The Russian village of Sosnovka, in the Sakha Republic, is not the sort of place that a person travels to on a whim. The republic is part of Russia’s Far Eastern Federal District, which, at 2,382,000 square miles, is nearly the size of India. Across that gigantic area live about 6.3 million people, fewer than in the city of Changsha, China. Though the highway that leads to Sosnovka from Yakutsk, the provincial capital, is being upgraded, not long ago that stretch of more than 300 miles was a dirt road that might take an entire day to traverse.

If you reach remote Sosnovka, though, you will find a small museum and a monument, erected in 2014, to a nurse from England named Kate Marsden, who went there in 1891. Back then, her journey took months. On the final leg, from Yakutsk, Marsden rode a horse across the boggy taiga, dodging bears and clouds of mosquitos for seemingly endless days until she reached her destination.

In many ways, Marsden fits the profile of a daring female explorer of the Victorian age. She went to Siberia to find a particular medicinal herb that she thought could cure leprosy, and to meet sufferers of the disease living in the Russian forest. Her advocacy for leprosy patients has since made her a local hero—there’s even a very large diamond named after her—but in her own time, her adventurousness, coupled with gossip about her personal life and sexual preference, brought her only infamy. After she returned from Siberia, she was vilified as a fabulist and an embezzler who had betrayed people who trusted her. Her critics questioned her motives for going to Sosnovka at all: What was she really after? Or was she just running away from something?

Marsden first heard of the miracle herb, which might alleviate the symptoms of leprosy and perhaps even cure it, from a doctor in Constantinople. It grows only in Siberia, he told her. In the late 19th century, that vast region had been under Russian control for almost two centuries, but it was a place of exile, disconnected from the rest of the country. Construction on the Trans-Siberian Railway did not start until the next year, in 1891.

None of this diminished Marsden’s obsession with the herb. “Had it been Kamchatka or the North Pole I would have tried to reach it,” she later wrote. She had been concerned with the plight of leprosy patients since 1877, when she first encountered the disease in Bulgaria, while nursing soldiers wounded in the Russo-Turkish War. By the 1880s she was pleading for permission to visit Molokai, the Hawaiian island leprosy colony, and was obsessed with meeting Louis Pasteur, who she thought had developed a leprosy vaccine. In February 1891, after no less an authority than the Empress of Russia corroborated the existence of this leprosy-curing herb, Marsden and a Russian-speaking friend, Ada Field, set out for Siberia.

Marsden and Field traveled first by train, then by sledge, “bump, jolt, bump, jolt—over huge frozen lumps of snow and into holes” to Omsk, in southwest Siberia. From there, Marsden continued alone. A horse-drawn carriage took her to the River Lena, a barge took her to Yakutsk, and from there she continued on horse, riding astride like a man. The road was so bumpy and muddy that she had no other choice. The journey, though difficult, had its fascinations. Marsden visited villas and prisons, saw eagles and forests where hundreds of trees had fallen (witches, the locals told her), learned that milk could be sold in frozen blocks, and rode across a stretch of taiga where the peat and forest were bright with flames. “The whole earth for miles around seemed full of little flickers of fire ... rising here and there above the earth,” she wrote.

After months of traveling, Marsden finally reached her destination, the area around Sosnovka, where she could see firsthand the conditions in which leprosy patients lived. They had been exiled there from their communities to small, overcrowded huts, without good clothes and often short of food. She met a 14-year-old boy who snuck back into town at night to sleep in his mother’s house, an uninfected girl born in an exile village and barred from leaving, a woman whose only companion, another patient, had gone crazy.

Having collected these stories, Marsden turned around and started the long journey back to Moscow. Her expedition lasted 11 months in total. Upon her return, she announced that she would write a book of her journey, to raise money for the suffering people she had met. She also, she said, brought back samples of the herb she had sought. In the ensuing months, Marsden was celebrated by Russian royalty, sought after by the press, and named one of the first female fellows of the Royal Geographic Society. Soon, though, the social intrigue of her past returned to spoil her newfound fame.

Of the women who had formed close relationships with Marsden, Ellen Hewett was most to blame for the scandal that dogged her after Siberia. The two women met while sailing to Europe from New Zealand, where Marsden lived for five years, and they became close. Hewett, an older woman, was “drawn to Marsden,” as University of Oxford scholar Elizabeth Baigent recounts in her Marsden biography, and after they landed, the pair continued to travel together around Europe, with Hewett paying the way.

“It was only when her finances reached a perilous state that Ellen Hewett was forced to accept the motives behind Marsden’s avowed affection for her,” writes Hilary Chapman in the New Zealand Slavonic Journal. Marsden needed the older woman’s money to support her peripatetic lifestyle. When Hewett began to understand this, they fought. In a last straw, Marsden struck Hewett, and the women separated for good soon after.

Hewett returned to New Zealand, and tried to warn other people connected to Marsden about the way she had been mistreated. Hewett collected information about Marsden’s other alleged financial scams. She failed to repay loans, sold furniture for a friend who’d left New Zealand and never handed over the money, and committed insurance fraud—taking out two policies before a mysterious accident put her out of her nursing job for months. Even the leprosy advocacy, Hewett believed, was part of the hustle.

The accusations made their way to Isabel Hapgood, an American writer with expertise in Russia. Hapgood had already heard disgruntled rumblings from contacts in Russia, and she chose to make Marsden her enemy. She spent six years working “to bring down Marsden and keep her down,” Baigent writes, by using all of her influence to discredit Marsden’s account of her trip. In a review of Marsden’s book, for instance, Hapgood wrote that it was “absolutely devoid of literary merit” and misrepresented both the conditions of life in Russia and the plight of people with leprosy. The Russian government, according to Hapgood, could care for “the sixty-six leperes over whom this disproportionate fuss and self-advertisement has been wasted.” The real purpose of Marsden’s work, Hapgood insinuated, was financial gain.

It’s not entirely clear why Hapgood had such animus toward Marsden, but her campaign worked. Soon Marsden’s charitable work was under investigation by the Charity Organization Society of London, and wealthy patrons began to withdraw support. A commission in Russia also began investigating Marsden, and almost as soon as she became famous for her long journey, Marsden’s reputation began to tarnish.

In the assessment of her most thorough biographers, including Chapman and Baigent, the accusations against Marsden weren’t entirely unwarranted. She was bad at managing money—though no one found any true irregularities in her charitable efforts—and she was hard to get along with. She could be particularly cruel to women with whom she’d once been very close, as Hewett experienced.

The herb she brought back from Siberia, too, proved to be a red herring. Modern writers retracing Marsden's journey found that there was a Siberian herb, kutchutka, that was known in the later 19th century as a potential treatment for the symptoms of leprosy. But it was no secret; Russians and Europeans had tested it and found its curative properties wanting. Chemist and Druggist magazine offered to attempt to identify the herb Marsden reported to have found, but she wouldn’t share a sample—even with these experts in medicinal herbs—and soon stopped replying to their inquiries.

The committees investigating Marsden were unable to find any true improprieties in the finances of her Siberia trip or subsequent charity work. Instead, the authorities chose to sanction her for the disclosures about her personal life—specifically that some of her relationships with women had been sexual. Marsden herself confirmed that this was true, although she claimed she was never the initiator. That, in the end, was what sealed her fall from the public eye. Being a lesbian was the worse offense.

In the years after her Siberian adventure, Marsden tried to resurrect her reputation, but she eventually faded from public life. She lived out her later years with her two sisters; she was particularly close with one of them, who helped support her. In the past 20 years or so, historians have assembled a fuller picture of the campaign against her and the accusations that brought her down. If Marsden was difficult, she was also living in a way that few women of her time tried to. The smear to her reputation was as much about prejudice toward women in general and anxiety about lesbian relationships as it was about her own shortcomings. Ultimately, Chemist and Druggist’s 19th-century assessment of Marsden may have been exactly correct: “The fact that her expedition was quixotic in its conception and has been barren of therapeutic results is no reason to carp at the credit to which her bravery and tenacity entitle her.”

In 1896, the Salmin Brothers, a Padua-based publishing company, produced Galileo a Madama Cristina de Lorena (Galileo's Letter to Christina). It had an embossed cover and slipcase, but it had another, exceptional feature: It was sized at just 0.7 by 0.4 inches. Within, the text is printed in “fly’s eye type,” which is so small that when the Salmin Brothers first used it, for Dante’s Divine Comedy, it reportedly damaged the eyesight of the typesetter. This time, it was used in a title about one-third the size of the previous example—the smallest book ever printed with hand-set, movable type.

Galileo’s tiny tome is just one of some 4,000 miniature books held at the University of Iowa, most of which were gifted to the institution from a single collection. The donor, Charlotte M. Smith, was an avid collector of rare books, but as volumes began to overwhelm her bookshelves, she turned to miniatures. Her first purchase was a 3.75-inch-tall edition of Clement Clarke Moore's A Visit From St. Nicholas (more commonly known by its opening line, "'Twas the the night before Christmas ... ”).

Admittedly, this title would not now be classified as a true miniature, which must be three inches or smaller. And it seems positively gargantuan compared with the books on the tinier end of the scale. The University of Iowa holds a collection of what are known as “ultra-microminiatures” (measuring less than 0.25 inches), including a Book of Genesis that can be worn as a pendant and read only with a magnifying glass. (The world’s absolute smallest—Teeny Ted From Turnip Town—was etched using an ion beam at Simon Fraser University and requires a scanning electron microscope to read.)

If there are challenges to reading some miniature books, just consider the process for creating them. “Working with the type, creating it and cutting it, setting it, and proofing it, seems be one of the biggest challenges,” says University of Iowa special collections librarian Colleen Theisen. “Remember, you set type backwards and upside down. Now add on the challenge of trying to do that when it’s a two-point font and still 'mind your p's and q's!’”

Given these functional constraints, what is the point of books so small? For starters, says Theisen, “They’re darned cute. We humans seem to be obsessed with cute things.” From cuneiform tablets to tiny medieval texts to the intricate little books produced today, small manuscripts have an enduring popularity.

But miniature books also have practical uses. It’s convenient to have a pocked-sized almanac of key dates, for example, or religious texts for devotional reading. “Just like an e-reader, small books have always been better for reducing weight while traveling,” says Theisen. “Napoleon famously had a traveling library that fit in a small box.”

Small books have also lent themselves to use as contraband. In 1832, American’s first book on contraception, The Fruit of Philosophy, or The Private Companion of Young Married People, was published in miniature for easy concealment. Despite these efforts, its author, Charles Knowlton, was prosecuted for obscenity, fined, and sentenced to hard labor.

From religious texts to fairy tales, Shakespeare to flirting guides, there’s a miniature book for every subject, ready to be concealed, collected, or carried. Atlas Obscura delved into the University of Iowa’s Charlotte M. Smith miniature book collection, which is also documented in the library's "Miniature Mondays" blog posts—to bring you a selection of itty-bitty reading material.

There are islands in the ocean that don't show up on any map and that no one will also ever set foot on. Known as pumice rafts, these "islands" are made of volcanic rocks, and instead of being anchored to the seafloor they float wherever the currents take them. They can stay afloat for years (long enough to ferry small animals and seeds around the world), and scientists have long wondered about the secret of their longevity. New research is finally providing an answer.

Pumice rafts pop up after underwater volcanic eruptions. When the hot lava hits the water and cools quickly, gas bubbles are trapped in the rock, and chunks float to the surface. The pumice resists becoming waterlogged somehow, which keeps it afloat for a long time, and researchers have found that the rocks tend to sink at night and rise back to the surface during the day. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, used X-ray imaging to figure out just what is going on that makes the pumice behave so oddly. Their 3D images show that there are two forces at work.

First, water doesn't completely fill the pores of the rock, like it does in a sponge. Even though those pores are connected, some are so narrow that the surface tension of the water traps gas inside, which provides the enduring buoyancy. The pumice eventually sinks when this trapped gas diffuses out through the rock. And the bobbing? The trapped gas explains this, too, since it cools and contracts at night, which makes the rocks less buoyant. The warmth of the day then causes the gas to expand again, lifting the rocks back to the surface.

Understanding, tracking, and modeling pumice rafts can help scientists keep track of underwater eruptions in remote corners of the ocean. Further, pumice rafts can be a nightmare for ships—ashy, pulverized pumice isn't great for engines. Models can help ships steer clear, and a better understanding of when pumice rafts will sink only make those models more useful.

Somerville, Massachusetts doesn’t attract many pilgrims. Spend enough time walking its narrow streets, though, and you’re guaranteed a particular kind of religious experience. It may reveal itself proudly in a front yard, or sneak up on you in a side yard. But eventually, undoubtedly, you’ll be blessed by the presence of a Bathtub Mary: a sculpture of the Madonna, generally about waist-high, carefully sheltered in its own protective nook.

Although these constructions aren’t unique to Somerville—there are plenty in the Midwest, as well as other Massachusetts towns—aficionados agree that they’ve colonized the city to an unusual degree.

“You can find Catholic statuary in the yards of other communities … where Catholic immigrants of Italian, Portuguese and Irish origin and their descendants have resided for decades," writes Deborah Pacini, an anthropologist and Somerville resident who has been photographing the shrines for about 10 years. "But it is unlikely that you will find so many in such a small concentrated area, and in such variety of forms, [anywhere other] than in Somerville." The city has, by some counts, at least 600 such shrines.

Bathtub Marys get their name from the structures they're typically placed in: actual bathtubs, tipped up vertically and dug halfway into the ground to form graceful, arched shelters. Although domestic shrines and home altars are a long-lived Catholic tradition, it’s thought that this particular incarnation began just after World War II, when postwar economic recovery led to a rash of home remodeling. Families installed shower-bathtub combos, and their old claw-footed tubs, which were difficult to recycle, ended up out in the yard, repurposed as religiously inflected lawn art.

Those who lack a bathtub at the crucial moment often provide other creative housing: Pacini has photos of the statues taking refuge under grape arbors and hand-built stone arches, and in miniature wooden cabins and wishing wells. Less crafty types take advantage of store-bought concrete domes, many of which have scalloped edges—thus the statues’ other tongue-in-cheek nickname, "Mary on the Half Shell."

With the character and basic setting taken care of, aesthetic innovation runs rampant. A Mary might be surrounded by an attentive pack of plastic dogs, or lit year-round by a single rigged-up Christmas bulb. Other holiday seasons make for unlikely tableaus: Mary hanging out with Uncle Sam, Jesus sharing space with inflatable pumpkins. “There’s a sort of folk art impetus here,” says Pacini. “People want to keep up with the neighbors.”

Pacini is far from the first Somervillian to be captivated by the statues. Cathy Piantigini, a lifetime resident and children’s librarian, has spent the past few years walking every street in the city in an attempt to map them. A local brewery, Slumbrew, has even put out a limited-edition beer called the Bathtub Mary. (It’s a pale wheat ale.) Some of the city’s newer residents have put their own spin on things—one bathtub arch now houses a toy robot.

For Pacini, the attraction is largely aesthetic—she loves the shrines’ “richness and vitality,” she says. But they also act as reverse bellwethers, coal mine canaries for a city that is experiencing rapid demographic and physical change. Property prices are rising, and family apartments are being redeveloped into condos. “When I see a realtors’ sign in front of a house with a shrine, I see an ominous portent,” writes Pacini. Occasionally, she’ll come across an empty bathtub, the former home of a Mary that has been displaced along with its family.

It's a trend that seems both sad and inevitable: Even Pacini, despite her love for the Marys, does not have one of her own. “I’ve been tempted,” she says. “But I haven’t gotten one yet.”

You can see the rest of Pacini’s pictures, along with her commentary, on her project website.

Tilapia isn’t just a delicious seafood option. The little fish is lately being used to treat severe burn victims.

As Reuters is reporting (along with a series of somewhat unsettling process photos), doctors in Brazil have begun experimenting with using the skin of the tilapia fish as a treatment option for 2nd and 3rd degree burn victims.

To prepare the skin, it is cut into thin strips, then sterilized and irradiated before being placed into cold storage, where it can last for up to two years. When deployed, the strips are placed on the damaged areas of the patient’s skin, almost like a cross-species skin graft, acting as a natural bandage that is more soothing and less painful than traditional gauze.

Researchers in Brazil experiment with a new treatment for severe burns, using the skin of tilapia fish https://t.co/hRJwnTEEm1pic.twitter.com/2x7WQ0jXtN

— Reuters Pictures (@reuterspictures) May 26, 2017

The technique itself is not revolutionary, and is usually performed with human or pig skin. Many Brazilian hospitals aren't able to keep traditional skins in stock, and have turned to the abundant tilapia in the country’s rivers. Researchers say they've found fish skin works almost as well as human or pig skin, even if it looks a bit more alien.

As a waste product of the local fishing industry, tilapia skin has the added benefit of being cheaper than medical-grade burn cream.

We've known for a long time that Jupiter is a giant, weird planet. But we may have underestimated just how weird. The Juno spacecraft, launched in 2011, just sent back its first batch of scientific data and it is a doozy. The gas giant has a lumpy magnetic field, polar storms as big as Earth, and auroras are unlike anything scientists have ever seen.

Researchers unveiled the new findings during a press conference on May 25, and published two papers in Science and another 44 papers in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. And all of that came out of just five passes by Jupiter in less than a year. Juno has barely scratched the Jovian surface.

It took three passes just to get a complete image of the planet's south pole, roiling with storms as large as Mars. Scientists were surprised to see that the planet's distinct bands don't extend to the pole, and are instead replaced by tempestuous swirls. They were also surprised to find the planet's north pole didn't look the same. “We're puzzled as to how they could be formed, how stable the configuration is, and why Jupiter’s north pole doesn't look like the south pole,” said Scott Bolton, the project's principle investigator, from the Southwest Research Institute, in a press release. It could be that in a year, the poles will look completely different. Stay tuned.

There are also massive solar storms at the poles that cause bright auroras. But unlike Earth's, they are not caused just by the solar wind. Jupiter's especially volcanic moon Io contributes sulfur gas that makes the auroras even brighter.

Between the poles other surprises lurked. The planet's magnetic field, for example, caught scientists off guard. They were expecting a strong field, but the data show they underestimated it. They also weren't expecting the field to be quite so variable. “Already we see that the magnetic field looks lumpy: it is stronger in some places and weaker in others," said Jack Connerney, a planetary scientist at NASA's Goddard Planetary Space Flight Center, in a press release. Scientists think there are large currents of liquid hydrogen churning in the planet's outer core, generating the field.

Juno has sent back some incredible images and data from its first five flybys, and there's going to be another major pulse of surprises when it passes over the famous Red Spot storm on July 11. Buckle your seatbelt—Juno's taking us on an amazing ride.

It is the eeriest war memorial you will ever behold.

Actually, I’ll just go ahead and say it’s the eeriest memorial you’ll ever behold. Of any kind.

You can thank Paul Landowski for that. Born in Paris to a French mother and a Polish immigrant father, Landowski was 39 years old when his unit, the 132nd Régiment d’Infanterie, was mobilized on August 6, 1914, at the very start of the Great War. He spent four years at the front, was awarded a Croix de Guerre in 1917, and somehow managed to survive. After he was discharged on January 9, 1919, Landowski returned to his home and to work, but he couldn’t seem to forget, or even to distract himself much. What haunted him most was the sight of so many dead poilus—French soldiers—piled up in trenches, stacked in mass graves. Though the trenches were now empty and the graves filled in, he could not get away from those images, the bodies, the faces. So he decided to work with them.

Landowski was a sculptor. Today he’s best known for Christ the Redeemer, that enormous 1931 art deco statue of Jesus that you see in just about every photo of Rio de Janeiro, but he was already a celebrated artist well before the start of the First World War. In 1920, when he was asked to create a memorial to those killed in the Second Battle of the Marne, he immediately thought of those images, those bodies, those faces. He knew that they haunted millions of other people, too, and that even those who had never seen such things—who had never gotten close to the front—were haunted by the vacant bedroom, the unfilled seat at the dinner table, the framed photo next to the polished shell casing on the mantelpiece. France was filled with emptiness. The only way to exorcise it, Landowski determined, was to acknowledge it.

If this seems obvious now, it certainly wasn’t then. There are Grande Guerre monuments absolutely everywhere you go in France, and not by happenstance. After the war, the French government offered funds to every settlement in France—every city, town, village, hamlet, community—to build a Grande Guerre memorial. I’ve been told that in the entire country, from the North Sea to the Mediterranean, only five settlements declined to do so. I cannot name any one of those five, and I’ve never met anyone who can, but even if they do exist, the participation rate was still, effectively, 100 percent.

Regarding the monuments themselves, though, there is little in the way of uniformity: there are steles and tablets, boulders and blocks, fountains and planters. The most memorable are the statues—and here again, there is a great deal of variety: men alone; men with each other; men with Marianne, the feminine embodiment of France. There are men charging, marching, standing still, lying down; their pistols drawn, bayonets thrust forward, hands empty, arms filled with a fallen comrade; mouths agape, lips pursed, gaze intent, eyes closed; alive, dying, dead. In the village of Sauvillers-Mongival, there’s a terra cotta sculpture of a life-sized, grim-faced poilu, hunkered down behind a machine gun, finger on the trigger. You won’t see many of those; it’s not a terribly romantic image.

And that’s the one thing that almost all French Great War memorial statuary has in common: romanticism. Not a trace of fear in the men’s faces, even the dying. They clutch their chests, thrust their arms out toward heaven, call out for their men to carry on!, stare out at the battle still underway. But they are not afraid. They do not experience regret. They may be a few seconds from death, but they are still fiercely alive, and looking only forward, never back. Even the dying figures seem more vibrant than I feel some days, and more noble than I am on my best ones.

That’s not what Landowski was going for. Rather than gone to a better place, he focused on: gone. Those empty dinner chairs, vacant bedrooms. He worked in granite, not marble or terra cotta. It took him 15 years to create eight figures, each standing in for roughly 170,000 poilus killed. They huddle together, eight towering stone men around 25 feet tall, arms hanging down, heads listing forward or to one side, eyes neither open nor closed. A Lebel rifle rests against one; another cradles a machine gun to his chest. The figure next to him carries two sacks full of grenades. Another rests his fingertips on a pick handle. A couple of them still wear their packs. Seven are in uniform; one appears to be naked. They are dead, but alive, but dead. Gone, to be sure, but definitely still right here. He called them Les Fantômes—the phantoms.

As striking as the sculpture is its setting, a hill called the Butte Chalmont near the village of Oulchy-le-Château, about 60 miles northeast of Paris. Like much of the area, Butte Chalmont and the surrounding fields saw terrible fighting during the Second Battle of the Marne. The butte itself caught so many big shells that its shape was changed dramatically and forever. Landowski had to install a series of steps at several points along the path just to make it traversable; the final 50 yards or so required a large staircase, dozens of steps, to scale what had been craters. From the top platform you can turn around and behold a stunning plain that stretches out for miles, dotted with groves and farms, like something out of a fairytale. It’s one of the most beautiful vistas in France. The gentleman who first brought me to see Les Fantômes told me the spot is popular with families, who come in summers and on weekends with blankets and pique-nique baskets.

If a place where legions of men were shot and blown up a century ago, and where their granite ghosts now stare down at you from on high, strikes you as an odd spot for a picnic, no matter how lovely the view—well, I can’t argue with you. It wasn’t the first thought that came to my mind, either. Then again, if you were going to rule out any place men fought and died during the First World War as picnic grounds and parks, you’d be taking an enormous chunk of northeastern French real estate off the table. And this, after all, is what those 170,000 times eight poilus died for: to keep France France. If their descendants couldn’t use this land as they pleased, they might have told you, then they themselves might as well have ceded it to the Germans.

And their memorial would have looked quite different.

Richard Rubin's newest book is "Back Over There," a personal journey back to the French rural landscape where so many American soldiers fell during World War I.

Before she became a novelist, Edith Wharton tried her hand at writing plays, and recently two scholars discovered one of her dramatic works, forgotten until now, hiding in an archive in Austin, Texas, Rebecca Mead reports in The New Yorker.

Wharton’s literary fame came later in life, and she wrote a number of unproduced plays in her 30s. She seemed, at one point, to be on the cusp of success. In 1901, her play The Shadow of a Doubt was slated to be produced, and a famous actress was cast in the lead role. The producer pulled out before the premier, though, and the play faded into obscurity.

Laura Rattray, of the University of Glasgow, and Mary Chinery, of Georgian Court University, had discovered an article referencing The Shadow of a Doubt. While attending a conference in Austin they searched the Harry Ransom Center’s holdings for the manuscript. They came up with two copies and have published the text in the Edith Wharton Review. It’s the first previously undiscovered work by the author found in 25 years.

The play, they write, features a former nurse whose husband discovers that she had helped in the assisted suicide of his first wife. As Mead writes, the play presages the themes of Wharton’s later novel, The House of Mirth.

As it says in the Book of Romans, "Those who are in the flesh cannot please God." Pious inventors in Germany are playing around with this bit of scripture: They've invented a robotic priest, currently dishing out sacred texts and wisdom in Wittenberg.

As The Guardian reports, the robo-priest, named BlessU-2, was created in honor of the 500-year anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. It's the work of a team from the Protestant Church of Hesse and Nassau, led by clergyman Stephan Krebs. It is certainly going to raise some eyebrows, but that is by design. The robot is supposed to be controversial. "We wanted people to consider if it is possible to be blessed by a machine," Krebs said.

When you approach BlessU-2, it first offers a series of choices. You can decide which language you'd like it to speak, whether you'd prefer a "male" or "female" voice, and what type of blessing you'd like to hear.

It then grinds into action, raising its arms, emitting light from its hands, and reciting your preferred prayer. Its mouth moves, its eyes rotate, and its nose changes color. The overall effect switches rapidly between "cute" and "menacing" depending on the angle of its eyebrows—much more expressive, it must be said, than what we know of Martin Luther's.

Despite BlessU-2's obvious skills, we shouldn't expect a disruption of the priesthood anytime soon, said Krebs. "[A robot] could never substitute for pastoral care," he told The Guardian. But at least this one knows what to say when we sneeze.

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.

Steve Libert had already violated the cardinal rule of scuba diving by losing track of his time on the lake bottom; now his fifth oxygen tank of the day was dangerously close to empty.

His face felt bloated and hot. He recognized the symptoms of nitrogen buildup in his bloodstream, but a storm was closing in. He pressed on, fueled by adrenaline. He was in the last few minutes of the last dive of the season, all alone in the bone-chilling October waters of northern Lake Michigan.

This was the 21st consecutive summer that Libert had spent looking for the 300-year-old remains of le Griffon, the first European ship known to ply the waters of the upper Great Lakes. Each year, he’d travel 18 hours each way from his home in Northern Virginia, spending thousands of dollars on gear and countless hours underwater. A few risky minutes weren’t going to stop him now.

“Lo and behold, on that day in October 2001, bam! Bumped into something,” Libert says. But his air tank had run out and he was forced to surface. At the boat, he asked for a fresh one to go back for another look. “One of my partners looked at me and said, ‘Steve, you can’t go back there,’” Libert says. In retrospect, he acknowledges, the additional dive time would have jeopardized his safety.

The team noted the GPS coordinates near Poverty Island, Michigan, and returned to the shore of the state’s Upper Peninsula. The following summer, Libert retraced his steps to find the massive hunk of debris that had caused him to risk everything: An oak timber that appeared to be protruding 10 feet from the soft sediment of the lake bottom.

Since its disappearance in 1679, the Griffon has taken on a mythic air. Widely considered the Holy Grail of undiscovered Great Lakes shipwrecks, the Griffon carried no treasure, nor anything else that may have retained its value after several centuries underwater. All the wreck offers is a brush with history—and the chance for its discoverer to link their name with that of a legendary explorer.

Shipwreck hunters joke that the Griffon is the most searched for and the most found ship in the Great Lakes—meaning there have been countless false alarms. Wayne Lusardi, a maritime archaeologist for the state of Michigan, has investigated at least 17 Griffon claims since 2002. Only two were actual ships. “I’ve looked at telephone poles, pieces of people’s barns that have washed up on the beach, piles of rocks, things like that,” Lusardi says.

Each new claim inspires a flurry of breathless headlines, but decades of dead ends have made the local shipwreck community wary. So far, the doubters have been right every time. The state’s official position is that no evidence of the Griffon has been found to date.

The cold, fresh water of the Great Lakes is kind to shipwrecks, and the 337-year-old wreckage could theoretically be found almost entirely intact. Each year, the lakes’ eerily preserved wrecks attract thousands of divers, tourists, researchers, and history buffs. Of those, only an elite handful are dead-set on finding the Griffon, but everyone knows the story.

Like any good ghost ship, the tale is steeped in fame, fortune, and intrigue. For the explorer Robert de La Salle (full name: René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle), who staked his wealth and reputation on the ship’s cargo, the disappearance was part of a chain of misfortunes that would eventually claim his life.

On January 26, 1679, Robert de La Salle drove the first bolt into the keel of what would become the Griffon, a barque longue of 30-50 feet. He planned to sail to the western shores of Lake Michigan, where he would hopefully collect enough furs to assuage his debtors while establishing a French presence in the region.

The Griffon set sail from Niagara on August 7 of that year. The crew launched earlier than planned to avert sabotage, then faced a hard slog through the shallow St. Clair River and a near-fatal storm on Lake Huron. Despite all this, La Salle arrived at the mouth of Green Bay almost a month after his initial departure: September 2, 1679. Some of his men had gone ahead via canoe to barter for furs, and awaited him onshore. Sixteen days later, the Griffon re-embarked for Niagara without La Salle aboard.

What happened next is lost to history.

La Salle continued exploring the continent’s interior, but the Griffon was never far from his mind. He began to worry about the ship’s safety after months passed without word from his crew. Neighboring tribes reported seeing the boat sail into a violent storm, then finding a hatch cover, spoiled pelts, and other apparent wreckage the following spring.

La Salle would eventually come to believe something more sinister. In a letter from 1683, he reported hearing strange rumors: A nearby village had been visited by a neighboring tribe. They had brought captive Frenchmen carrying pelts and explosives—both of which the Griffon had been carrying. One of the men may have matched the description of the ship’s pilot, a man most records refer to as Luc the Dane. Luc, La Salle decided, must have sabotaged the ship to sell the furs himself.

Until his death in 1687, La Salle believed his crew had betrayed him.

It was three hand-hewn pegs in the beam that first made Libert suspect he’d finally solved one of the biggest mysteries of the Great Lakes. Given the wood’s shape, apparent age, and location, he concluded the beam was the Griffon’s bowsprit, used to maneuver the sails. And so he returned year after year in search of proof of the Griffon. Fifteen years later, it remains just out of reach.

In 2013, Libert permanently moved to Michigan after retiring from a career as a Washington, D.C.-based intelligence analyst. The home he shares there with his wife, Kathie, doubles as the headquarters of Great Lakes Exploration Group, the company Libert founded to identify, protect, and preserve the timber.

“In a way, it is a treasure hunt,” Libert says of his 36-year quest. “The ship itself is the treasure. It’s the ship itself and the voyage that it made and what it means to the United States.”

La Salle, after all, is the man who discovered the mouth of the Mississippi and named the Louisiana Territory. The Griffon would have tremendous historical value, but it’s the search itself that drives Libert. “Every time I go in the water, it’s just extremely exciting,” Libert says. “You’re reaching, and you’re hoping, ‘If I bump into something, is it the ship?’”

The document Libert says led him to the area is a closely guarded secret, but he stands by the conclusions he’s drawn from it. “There’s just no other place in the Great Lakes that fits that description,” he says. He spends his winters examining maps and firsthand accounts of La Salle’s expeditions, carefully considering translations of early modern French and local tribal languages and counting distances by archaic nautical units. He obsesses over details many amateur historians might find tedious.

On the other hand, diving is expensive. Outfitting each diver for the frigid lake costs Libert thousands of dollars—and even then, a crucial clue on the lake bottom may as well be a needle in a haystack. Libert spent eight years diving the same patch of lake around Poverty Island before he bumped into the timber.

“We can’t get a date on it, but we know it’s old by certain things like erosion marks and the construction of it and the types of wood that it is,” he says. “You can look at the dimensions, the shape… Is it comparable to the size and the shape that the Griffon would’ve had? Yes.”

Valerie van Heest, director of the nonprofit Michigan Shipwreck Research Association, disagrees. Like Libert, she’s been diving the Great Lakes for 40 years.

Van Heest and other skeptics say what Libert believes is a bowsprit is actually an old fishing implement called a pound net stake. She holds up two photos: the first of a pound net stake; the other, an underwater shot of Libert’s timber. “It was like a four-posted device with a net in between it, designed to catch fish,” she explains, then rhetorically adds: “What does that stick in the pegs look like?”

She talks about Libert carefully—diplomatically, but with sympathy for his passion. “I think he truly believes that the piece of wood he’s found was at some point connected to the Griffon,” she says, “but I think his dream has taken him in a direction that’s not real.”

In reality, the Griffon was found and destroyed decades ago, she says, reaching for a slim paperback written by the shipwreck hunters Joan Forsberg and Cris Kohl.

Forsberg and Kohl have collaborated on five books on the underwater graveyards of the Great Lakes. Their latest, The Wreck of the Griffon, is a historical account detailing 22 Griffon claims, including Libert’s timber. Their research has guided them to a wreck documented more than a century ago, on the Canadian side of Lake Huron.

As Forsberg and Kohl tell it, the story goes something like this: In the late 1890s, a man named Albert Cullis, the keeper of the Mississagi Strait Lighthouse on Manitoulin Island, Ontario, discovered a watch chain entangled in the exposed roots of a tree. Underneath, buried in the soil, he then found three small metal tokens made of copper or brass, all supposedly marked with 17th-century dates.

After more searching, Cullis came across a cave with four skeletons and another nearby with an additional two. He reportedly also found more tokens and tools associated with life on a ship.

“There were six skeletons; six members of the crew that left on the Griffon on that fateful day,” Forsberg says. Legend has it that one of the skeletons had a massive skull. Forsberg says that La Salle’s pilot Luc was rumored to be nearly 7 feet tall.

Newspapers at the time reported that the artifacts, debris, and human remains were the last trace of the fabled ship and its crew. Decades passed, and then in the 1920s and 1930s, wealthy advocates sent a bolt from Cullis’s discovery for dating and analysis at the Louvre. The results were inconclusive.

Still, the bolt, Forsberg says, seems consistent with French shipbuilding methods before the 18th century. That doesn’t mean, of course, it was from the Griffon, and not everyone believes it was—but historians know of no other sailing ship, European or otherwise, having traveled the upper Great Lakes at that time.

Some skeptics argue that the bolt could be evidence of a previously unknown European ship from the same time period. Others say the wreck isn’t a sailing ship at all, but a more typical boat for the tribes of the region.

For Forsberg, it’s the pieces of lead caulking scattered near the bolt on the shore that tip the scales in favor of the lighthouse wreck. She and Kohl recently uncovered an order of lead made by La Salle in France, dated right before the Griffon’s construction.

For Forsberg and Kohl to be right, the Griffon would have had to have made it much farther than Poverty Island. They think the ship became incapacitated by a storm and was blown through the Straits of Mackinac, breaking apart on a reef six miles across the Mississagi Strait from the lighthouse. In this telling, pieces of the ship and six crewmembers then blew west. By the time the broken Griffon reached Manitoulin, four of the sailors were dead or dying. Their comrades laid their bodies out in the first cave before moving on, only to die in the second cave.

Manitoulin Island’s claim on the Griffon has all the hallmarks of great small town lore—but even those directly involved in preservation efforts aren’t necessarily believers.

“I like things to be exact,” says Nicole Weppler, curator of the Gore Bay Museum, which held some of the last shards of the wreck until last year. “In France, they have decided it is definitely not the Griffon,” she says, referring to the testing done in Paris 84 years ago.

Her archives include letters from 1956 in French and English that remain vague about a Griffon connection, as well as correspondence between some of the era’s most prominent Griffon hunters. She doesn’t doubt the wreck is historic, just that the pieces are from La Salle’s ship. “Imagine it’s a 17th-century vessel, not the Griffon,” she says. “That’s exciting by itself.”

Still, there are no records of any other ship from that time sailing those waters. “There is an actual ship that was on Manitoulin Island,” Forsberg says. “If it’s not the Griffon, whoa—what the heck is it?”

Rummaging through the trunk of his hatchback, Rich Gross pulls out a copy of Forsberg and Kohl’s book. “These books perpetuate rumors about the Griffon,” Gross says, and tosses it aside. He then grins, and tosses a 10-pound bison pelt at a reporter, followed immediately by another from a full-sized beaver. “This is what La Salle was after,” he says.

The furs are Gross’s way of demonstrating the physical and financial heft of the Griffon’s cargo. “The crown gave them no money,” he says, explaining that La Salle’s voyage was funded solely on the explorer’s fur trade. Today, Gross’s trunk also carries a weightiness: The furs nestle between seemingly endless boxes brimming with a lifetime of research.

Gross didn’t know Libert personally until 2001, when the timber showed up on the regional news circuit. Gross phoned Libert, and ever since he’s been moonlighting as Great Lakes Exploration’s resident historian—when he’s not teaching science at a suburban high school outside Chicago.

“I’m holding at least $100,000 worth of work in my hands right now,” he says, clutching a stack of spiral-bound reports from Great Lakes Exploration. In the reports are geographical surveys, journal articles, and photocopies of primary sources. Combined, the pair have been obsessively researching La Salle for 60-plus years.

From August 1976 to April 1977, a 19-year-old Gross helped reenact the explorer’s 3,300-mile journey from Montreal to the mouth of the Mississippi River. The group wore handmade clothing and built canoes, mimicking the finest details of the original expedition.

“I walked in the man’s footsteps,” Gross says. “What I learned was what was possible.” He leafs through the binders while listing off counterpoints to the Manitoulin hypothesis. First to go is Luc’s fabled, oversized skull. He flips to a letter from La Salle describing a short-legged, not gigantic, Luc. “Have you ever met a tall man with short legs?” Gross asks.

He also disputes that lead would’ve been used to seal the Griffon, or that its builders would have used iron bolts.

“There were bolts on the Manitoulin wreck that were 37 inches long, 1 3/16 inches in diameter, with massive, threaded ends and big, square nuts on them. My friends in France assure me that there were no threaded rods or bolts on any 17th-century ships,” he says, referring to a French archaeological team who have investigated their claim. Threaded bolts, according to Gross, weren’t used until the latter half of the 18th century. Every claim until now, he says, has been debunked—except the timber found off Poverty Island.

Back in the early 2000s, Libert thought the beam he'd found might be attached to the Griffon’s hull, buried under the lake sediment. Sonar had given him hope, revealing a faint signature that resembled a ship. He spent most of the next decade fighting for an excavation permit for the site. He estimates that the cost of the search, combined with the fight for the permit, have totaled well over $1 million.

He says the state is trying to keep him and other private citizens out of the discovery process. “They didn’t want us having any part to do with finding it,” Libert says. “They think academics and government should do it.” When the state of Michigan tried to block him he took the case to court, where it caught the attention of the French government. If the timber is La Salle’s ship, France legally owns the wreck. They not only supported Libert in the courtroom, but sent three government archaeologists to lead the excavation. Seven years later, Libert finally won a six-day excavation permit.

Dean Anderson, state archaeologist for Michigan, says Libert’s application was treated like any other. “We were simply going through the process,” he says, pointing out that the state approved the permit once the French archaeologists were in charge.

The excavation, Libert hoped, would justify his troubles, but the beam extended 9 feet into the lake bottom and stopped. There was nothing attached that might have hinted at a ship. “I do remember that day and I try to forget about it,” Libert says. “When we did the remote sensing, the signals hit the zebra mussels and showed a false positive.”

Libert suffered from congestive heart failure immediately after the 2013 excavation. He acknowledges the toll his search has taken on both his health and finances, but the biggest loss, he says, is less tangible: “My largest regret is not spending time with my wife.”

In 2014, the French team published a paper in the proceedings of the Advisory Council for Underwater Archaeology concluding that the beam’s size and shape is consistent with French bowsprits of La Salle’s era. Their report also says it would be rash to draw broader conclusions without more evidence.

“When we were younger, the first 15, 20 years of his diving, it was really fun,” says Libert’s wife, Kathie. “I enjoyed him coming home; listening to his stories.And then it started not to be fun anymore, when the legal part of it started to come into play.”

The Abandoned Shipwreck Act of 1987 declares states have the right to archaeological wrecks found within their borders. The state’s mandate is to preserve shipwrecks and ensure responsible archaeological practices. Michigan requires that professionals do any tests or removal of artifacts. However, international conventions say that the Griffon’s home nation, France, would own any certified wreckage.

To confirm the beam’s identity, Libert needs state permission to sample the debris for testing. He unsuccessfully applied for dendrochronology permits in both 2013 and 2015. Anderson says the state was concerned about Libert’s proposed use of a manual saw and corers.

Rather than feel discouraged, Libert is certain he’s closer than ever. He now believes the beam was probably dislodged from the rest of the craft, which should be nearby. He spent the summer of 2016 searching for his ultimate prize, the Griffon’s hull.

The search came up empty, but he did learn a few things—the first of which is that because of a May solar storm, which can distort satellite and other electromagnetic signals, he spent some time searching the wrong section of lake. He also says he’s found some intriguing pieces of debris that he’d like to test, but his rejection by the state has made all but superficial observation impossible.

There are dozens of Griffon claims scattered from Lake Michigan to Lake Erie, but some scientists and historians think the wreck itself will always remain out of reach.

The ship should have some kind of confirming artifact, much like its sister ship, la Belle, which was found on the bottom of Matagorda Bay, Texas. La Belle was loaded with evidence: most convincingly, brass cannons marked with the leaping-dolphin sigil of La Salle’s patron, King Louis XIV. According to historical accounts, the Griffon sank with seven similar armaments on board.

Built in 1685, la Belle is a mirror image of the Griffon. The two ships were the same class, close to the same size, and carried hopes of the French Empire on board—but instead of the wilderness of Niagara, la Belle was built by professionals in France. La Salle brought la Belle and three more ships across the Atlantic loaded with settlers and supplies with the dream of founding a French colony on the Gulf of Mexico.

While La Salle left the ship to explore farther inland, la Belle ran into its own troubles and eventually sank, killing several crew members. A long string of losses wore on the struggling party. Eventually, La Salle’s men would lose patience. In March 1687, almost seven years after the disappearance of le Griffon and less than a year after the sinking of la Belle, they shot La Salle to death in a mutiny.

The Texas wreck enjoyed a moment in the spotlight after archaeologists pulled it from the bay in 1996. “Ships have a magnetism to them,” says Peter Fix, from a balcony overlooking la Belle’s reconstructed hull. Fix is part of a restoration team working on the la Belle exhibit at the Bullock Texas State History Museum in Austin. The exposure the Griffon has brought to maritime archaeology is great, he says, but adds that the academic community generally has not embraced Libert’s find.

“Archaeologically, I don’t think there’s enough information,” he says. “It’s just the one piece there and nothing else. It just doesn’t seem logical.” He and many of his colleagues believe Libert’s timber is a fish weir, a tool similar to a pound net stake.

On la Belle, a hammering process known as peening, not threaded bolts, secured the beams, but we know so little about the building of the Griffon that Fix can’t say for sure what the shipbuilders used. He will say that access to iron was probably limited, making wooden pegs a more likely choice. Libert says that these pegs are the wooden spikes protruding from his beam.

This key gap in the historical records—a total lack of construction details or plans for the ship—leaves the rivaling assertions of Libert, Gross, Forsberg, and Kohl unanswered.

Since 2013, Libert’s timber has been stored at a facility in Gaylord, Michigan. It’s kept in ideal conditions for preservation under the supervision of an unnamed archaeologist. “I usually go over once every couple months,” Libert says. Shortly after the excavation, Libert attempted to date the timber using tree rings and radioactive carbon isotopes. To avoid damaging the beam, he took it to the radiology department at Otsego Memorial Hospital in Gaylord, where he used a CT scanner to get an image of the beam’s growth rings. The scan was inconclusive.

Radiocarbon dating was also ambiguous. While the average date of all samples put the timber at 100-180 years old—far too young to be the Griffon—one did date to the 1600s.

In 2016, Libert collaborated with a 3D-imaging company to create a computer model of the timber. In one of his recent examinations, he found another clue—a figure carved into the wood resembling the letter D, or the Roman numeral for 500. He thinks it may be part of a date carved into the wood: MDCLXXIX would be the Roman numeral for 1679. La Belle, he says, is similarly dated. He’s sent photos to several researchers, none of whom have replied.

“Probably 99 percent of that wreck’s gonna be there,” Libert says. He’s already been hunting for decades and says he’ll keep hunting until he finds it. He’s very aware of what the shipwreck community is saying about his quest. “I don’t care what other people say—I really don’t,” Libert says. “I know, like Rich knows, my wife knows, my colleagues know, we’ve just got to find the hull of that ship.”

For now, the Griffon stays stranded somewhere between folklore and history. Everyone has proof and disproof; a thrust and a parry. Most hope that some small artifact of Griffon is still out there, waiting for the right diver. Of course, it’s also possible that the ship is simply gone, long ago weathered away on a beach or salvaged for scrap and souvenirs.

Libert can’t entertain that possibility. Summer 2016 was his 37th year searching for the Griffon, and he’s more hopeful than ever that the ship is right around the corner. He’s still talking to the French, finding new collaborators, and buying new remote sensing equipment for the next diving season. He’s got his timber safely tucked away. He’s got everything he needs, except the hull, the missing puzzle piece. He’s sure 2017 will be the year. It’s right around the corner.

Eunice Lee, Joanne Lee, Coral Lu, Lee Won Park, John Rosin, Alice Yin, and Jia You contributed to this story.

When an occupying army takes hold of a village, that place is changed. How long the soldiers stay, how much damage they do, how thoroughly they integrate with a community—these factors can dictate how much changes and how fast. Even if the soldiers decamp and disappear entirely, the effects of the occupation linger. They may, in fact, be irrevocable.

Invasive plants—nonnative species that take over existing ecosystems—are akin to an occupying army. When dealing with plants, however, people rarely consider the long-term trauma invaders exact on ecosystems and their plant communities. “We just think—invasive plant, therefore manage,” says Daniel Tekiela, an assistant professor of invasive plant ecology at the University of Wyoming. “If the plant’s not there any more, we have been successful.”

But Tekiela is more interested in the aftermath, what happens after the invaders are gone. After cutting down, pulling up, and waging chemical warfare on an invasive plant, what becomes of the community that remains? In a paper published in Invasive Plant Science and Management, he and coauthor Jacob Barney, an associate professor at Virginia Tech, investigate what they call “invasion shadows,” the accumulated impacts of the establishment and removal of invasive plants. They are interested in how quickly invading plants change ecosystems, but also how long the changes they bring might linger, even after removal.

In the study, Tekiela and Barney tracked four types of plots over the course of three years. They began their study in a forest at Virginia's Pandapas Pond, where Japanese stiltweed, one of the most prolific invasive plant species on the East Coast, had invaded. There, they created plots where they left the stiltweed untouched and others where they eradicated the invader by hand-pulling established plants and clearing seedlings every year after that. Nearby, in an uninvaded stretch of forest, they monitored stiltweed-free plots and seeded others with stiltweed to mimic an invasion.

One important question they asked is how quickly the seeded, newly invaded plots would become like the places where stiltweed had been well established. Tekiela and Barney expected to see a steady progression of impacts over the course of their study. What they observed surprised them. When they looked at the ecosystem-wide impact, the seeded plots came to resemble the long-invaded plots rather rapidly.

“It took very little to have a sudden shift in basically everything,” says Tekiela. “It shifted quickly and stayed there.”

The environmental stakes to changes like this can be high. Tekiela is from the Midwest, and before he was an invasive plant ecologist, he visited an East Coast park and took a picture of the pretty area he was hiking through—covered with an understory of bright, lime green vegetation. Years later he found the picture again, and realized that he had been photographing Japanese stiltgrass. If you’ve hiked a forest on the East Coast forest, you’ve probably seen oceans of this plant, and maybe found it enchanting.

But stiltgrass is a powerful shaper of its environment. It creates an understory, which changes which tree seedlings thrive and survive. Over time, these changes percolate upward, and stiltgrass shifts the composition of the upper canopy of the forest. The invasive might look pretty, but it dominates the forest, from ground to crowns.

That dramatic impact is good reason to try to control stiltgrass. But Tekiela and Barney's study suggests that stiltgrass' impact survives, even when the plant doesn't. By the end of the three years of the study, the plant community in the plots where stiltgrass had been removed had diverged even further from the community present in the plots that had never been invaded at all (and from the ones were stiltgrass was allowed to remain). In other words, when the invaders left, the place changed even more than before.

The implication of the findings is that there’s not much time after a plant invasion begins to stop it from having an impact. And once the invasion has occurred, simply kicking out the invaders can inflict still more change on the plants that once called that stretch of land home.

More broadly, it also says that attempts to manage plant ecosystems often have no empirical basis. All the shades of a community and its invaders—who was where, who came and when, how long did they say, what cruelties did they inflict, who benefited, who lost out—can impact the life of a place permanently. In human terms, we understand this instinctively, that the invading force can alter the village. But with plants, it's not quite so intuitive.

“I talk to people all the time whose job it is to manage plants, and they have this visceral hate of all nonnative plants," says Tekiela. “We have such a short-term mindset when we think about controlling invasive plants that we don’t even think about at least paying attention to the state of that ecosystem afterwards.

“The goal is to have a better ecosystem, not to kill the invaders,” says Tekiela. “People often mistake those two messages.”

Sea sponges seem like some of the gentler denizens of the oceans, but not all of the thousands of species in the phylum are placid filter feeders, consuming bacteria and whatever other particles the water brings to them. Some, like a species newly discovered off Canada's North Atlantic coast, are carnivorous.

The new sponge doesn't look anything like its more recognizable cousins. Rather than a colorful, bulbous body, it's spindly and over six feet long, with a bunch of tiny glass spikes along its arms to ensnare prey. That prey is zooplankton: small organisms, such as crustaceans, that feed on other (often microscopic) marine organisms.

The species was first spotted in 2010 by scientists on a Canadian Coast Guard ship with a remotely operated vehicle, according to a statement from Fisheries and Oceans Canada. They weren't trawling for new species when they spotted the sponge's strange shape nearly 10,000 feet below the ocean's surface, but they took a sample anyway. The sponge, named Cladorhiza kenchintonae, will officially be described in a paper coming out later this summer and joins just 137 other known carnivorous sponge species.

Carnivorous sponges aren't limited to any particular depth or region. One species was found in caves in the Mediterranean just 55 feet below the surface, and four other new species from North America's Pacific coast were described in 2014. The one thing these species all seem to share is an environment lacking in the usual easy meals that other sponges thrive on. If there aren't enough other options floating by, the only sponges that will be able to scratch out a living are the carnivorous sort.

Japan’s “bubble economy” was riding high in the 1980s. The United States could only watch with a mixture of dread and indignation as Japan Inc. snapped up prime real estate such as California’s Pebble Beach golf course, Hollywood studios and even New York’s Rockefeller Center.

Japan had it all, except, it seemed, tolerance for those middle managers among its ranks seen as hindering the Japanese economic miracle. But a solution was at hand. For managers perceived as soft, indolent or otherwise incompetent, and would-be junior executives not quite ready for prime-time, the answer was a ticket to jigoku no kunren: Hell Camp.

Far from the trust-building exercises and fun runs of modern corporate retreats, Japan’s executive hell camps were run with the discipline and intensity of military basic training. The goal was to whip into shape underperforming middle-management types, as well as giving them the assertiveness the Japanese felt they lacked in dealing with Western competitors.

At Kanrisha Yosei Gakko (KYG), the best-known hell camp of the 1970s and ‘80s, rules of the 13-day course were strict. Days began at 4:15 a.m. and lasted well into the evening. Radios and visitors were prohibited; candidates were expected to focus entirely on the mission at hand. When questioned by instructors, students’ answers were expected to be quick, and above all, loud.

Perhaps the defining feature of the course at KYG—which cost approximately $4,300 in 2017 dollars—were the ribbons of shame that were pinned onto each candidate upon arrival. The ribbons, 14 in total, corresponded with a particular task or shortcoming that had to be conquered in order to graduate from the program. Confidence; company pride; penmanship and report-writing; team building; and public speaking were just some of the areas in which managers needed to prove themselves. To complete the final challenge, participants had to individually belt out—in public in front of Fujinomiya Station—the school’s “Sales Crow” song as proof of overcoming feelings of self-consciousness in public speaking.

Failing the course often meant the end of one’s climb up the corporate ladder. In its first nine years, however, over 150,000 candidates graduated from KYG’s program and today the school boasts over 300,000 graduates across the country.

The unusual nature of the hell camps inevitably drew attention from overseas. News media flocked in for interviews. The 1986 Ron Howard film Gung Ho, about a Japanese car company buying an American auto plant, featured elements of hell-camp training and introduced the ribbons of shame concept to a wider audience. An alternatively fascinated and perplexed Diane Sawyer ran a segment on KYG’s hell-camp program for 60 Minutes in 1987. As an anxious America watched the seemingly inexorable march of Japan’s economy, hell camps only added to the worry.

Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the KYG brand of hell camp was eventually franchised for use in the United States in the late ‘80s. At a facility in Malibu, the strict training regimen was much the same as its Japanese counterpart, with a few tweaks to match American sensibilities, and a heftier price tag—$5,300 per person—to match. Days began at 5 a.m., for instance, and ribbons of shame were rebranded as “ribbons of challenge.” Candidates were, however, still required to perform such tasks as 25-mile night hikes and the dreaded Sales Crow singing challenge—trundling off to a nearby shopping mall parking lot to sing before bemused crowds.

Today, the venerable Kanrisha Yosei Gakko still operates at the foot of Mt. Fuji as it has since 1979, offering a range of programs for middle management, junior employees and recent university graduates. Changing economic fortunes and a modern business climate, however, have largely seen other camps fall by the wayside. While KYG persists, Japan’s hell camps—and their ribbons of shame—are a quaint reminder of the economic boom years of the 1980s.

They say you are what you eat, but in the case of a recent video depicting a snake regurgitating another, still alive snake, the opposite also seems to be true.

This astounding video, shared by National Geographic, at first appears to be just another snake sighting on a Texas roadside. But soon enough, it becomes clear that this is two for the price of one. As Christopher Reynolds, who shot the video, notes, it looks like there is something coming out of the black snake’s mouth, and then suddenly it begins to regurgitate its meal, slowly choking out another live snake that it had swallowed. In the end, the hungry snake escapes into the grass, and the vomited snake slowly moves around, seemingly and understandably, in a daze.

As Reynolds suggests in the video, the larger of the two snakes was probably startled by the humans in their midst, and decided to spit-up its meal so that it could scurry off into the brush. This theory was corroborated by a representative with the Florida Museum of Natural History who spoke with National Geographic. Snakes prefer to be left alone while they digest their food, and it's not uncommon for them to regurgitate if they are interrupted during a meal. It is also possible that the other snake may have just been too much for the black snake to handle.

The species of the snakes in the video has not been determined, but no matter what, for one of those creatures it was their lucky day.

Whether a wine is organic or not, wine producers invest a lot of time and money combating pests and blights that can destroy their precious crops of grapes. But vineyards have an interesting relationship with one fungus in particular, known as bunch rot or gray mold. Bunch rot can hurt yields and, in wet conditions, flavors. But when conditions are just right, when the vineyard is dry just after infection, the fungus is referred to by a much more reverential name: noble rot. Grapes affected by noble rot tend to produce sweet wines, such as Sauternes and late-harvest Rieslings, because the fungus causes grapes to lose water, concentrating the fruit's sugar.

Vintners have known about and used noble rot to their advantage for centuries, but until now it hasn't been known exactly how the fungus impacts the resulting vintage. A recent study published in Frontiers in Chemistry tracked wine made from grapes affected by noble rot and another fungus, powdery mildew. The German researchers found some concrete changes in how the infections changed the resulting wines' aromas—including the ones that make a noble rot wine so great.

Noble rot in white and (rare) red Rieslings, along with Gewürztraminer grapes, causes an increase in the molecules responsible for peachy and fruity flavors, as well as toasty notes. Andrea Buettner, one of the authors of the report, noted in a press release that these changes "could be partially related to the higher sugar content reported in the infected grapes." Trained tasters in the lab preferred the noble rot wine aromas to the "healthy" control wines for all three varieties.

The grapes affected by powdery mildew, on the other hand, did not fare so well. The resulting wine had fewer of the molecules that create vanilla notes than wine from healthy grapes, for example. The tasters rated the powdery mildew–infected wine aroma as worse than the control. "This negative rating was, however, not related to any specific off-note but was rather due to a lack of positive aromatic notes," said Buettner. "In fact, the wine was described as being rather flat." When it comes to vineyard fungi, it pays to be picky.

When the poet Brian Sonia-Wallace answers the phone from his apartment in Los Angeles one recent afternoon, there's clearly a skip in his step. "I ordered a typewriter from 1917, and it just arrived," he says. "It's not fantastic, but it was $100, and I'm pretty chuffed with it."

Despite his penchant for old technology, Sonia-Wallace's literary career has been decidedly contemporary, even futuristic. Rather than shutting himself up in an office and seeking wide publication in literary magazines, he lugs his typewriter out to the street, where he writes poems individually tailored to passers-by. And instead of chasing university jobs, he aligns himself with corporations and other large entities, having served as a poet-for-hire for Dollar Shave Club, Google, and the U.S. National Parks Service.

Earlier this month, Sonia-Wallace was announced as the first-ever Writer-in-Residence for the Mall of America. It's just one of the (paid) adventures he has planned for June—others include a stint writing screenplay fragments on the street for L.A. Tourism, some time in the Poetry Tent at Michigan's Electric Forest music festival, and that other golden corporate writing assignment, an Amtrak residency.

We spoke with Sonia-Wallace about his strategies for keeping poetry alive in a time and place that doesn't seem too keen on supporting it, and how he keeps snagging all these paid poetry gigs.

When did you first know you wanted to be a poet?

I've been writing all my life, since I was a kid. I went to university in Scotland. I'm from L.A. originally, and I kind of wanted the opposite, so I went to college in a small medieval Scottish fishing village, which I think is about as far from L.A. as you can get. And I would go on walks through the farmland of Fife, and wear a flat cap, and call myself a poet, and write poetry and read it to whoever I was with. That was, I guess, the start. In some ways, it's kind of a character—it's a little bit of a game. There's something really gleeful in being able to tell someone some words you thought of one time, and have them have an emotional response and be invested, and be engaged—and be like, "Me too!"

When did you take the leap and make poetry your full-time occupation?

I came back to L.A. after college. I did a lot of artistic internships, and wound up doing a nonprofit grant-writing job, which I think gave me a lot of skills in terms of being able to do a budget, being able to pitch a project—how to do planning and reporting when, at the end of the day, you're working with other people's money. So that was a huge and unforeseen [step in that direction]—something that wasn't what I'm doing now, but definitely led to it.

Through that, I kind of went: "I'm raising money for other people to make their thing. Could I raise money for myself to make my thing?" And so in 2014, I left my job and I started doing art independently. The poetry wasn't actually the first thing that I landed on—that came a number of months in. I'd been doing a lot of different poetry actions. I do writing workshops in a park with a bunch of friends on typewriters, and we'd post the poems around the neighborhood. The idea was to create guerrilla art galleries, putting poetry in people's everyday lives in public spaces. I'd been playing with that. But then in September 2014, I ended up having a commission for a theater piece that got cancelled. So I was like, well I can either get a minimum wage retail job, or I can try writing poems on the street.

What was life like as a roaming poet-for-hire?

I was just trying out writing everywhere. Showing up to farmer's markets, showing up to art gallery openings, going to taco truck festivals. Just like, "Where are there people who maybe are interested in spending a little bit of money and having an experience?"

I write poems based on customer requests. I remember in that first month, writing a poem for a 6-year-old in a parking lot at night. [The words of his request] are in other subsequent poems, which I think is why they stick in my mind. He said, "I want a poem about 'I love you Grandpa,' because he just passed." So there was this incredibly adorable 6-year-old, and then also, his mom was right there with him, so her dad had just passed away. Writing something at his level that would also affect her, and that would be a tribute to someone who I had never met—it was a really interesting challenge.

A surprising number of people want poems about their dogs. I guess that's a thing that people need poems about. A lot of people just get whatever's important to them, which is kind of an interesting exercise—just going around in public and asking people, "What's important to you?"

How did this more recent phase of your career get started?

I'd done the poems-on-the-street thing a couple times before, and I had a sense of what I would make in tips. I ended up making California minimum wage before taxes. That was my benchmark. And then that ended up parlaying, in a really organic way, to people I'd met on the street going, "Oh, my company is having this party! Let me see if I can get some money for you to come write for us here." Or, "I'm having cocktail hour with the city planners, let me see if I can bring you in as a special treat for the guests."

I think about what I do as poetry as a service, or literature as a service. And I've done events where I'll be next to the bartender, or next to whatever other kind of entertainment is there. There's something that I love about taking something that we think of as so inaccessible—"Who understands poetry anyways?"—and being like, no, this is something you might want, three drinks in, before going on with your night. It tickles me to mess with that perception a little bit.

I've done a bit of work with people who have found me online. My personal site miraculously ended up having really good Google Analytics. It's on the first page of results if you Google "hire a poet." There was one old guy who called me, and he was like, "I need a poem for my friend's wedding in three hours. Can you do that?" And I was like "Whoa, you actually caught me on a good afternoon. Tell me about your friend."

When did you first start working directly with companies?

There were two [residencies] at the beginning. One of them was from a woman on the street who said "Oh, you know what, I actually do marketing for Dollar Shave Club, and we've been talking about having a weekly haiku column. Do you write haikus?" I was like, "Yes, of course I write haikus." So I worked with them for a few months as the resident poet—not going into their offices, but writing a haiku column for them. It was the lifestyle section—stuff that people who buy the razors might also be interested in. They were interested in doing new releases in film and music, so I would write micro-teasers: Here are all the cultural things that are happening that you might be interested in, but you're probably busy, so here's five haikus about them, and you can decide which of them you want to look into more. It was great. It was an interesting mix of having to do research and cultural journalism, but within constraints.

Around the same time, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, which is just north of L.A., was having an artist-in-residence program. It specifically was targeting kids, and the woman who runs it has a background in youth education work, and is really interested in, "How can we have artists engage youth with the mountains?" So I worked with them, I worked with an after-school program, and we brought late elementary school kids up to the mountains. They all wrote their own plays and short works and performed them based on that experience.

The funny thing about residencies—there's this [misguided] idea of what a residency actually means. A lot of times it's just what they'll call artistic projects, or the idea that it's an ongoing piece of work. So Amtrak and Mall of America will be the first two really where it's been residential, where I'll actually stay in a place that's being provided.

What interests you about these opportunities to embed somewhere specific and write?

My background is in a lot of devised and site-specific theater. And so when I think about a lot of the work that I do now, it's really in the vein of site-specific poetry. It's something we don't do, it's not a thing—but maybe it should be! Maybe there are interesting ways of, through the connection with place, revitalizing this art form. On Instagram, one of the hashtags to get you into the poetry world is literally #poetryisnotdead. And it's both sweet and super depressing. I'm like, 'Whoever said poetry died?" [Puts on "sad poet" voice]: "I can't get paid, it's not a thing, I'll just teach English"—I mean cool, but also, does it have to be that way? There are more improbable worlds.

With site-specific poetry, you can take this tradition that, if you want—and I totally use this in all of these residency applications—you can stretch it back to the Dharma Bums riding the trains in the time of Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. You can stretch it back to medieval bards wandering town to town, singing and writing songs about the town. And maybe some friendly nobility will give you money, and then you'll praise them for a while, and then you'll keep moving on. I see a really nice lineage there with what I'm trying to do as an artist working on making money from poetry.

What's your game plan for the Mall of America? What are you excited about?

I've been talking to them a little bit about my environment. It's really nice as an independent artist who so often scrounges, not necessarily just with resources, but with collaborator time. It's hard to collaborate with a group of artists who all have six jobs. It's great to have a designated team where it's like, this is what they do. They're the staff at the Mall of America. They're like, "Oh yeah, what do you want for a backdrop? Let me make you some Pinterest boards?" Cool, you're going to make a thing for me, and I just have to tell you what I want? Yeah!

So we'll see what we end up going with. I'll have some sort of writerly backdrop. I'm interested in creating a little literary-retreat-oasis space, where it's me on the typewriter, but there's also some chairs and tables around where people can sit and watch me write. Having some books on them, maybe a take-one-leave-one library. We'll see how it evolves, but the idea is that it's more than just a writer sitting and writing. I've had some really interesting experiences doing corporate events, where people want to hang out. They don't want to just get a poem and go on with their day. They want to share their writing, or talk about their favorite book. So we'll be curating that a little bit.

I am contractually obligated—and I love saying contractually obligated in this context—to be at that desk writing for four hours a day. My goal is to write 20 to 25 poems a day. One of the things I talked to the Mall about, is I said, "Hey, we're not spending money on travel [because of the Amtrak residency]—do you think we could take that money and use it to bring in local artists as well?" We haven't finalized or released the names yet, but I'm super excited. It'll be a different artist from a different discipline for the last two hours every day. I'll have been writing for a couple hours before that, so I'll have some work they can respond to. We might do some on-the-spot collaboration.

At this point, you've gotten all kinds of coveted corporate poetry gigs—Dollar Shave Club, the National Parks, the city of L.A., various music festivals, Amtrak, and now the Mall of America. What's your secret?

I think one of the reasons I got this residency was that within my pitch, I made really clear the different generational reactions to what I do. Working on a typewriter, I get nostalgia and I get novelty, along an age line. They'll either really be taken back, and they'll want to tell the story of how they learned to type, or how they used the typewriter to type their college essays. Or they'll be younger people who just think typewriters are super high-tech because they print while you write. I always make a really bad joke—I always say it's the new MacBook Pro. It's the worst dad joke, but it works every time.

In general, I don't have an advanced degree in poetry. I'm not the most literate person in contemporary poetry. I think the key at the end of the day is understanding who you're writing to. If I'm talking to a corporate client, I understand they have corporate needs. I'm not going to tell them, "Well, I'm writing Moby Dick, and it's going to be the next great American novel, and you guys need to sit down for 10 years while I do that." That's not going to work.

I think we glorify this idea of the creative process as sacred, and the artist as sacrosanct, and that money corrupts, and that pure art should be free from all influences. At the end of the day, I just think that's bullshit. If you believe that the personal is political, and that art is necessarily political and either progressive or counter-progressive, you have to accept that there's always going to be a lot of influences pushing on any given work. So it's kind of interesting to embrace those influences as being very public. I'm not trying to hide them. I'm not going to be like, "I wasn't in the Mall when I wrote these poems." I've been writing a lot about this lately, which I think is in part as a result of applying to these residencies: How can something that's commercial still be intimate and personal and true, in a human way?

Why align yourself with corporations at all? What role do you see them playing in the future of poetry?

So many of the residencies I see—even submissions for literary stuff—are really this pay-to-play model. There was one that I was super excited about, where a group of artists go to the Arctic Circle, [but] it's about $10,000 of cost to the artist. And that's a fantastic thing for folks who either have a project that will make money that needs them to do that, or people who have that income lying around to do a vacation with some interesting product. I understand why it works in terms of the economics, but the result is just that the cultural producers pay money, and the cultural disseminators make a little money. I don't think anyone's getting rich off of the backs of writers—they're just barely squeaking along by themselves.

At the end of the day you end up with this weird, I want to call it a "trickle-up effect," where the little money that artists are making, they're spending trying to get their art out there. There's not necessarily a career in that. And there's this hope that you'll make it, and you won't have to pay anymore—but I don't quite understand the pipeline, which is why I've kind of avoided it.

I do a lot of arts advocacy work as well, at the city level. I'm a huge proponent of art as a good unto itself, and something that's worth supporting. When I went to the U.K., Labor was still in power… and the context and the cultural understanding of what art-making means, and who is a patron of the arts, and who art is for, was much broader than it is in L.A., and in the U.S. at large. France has the idea that their biggest export is culture—I would argue that the U.S.'s biggest export is also culture, but we don't necessarily call it that. And maybe we should think about curating, I guess, a little bit more, and think about the idea that the public has a role in curating the aesthetic and the culture of a place, and that the public's representative is the government, and therefore the government maybe has a role, too.

I've definitely embraced this idea of corporate poetry. I love the idea of showing private companies that poetry can add value to their bottom line, and having them bring poetry in, and enabling poets to maybe not make a full livelihood, but to have a good portion of their career supported by some of these gigs.

So I see what I'm doing as broader than any single residency. If there are a couple of competitions, that's great. But ideally what I'd love to do is, like, "Hey, Mall of America, holy crap, that was awesome—you got so much media time, you got so much community goodwill. You should do this every year." That would be ideal for me. And then other people see that, other people start replicating it—if we can build a network of private enterprise supporting the arts and recognizing where artists can come in independently and work with them in a way that's mutually beneficial, I think that's about as good as we're gonna get under a system of late capitalism, and a Republican president and Congress.

Is there anything you're nervous about going into this Mall of America gig?

The thing I'm worried about, and working on problem solving for, is how to manage the flow of people. Obviously, as many people as possible who want a poem should be able to get a poem. But also I'm one guy, and the Mall is a large place, and this has had a decent amount of publicity. So I'm really interested in the challenge of how to curate who those people I'm writing for are—how to make sure that I'm being fair and accessible, but also that I'm having real interactions, rather than just jotting off three lines as fast as I can.

As far as the writing—one of the really nice things about Amtrak, about Mall of America, about all of this is, I've done public writing in so many weird places that I'm not worried about that aspect of it. I did a gala last Friday night where I was outside, and I had to keep a door open to get light because none of the lamps and lights and stuff reached the area that I was. So I was sitting in this open doorway of light. I've really worked in many and varied writing conditions. And so I'm not like, "Oh, it's going to throw me to be next to a Nordstrom." I think the Nordstrom will be fine.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Ocean waves are, by definition, in a constant state of motion. They swell, surge, crest, and break, and then ebb into another pulse of water. For a photographer, capturing this process requires impeccable timing—a sense for that moment when a wave will rise, or crash, or form a perfect barrel—so that the image is frozen in time but also captures the essence of movement. Ray Collins is a master of that moment, and has won awards for his deep, textured photographs of mountainous waves and roiling seascapes.

Cinematographer Armand Dijcks had been experimenting with animating splashes of water when he first encountered Collins’s photographs. He wondered if he could show the waves “in motion, but staying in place at the same time,” he says. “The idea was to stretch out the 1/8000th [of a] second during which the image was created into infinity. In a lot of my work, I like to mess with people's minds a little, and this contrast between a very short time span being stretched infinitely long, and between motion and stillness is a perfect example of that.”

After he created a rough example to show Collins—“He immediately liked the idea,” he says—Dijcks set to work. The result is a series of moving-yet-still images, known as "cinemagraphs." This relatively new technique involves manipulating a still image to create looped, recurring motion. The effect can be startling. They’re photographs that move, or videos that refuse resolution.

Named "The Infinite Loop," his series of cinemagraphs include cliffs that bristle but never collapse, eternal tubes, and rising edifices of water. Atlas Obscura spoke with Dijcks about the particular challenges of water and the benefits of collaboration.

How do you create a cinemagraph?

You usually start with a few seconds of video footage. You then create a mask that reveals the motion only in certain parts of the image, with the rest being still. The motion is then looped so that it will continue endlessly. Although it's possible to do the masking and looping in Photoshop, I prefer to use a dedicated application, called Flixel Cinemagraph Pro, that speeds up the whole process significantly. But you don't necessarily have to start with regular video. You can also use time lapse footage, or, as in case of my wave cinemagraphs, animated stills. In those cases the process usually becomes a lot more involved, and you might need additional software. In my case, for example, I used After Effects for the animation.

How do you and Ray collaborate?

The way it usually works is that Ray sends me a selection of high resolution images, from which I pick a number of candidates that I think will work well in motion. I start working on those, and a few of them make it to the cinemagraph stage. For our recent cinemagraph film The Infinite Now, we worked with two talented Dutch musicians, André Heuvelman and Jeroen van Vliet, who created a custom soundtrack inspired by the wave cinemagraphs. I personally very much enjoy this kind of collaboration with talented artists, because the result ends up having way more "depth" than what one person could probably create by themselves.

What is the biggest challenge in creating a wave cinemagraph?

The motion of the waves is sometimes unexpectedly complex, with different parts of the image moving in different directions at once. Our brains have an intuitive understanding of how water moves, so if the motion doesn't look natural, the viewer will immediately pick up on that and it will break the illusion. On top of that, not every type of motion is easy to loop. It usually involves a lot of trial and error, and some images that I thought would work great as cinemagraphs turn out not to work at all.

What does a cinemagraph have on a photograph or film?

I've always been interested in exploring the intersection of moving images and stills. In my mind these are not really separate things, but two sides of the same coin. At some point I started with time-lapse photography, and based on that created a "long-exposure time-lapse" technique, which blends series of stills to look like a moving, long-exposure image. After that I started experimenting with something I call "morphlapse," very short time-lapses that are extreme stretched out in time, creating a surreal effect.

Cinemagraphs are a continuation of this path, a different way of blending stills and motion in interesting ways. Like the other techniques, a good cinemagraph usually makes you do a double take, and wonder what you're actually looking at. It's an effect that scientists call "cognitive dissonance." Your brain gets two different inputs, a still image and an element of motion, and is trying to make sense of what's going on. This makes the viewer engage with it more actively. Very often I'll combine my previously developed techniques with cinemagraphs to create multiple levels of cognitive dissonance.

A cinemagraph can make you really explore a moment in time in a different way than a photograph or film can. In a photograph you loose the sense of motion. Having that motion can literally add another dimension to how you experience the image. In a film on the other hand, you do have the motion, but the moment is over very quickly, so you hardly have time to take it in.

On top of that, in a cinemagraph you can selectively direct the viewer's attention to certain subtle motions that one otherwise wouldn't notice, while freezing everything else. For example, the subtle motion of a leaf on a tree in a busy street, with the motion of the traffic and pedestrians frozen in time. Normally you would never notice the motion of that leaf, because it would be visually overwhelmed by all the other motion.

What other subjects do you think might lend themselves to this treatment?

At the moment I'm working on a series of cinemagraphs based on images of the planet Saturn and its moons, taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. I'm using a technique similar to the wave cinemagraphs. I've previously created cinemagraphs based on time-lapse images shot from the International Space Station. Given that I'm a bit of space geek, these series have been a lot of fun to work on.

The University of Cambridge has officially employed a maniac. A Lego maniac, to be precise, although they are calling the position the “Lego Professor of Play.”

According to The Independent, Professor Paul Ramchandani has been hired to this dream position as part of The Lego Foundation’s Play in Education, Development, and Learning (PEDAL) research initiative, which is being established at the school. Despite sounding like the kind of job you might invent in grade school, Ramchandani, a child mental health specialist, and PEDAL have goals that are more than just fun and games.

The Lego Professor of Play will head up the PEDAL center at Cambridge, which will study the role and importance of play in children’s education. Part of their focus will be on how play can help teach fundamental skills, such as problem-solving and teamwork. The Lego-funded education research hopes to produce a better understanding of the importance of just letting kids play—so they can, in turn, educate parents, schools, and even government.

Along with other Lego-centric jobs, like Master Builder, it seems like there might be more opportunities than ever to build a future as a true Lego maniac.

Across the continent of North America, there is great north/south divide—for flying squirrels. Southern flying squirrels live in the eastern half of the continent, from southern Canada down to Florida, and in the highlands of Central America. Northern flying squirrels live across Canada and up into Alaska. The two population were long separated by glaciers. As National Geographic reports, the key difference between the two species is the morphology of their penis bones, but they’re not really all that different—there are even north-south hybrids in some places.

Until now, flying squirrels that live on the West Coast of the United States were grouped with the northern species. But Brian Arbogast, of University of North Carolina Wilmington, had a hunch that they might not be part of the same tribe.

“There was just something weird” about the West Coast squirrels, he told National Geographic. (East Coasters can understand the sentiment.) The West Coast squirrels didn’t look quite like the rest of the northern squirrels, and in a new paper published in the Journal of Mammalogy, Arbogast and his colleagues identify these West Coasters as a new species, named Humboldt’s flying squirrel, after the naturalist Alexander von Humboldt.

The report states that besides the physical differences (West Coast squirrels are “smaller and darker” than the northern squirrels, according to National Geographic) the Humboldt’s flying squirrels are genetically distinct. In fact, they are more different from northern flying squirrels than the northern and southern species are from each other.

Yesterday, Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing's Class of 2017 gathered at the Brookdale Campus Auditorium for their convocation. That is, except for Jerich Alcantara. Thanks to massive MTA delays, the longtime New Yorker ended up celebrating his graduation on the E train, with the help of his fellow straphangers.

Alcantara—who told NY1 he left very early for the big day—ended up stuck underground for several hours. When he realized he wasn't going to make it, he decided to turn his misfortune into a celebration.

"When we were on the train at some point it looked like everyone was kinda upset, tired of everything," Alcantara told NY1. "So I decided I'd just thank everyone for being there for my graduation, that it meant a whole lot to me. And they just all started cheering."

Everyone got into it. In a short video posted on Facebook by one of the accidental attendees, smiling subway riders clear out room so that Alcantara's friend can shake his hand and give him a "diploma" (a picture on his phone). The trapped riders then congratulate, hug, and chat with the graduate, who is decked out in a purple cap and gown. Throughout, Green Day's "Time of Your Life" can be heard playing tinnily through a portable speaker.

"In over ten years riding the subway I never experienced anything like this," Alcantara told NY1.

When Alcantara finally made it to school, his friends and family threw him another celebration in the empty auditorium. But you know what they say: If you can't graduate with the ones you love, graduate with the ones you're with.

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.