Every year in Las Vegas, pizza acrobats from across the globe convene to compete in the star-studded World Pizza Games. A subset of the city’s annual Pizza Expo, the games showcase athletes, many of whom are also chefs, as they take dough to new heights. (There's a similar competition—known as the World Pizza Championships—in Italy each year.)

In a video for Great Big Story, World Pizza Champion Tony Gemignani—who holds the record for most consecutive across-the-shoulder rolls of pizza dough in 30 seconds (he says he did “36 or 37” rolls)—pitched the sport like this: “Pizza acrobatics are tricks with pizza dough.” In the same way the Harlem Globetrotters perform elaborate maneuvers with basketballs, he said, pizza acrobats pull off similar moves with, well, dough.

The main difference is that the consistency of pizza dough is variable: it constantly morphs as you play with it, meaning that when contestants toss their pizza dough into the air, they won't always know how it will look when it lands.

During the competition, the acrobats perform a variety of tricks for a small panel of judges. For two to three minutes, as a song plays in the background, they toss their dough into the air as they jump, spin, and do cartwheels.

Interestingly, the acrobats often don't prepare for their performances using real pizza dough. They opt instead for the artificial ProDough, which lasts much longer than real pizza dough. Made from silicon and plastic, ProDough claims to emulate the texture and consistency of the real thing. It also glows in the dark.

Video Wonders are audiovisual offerings that delight, inspire, and entertain. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

Four years after it originally launched, the S.S. Upper is finally on its way to Europe. And the 5th graders who initially sponsored her are happy to hear it.

While it isn’t exactly a Spanish galleon laden with treasure, the S.S. Upper is still a remarkable ship. The three-foot-long craft was first launched around 2013 just north of Bermuda along with four other mini-boats. The launch was the work of a program called Educational Passages, which helps schools and students launch GPS-tracked mini-boats, as a way of helping teach them about the ocean and its currents. The little boats have no engine, just a small sail that pushes them along the natural wind currents, as they float aimlessly on the water. The S.S. Upper had been sponsored by the 5th grade class at Davie, Florida’s Summit-Questa Montessori School.

As Educational Passages founder, Dick Baldwin, told us, the little boats were supposed to have floated into the Gulf Stream and be carried north to Europe, but a storm blew them all back towards Charleston, South Carolina. "Charleston is a hotbed of mini-boats," says Baldwin. He and his associates were able to round up and relaunch four of the boats, but the Upper eluded them, finally ending up in a Charleston Goodwill thrift store. It was there that a friend of Baldwin's happened upon the little craft by chance, and recognizing it for what it was, contacted him.

The Upper was fitted with a new GPS unit, and over the next few years, attempts were made to get the craft sponsored by another school and relaunched, but nobody bit. Finally in early June 2017, she was relaunched 50 miles off the shore of Charleston, but ended up washing back ashore a day later, where the boat was picked up by the Edisto Police Department.

After contacting the original Florida school, who were delighted to hear that the boat's journey was continuing four years after its launch, the Edisto Police returned the boat to a Charleston captain. The S.S. Upper is now scheduled to be sent off from a cargo boat some 100 miles out to sea. With any luck, this latest attempt to reach Europe might actually work.

According to Baldwin, around 80% the tiny boats they launch do make it across the ocean without guidance; Baldwin thinks the Upper will land somewhere around Ireland.

"It's all about the wind and the currents," he says. The Upper's journey can be tracked here.

Today inkblots are almost universally seen as psychological diagnostic tools. But before the "Rorschach Test" became a household term, there was the Victorian game of Gobolinks, which used inkblots to inspire eerily imaginative poems based on the random chaos of ink dripped on paper.

Technically known as klecksography, inkblot art got its start back in the 1700s. German poet and physician Justinus Kerner is generally credited with innovating the form after he began accidentally dropping ink blots on his papers as his eyesight failed. Seeing them as more than just sloppy mistakes, he would fold the paper and create a single mirrored form, which he would then interpret and add to, ending up with illustrations he would then pair with his poetry. Kerner’s artistic work would eventually be published in 1890 in the German language book, Klecksographien.

“The allure for me is that this is a pre-verbal language,” says Tyler Kline, a visual artist who has been incorporating klecksography into his own work for over a decade. “With a lifetime of investigation and study, codes and cyphers can be developed. The image will be read on multiple levels.” The same evocative ambiguity that make inkblots perfect for psychological readings, make them terrific inspiration for artists of any age.

Undoubtedly inspired by Kerner’s work, released just a few years earlier, two American authors, Ruth McEnery Stuart and Albert Bigelow Paine took his process a step further, when they released their terrifically titled book, Gobolinks, or Shadow Pictures, in 1896. Stuart and Paine envisioned the creation of inkblot art as an act of chaos and imagination. As defined in the book, a “gobolink” is a “veritable goblin of the ink-bottle,” The idea being that the blobby splotches of spilt ink create unique creatures free from the creator’s influence, but still defined by their interpretation.

“One of the characteristics of inkblots is their dynamic and organic nature," says Kline. "The technique of creating inkblots is one where the ink records a physical action. What was transient now has stasis."

The book also outlines a set of rules that gamifies klecksography. The game of Gobolinks asks players to create ink blots, write a rhyme based on the image, then choose judges among the players to assess which of the blobs are the best, and which is the “booby.” The authors also suggest that people dress up for a Gobolinks party, wearing outfits that are the same on one side as they are on the other, just like an inkblot. As they say, “No game could be more productive of amusement than Gobolink.”

As they are presented, the rules are overly complicated, and seem pretty judgmental by modern standards, but the resulting artworks are nonetheless remarkable. Over 84 gobolinks are presented in the book, most accompanied by poems, while a few are simply grouped by their general shapes, into groups like “Seaweeds.” Yet they all share the same slightly creepy form and symmetry for which klecksography is known.

While Gobolinks is the gold standard for whimsical turn-of-the-century klecksography, it was not the only book of its kind. In 1907, a short, but equally delightfully named book called The Blottentots was released, containing another set of ghostly inkblots alongside poetry. While clearly derivative of Gobolinks, the Blottentots were just as unique and charming, but also seemed to embrace the inherently shadowy, otherworldly look of inkblot creations.

In 1921, Hermann Rorschach published Psychodiagnostik, which became the clinical bedrock on which the psychological inkblot test would be based. Klecksography then became more commonly associated with psychology than with poetic exploration. However, using inkblots as art is far from dead. There are still artists like Kline who are still keeping it alive, and even evolving. “My favorite technique is using multiple folds to create a rhythm of symmetry," he says. "I am looking to unlock the hidden asymmetry of klecksographs."

Anyone that’s played a modern open-universe video game can attest to how large simulated worlds can get, but they’ve got nothing on an incomprehensibly large universe simulation that was recently created by a supercomputer at the University of Zurich.

Calculated using “2 trillion digital particles” of information meant to represent dark matter, the simulated universe contains some 25 billion virtual galaxies, making it the largest universal simulation ever. Visually, it looks like an almost impossibly complex and chaotic web.

According to Science Alert, the simulation, which took three years of research to develop and implement, was mapped by the Piz Daint supercomputer at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre. It took the powerhouse computer 80 hours to complete the calculations, which is actually considered pretty fast. The resulting simulation of our universe is both the largest and most accurate view of our universe (and its history) ever created.

The simulation was created for use with the Euclid satellite which is set to launch in 2020. The Euclid’s six-year-mission will be to look for and study evidence of dark matter and dark energy, those maddeningly hard-to-find forces that are thought to make up the majority of the universe. Using the simulation as a basis of comparison, the satellite will look for variations in the observed light of the universe, hoping to detect evidence of any influence by invisible dark forces.

Before the satellite launches, researchers will also study the simulation to see what they can learn just from their calculations. The mind boggles.

Bread, as we know it, is banned in space. This is less to make astronauts' lives more miserable than to avoid a catastrophic, deadly fire, should crumbs drift into a spacecraft's electrical system, or other complications.

In the early years of the space program, this concern was mostly hypothetical, until 1965, when John Young, an astronaut on Gemini 3, snuck a corned beef sandwich, from Wolfie’s Restaurant at the Ramada Inn in Cocoa Beach, into the spacecraft. There was no disaster, but there were crumbs everywhere, and a bunch of politicians angry that the astronaut wasn't eating the carefully engineered food that cost millions to develop.

So crumby bread hasn't made it back to space since, but now scientists in Germany are developing something that might pass muster with aerospace engineers: bread that lacks crumbs entirely. According to New Scientist, the bread is part of an effort to make long-term space living more sustainable while enhancing the lives of those who will do it.

The scientists, part of a company called Bake in Space, still haven't perfected the recipe, or determined how it will be baked, but the company said it will test several approaches during a European Space Agency mission to the International Space Station next year.

The challenge, you might guess, is making a crumb-free bread that is also pleasant to eat. One approach being considered is a vacuum baking system, controlled on Earth but baking the bread in space, which would make it possible to bake at lower temperatures. It would also, a Bake in Space official told New Scientist, "make bread rolls more fluffy."

In the original edition of Heinrich Hoffman’s 1845 German children’s book, the most famous character—Struwwelpeter, or "Shockheaded Peter," whose name later became the book's title—appeared last. In six short, illustrated stories, Hoffman, a physician from Frankfurt, told grisly moral tales: of a boy who wasted away after refusing his soup, another who lay writhing in pain after a mistreated dog exacted revenge, and yet another who had his thumb cut off after he sucked on it one too many times. Struwwelpeter’s sin was that he never cut his nails, bathed, or combed his hair; his punishment was distinct and cruel—he was unloved.

Before it was called Struwwelpeter, Hoffman originally and less compellingly named the book Lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder mit 15 schon kolorirten Tafeln fur Kindervon 3–6 Jahren (“Funny stories and droll pictures with 15 color plate, for children ages 3–6”). The New York Public Library’s rare books collection holds one of the original copies from 1845, and the illustrations—Hoffman’s hand-colored originals—from that edition are reproduced here. When the library purchased this copy in 1933, it was just one of four known extant copies of the first run.

The book itself is a slim volume—just 15 pages, each printed only on one side. By Hoffman’s account, he put it together as a Christmas present for his three-year-old son, when no other children’s book would do. (There’s some evidence, as scholar Walter Sauer found, that the book’s generation was less spontaneous and that Hoffman, a doctor, had tried out the stories on his young patients over time.) Hoffman’s book club friends, who had some power in German publishing at the time, encouraged him to release it to the wider public.

The original run was at least 1,500 copies, possibly as many as 3,000, as Hoffman reported in a letter to a friend, and sold out within about two years, prompting a second edition. Starting with that edition, revisions were made to the original drawings. Later versions further elaborated the illustrations, moved Struwwelpeter to the front of the book, and added more stories.

The book proved enduringly popular. By 1848 it was already in its sixth edition and had sold more than 20,000 copies. One of the most famous stories is "The Story of Little Suck-a-Thumb," a boy named Konrad who was warned not to suck his thumb, lest Scissorman come and cut it off. But he can't resist. He puts his thumb into his mouth and, lo and behold, the terrifying Scissorman appears and snips off the offending digit. This morbid creature quickly entered the canon, and appeared later in diverse texts such as W.H. Auden's poetry and Tim Burton's Edward Scissorhands.

Hoffman spared none of his fictional children. When they misbehaved, they were punished. Cruel Frederick, for instance, was nasty to all creatures, pulling wings off of flies, killing birds, and throwing kittens down the stairs.

But when Frederick beat his dog without mercy, the dog turned on him.

Frederick ends up in the bed, wounded and sick, and the dog is never punished. He gets to eat the boy's dinner (at the table, no less).

Most of the original stories featured naughty children, but one had a hare as a protagonist. A hunter foolishly falls asleep in the field.

The hare, his prey, steals his gun and, like Bugs Bunny getting the best of Elmer Fudd, turns it back on the hunter. This doesn't end well for anyone, as the hare's own offspring is burned by hot coffee in the ensuing chaos.

Most of the stories have a timeless quality. There will always be children who suck their thumbs, are mean to animals, or refuse to eat supper. The story of the inky boys veers into not-so-timeless territory. It's a story of three white boys who harass a black boy for the color of his skin.

The language used to describe the black boy wouldn't be published today, and the illustration, which shows the white boys clothed and the black boy in a loincloth, also betrays the racist tropes of its time. The boys are indeed punished for making fun of the boy for the color of his skin—a lesson that wouldn't be out of place in a contemporary storybook—but, as part of their punishment, they're dipped in black ink. The lesson might be that they should learn to accept difference—but being black is still stigmatized.

As the book was reworked over the years, the simple illustrations became more and more elaborate and packed with detail. Soon the hand-coloring gave way to color-printing with wooden blocks. But the originals remain enchanting, disturbing, and haunting on their own. Even today Struwwelpeter and Scissorman are hard to forget. One can only imagine the effect they had on German children in the mid-19th century.

While on a research trip to the British Library with her students, Laura Moretti, a university lecturer at Cambridge, came across an unusual volume of familiar stories. Titled, The Fashionable Ise: The Origins of Utagaruta, the picture book contained adapted versions of the Tales of Ise, a canonical work of Japanese literature dating back centuries, most likely to the 800s.

The book Moretti had found turned out to be the earliest-known adaptation of the book for children. Created in 1766, the volume first shows the main character as a young boy, likely to encourage young readers to identify with him and uses simpler phonetic characters that readers with only two years of school could read, Cambridge explains.

The book also contains only a selection of the 125 episodes in the full Tales of Ise, which contains scenes from the life of an unnamed man, from his youth, through his adult loves and troubles, to his old age.

Though the book was held in the British Library, scholars of Japanese literature did not know of its existence. “I had never heard of or seen a children’s adaptation before – no-one knew of this book,” Moretti said in a press release. In a new book, Recasting the Past, she reproduces the full, illustrated text, along with a translation, for a new set of readers to enjoy.

The Works Progress Administration (WPA)—Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s nationwide effort to re-employ unemployed Americans during the depths of the Great Depression—conjures images of daring dam-builders and fearless steel-workers. But children’s books? Not so much.

Leave it to FDR and his stable of advisors to defy expectations.

While legions of laborers collected government paychecks for their contributions to massive infrastructural projects, thousands of idle creatives also hit the pavement on Uncle Sam’s dole. They, however, were commissioned to create a different type of public work: diverse portraits of the country’s past and present in pen, paint, and photographs. These were the employees of Federal Project Number One (aka, “Federal One”), the cultural wing of the WPA, which included a select group of children’s authors, illustrators, and editors.

Federal One’s five divisions dispatched authors and artists from state-based offices with the broad aim of sponsoring projects that served the public good. With this mandate, the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) produced 276 volumes and 701 pamphlets, amounting to over 3.5 million individual items. Its archive includes extensive folklore and oral history collections (2,300+ recorded interviews with formerly enslaved people, among other life histories), as well as the renowned American Guides Series, which was conceived as a way to document local cultures threatened by the rising tide of commercialism. Contributors included many then-unemployed writers who later became giants of American letters; the Illinois office alone employed Margaret Walker, Studs Terkel, Nelson Algren, Richard Wright, and Saul Bellow.

While the guidebooks have been feted by figures ranging from John Steinbeck (how he so wanted to bring them all on his cross-country travels with Charley!) to Michael Chabon (essential in researching The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay), other pieces of FWP writing have largely faded from memory. Those forgotten works include children's books from three regional offices—New York City, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee—that produced diverse texts for juvenile readers.

New York’s New Reading Materials Program launched in 1936 with a run of cheaply produced typewritten, mimeographed texts designed to entice rough-and-tumble city kids, who, according to a New York Times account of March 15 of that year, were “largely inured to hard knocks.” The topics were engaging and of a variety of genres (realistic fiction, fairy tales, adventure serials, poetry, informational texts), the language was “living,” and the visuals striking. These materials were not made for instructional use by the teacher; rather, the intent was to build a desire to read for reading’s sake.

The program worked, and word of it traveled around the country. According to a 1937 St. Louis Post-Dispatch article on the New Reading Materials program, the NYC Board of Education soon began to receive fan mail from children eager to learn the fates of their favorite serialized characters, such as Alfred Sinks’ Tom Coe, Pirate. As the Post-Dispatch notes, the letter-writers “wanted to know ... whether the pirates settled down to become home-loving folk or whether they were pardoned.” Such queries followed Sinks on his school speaking junkets, where he not only addressed questions regarding Tom Coe’s future but also found himself inundated with autograph requests.

With this type of reception, the program adopted better printing techniques and wider circulation: by the end of 1937, more than 21,000 copies of the books were in use among 140 city schools.

Kids—tentative and avid readers alike—loved the New Reading Materials. The stories are often dark, funny, and realistic, defying the unstated rule of writing for elementary-aged children that things always resolve for the better, that even when protagonists get lost, they generally find their way home.

Author Sulamith Ish-Kishor’s Meggie and the Fairies, is case in point. In it, happy, flower-picking Meggie Morrison drifts too far afield, is lured by a fairy’s siren song, and finds herself an ambivalent prisoner in an underground fairy kingdom. Rescue attempts ensue, but all fail. Meggie is released 100 years later to find the world changed: there’s no more home, no more family. Distraught, she returns to the hill of the fairies, where she cries herself to death, only to be reclaimed by the agents of her destruction who watchfully wait for her awakening. While there was no happy ending for Meggie, there was for Sulamith—she later wrote countless acclaimed works, including the 1970 Newbery Honor book Our Eddie.

Irving Drutman, who variously worked as a journalist, editor, theater critic, songwriter, and memoirist, also penned a volume that defied the happy-ending rule. The Proud Prince picks up after the ever-after, centering on the undoing of the eponymous Proud Prince and his equally vain and greedy wife. Mere pages into Drutman’s story, the prince ascends to the status of king. He and the newly minted queen begin a quest for the world’s most elaborate, heavily jeweled robe. In the process of assembling it, they bankrupt the kingdom and themselves. And the robes? Too heavy to wear, totally useless. As the depressed royals sit down to dinner in their aged robes, they’re stunned to learn that there’s no dinner—all the money for food went to finance their greed.

New York’s New Reading Materials Program had analogue units in Pennsylvania and Milwaukee that produced children’s books, although the purposes and intended audiences differed. At the Philadelphia office of the Pennsylvania Writers’ Project, the 39 informational texts of the Children’s Science Series were assembled in conjunction with the commercial publishing house, Albert F. Whitman. In Milwaukee, four primers—along with hundreds of toys, games, dolls, tapestries, and other furnishings—were created by more than 5,000 artists and craftspeople, mostly women, many African-American. While less is known about the authors of these volumes and their reception, they merit mention as works that the government saw fit to print in an era when the authorial need for a paycheck was wed to children’s needs for resources to educate and entertain.

To see more of the WPA Children's Books, delve into the Digital Archives of Broward County.

Mackie's of Scotland Potato Crisps, a potato chip producer based in Perthshire, knows their audience. Alongside more staid varieties (salt & vinegar; chili pepper) they offer chip flavors like "roast ham," "prawn cocktail," and "whisky and haggis."

Soon, they'll even have a bag suitable for dessert: they're about to start churning out strawberry-flavored potato chips.

The flavor started out as an April Fool's Day joke, but after a tip from their distributor in China that the country's snackers were "veering towards sweet flavors within crisps," the company decided to develop them, Mackie's commercial director, James Taylor, told the Courier.

After samples they sent to an industry trade show there proved a "massive success," they decided to begin selling them, along with a salted-caramel variety. At first, the new flavors will only be available in China—but the company hasn't ruled out making them more widely available.

At least one other company, Koikeya of Japan, has tried a strawberry chip before, to mixed reviews. Reactions to Mackie's new flavor have thus far been more positive. “It tastes like strawberry ice cream but in a crisp," one UK-based taster told the Courier. "I think I would buy that actually.”

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.

One by one, the prints unfold before you. One shows sheep leaping in the grass, another, children on a tree-hung swing, the moon shifting above them. All are charming, sophisticated, and unbelievably detailed. They take the essence of everyday objects and activities, and unspool them into mesmerizing patterns. No matter how much you may want them, though, you can't get these prints on Etsy. In fact, you can't get them anywhere.

They live mere miles from where they were produced, at the Cape Ann Museum in Gloucester—the last bastion of the nearly forgotten Folly Cove Designers. Helmed by a children's book illustrator and comprised of her previously untrained friends and neighbors, the Folly Cove Designers were hardworking, tight-knit, and sincere—so sincere, they eventually voted themselves into obscurity.

To children worldwide, Virginia Lee Burton is the beloved hand behind half a dozen classics, including Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, Katy and the Big Snow, and The Little House, intricately illustrated tales of close-knit communities. But to her neighbors at Folly Cove, on the north shore of Massachusetts, she was Jinnee Demetrios. Jinnee and her husband, the sculptor George Demetrios, moved to the area in 1932 with their one-year-old son Aristides, who was soon followed by Mike. The couple quickly became community pillars, making art all day, and spending evenings gathering their friends and neighbors for raucous sheep roasts.

"Folly Cove gets its name because it would be folly to bring a ship in and turn it around," says Christine Lundberg, producer of the film Virginia Lee Burton: A Sense of Place, as well as the upcoming Beautiful and Useful: The Art of the Folly Cove Designers. This ethos carried over into the rough-and-ready town life. "You couldn't get pretty little things," says Lundberg. "If you wanted them, you had to make them." An artist through and through, Jinnee surrounded herself with homemade treasures, including, as the story goes, a particularly nice set of block-printed curtains. One of her neighbors, Aino Clarke, admired the curtains so much she wanted to make her own. Jinnee and Aino struck a deal: Jinnee would give Aino top-to-bottom design lessons if Aino, a member of the local orchestra, would teach Jinnee's sons the violin. (A less legendary, but perhaps more truthful, version of this tale holds that Aino suggested Jinnee give design lessons to her neighbors in exchange for money to buy the necessary paper to illustrate her first book.)

Regardless of exactly how the two came together, Jinnee's flint struck on Aino's iron sparked an artistic movement. Within its rock-hard exterior, Folly Cove harbored a vein of artistic impulse that dated all the way back to the 1800s, when painters had flocked there to take advantage of the seashore's distinct sunlight. ("If you spend time lying on the granite around here, you get creative powers," one resident told Lundberg). As Jinnee and Aino dove into the lessons, other members of the community began joining them.

Thus began the Folly Cove Designers (FCD), a ragtag group of locals united by their desire to fill their lives and their minds with a particular form of well-thought-out beauty. Many members were, like Aino Clarke, the children of Finnish immigrants, and sought to combat the economic and emotional hardships of the Great Depression. Others were so-called "Yankees," who had moved permanently to Folly Cove after vacationing there as children, and who wanted something new to do. Eino Natti, one of the group's few male members, was an Army veteran and former quarryman—experiences he drew on for prints such as Polyphemus, of a granite-carting train, and PT, which shows near-identical soldiers in mid-squat. Elizabeth Holloran, the local children's librarian, printed young people skiing and sugaring. "A majority of them were never artists," says Cara White, director of the Cape Ann Museum's Folly Cove gallery. "They were editors, architects, housewives, accountants."

This didn't matter to Jinnee, who was convinced that—through practice—anyone could learn design. To enable this, Jinnee put her students through a rigorous artistic process that cycled with the seasons. In the fall, members met in the Folly Cove Barn for class, learning Jinnee's guiding design principles and choosing subjects for their prints. Jinnee steered her students away from lofty or imagined subjects, and encouraged them to find inspiration in everyday Cape Ann life.

The resulting familiarity and love, she believed, would come out in the design. Jinnee herself printed everything from commuter trains to spring lambs to her fellow guild members, gossiping over mailboxes cheekily labeled "VLB," "AC," and "FCD." When it came time to ink these designs, she often chose the greens and browns of an omnipresent local plant—seaweed.

During this time, members also did what Jinnee called "homework"—painstaking, repetitive drawing exercises, meant to help the artists get to know their subjects inside and out. "If a student wanted to feature an apple in her design, she had to fully explore the fruit: the whole apple, its sections, the seeds, the blossom," writes Jennifer Scanlon, a professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at Bowdoin College and the author of an article drawn from ethnographies of the group's members. "Through this examination, and the resulting series of drawings, the apple became hers."

Over the autumn of 1958, for example, veteran guild member Peggy Norton did at least 300 sketches for what would become Story and a Half House, a study of her own home in Gloucester. The drawings, all in stark black and white, show the house from every angle, repeated in a multiplicity of patterns—large and small, straight and spiraling, tiled, mirrored, and jauntily diagonal. The final print, a kaleidoscope of large and small houses, is the clear result of all these permutations, greater than the sum of its parts.

At the beginning of winter, members gathered in the barn once again, this time to jury their final designs before a small, rotating group of their peers. Approved drawings would be redrawn on linoleum blocks and painstakingly carved, a process that took anywhere from 60 to 100 hours. Members toted their blocks around like extra children, making time for them in between other responsibilities. Some worked at their kitchen counters, and later joked of finding linoleum hunks in the mashed potatoes. By spring, when the blocks were done, it was back to the barn to ink the linoleum, lay out their chosen fabric, and make the prints, which they did in their typical bootstrapped fashion: by jumping up and down on the block.

In 1940, the designers added a summer element to the cycle—they festooned the barn with their newly printed cocktail napkins, nightgowns, placemats, and swimwear, and opened it to the public for an informal exhibition. It paid off: "People were just all over what they were doing," says White. Within a few years, they were putting on an annual show, plying attendees with coffee and Finnish nissu bread and selling their wares to tourists and townies alike.

Those who made it far enough to publicly display a design had also "passed" the class. These new FCD members received a diploma, designed and hand-printed by Jinnee herself. Rather than Latin or cursive, this certificate got across the recipient's accomplishments via a 25-panel cartoon that detailed the entire printmaking process, from the initial brainstorming to the final jump.

As the guild grew, Jinnee kept steering it with an iron fist. "She was a woman driven," says White, before doubling down—"No, she was a woman obsessed." In a typical day, she might wake at 5 a.m., work until her sons clamored for breakfast, head out for a quick swim, and then duck back into her studio, where she focused so diligently on illustrations, prints, and other work that, according to her eldest son, she "nearly drove herself blind." Outside said studio, she hung a hand-painted sign featuring a cartoon self-portrait that stuck out her tongue and waggled her fingers at the viewer. "Working 5 AM to 5 PM," it said. "If you have nothing to do, don't do it here!"

She expected similar commitment from her students. Each guild member was required to produce at least one block per year, which they shepherded from a seed of an idea all the way to a fully blossomed print. Everyone, even longtime veterans, had to take Jinnee's class every year to remain in the group, redoing the homework and relearning the design principles until they were carved into their collective consciousness like, well, designs in a block. Though some members only stayed for one cycle, many stuck it out year after year, and begrudged this repetition only slightly. As one member put it, "We find new secrets in the darned thing every time."

In the early 1940s, the group voted in a business manager, member Dorothy Norton. She collected dues from each member and used the money to buy the guild consistent supplies—good ink, precise carving tools, and acre upon acre of battleship linoleum, decommissioned by the U.S. government after it proved too flammable for use in Navy boats. Eventually, members began acquiring professional-grade acorn presses, which, though less dynamic than the tried-and-true jumping technique, managed a steadier print. Spring evenings would see members criss-crossing Cape Ann, schlepping their blocks and fabrics to the nearest press.

Throughout the '40s, '50s, and '60s, a bigger audience found the FCD. Lord & Taylor dedicated 20 showrooms to the group's designs, and they were showcased in museums from the Metropolitan to the Smithsonian. As the spotlight intensified, the guild steadfastly refused to compromise. When a Macy's representative told Jinnee that if she played her cards right, she'd soon be able to drive a Rolls Royce, she was said to have replied, "I like my Ford."

Further temptations followed, but the group stuck fast to their principles. After a wholesale company ripped off one of their designs, they began patenting them, locking the originals in a safety deposit box. A porcelain company asked to print Eino Natti's Roosters on a set of dishware, but it proved too detailed for their machines. Rather than simplify the design, the guild cancelled the contract.

The money that did come in propelled the group forward—some members made a living off of it. But in the mid-'60s, Jinnee, an avid smoker, developed lung cancer. As she sickened, guild members helped her continue working; Natti even cranked the press for her, an act previously forbidden under the group's DIY ethos. But when she passed away, in 1968, they voted to disband. Over the course of the next year, they sold the barn and gave their inventory to the Cape Ann Historical Society, now the Cape Ann Museum. The members, and all the businesses they had worked with, agreed never again to reproduce any of the group's prints.

In Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, perhaps Jinnee's most famous work, Mike and his machine, Mary Ann, volunteer to dig the foundation for a new town hall. After finishing the job in a single day, they find themselves stuck down there, unable to get out. Rather than scrapping the steam shovel or undoing her work, the community decides to transform her into the town hall's furnace, and Mike into the building's janitor. They figure her indomitable spirit will warm the town for decades to come.

In this way, Jinnee's dedication warmed the community she formed, even after her death. "She wanted people to have art in their daily lives, and she believed that people get something fundamental out of hard work," says Scanlon. "It became an important component of who they were, and how they participated in the world—and, probably most importantly, how they saw themselves in their everyday lives. As community members, as housewives, but also as people who produced something beautiful."

This story originally ran on August 21, 2016.

Humans have tried a lot of things to kill or repel mosquitoes. Pesticides, citronella candles, smelly DEET spray, and, most recently, gene drives have all been used on the pesky, disease-carrying insects. Scientists have now developed a promising new weapon in the war on mosquitoes, a fungus armed with spider and scorpion venom.

Yes, that sounds rather alarming, but the fungus only kills mosquitoes, and research suggests it only impacts species, such as Aedes aegypti, that carry diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, and yellow fever. But the fungus isn't very potent on its own—it takes a lot to actually kill a mosquito. So an international team of researchers gave some of the strongest fungi strains a genetic boost with genes from the North African desert scorpion and the Australian Blue Mountains funnel-web spider that code for toxins that block nerve impulses.

Tests on wild-caught mosquitoes show the genetically modified fungus is quite lethal to them. Just one spore of the fungus was enough to kill an insect—and stop their blood feeding. "Our fungal strains are capable of preventing transmission of disease by more than 90 percent of mosquitoes after just five days," said Brian Lovett, an entomologist at the University of Maryland and coauthor of the report, in a press release.

While the idea of releasing into the wild a fungus that produces neurotoxins sounds terrifying, it's apparently nothing to worry about if you're not a mosquito. The toxins themselves are already approved for use in insecticides by the Environmental Protection Agency. And the fungus really does affect only mosquitoes. In experiments, honeybees went about their business just fine after being sprayed with fungal spores. If all goes well, the spores could be released in the wild, with the additional safeguard of a gene that only allows the release of neurotoxins into insect blood. But this might all take some time, so don't throw out your bug spray just yet.

Meet the Hupfeld Phonoliszt-Violin: the 1907 violin-piano combo that literally played itself.

A creation of the Hupfeld Company, at the time the largest global distributor of automatic instruments with an employee count reaching into the thousands, the creation capped off a growing trend to automate increasingly complex musical instruments. Though player pianos had already attained widespread usage, the Phonoliszt-Violin was revolutionary for its addition of a self-playing violin component, earning it the title of "Eighth Wonder of the World" at the 1910 Brussels International world's fair.

The machine features three violins, which are played by a spinning bow made of horse hair and operated via a pneumatic system. The above restoration can be seen performing Fréderic Chopin's Nocturne Op. 9, No. 2 in E flat major—an incredible feat for an automated system.

The antique seller 1stdibs.com notes:

Remarkably, both the piano and the violins are dynamic, allowing for a previously unheard of range of volume and tone. From the most delicate pianissimo to a crashing fortissimo, this unparalleled instrument has the ability to render musical pieces with all of the skill and vigor of a real musician.

During the machine's heyday, the Hupfeld Company developed around 900 different music rolls for it. They sold thousands of the Phonoliszt-Violin, mostly to opulent hotels and restaurants that used them for background entertainment.

But by the mid 1920s, the popularity of automatic instruments cratered as phonographs and radios spread throughout the world. The Phonoliszt-Violin, like all Hupfeld Company instruments, took a hit. After the Great Depression struck, production essentially shut down.

Today, only 63 still exist. And accompanying the rarity is a hefty price tag: the starting price for a Hupfeld Phonoliszt-Violin on 1stdibs is $885,000.

Video Wonders are audiovisual offerings that delight, inspire, and entertain. Have you encountered a video we should feature? Email ella@atlasobscura.com.

Four decades ago, a cartoon raccoon caused an ecological plague across Japan that continues today. But a legacy of invasive destruction hasn't stopped Rascal the Raccoon from remaining an adorable anime icon.

First introduced in the 1963 book Rascal: A Memoir of a Better Era, the impish little trash-eater known as Rascal was a hit from the start. The book, a memoir of author Sterling North’s childhood, in which he adopted a baby raccoon for a year, was a hit with the youth of the era. It was quickly made into a live-action film by Disney, which depicted Sterling’s adventures with a comic playfulness that was not quite so apparent in the book. While both of these incarnations met with wide success, it was not until Rascal hit Japanese audiences that his star really rose—for better or worse.

In January 1977, the Nippon Animation Company released Rascal the Raccoon (Araiguma Rasukaru), a 52-episode anime cartoon series that returned the story to its more dramatic, bucolic roots. (And also featured early work by animation pioneer and Studio Ghibli cofounder Hayao Miyazaki!) The series aired all year long, and the ongoing adventures of Sterling and Rascal were a massive hit with Japanese children, who took to the story of a young boy and his ever-present animal sidekick, foreshadowing the popularity of franchises such as Pokémon, which took the country (and world) by storm decades later.

The show proved so popular that Japanese families began importing pet raccoons from North America at an alarming rate. For years after the cartoon’s 1977 release, at least 1,500 raccoons a month were hitting Japanese shores so that fans of the show could act out Sterling’s adventures. If only they had finished the book first.

As Sterling discovers at the end of his tale, raccoons are wild animals that make terrible pets. In the end, he is forced to release Rascal into the wild. Back in the real world, many new raccoon owners were learning the same difficult lesson. Their imported pets began getting into everything, becoming violent towards humans, damaging homes and property, and generally being, horrible five-fingered menaces. Taking a cue from their favorite show, many families simply released their raccoons into the wild. As resourceful garbage hounds, the newly introduced species had no trouble gaining a foothold on the Japanese mainland.

Eventually, the Japanese government banned importing the animals, but it was too late—the Curse of Rascal had taken hold. Today, they are seen as an invasive menace that destroys crops across the country, causing around $300,000 dollars a year in agro-destruction. They are also one of the leading causes of damage to historic temples. They steal fish and fruit from vendors, and worse, are beginning to push out native species.

Ironically, one of the species affected by the raccoon boom is the tanuki, Japan's native species of "raccoon dog." While they look alike, the two species are not closely related, but their comparable size means that they compete for many of the same wild resources. American raccoons have encroached on the tanuki's turf.

Despite all of the problems caused since the Rascal boom of the 1970s, the aggressively cute cartoon version of the critter has remained a popular character in Japan, appearing on all sorts of merchandise, from cell phone cases to plush dolls. Rascal can also often be found getting mashed-up with more contemporary anime hits such as Attack on Titan.

In 2017, Nippon Animation opened a Rascal-based pop-up shop in the sprawling Toyko Solamachi shopping center to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the cartoon's premiere, and the Tokyo Anime Center held an exhibition of art and artifacts from the cartoon. Rascal is still a cutie, but his impact on Japan's ecosystems isn't so adorable.

An earlier version of this article originally ran in August 29, 2014.

Last week, in the Blue Hills Reservation outside Boston, two teens and a 21-year-old set out to look for unidentified flying objects and got hopelessly lost.

They were, it's safe to say, rather unprepared. One wore slippers—not the right footwear for the rocks and branches and undergrowth of the woods. Their phones weren't fully charged. And they had no flashlights. After reaching the top of a hill and realizing they did not know where they were, and were surrounded by darkness, they decided to call for help.

The Boston Globeidentified the trio as Ramona DiFrancesco, 18; Travis Stoecklin, 21; and Savannah Winship-Cody, 17. Each was led out of the forest last Thursday night, unharmed, after being located by a police helicopter.

Here is DiFrancesco, speaking to 7News just after she reached safety.

BREAKING: Only on @7News: @MassStatePolice had to rescue 3 hikers in Blue Hills Reservation tonight who were hunting for...well...UFOs. pic.twitter.com/sS76XZ8rqh

— Adam Bagni (@AdamBagni) June 9, 2017

Despite the problems they encountered, DiFrancesco told the Globe that the hike was worth it. Not only was it "beautiful," the three did, in fact, see some UFOs, including “three bright lights in the formation of a triangle” and some kind of circular thing that was “bigger than the moon," DiFrancesco said.

Here's a photo of the alleged UFO in Blue Hills Reservation tonight. State police had to rescue the 3 hikers/UFO hunters. @7Newspic.twitter.com/fsAfoX2q0A

— Adam Bagni (@AdamBagni) June 9, 2017

Night hikes are indeed a wonderful way to experience nature, and here's hoping that the trio prepares a bit more before their next one.

Albino animals are rare to find in the wild, but albino sea creatures are an even more elusive sight. So imagine the excitement of the lucky whale watchers who recently caught a glimpse of a pure white dolphin swimming in the open ocean.

According to Live Science, the young dolphin was spotted in California’s Monterey Bay by members of a Blue Ocean Whale Watch boat tour, as well as others, who caught a video of the rare creature.

The animal was identified as a Risso dolphin, and according to one of Blue Ocean’s co-owners, this isn’t the first time this specific dolphin has been spotted in the area.

The approximately three-year-old albino was previously seen in the area in 2014 and 2015, and now seems to have grown into a healthy young juvenile. The latest sighting saw the dolphin swimming in a pod of about 50 others, including some its own age.

It seems like, in other words, it has friends.

Contrary to what one might like to believe, Anushka Ravishankar does not dream up words such as “Hayakilikileee” in her sleep. Despite having written about baby buffaloes blowing big blue bubbles, math teachers who turn into multiplication signs, and even a Fivetongued Firefanged Folkadotted Dragon Snake, Ravishankar's dreams are admittedly prosaic. "I dream about the things I forget to do,” she says. “If I've forgotten to write an email to somebody, they pursue me in my dreams."

At the May launch of Ravishankar's new book in the South Indian city of Chennai, the author enlists the help of a young woman to demonstrate the efficacy of remedies for hiccups that are listed in her book of nonsense verse, Hic!. It is a romp through remedies that range from the renowned to the ridiculous. One vile cure—that of pouring mustard in the nostril—has the children restless with curiosity to see if it really works. Ravishankar's resounding "Hic!" throws them into a collective chortle.

Twenty years ago, while working with Tara Books, an independent publishing house of international acclaim, based in Chennai, Ravishankar had the opportunity to write her first book to accompany artwork by children's' book illustrator, Pulak Biswas. "For Tiger on a Tree, we needed text which had to be at a tangent to the pictures, so that it didn't repeat what the pictures said," Ravishankar says. "It had to have a life of its own." The book, written in nonsense verse, was translated into eight international languages, and sold over 50,000 copies worldwide.

With over 25 children's books to her credit since, ranging from verse to fiction to non-fiction, Ravishankar is regarded as India's Dr. Seuss. Her books, written in English, have been translated to languages such as Dutch, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Korean.

Ravishankar is best known for her work in the genre of literary nonsense. Following in the tradition of Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, Ravishankar writes nonsense verse in English that veers towards semantic nonsense of the Carrollian kind.

Around 2006, Ravishankar discovered India's own legacy of literary nonsense in the form of a book project that attempted to study the nonsense traditions of India. As a member of an online group devoted to the late Edward Lear, an English artist, musician, and writer of literary nonsense, Ravishankar encountered Michael Heyman, an American who was putting together a book called The Tenth Rasa: An Anthology of Indian Nonsense.

"Once we began to correspond, I offered help on the nonsense from the southern states,” says Ravishankar. “Until I started working with this project, I didn't realize that there was so much nonsense in Indian languages."

The Tenth Rasa, considered by some as the first non-Western anthology of nonsense in translation in the world, was co-edited by Heyman, Sumanyu Satpathy and Ravishankar. It is a compilation of contemporary nonsense, mainly for adults, in English, as well as translations of nonsense written by some of India's most nimble wordsters. These range from the 15th-century illiterate poet Kabir and his “ulatbamsi,” or “upside down language” (Hindi), to the 16th-century jester poet, Tenali Ramalinga's verse that uses only the words for “goat” and “tail” (Telugu), to later writers of nonsense in Indian languages like Sukumar Ray (Bengali), Mangesh Padgavkar (Marathi) and Kunjunni (Malayalam) to contemporary nonsense prose and verse in English by writers such as Sampurna Chattarjee, Shreekumar Varma, and Ravishankar herself. The book also brings the rich language tradition of India to the fore through its nursery and folk rhymes that Indians have grown up reciting, but didn't realize belonged to the nonsense genre.

"Mangesh Padgavkar, who writes in the Marathi language, was very aware of the idea of nonsense and even coined his own term for it—Vaatratika,” says Ravishankar. “But he was also aware that a lot of the time, when one tries to write nonsense, one ends up writing satire or humor."

"The problem is, if you write nonsense, there is a good chance that you will be taken seriously. It happened with The Hunting of the Snark. People wrote to Lewis Carroll explaining to him what the deep profound meaning of the poem was. And actually he wrote it as just nonsense."

This Saturday, June 17, a boat is scheduled to arrive in Honolulu. But this is not just any boat: It is a 62-foot-long canoe that has spent the past three years circumnavigating the globe.

The canoe, based on an ancient design, set off from Hilo, on Hawaii's Big Island, in May 2014 with a crew of 17. It eventually visited 19 countries and traveled more than 46,000 miles, according to Scientific American. The trip was organized by the Polynesian Voyaging Society, and is as much about bringing attention to the effects of climate change as it is about showing how indigenous peoples traversed the Pacific Ocean to settle remote islands hundreds of years before modern navigation.

“For centuries, Europeans stubbornly refused to acknowledge Polynesian achievements because they simply could not believe that a so-called primitive society was demonstrably better at navigation than they were,” Wade Davis, an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society, told Scientific American.

The canoe's navigators use a system known as wayfinding, which has been passed down for generations and requires navigators to commit the paths of hundreds of stars to memory, while also relying on "the direction of waves and the movement of seabirds," according to Scientific American. The canoe is named the Hōkūleʻa, the Hawaiian name of the Polynesian zenith star (Hōkūleʻa can also mean "Star of Joy").

The crew of the Hōkūleʻa has been documenting their voyage on Facebook and the Voyaging Society's website, including visits to Pacific islands that are most susceptible to climate change. Some of those places are less vulnerable to being inundated by rising seas than they are to running out of freshwater as salt water seeps into island aquifers.

“The irony is that the Pacific islands have nothing to do with creating climate change but they are the ones who are suffering the most," said Nainoa Thompson, president of the Polynesian Voyaging Society. "The good news is that we found thousands of people there full of aloha, full of compassion and caring for the Earth and for the oceans, which give us our life."

Pick a number, any number, and I'll tell you a story. Fifty-nine? Hunker down for "Fox and the Sour Grapes." Eleven hundred fifty-one? Good choice—that's "The Ogre Overawed by Displaying Objects." Five hundred? That's "Guessing the Helper's Name," or, as you might know it better, "Rumpelstiltskin."

Such are the joys of the Aarne-Thompson Uther Tale Type Index, a massive categorization system that, in the service of scholarship, has attempted to squeeze every Indo-European folktale and fable into a salient category, complete with a corresponding number and pithy name.

"Anytime I start doing any fairytale or folk narrative research, one of the first things I do is go to the Index," says Jeana Jorgensen, a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley's folklore program. "It's indispensable."

Jorgensen studies gender and sexuality in fairy tales and folk tales, and tale types help her compare how the same basic story—Cinderella 510A, for example—is told in different geographic locations. Throughout our conversation, she rattles off tale type names and numbers as though they're old friends: Beauty and the Beast 425C, Little Red Riding Hood 333.

While some tale types, like those three, are named after their most familiar versions, others are given a descriptive title that sums up the mini-genre's most vital plot points. "Some of these stories are really culturally specific, but you have to have a general enough name that you get the sense of what it's about," says Jorgensen. The result is a litany of names that are evocative, or absurd, or (often) both—a catalogue of the weird ways humans have explained the world to each other and themselves.

The current system, the ATU Tale Type Index, was introduced in 2004, but it's the latest step in a folklore categorization project that has been going on for generations. It started in the early 20th century, when Antti Aarne, a Finnish folklorist, took it upon himself to organize all the tales currently present in Scandinavian collections into several thousand named and numbered categories. "Animal Tales" (like "Curing a Sick Lion" and "The Wolf Dives Into the Water for Reflected Cheese") got numbers one through 299, followed by stories that fell under "Tales of Magic" (300-729), "Tales of the Stupid Ogre" (2009-2430), and so forth. Aarne published the results in German in 1910, under the title Index of Types of Folktales.

In 1928, the American folklorist Stith Thompson revised and added to Aarne's index, plus translated it into English. He took another stab at it in 1961, editing and updating his own work. By this point, the system—now called the AT Tale Type Index, for Aarne-Thompson—was in widespread use. "The academic folklore community has reason to remain eternally grateful to [Aarne and Thompson]," the folklore expert Alan Dundes wrote in 1997. "The use of [the index] serves to distinguish scholarly studies of folk narrative from those carried out by a host of amateurs and dilettantes."

After the second revision, though, certain scholars, including Dundes, started surfacing and discussing various critiques of the AT Index. Some of these were methodological, and focused on the criteria used to sort stories, or questioned the utility of sorting at all. Others were sociopolitical. "A lot of the titles of the earlier tale types were actually kind of sexist," says Jorgensen. "They would erase female agency."

She gives as an example one of her favorite tale types, number 451, in which a maiden goes to great length to rescue her seven brothers, who have been transformed into ravens (or, in some versions, swans or rooks). Under the Aarne-Thompson system, this type of story was called "The Brothers Who Were Turned Into Birds," despite the fact that their sister is the clear protagonist.

This kind of thing was particularly disappointing because, as the scholar Torborg Lundell explained in a 1986 paper, unabridged versions of folktales are often more complex than their popular reinterpretations. "The model for female conduct reflected in [folktales and fairytales]... is far from confined to the submissive beauty of popular selections and Walt Disney's dramatizations," Lundell writes.

So in the early 2000s, another folklorist, Hans-Jörg Uther of Germany—the "U" in "ATU"—stepped up to the plate. Along with a team of international researchers, Uther consolidated similar tale variants, rewrote summaries, and added over 250 new types and subtypes (such as 777A*, "The Man in the Moon"). The team also made a special effort to include tales from underrepresented groups, and to correct for sexism. ATU 451, for example, is now called "The Maiden who Rescues Her Brothers." The result, a three-volume work titled The Types of International Folktales, is over twice as long as previous efforts.

Researchers are, it seems, having a blast with it. Jorgensen recently used the classification system to study tales in which a heroine is forced to maintain a vow of silence, including ATUs 451, 533 ("The Speaking Horse Head") and 442 ("The Old Woman in the Forest"). Last year, two researchers from Portugal ran a phylogenetic-style analysis on a big chunk of tale types, in an attempt to figure out the "ancestor" of today's multitude of stories. (The strongest contender: ATU 330, "The Smith Outwits the Devil.")

Of course, it's still not perfect. "It's not as multicultural as it could be," says Jorgensen. "It's still slim on certain parts of Africa and Asia." Some scholars allege that tale type names continue to reflect prejudices—stories in which a beautiful princess is forced into catatonic sleep by her stepmom, for example, are currently called "Snow White," even though they also occur in cultures where white skin is not the norm. Still others argue that having tale types at all can encourage abstraction and decontextualization.

Sometimes, though, that very abstraction and decontextualization makes for its own, curiosity-inducing poetry. Don't you want to know what happens, across cultures, in ATU 570, also known as "Bunnies Beware of the King"?

Yvette Quinn happened to catch sight of a cache of NASA documents that were just sitting in the trash in her neighborhood in Florida. When she rescued them from the curb, she found that the stack included some amazing documents—designs for lunar explorers, a pass for a 1999 shuttle launch, and, most disturbingly, a list of aerospace engineers with top secret clearance, along with their social security numbers.

The documents seem to have belonged to a G.H. Hampton, who worked at the contractor Martin Marietta for many years.

The NASA documents included test results, early aerospace models, and designs for some of the first drones.

Quinn, a retired Navy aviation electrician, realized the value of what she had found and shared her discovery with a local news station; the station donated some of the most valuable finds to the American Space Museum, in Titusville, Florida. Now, the museum has both the model of a 1960s lunar excursion model and the rendering of the design on paper.

Last month, Kristin Warner went fishing at Newcombe Brook in Nova Scotia and caught a bunch of brook trout. When he sat down to clean them, though, he found he'd nabbed something else, too: two of the fish's stomachs contained whole mice.

When Warner photographed the mice and posted it Facebook, he heard from a number of other people with similar experiences, the CBC reports.

This failed to ruffle zoologist Andrew Hebda, who told the outlet he has come across trouts with all sorts of things in their bellies. "Although we tend to think of them as the majestic trout," he said, they're not just leaping gracefully out of the water for flies all the time. "They can feed on a whack of stuff." In springtime, that can mean mice, who might try to swim across the river, or get flooded out of burrows near the shore.

Rodent-eating trout are not a strictly a Nova Scotian phenomenon. Companies sell mouse-shaped lures for hooking big fish. A study done in Bristol Bay, Alaska indicated that some years, 25% of fish there gorge on small mammals. (One rainbow there was found with 20 shrews in its stomach.)

The three mice Warner found were more than enough to give him pause, though. "I was surprised to see them in there," he said.

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.