt for a strange sort of stolen property: an eight-piece, 180-foot, multicolored inflatable obstacle course.
In photos, it looks like a pretty solid challenge—ramps, tunnels, slides, and plenty of things to clamber over. One section contains some kind of yellow monster with a blue hat.
Thieves nabbed the massive toy from a commercial yard sometime between Sunday and Monday. They also stole the red trailer used to cart it around.
If you're in the area and feeling that vigilante spirit, keep your eyes peeled for a trailer with Arizona plate 7A7D1, stacked with rolled-up tarpaulin. Or just look for a massive, unauthorized great time going on in someone's backyard. As Sgt. Vince Lewis told ABC 15, "This particular item is going to be difficult to hide."
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.
The rat race got you down? Well, an all-cat veterinary clinic in Dublin has a job opening that just might make you feel a bit better about things. How does "professional cuddler" sound?
Just Cats Veterinary Clinic, whose job posting has set the hug-deficient interneton fire, is seeking a natural cat person who can simply come in and give their patients some love. The perfect person for the position, they wrote, would have natural “cattitude,” count kittens to go to sleep, and feed stray cats. The actual job, which they advertise as full-time, would require the cuddler to pet and soothe any feline patients who are nervous—so “gentle hands” and the ability to decipher different types of purring are pluses.
It could almost be taken as a joke, except for the end of the posting, which adds, in a no-nonsense fashion, “A veterinary council of Ireland recognised qualification is essential for this role.” So you will need a bit more experience than years as a feline fancier.
A representative from Just Cats told the Huffington Post that the official title associated with the position will depend on the experience of the chosen candidate, but could range from essentially being a veterinary intern to a full nurse, in terms of comparative importance.
The clinic hopes that care focused on the comfort of the animals will encourage cat owners to bring their pets to the vet more often. Unsurprisingly, the clinic has received applications from all over the world. They might be on to something.
On a mild summer evening in 1769, English poet Thomas Gray found the perfect spot to watch the sun set over the Lake District in the country’s northwest—and he didn’t come empty-handed. As warm light brushed the sky with color, he carefully positioned his Claude glass, a convex, tinted mirror designed to soften and frame the landscape.
Gray’s depiction of that evening in his memoirs sounds a lot like a modern-day selfie accident. With his focus on the mirrored image, Gray said he "fell down on my back across a dirty lane with the glass open in one hand.” In a deft 18th-century #humblebrag, he added that he “broke only my knuckles, staid nevertheless, and saw the sun set in all its glory.”
Thomas Gray was an early adopter, but the Claude glass became a staple of 18th-century packing lists. Portable and compact, it was named for the French artist Claude Lorrain, whose paintings have a beatific glow reminiscent of a heavy-handed Instagram filter.
To use the mirror, travelers sat with their backs to the scene, holding the folding glass at shoulder height so they could see behind them. The convex shape brushed background objects into the far distance, and the tinted glass softened the reflected tones. Users loved how the Claude glass made landscapes look like a Lorrain canvas, with no paint required. But Claude glasses provided more than an artsy filter—they were part of an aesthetic movement that was changing British travel.
Wealthy travelers had been making the “grand tour” of Europe since the mid 17th-century, and while they wrote glowing letters about the beauty of Tuscan landscapes, untamed nature still inspired fear. Wild mountains, Alpine passes, and even the rolling terrain of the Lake District were “sublime,” a word that conveyed real danger and awe. What they called “beauty” was milder and cultivated, reflecting a value for the soft, smooth, and delicate.
Then in a 1768 essay, artist William Gilpin outlined a set of “principles of picturesque beauty,” which Gilpin placed at the intersection of the sublime and the beautiful. The picturesque was rugged nature tempered by milder elements—like a landscape scene offset by a pretty cottage, or the Instagram credo of “little person, big landscape”. And to make an appealing view even more picturesque, Gilpin encouraged the use of a Claude glass.
With “picturesque” trending, the Lake District was suddenly on the travel map. Just decades before, the region had been considered too “sublime” for a good vacation. But the rise of picturesque travel put the spotlight on the area, and gave rise to a series of travel guides that detailed the precise locations that travelers could find real-deal, authentic picturesque views (don’t forget your Claude glass!).
Thomas Gray’s memoirs included detailed descriptions of the best vistas in the Lake District, and in the 1778 book Guide to the Lakes, Thomas West directed travelers to the best “stations,” curated sites with Claude glass-ready views. Then, as now, a favorite destination was Lake Windermere, where West’s seven stations became favorite gathering points for fashionable travelers.
It wasn’t long before this travel movement took a meta twist. Because once you go in search of the picturesque, the temptation to futz around with the layout can be overwhelming. In his Observations, relative chiefly to picturesque beauty, made in the year 1772, William Gilpin recalled a trip from Hawick to Selkirk, where the skyline was in clear need of a stylist. “The mountains formed beautiful lines,” he wrote, but “they require the drapery of a little wood to break the simplicity of their shapes.”
As historian Lynne Withey recounted in her book Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours, plenty of 18th-century travelers piped in with recommendations for sprucing up the landscape, from trimming the trees to carving steps into rocky paths. Gilpin himself fantasized about improvements to the centuries-old Tintern Abbey, saying “a mallet judiciously used… might be of service” in removing the abbey’s gable ends, “which are not only disagreeable in themselves, but confound the perspective.”
Imagine the scene: the rural, wild Lake District became a favorite destination for travelers wielding tinted mirrors and guidebooks, full of tips on improving the neighborhood. It was only a matter of time before they became the butt of jokes by everyone from Jane Austen to William Wordsworth.
Some lines could be pulled fresh from a modern-day critique of Instagram-obsessed travelers. In the 1798 comic opera The Lakers, tourist Beccabunga Veronique is hard at work on a painting that corrects the flaws of the Lake District’s all-too-real landscape. “If it is not like what it is,” she said, “it is like what it ought to be. I have only made it picturesque.”
Wordsworth, a shade-throwing resident of the Lake District, entitled one poem “On Seeing Some Tourists of the Lakes Pass By Reading; a Practice Very Common,” then griped at the distracted visitors: “For this came ye hither? is this your delight?” He frequently complained about the mindless tourists that crowded his favorite spots, and rolled his literary eyes about the use of Claude glasses.
And in 1812, Claude glasses and picturesque travel took a satirical death blow when writer William Combe published The Tour of Doctor Syntax: in search of the picturesque, a parody poem lampooning affected, pretentious tourists. Like William Gilpin and Thomas Gray, Doctor Syntax risked everything for a good view and an impressive story—falling in lakes, getting treed by bulls, and being thrown from horses along the way.
“I’ll make a tour—and then I’ll write it. You know well what my pen can do,” said Doctor Syntax to his wife as he set out to get rich and become a travel influencer. “I’ll prose it here, I’ll verse it there, And picturesque it everywhere.” Or as a 21st-century Doctor Syntax would put it: #travel #blessed #picturesque.
Bread clips! Consider them for a moment, if you will. They're those flat pieces of semi-hard plastic formed into a sort of barbed U-shape—you know the ones. They can be found keeping bread bags all over the world closed and safe from spoilage, smartly designed to be used and reused. They're all around us, constantly providing an amazing service, and yet still, they're taken for granted. And it turns out they're almost exclusively all produced by a single, family-owned company.
Kwik Lok, based in Yakima, Washington, has been manufacturing these little tabs ever since their founder whittled the first one from a credit card. Without giving specific numbers, Kwik Lok says that they sell an almost unimaginable number each year. "It's in the billions," says Leigh Anne Whathen, a sales coordinator for the company, who says she personally prefers plastic clips to their natural enemy, the twist tie, because they last longer.
Floyd Paxton, Kwik Lok's founder, was a second-generation manufacturing engineer who began his career working alongside his father, Hale, producing nail machines during World War II. Prior to the post-war plastics boom, both Paxton and his father produced, among other things, the nails used to close wooden boxes of fruit. In other words, package sealing was in Paxton's blood.
According to the Kwik Lok website, the idea for the bread clip came to Paxton during a flight in 1952. As the story goes, while he was on the plane, Paxton was eating a package of complimentary nuts, and he realized he didn’t have a way to close them if he wanted to save some for later. As a solution, he took out a pen knife and hand-carved the first bread clip out of a credit card (in some tellings, it was an expired credit card).
From this humble beginning, the bread clip as we know it was born. As the use of polyethylene bags to package fruit and other foods rapidly increased, Paxton realized that he'd invented a cheap, reusable solution to sealing open-ended bags. His simple invention required minimal dexterity to operate and did not require stressing the piece, allowing it to rival twist-ties and sticker tags.
Paxton established the Kwik Lok Corporation in 1954 in California, and quickly set out to popularize the tabs (now known officially as Kwik Lok Closures) by using them to close bags of apples. The company eventually moved to Washington state, where their headquarters are still located.
Kwik Lok continued to grow over the decades as did demand for their little clips, which became popularly known as "bread clips" or "bread tabs." Paxton eventually began developing new packaging machinery, including ones to manufacture Kwik Lok Closures, and one to put them on the bags automatically, which Whathen says they still sell to bakeries.
According to Whathen, Kwik Lok secured a patent on their little innovation in the early days of the company, and to this day, Kwik Lok remains one of the only manufacturers of bread clips in the world. Whathen says that the only other firm she's aware of is a European competitor called Schutte. Kwik Lok also has the distinction of still being owned by Paxton's descendants. Floyd's son, Jerre, ran the company until his death in 2015, and today it is owned by two of Jerre's daughters. "We're still going strong," says Whathen.
Kwik Lok operates two factories in the U.S., plus manufacturing plants in Canada, Australia, Japan, and Ireland. Far from the hand-crafted clip that Paxton made on that airplane, the company now offers just about every variation of the closure one might want. As for Floyd Paxton himself, he died in 1975, spending much of the last years of his life promoting his strict conservative politics as a member of the John Birch Society, including mounting four unsuccessful congressional campaigns. But his politics aside, Paxton’s invention is as widespread as it has ever been, finding its way into the lives of nearly every strata of society, everywhere on the globe.
Some plants rely on birds or the wind to carry their seeds far and wide, while others have evolved prickly seeds that can hitch a ride on the coat of a passing animal. But the Argania trees of Morocco have a different dispersal method: climbing, spitting goats.
Some of the local goats have developed a distinctive approach to grazing during dry periods: They climb up in the thorny branches to get at the tree's leaves and fruit, sometimes with help from herders. The goats are bigs fans of the fleshy exterior of the fruits, but they couldn't care less about the large, hard seeds. It's always been assumed that the goats just swallow the seeds, which would pass through the digestive tract. The seeds are then gathered so valuable argan oil, which can be used both in cooking and for cosmetics, can be extracted. But new research suggests the goats aren't swallowing the seeds after all.
The researchers, from Spain's Doñana Biological Station, were skeptical of the stories about Argania seeds in goat poop (they're awful big), so they decided to test their hypothesis on some real subjects. They fed 29 Spanish domestic goats a bunch of different kinds of fruit, including ones from fan palm, common hawthorn, Mediterranean hackberry, olives, and locust bean, and watched what happened to the seeds.
Some of the smaller seeds went through the full digestion process, but the goats spit out many of the large ones. The researchers write in their report that this isn't actually weird behavior—they've observed sheep and deer spitting out seeds as well. They've determined that it's far more likely that the daring, tree-climbing Moroccan goats spit out their seeds. If the behavior is as common as the researchers suggest, it's possible this is an important but overlooked form of seed dispersal—one that may be critical for some ecosystems and plant species.
Newfoundland photographer Gerald Gale recently caught some video of an ultra-rare white moose in the wild. In the video, shared on CBC News, the stark animal can be seen moving out of some woods and across a two-track dirt road. He pauses for a moment to regard the photographer, looking to all the world like some kind of spirit guide. With a slightly pink snout and almost entirely white fur, he looks very much like an albino as well, but he is neither. He simply carries a rare type of coloration referred to as “piebald.”
Piebald coloration—white with portions of darker pigments—can be found all over the animal kingdom, on creatures ranging from fish to snakes. It is most commonly known in horses, which can bred specifically for the look. However, in the wild it is rather rare, and all the more striking on an animal as large as a moose.
This is not the first time such a moose has been spotted in the area either, leading to speculation that the local population carries a genetic predisposition for piebald coloration. Whatever the case, this moose has a look somewhere between spectral visitor and Disney character.
Not so long ago, in Plymouth, England, Jerry Sibley headed out to visit the old Jewish graveyard. As the custodian of the Plymouth Synagogue, he was investigating a called-in complaint about trees at the cemetery messing up the phone lines of a neighboring house. When he arrived, the Plymouth Herald reports, he was faced with a mystery: There were no houses or obviously troublesome trees anywhere nearby.
Apparently, the complaining neighbor, who did not leave an address or callback number, was referring to a different cemetery. Sibley soon learned that there was an even older Jewish cemetery in the city. The one he knew of was created in the 1850s. He was looking for one that dated back to the 1700s.
Sibley went to Google Maps, with a clue that placed the older cemetery on Lambhay Hill. After an initial effort failed to find it, he painstakingly over aerial images again until he found bright green spot. He zoomed in—and he could just make out some headstones.
The cemetery gone unvisited for so long that no one at the synagogue knew how to open the door to the walled space. Sibley sorted through a box of 300 keys until he found the right one. When he opened the door he found a secret garden of trees, grass, flowers, and gravestones.
With help, he cleaned up the cemetery and created an audio tour of the gravestones that included the history of people buried there. The troublesome trees that steered him there were cut down, but the cemetery is still a little bit wild.
An associate editor for the Global Journal of Addiction & Rehabilitation Medicine, Olivia Doll, lists some very unusual research interests, such as "avian propinquity to canines in metropolitan suburbs" and "the benefits of abdominal massage for medium-sized canines." That's probably because Olivia Doll is a Staffordshire terrier named Ollie who enjoys chasing birds and getting belly rubs. In all her spare time, Ollie also has sat on the editorial boards of not one, but seven, medical journals.
Ollie's owner, Mike Daube, is a professor of health policy at Australia's Curtin University. He initially signed his dog up for the positions as a joke, with credentials such as an affiliation at the Subiaco College of Veterinary Science. But soon, he told Perth Now in a video, he realized it was a chance to show just how predatory some journals can be.
"Every academic gets several of these emails a day, from sham journals," he said. "They're trying to take advantage of gullible younger academics, gullible researchers" who want more publications to add to their CVs. These journals may look prestigious, but they charge researchers to publish and don't check credentials or peer review articles. And this is precisely how a dog could make it onto their editorial boards.
“What makes it even more bizarre is that one of these journals has actually asked Ollie to review an article," Daube told the Medical Journal of Australia's InSight Magazine. The article was about nerve sheath tumors and how to treat them. "Some poor soul has actually written an article on this theme in good faith, and the journal has sent it to a dog to review.”
At the time of this writing, the Global Journal of Addiction & Rehabilitation Medicine still lists Ollie as an associate editor, and a journal called Psychiatry and Mental Disorders lists her as a member of its editorial board (complete with a photo of Australian pop singer Kylie Minogue wearing glasses, for some reason). Ollie's career sniffing out fraud is looking promising.
Deep in the Australian desert, in a remote area not accessible by car, a helicopter pilot spotted an SOS sign earlier this week, Australia's ABC News reports. The sign is made up of stones arranged in an unmistakeable distress signal, but police have so far found no indication of who made it—or how long ago it was made.
The area where the sign was found is called Swift Bay, which is dozens of miles north of a popular off-roading area and more than 300 miles from the nearest city.
Police have found evidence of a campsite near the signal, but it’s not clear how old it is either. They’re considering the possibility that the sign may be a hoax of some kind, but will continue to search for missing persons and ask the public for information.
N6946-BH1 had a long, glowing life. A red supergiant star that hung in a spiral galaxy 22 million light years away from the Milky Way, it was 25 times the size of the Earth's sun, and blazed about 100,000 times more brightly.
Astronomers would have expected a star of its size to have an appropriately dramatic death. Many massive stars go out as supernovae—enormous explosions that catapult heat, elements, and cosmic rays into space. In 2009 scientists watched as N6946-BH1 seemed to gear up for its big moment. For a few months, it "shot up in brightness to become over 1 million times more luminous than our sun," Phys.org reports. A spectacular supernova seemed to be approaching.
And then ... it simply vanished. By 2015, the Hubble and Spitzer telescopes couldn't see it, nor could they detect any radiation coming from where it once was.
In the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of researchers that monitors 27 galaxies for supernovae offered up their diagnosis: N6946-BH1 was a so-called "massive fail," an enormous star that, despite its size, collapsed into a black hole with no extra fanfare. In the seven years the team has scanned the sky for supernovae, it's the only star they have seen this happen to.
N6946-BH1 may have faded away rather than burned out, but its death sheds some light on a longtime mystery: Why the rate of observable supernovae doesn't match the likely rate of massive star deaths. "The typical view is that a star can form a black hole only after it goes supernova," Christopher Kochanek, the study's lead author, told Phys.org.
If it can reach the same state through less dramatic means, he says, "that would help to explain why we don't see supernovae from the most massive stars." After millennia of shining, maybe some stars just want to rest.
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.
Anonymous peer review is a cornerstone of the modern academic world—a way to double-check and evaluate scholarly work before it is made public. It can also be a soul-crushing wake-up call when things don’t go so well. Love it or hate it, the time-tested process was recently immortalized in a stone monument outside of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics (HSE).
For those outside academia, peer review is a process in which scholars who wish to publish their works in journals first must have them formally reviewed by other experts, who anonymously comment on whether the work is sound and worthy, could stand to be improved, or should be rejected outright. It provides necessary perspective, but can also seem clinically unfeeling and, to the rejected, somewhat arbitrary. So, according to a story in Nature, when the HSE was trying to determine what to do with a giant block of concrete outside their institution, they decided to honor the process.
The recently unveiled monument is a huge stone die, with common outcomes of peer review etched (in English) onto the five visible sides: “Accept,” “Minor Changes,” “Major Changes,” “Revise and Resubmit,” and the dreaded “Reject.” Surrounding the outcomes are the titles of academic papers, many of which were authored by people who donated to the project.
The monument is meant to honor the rarely acknowledged efforts of the anonymous reviewers. It is also a nice reminder that in any creative, scientific, or academic endeavor, rejection is just one side of the die.
In the premiere episode of the FX series Taboo the protagonist, James Delaney (Tom Hardy), takes advantage of a local doctor's moral flexibility to quietly exhume his father’s body and determine the cause of death, which he believes to be decidedly unnatural. In a dark operating theater, the surgeon grimly slices into the dead man’s stomach and tests its contents in an arcane maze of glassware and burners. When the apparatus breathes out a metallic residue, Delaney has his answer: his father’s death—and the madness that preceded it—was the result of arsenic poisoning.
Dramatic though it is, this procedure is no showrunner’s invention: known as the Marsh test, the “terror of poisoners" was an important—and much debated—part of 19th-century courtroom drama. (Taboo’s portrayal is mostly accurate, but anachronistic—the show is set in 1814, while the test dates to 1836.) Used well into the 20th century, the Marsh test was for decades the center of ongoing dialogue between law and science, begging questions about the credibility of scientific testing and creating a role for expert testimony in criminal prosecution.
Arsenic is perhaps history’s most prolific poison, and for good reason: it has been historically easy to obtain, is odorless and tasteless, can be introduced quietly over time in small unassuming doses, and in the end its symptoms mimic those of any number of ordinary diseases. For most of history there was no reliable way to detect it, and so arsenic was a lurking threat, with deaths both common and under-reported.
The 1833 murder trial of John Bodle presented a typical narrative of family tiffs gone south: Bodle was arrested on suspicion of slipping poison into his grandfather’s coffee, and chemist James Marsh was called upon to provide forensic evidence at trial. While Marsh found arsenic in the coffee based on then-standard testing, his results were insufficient to persuade the jury; at the time, test results often deteriorated before they could be demonstrated, putting scientists into “take my word for it” territory. Frustrated over Bodle’s acquittal, Marsh went searching for a more reliable test to cut through the ambiguities of arsenic poisoning.
He knew from documented 18th-century chemical processes that arsenic acid would react with zinc to produce arsine gas, and in 1836 figured out that the gas, when heated to a particular temperature range, would leave a stable film of metallic arsenic on a piece of glass or porcelain—an indicator that came to be called the "arsenic mirror.” Marsh's test could accurately detect minute quantities of the poison and, to the delight of criminal prosecutors, was viable on long-dead bodies. The telltale mirror, further, made for a conveniently clear and dramatic presentation in the courtroom.
Perhaps the most famous use of Marsh’s test was in the trial of Marie Lafarge in 1840, in which the defendant stood accused of poisoning her husband. Young Marie had entered an arranged marriage with Charles Lafarge believing him to be a wealthy, cultured businessman, and when she found out he was in fact a boorish clod with a run-down chateau, rough sexual habits and substantial debt, she got to putting arsenic in his food. (Friends mentioned that they’d heard her asking casually about mourning fashions: How long did you have to wear black, again?) By the time Charles came to realize his wife’s devotion to home cooking was not a loving gesture, it was too late.
A back-and-forth festival of forensic testing ensued: local scientists first analyzed the dead man’s beverages, stomach tissue and vomit; and while they claimed to have found arsenic, their glassware broke during testing. Moreover, defense counsel was upset at use of outdated techniques, and called in Mateu Orfila, dean of the Paris Faculty of Medicine and the era’s premier toxicologist, who confirmed that only the Marsh test would be credible in court.
Subsequent analysis with Marsh’s procedure failed to find any arsenic, but now it was the prosecution’s turn to call Orfila to their side: citing the scientist’s research stating the stomach might be able to expel poison, they said testing would have to be done on Lafarge’s organ tissue for a truly definitive result.
At this point there was next to nothing left of poor Charles Lafarge, whose body when exhumed was said to resemble a “species of paste, rather than flesh.” While this did not keep the scientists from their work, it did, however, influence the concessions available to a crowd of eager spectators: between entertainment seekers, scientists, lawyers and Marie Lafarge’s surprisingly large fan club, many of whom found the “black widow” thing particularly sexy, the crowd purchased some 500 bottles of smelling salts.
Lafarge’s attorney “wept tears of triumph” when analysis came up clear. Still unconvinced, the prosecution raised the specter of user error: it was the first time the local scientists had performed the notoriously finicky Marsh test. What if they in their inexperience had achieved a false result? To surmount the burden of proof, Orfila himself performed a final analysis. He handily detected arsenic in a milkshake-like preparation of organ mash, and Marie Lafarge was convicted and sentenced to hard labor.
The Marsh test was to have been a decisive tool in poisoning cases, all but eliminating the need for discussion at trial; and yet, the Lafarge trial only highlighted its many vulnerabilities.
As events show, the test was simple but not easy: scientists needed skill and familiarity to get it right. Further, Marsh’s sensitive process raised questions of whether forensic testing invited errant criminal liability around a substance that was both common and legal in the 19th century. Arsenic was an ordinary means of pest control, a routine preservative and household ingredient in things like green fabric dye and wallpaper, and this is not to mention the fact that arsenic made its way into loopy patent medicines and, through coal smoke, much of the atmosphere. Orfila and others for a time (incorrectly) assumed that some measure of “normal arsenic” occurred naturally in the skeletons of living things, absorbed from the environment—the idea being that you could basically boil knuckle bones for beef broth and find trace arsenic in the pot. How were juries to distinguish malice from nature?
And while the test could not be interrogated, the expert could. Used to bolster or discredit a lawyer’s agenda when useful, 19th-century forensic analysis raised questions we still endeavor to answer in courtrooms today: in matters of law and science, how do you tell a good expert from a bad one? Who do you believe, and why? What causes emotions to cloud over data? What margin of error in conviction, if any, is acceptable in the pursuit of justice?
Courts today apply tests to determine the sufficiency of scientific evidence, admitting expert testimony when it is both relevant and reliable for the jury in its role as trier of fact. In the Marsh era, courts were exploring these issues in real time as new scientific processes came to light.
The Marsh test alone could not answer these questions. What it did do, through the Lafarge case, was to give expert scientists a previously unconsidered role in jury trial. No longer content to leave conclusive analysis to whomever was the local doctor or enthusiast, courts came to seek and rely upon the expertise of qualified professional scientists, applied to accepted techniques and common conditions. In the end, James Marsh did more than put arsenic poisoning decisively out of fashion: he created the lineage of modern forensic science in court.
