On Sunday, Amanda Charsova, who runs a Bay Area company that rents carnival games, posted some distressing news: A 25-foot-long trackless electric train for children, valued at $60,000, had been stolen.
The colorful train had been stored in a large black trailer, and that's what was taken from a company parking lot in Pleasant Hill, California. "Please keep your eyes out for a large black trailer with a pointed front that's looks like the picture I posted below," Charsova wrote on Facebook. "Also please keep your eyes open for the beautiful train."
Indeed, people kept their eyes open. On Monday, Charsova reported some good news. A Facebook user, Laura McCollum-Perkins, spotted the trailer sitting behind a yoga studio in Walnut Creek, a couple miles south of where it was taken. The train was still inside.
Ed Sossamon, 58, the company's owner and Charsova's father, told the East Bay Times that the episode had renewed his faith in humanity, and in Facebook, "which I always thought was stupid."
"A huge THANK YOU from my entire family!" Charsova wrote Monday. "Now the kids this weekend do not need to be disappointed." McCollum-Perkins has been gifted a free appearance from the ride at the nonprofit event of her choice.
Please do not steal small electric trains that are designed for children.
When the Planning Board in Montclair, New Jersey, approved a new housing development at 44 Pleasant Avenue, they had a condition: the home that currently sat there could not be destroyed. It needed to be moved elsewhere before construction could begin.
Now, that house is on the market for a whopping $10. The catch? The buyer needs to pay for its relocation costs.
Built in 1906, the house was once owned by Aubrey Lewis, a Notre Dame football star who, in 1962, became one of the first black agents to enter the FBI.
This isn't the first home with a similar catch to sell for less than the price of a movie ticket. In 2011, The New York Times reported on a soon-to-be demolished Minnesota house that was on the market for $1. The couple that bought it ended up paying $22,000 to have it moved.
At the time, the company Milbank House Movers Inc. told The New York Times that relocating a home usually requires between $15,000 and $60,000—still around half of what it would cost to build the same house from scratch.
Thanks to the Serra da Mesa Dam in central Brazil, close to 300 islands were created in the span of just two years. More than 650 square miles of the Cerrado region were inundated by the reservoir, which finished filling in 1998. The region is considered a biodiversity hotspot. By so altering the landscape, the dam and reservoir threaten that, but by creating new environments and isolating species, they're showing how life adapts to all the changes we throw at it.
The hilltops that became islands were once home to a variety of lizards that eat termites, and isolation impacted different varieties of lizards in different ways. Larger species died out (though they survive on the mainland) because they couldn't find enough termites on their islands maintain large body size. So Gymnodactylus amarali, a small gecko, inherited a whole termite buffet.
There was just one problem. For most of the G. amarali geckos, the termites were too big to eat—bigger than their mouths. But some of the individual lizards were lucky enough to have slightly larger heads. So they gobbled up termites, thrived, and passed the large-head trait on to their offspring. When scientists from Brazil and the United States compared the island-dwelling lizards with their mainland relatives—separated by only 15 years and a short stretch of water—the researchers found the island lizards had heads that are about four percent larger. The researchers write in their report that the shift is "astonishing" because it was so rapid and the lizard populations on the five islands they studied evolved the same trait independently of each other.
It is possible, Science reports, that the larger head size isn't a result of evolution, but rather better growth thanks to the new environment and altered diet. However, the researchers believe evolution explains the size difference, and plan to check for genetic changes in the future.
The 1,082-foot-tall Ryugyong Hotel, perhaps better known as the "Hotel of Doom", is the largest unoccupied building in the world, rising 105 stories above Pyongyang, North Korea. Construction on the pyramidal building began in 1987, was halted in 1992, resumed in 2008, and was halted again in 2013—leaving, at the end, nearly four million empty square feet of space, and a sulking, embarrassing colossus looming over the capital.
On the ground level, walls to keep people from entering the construction site have long stood, but last week those walls came down, just in time for the July 27 anniversary of the armistice that ended the Korean War. What was behind them? Two new walkways leading to the building and a sign that read "Rocket Power Nation," an apparent reference to recent missile tests, according to the Associated Press.
The building itself remains empty and, as the Associated Press noted, the latest unveiling is probably less about getting the building operating as intended than it is about finally using some of the space it occupies. The building "is believed to be far from complete inside and possibly even structurally unsound," said the report.
From the outside, however, it's still an impressive sight. It's thought that the building was first intended to best the 741-foot-tall Swissôtel The Stamford in Singapore, which was, in 1986, one of the most ambitious projects ever completed by a South Korean company. That hotel, designed by I.M. Pei, has 1,261 rooms and 16 restaurants and bars. Rooms start at around $200 a night.
To many outside of the U.K., the town of Slough is mostly known as the setting for the original BBC incarnation of The Office. But now it's experiencing a strange rash of tree-fellings that would have been just the kind of thing Gareth might have tried to solve.
As the BBC is reporting, a mystery tree killer is at large in the town, responsible for cutting down at least six “substantial” arbors in Upton Court Park. The first tree in the weird spree was brought down six months ago, with five more having been discovered to have been cut down since. Local authorities say that it is more than just kids messing around, and that the large trees would have taken a chainsaw to take down.
It's thought that the culprit may be posing as a tree surgeon, wearing a reflective vest as they work; piles of logs have also been found, indicating that they might also be trying to sell the wood.
Whoever it is, authorities advise residents who spot any suspicious people to leave them be, and contact the police. They’re looking at you, Gareth.
The greatest racehorse of the 18th century was allegedly born during the 1764 solar eclipse, which tracked from Iberia to Scandinavia, at noon on April Fool’s Day. He was named, appropriately, Eclipse, and had a brief racing career of just 17 months. At that point he had to be retired, not for any physical reason, but because he won so consistently that no one bet on any other horse.
The 1760s and 1770s were some of the louchest years in Britain’s history. One woman in five made a living selling sex. Gambling was similarly rife through every level of society. At its tamest, this involved cock fighting and horse racing. When a man collapsed outside the posh gentlemen’s club Brooks, members staked money on whether or not he was dead. Even high-society women were involved. Those with no other income, David G. Schwartz writes in Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling, “sometimes allowed their houses to be turned into gambling houses.”
All these factors contributed to a golden age of betting on horses, when a man might make his fortune from a well-picked colt. In Eclipse's case, that man was Dennis O’Kelly, a rogue with a brogue, who made his way from rural rags to racing riches through a heady combination of gambling, sex, and horses. That combo similarly informed Eclipse's life.
At a year old, however, Eclipse’s future was far from bright. Owned by the deeply unpopular Duke of Cumberland, he was sold for just £75 to a meat farmer and salesman, William Wildman. Never classically beautiful, Eclipse was a “leggy yearling” with an “ugly head” and a stinking temper, according to Theodore Andrea Cook's 1907 biography, Eclipse & O'Kelly. At that time, untameable horses were often castrated, or gelded, to try to bring them into line. Instead, Wildman put him in the hands of a rural "rough-rider," who tired Eclipse out with a mixture of daytime trotting and all-night poaching expeditions. Later portraits show him running with his head down and his ears pinned back, often a sign of a seriously touchy steed.
But word began to get out about his speed. “At first,” writes Nicholas Clee, author of Eclipse: The Story of the Rogue, the Madam, and the Horse That Changed Racing, it was “the trainer, owner and stable staff.” From there, the bookmakers and other gamblers. By the time Eclipse’s hooves hit the turf, “the whole place [was] abuzz.” O’Kelly, a racing enthusiast, professional gambler, and occasional conman, had taken note.
Shortly before Eclipse’s first race, at the age of five, a group of bookmakers had sneaked down from London for a glimpse of this exceptional horse at a private trial. They missed it, but, according to an 1853 account, they ran into an old woman “toddling along” nearby. She knew almost nothing about horse racing, she said, but she could tell them that “white legs” was far in front, and that the others would never overtake him, “if he ran to the world’s end.”
She was right. Eclipse won the race. And then another, and another, and every one after that. Eclipse’s rough riding might have saved him from the snip, but it didn’t mollify him altogether. He only just tolerated having jockeys on his back, provided they “content[ed] themselves with sitting quiet upon the saddle.” He ignored almost all commands or attempts to rein in his speed, but he loved to race. He was never beaten, nor "had a whip flourished over him, or felt the tickling of a spur, or was ever, for a moment, distressed by the speed of a competitor."
In fact, no one knows quite how fast Eclipse could have run if pushed, though some accounts have him galloping off at almost 60 miles an hour. “No horse could be found to call forth his extreme pace,” according to The Farrier and Naturalist, published in 1828. It’s likely that speed came from his unusual lineage: Eclipse is said to be have been descended from two of three Arabian stallions that had recently been imported to the United Kingdom, and are thought of as the "foundation stallions" of what we now consider Thoroughbreds.
In 1769, O'Kelly bought the horse in two installments of 450 and 1100 guineas (a guinea was one pound, one shilling). By that point, O'Kelly had already begun to clamber up the British social and economic ladder.
Originally from a tiny town in western Ireland, O'Kelly had come to London to seek his fortune. He found a job carrying a sedan for high society, and then found his fortune inside of it. According to a hack biography published in 1788, shortly after O'Kelly's death, the lady in the covered chair took a shine to him. High-profile women taking lovers was not uncommon at the time—take Lady Worsley, one of the most eligible young women of the time, who had 27 lovers, some of whom testified during her divorce proceedings.
O’Kelly gave up carrying sedans for a living, but, when his patron's money dried up, he took to gambling to support his extravagant lifestyle. The strategy landed him in debtors’ prison, where he met Charlotte Hayes, one of the most successful brothel keepers in London, who was his professional and romantic partner for the rest of their lives.
O'Kelly was well liked, though not always accepted by the landed gentry and noblemen of the racing set. The adopted 'O' in his name, according to his biography, came from his largesse and generosity.
Who keeps the best house in England? was the frequent question.—O! Kelly, by much. Who the best wines? O! Kelly, by much. Who the best horses? O! Kelly’s beat the world. Who the pleasantest fellow? Who? O! Kelly.
The purchase of Eclipse was their finest business decision. He earned the couple close to £30,000—$6 million in today's money. While the racing brought in some of this revenue, much more came from applying Hayes's trade to O'Kelly's horses. Eclipse mated with the mares for £50 a go, around $10,000 in today's money. He did this more than 300 times.
After a few years, the cross-country reproduction tour began to take its toll on the horse. Eclipse became "very decrepit and foundered in his feet." He was ferried around in what may have been the first horse box, a four-wheeled carriage drawn by two other horses, with snacks and refreshments for the ride.
In December 1787, O'Kelly died of "luxury and hard living"—otherwise known as gout. His fortune, and Eclipse, passed on to Hayes.
Eclipse outlived his master by only a couple of years. He died of colic in early 1789. At his funeral, according to 1805 Turf Register and Sportsman & Breeder's Stud-book, mourners ate cake and drank ale to the strains of a stirring epitaph:
... from the hoof of Pegasus arose. Inspiring Hippocrene, a fount divine; A richer stream superior merit shows. Thy matchless foot produced O'Kelly wine ...
Relics of the legendary horse were coveted after his death. Bits of his body began to materialize around the country, like pieces of the True Cross. And, there were far more pieces of his anatomy circulating that could have belonged to a single horse (not unlike bits of the True Cross). There were, at one point, six Eclipse skeletons knocking around, and nine "authentic" hooves, some of which were repurposed as trophies and inkstands.
“The ‘genuine’ hair out of his tail would have generously filled the largest arm-chair in the Jockey Club," wrote biographer Theodore Andrea Cook. The actual bones, however, spent some years rattling around the cupboards of Bracy Clark, an equine historian. They were sold first to the New Veterinary College in Edinburgh, and then to the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in London. From there, the bones zigzagged to the Natural History Museum, to the National Horseracing Museum, and finally back to the Royal Veterinary College, where they are exhibited today.
There is, however, a piece of Eclipse that is spread far and wide across the country—his blood. That mating tour resulted in a great many foals, who had a great many more—and today over 90 percent of all British racehorses are directly descended from the one born when the Moon's shadow passed over Europe in 1764.
Our Arctic ice cap is melting. Many people know this, but endurance swimmer and environmentalist Lewis Pugh has taken it upon himself to truly feel it. This past Saturday, July 30, Pugh swam a full kilometer along the edge of melting sea ice in the subzero Arctic Ocean, clad only in a swim cap, goggles, and a Speedo.
Pugh has spent the last ten years braving freezing water in order to encourage international action around climate change. This was the first in what he is calling his Arctic Decade Campaign, during which he will swim long distances through formerly frozen seas in Norway, Canada, and Russia—"places that, until recently, were not swimmable at all," he writes.
Pugh called this past weekend's swim, in Norway, "the toughest of my life." As he writes in his latest blog post, the ocean clocked in at half a degree below freezing on the Saturday of his swim, and the subzero temperatures threw him off, shortening his strokes and preventing his hands from properly gripping the water.
Although Pugh almost threw in the towel at 650 meters, he kept going, and completed the entire kilometer. It took him 22 minutes, the longest amount of time he's spent in such cold water. When he was finished, he had to bite the arm of one of his support team members in order to get hauled into the boat, because he couldn't grab onto him any other way.
Pugh began raising climate change awareness through Arctic swimming in 2007, when he accomplished a similar one-kilometer swim across newly-open ocean. In the ten years since he undertook that endeavor, glaciers have disappeared, climate irregularities have increased, and we've seen some of the lowest sea ice coverage in recorded history.
Meanwhile, Pugh says, the world has largely failed to rise to the occasion. "Over the last ten years people have often said to me, ‘You must be mad to swim there,’" he recently wrote. "But I feel like the rest of the world is mad, and I am the sane one."
On Twitter, Pugh took the time to answer questions about something that people are endlessly curious about: how he manages to complete these freezing swims. Before an Arctic plunge, he says, he trains in progressively colder ocean water, getting himself mentally and physically ready.
"If I start thinking I am cold, I'll be out [of] the water very quickly," he writes. (The near-Arctic ocean he practiced in for this swim, in Longyearbyen, was not as chilly as he would have preferred for training in—another symptom of climate change.)
Over thirty years of cold-water training, he explains, even his physiology has changed—when he's about to dive in, his body temperature rises in anticipation, sometimes up to 100.7 degrees Fahrenheit.
Some of his tips can be applied more generally, though: "I always dive in," he writes in one post. "If you dip your toes in, you're just spending longer in the cold."
"Besides," he concludes, "It's important to commit 100%."
Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.
In 1882, in the southeast Australian state of Victoria, repeated attacks on the general public were carried out by a figure known only as the “Wizard Bombardier.”
This individual was known for wearing an ostentatious outfit of white robes and a sugarloaf hat. The Wizard’s strategy involved disorienting people with loud screams before hurling stones and other sorts of missiles at them. Then the ghoulish individual made a quick dash and was gone.
Attacks like these, in which pranksters disguised as ghosts would wreak havoc, came to be known as “ghost hoaxing.” There were many cases and perpetrators in Australia from the late 19th century to the First World War—to the point that rewards were offered for the apprehension of ghost hoaxers.
In this era, Australia was the perfect location for villains and rogues who wished to imitate apparitions for their own ends. Dr David Waldron, author of “ Playing the Ghost: Ghost Hoaxing and Supernaturalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Victoria,” says that the lack of professionalized police meant that Australia had a particular “lawlessness.” An abundance of leisure time and a lack of affordable entertainment options created an environment ideal for ghost hoaxers who often used their own theatrics to entertain themselves.
Technology helped make the ghost pranksters look more spooky. As Waldron writes, the recent invention of phosphorescent paint meant that individuals could glow in the dark as they menaced others, which made their outfits all the more believable and gave the hoaxers an otherworldly appearance. Ghost hoaxers sometimes fashioned elaborate disguises—in 1895, one prankster created a costume to resemble a knight and emblazoned the phrase “prepare to meet thy doom” on his armor. To ratchet up the threat factor, this “knight” also threatened people with decapitation.
Australia during this period was very concerned about the threat of “larrikins,” who were rowdy youths out to cause mischief. Some of these larrikins regarded ghost costumes as suitable devices with which to commit crime and violence. A sort of urban warfare was fought, with ghost hoaxers on one side and, on the other, vigilantes and armed guards who were determined to shoot these pranksters with buckshot to end their mischief.
Waldron has identified that despite the ghost pranks being associated with the working class, once the ghosts were apprehended, “many if not most of those arrested” were in fact “school teachers and clerks and the like and a small number of middle-class women.”
One unexpected ghost hoaxer was Herbert Patrick McLennan, who in 1904 equipped himself with a glowing outfit that included a top hat, frock coat, and boots. Most menacingly, McLennan carried a cat o’nine tails whip and used it to assault women he encountered. When a bounty of £5 was placed on McLennan, he proceeded to declare war on the authorities, threatening to shoot anyone who came after him in a letter addressed to local leaders, in which he referred to himself as “the ghost.” When McLennan was arrested, however, it was discovered that he was a powerful and influential clerk and public speaker. McLennan was sent to jail, but he was soon back out again.
Some ghost pranksters made their own custom disguises, such as wearing a coffin strapped to their backs so as to give the appearance of having risen from the dead, as in one case in 1895. A female ghost hoaxer even incorporated music by playing a guitar while she skulked around near a hotel, according to reports in 1880 and 1889.
One theme common to ghost hoaxers was the use of pre-existing superstitions and locations that were regarded as haunted. Ghost hoaxers often occupied sites that were already associated with death, such as cemeteries, in order to double down on fear. Some hoaxers even painted a skull and crossbones in a particular location to create fear before they arrived wearing claws and animal skins to wreak havoc.
To the wider community, ghost hoaxers presented a threat not just through fear but also via crime and violence, such as indecent exposure, sexual assault, or even just stealing eggs. Not all citizens were prepared to stay helpless in the face of this threat. In 1896, ex-soldier called Charles Horman seemed to be a one-man army against the ghost impersonators. He opened fire with a shotgun on one youth who was pretending to be a ghost, while using a cane to attack another hoaxer who was assaulting a woman.
Parents whose children had been physically attacked by ghost pranksters also took the law into their own hands. One woman, Mrs Date, unleashed her pit bull on a ghost hoaxer who had assaulted her daughter. In 1913 a mob of vigilantes chased after and beat a man wearing a glowing ghost outfit who had terrified an old man.
Eventually the phenomenon of the ghost hoaxers disappeared, hastened by the arrival of World War I, which took the lives of over 60,000 Australian soldiers. As Waldron says, the war showed that there were “far bigger issues at stake and the symbolism of death becoming less amusing.” With human mortality no longer a premise for pranks, ghost hoaxing lost its spirit for good.
A gruesome plague is infecting oak eggar moth caterpillars in Lancashire, England, and leaving a trail of exploded body parts in its wake. The baculovirus turns the inside of the bugs into goo and brainwashes them into getting up as high as they can. Once the zombie caterpillars are up there, they burst to spread the pathogen below.
Chris Miller, from the Lancashire, Manchester and North Merseyside Wildlife Trusts, was carrying out a butterfly survey in the area when he found "small scraps" of caterpillar hanging from branches and tall blades of grass. "It is really unusual seeing caterpillars high up, as they can be eaten by birds," he said in a statement. Ordinarily, the larval moths spend much of their time hiding in bark crevices or dirt. The virus, however, reprograms their instincts. "It's like a zombie horror film," Miller adds.
The virus “ends up using just about all the caterpillar to make more virus,” Kelli Hoover, an entomologist at Penn State University, explained to National Geographic. “It becomes a pool of millions of virus particles that end up dropping onto the foliage below, where it can infect other moths that eat those leaves.”
So is this the start of the zombie caterpillar apocalypse? Probably not, Hoover says. The virus may actually be a positive thing, ecologically speaking. When moth numbers grow, outbreaks of the infection might help keep caterpillar infestations in check.
Hundreds of years ago, in the late 1st century A.D., this neighborhood near the Rhône River, in what’s now southwestern France, was a place for wealthy Romans to build sumptuous houses. For 300 years or so, families made their homes here, until one day a fire forced them out of their homes. The neighborhood was abandoned, buried under ash, and forgotten.
Now, as a developer prepares to build new houses here, not far from Lyon, archaeologists have rediscovered this hidden Roman neighborhood. The site is unusually well preserved because of the ash that fell over the buildings. Benjamin Clément, who’s leading the excavation of the site, is calling it a “Little Pompeii.”
The site is large, about 75,000 square feet in area; among the most incredible finds are a residence with an intact mosaic of maenads and satyrs, another with a mosaic of a half-naked muse being kidnapped by Pan, and a public building featuring a statue of Hercules. These were the buildings used by wealth people: the team has found evidence of sumptuous gardens and interior water supply systems. Overall, says Clément, it is the "most exceptional excavation of a Roman site in 40 or 50 years.”
There are a lot of approaches to cutting an onion without crying—freezing it, cutting it underwater, or even wearing goggles. When an onion is sliced open, it releases a pesky molecule known as a lachrymatory factor. When it hits your eyes, it's all over. Your lachrymal glands start churning out tears. Scientists long ago identified the chemical makeup of the lachrymatory factor—a rare type of sulfur oxide—and the enzyme that helps create it. But they weren't quite sure how that process works, until now.
A research team led by scientists from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, focused their attention on lachrymatory factor synthase, the enzyme that helps the molecule form. They analyzed the enzyme's structure and determined just how it interacts with the chemical precursors to the lachrymatory factor in an onion. Then, after comparing the enzyme with similar molecules, the scientists were able to identify the exact steps involved in converting the sulfenic acid in an onion into something that makes people cry. "The remarkable, eye-irritating property of the onion can be understood at its most fundamental, atomic level," the authors write in their report in the journal ACS Chemical Biology.
Lachrymatory factor synthase was first discovered in 2002, and since then scientists have managed to produce onions that don't produce the enzyme at all—no more tears. The culinary implications of this discovery remain to be seen, but at least now you'll know what's happening on a molecular level next time you make French onion soup.
Around 140 million years ago, the things that we call flowers today were just beginning to emerge from the process of evolution. No one knows how, exactly, but thanks to scientists and computer simulations, we now have an idea of what it might have looked like. And it's (surprisingly?) recognizable, just like what we see today in forests, florists, and gardens:
The international group of scientists pulled together everything they could about the evolution of flowers, including DNA, and walked it back to come up with a theoretical common ancestor. The unnamed flower is thought to have contained both male and female parts, as well as trimerous whorls, or sections of petals that occur I groups of three. "These results call into question much of what has been thought and taught previously about floral evolution," Juerg Schoenenberger, a coordinator of the study, said in a release. The study was published Tuesday in Nature Communications.
There's still a lot that is not known about flower evolution, such as how, exactly, they came to be so wildly diverse. Fossil examples from these early years, which have yet to be found, might clear up some of these lingering mysteries. Still, scientists are pleased with the progress.
"When we finally got the full results," said Hervé Sauquet, a professor at the University of Paris-Sud and leader of the study. "I was quite startled until I realized that they actually made good sense."
Photographer Dusan Stojancevic can't always wait for the rain. His popular photo series involves capturing the reflections of famous buildings in water droplets. So when he is visiting a new city and there is no rainwater along the streets, he sprinkles some drops of his own. He tries to do it without a pattern, so it looks natural.
Little else about Stojancevic's photographs is staged, however. Aside from small color corrections, Stojancevic does not use editing software. His preferred technique is macro photography, in which an object is presented as larger in the image than it is in real life. Macro photography was once difficult to pull off, requiring special add-ons to magnify the camera lens, but the advent of digital photography has proved a boon to people like Stojancevic. Many digital cameras can automatically rearrange their lens elements to optimize close focus.
For fifteen years, Stojancevic's "droplet microcosmos" series has forced viewers to consider towering world landmarks from a unique perspective—that of a tiny water droplet. His earliest images were taken near his home in Belgrade, Serbia. He added several more to his collection on a trip to New York.
Recently, Stojancevic has also expanded his project to feature more than mere buildings. In a collaboration with the non-profit WaterAid, he photographed—through water droplets—people who have benefited from the expansion of clean water into their communities.
In Shetland, the rolling hills are covered in what's known as blanket bog, built up over hundreds, even thousands, of years. The climate on the Scottish archipelago is wet, and when the sphagnum mosses that cover the hills die, they decompose slowly, transforming into peat. Under a smooth blanket of fresh new growth, the soggy peat accumulates, growing yards deep in some places. Sue White spends quite a bit of her time out on bogs like this, planning how to fix them.
Part of White’s job, as the Peatland Restoration Project Officer of the Shetland Amenity Trust, is to find places where that blanket of moss has been torn. Damaged bogs can dry out into black strips of bare peat. A small crack can turn into a gully, which will form other gullies, until the peatland is exposed, dry and dying. In one worst-case scenario, heavy rains can pour through the cracks and puddle, like a blister, deep below. “It builds up and builds up and builds up until eventually it just wrenches the whole hillside away,” she says. “When the peat starts moving, it’s like gravy. It’s that kind of consistency. It just flows and flows and flows.” White is there to help save damaged bogs before this can happen.
Environments such as Shetland’s, along with peatlands around the world, have been overlooked for years. They are not necessarily easy to love: low and mucky and often bare of trees. To walk across a peatland, you’d better bring a good pair of boots.
But across the world conservation efforts such as Shetland’s are putting new effort into saving these unloved but important lands. Earlier this year, for instance, the Scottish government announced it will put £8 million per year into peatland restoration, more than ever before. In Indonesia, fires have destroyed tropical peatlands (which unlike more northern peatlands, can be covered in trees), and in 2016 the government there created a special peatland restoration agency. And at last year’s international climate change conference in Marrakesh, Morocco, world leaders announced a Global Peatlands Initiative.
This attention to peatlands is being driven, in part, by the growing awareness that these scrubby-looking areas are among of the world’s most important carbon sinks. They cover only 3 percent of the planet’s land surface, but store 30 percent of its carbon—more than twice as much as the world’s forests. And when peatlands are damaged or drained, they leak massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere.
With climate change's impact increasing by the day, conserving these environments is starting to seem like critical work. In the 1990s, environmentalism often focused on biodiversity, and rain forest was the ecosystem that concerned people rallied around. In the 2010s, the rain forest still matters, but the bogs do, too.
Richard Lindsay, the head of environmental and conservation research at the University of East London's Sustainability Research Institute, has been studying peatlands for decades, and he compares these landscapes, “some of the most fascinating and spectacular of the natural world,” to Cinderella. “They provide us with so much in a totally invisible way, just like Cinderella,” he says. But even getting people to recognize their existence is a challenge. Depending on where you are in the world, peatland might be described as forest, tropical forest, upland heath, or low-growing cloud forest, and the peat that underlies the vegetation might be ignored or mismanaged. Back in January, scientists identified the world’s largest peatland, which covers an area larger than all of England, in a tree-covered basin in the Congo region of Africa. No one had even known it was there.
Awareness of peatlands began growing among conservationists in the 1980s. Early in his career, Lindsay got involved with a major fight to save the Flow Country, a blanket bog that extends over vast parts of northern Scotland and that was being transformed into forestry land. At the time, no one knew how unique the ecosystem there was; now it’s being considered as a possible World Heritage Site. Over time, places such as Finland (the most peat-dense country in the world), South Africa, Austria, Canada, and the USSR began surveying their peatlands. Scientists also began to understand the ecological services, such as water filtration, that peatlands provide. But it was the international efforts, starting in 1992, to fight climate change that started to draw real attention to their secret, carbon-storing power.
There were times and places when humans did respect and value peatlands. In Ireland, for instance, peatlands were used to store and preserve huge chunks of perishable butter. They were also seen as religiously significant, and have preserved the bodies of people buried thousands of years ago. (Some of that preserved butter may have been intended as an offering to the gods.) “There are very few areas of the world where if you stand in the middle of the landscape you see what Neolithic society would have seen,” says Lindsay. “There is something incredibly primeval about it. We know from the peat record that these areas have been there for 10,000 [or] 20,000 years. In some cases, 60 or 70,000 years or more. That’s something that’s quite special.”
But as places to protect today, peatlands can be a hard sell. They are gooey. Lindsay points out that they have fewer solids than milk, which means walking on a bog is almost like walking on water. They're no good for growing crops, and because the plant matter in them doesn't decompose, they don't release nutrients into the environment. Perhaps this is why, in parts of Europe for example, vast stretches of peatlands have been drained and destroyed. Though most of the world's peat remains intact, it is under threat. In Southeast Asia, for example, peatlands are being transformed into commercial tree plantations.
But in the past few years efforts to conserve and restore peatlands have been accelerating. Damaged peatland can take hundreds of years to recover, but protecting and restoring it can be relatively simple: If they is drying out or has been drained, just add water.
When White first started working with peatlands in Shetland a few years ago, she sometimes despaired over the dark swaths of damaged peatland. But she's since learned that there are simple, effective strategies for bringing them back. Once she identifies places where a peatland has been damaged, her next step is the stop the water from flowing out of the peat. “We dam the gullies,” she says. “You get an instant result quite quickly. You get pools. It’s like being kids again.” Sometimes making the dam is as simple as piling up earth with a piece of construction equipment. Sometimes it requires using plastic poles or netting—in Shetland, creatively reused fishing equipment. Signs of improvement can be visible within a few years. Says White, “What we have learned is—it’s doable.”
For more than three hundred years, a statue of the Roman Catholic Saint Rosalia has been a fixture of the Austrian town of Neusiedl am See. Last week, the beloved statue was beheaded. A neighbor reported the news to the local police last Friday, assuming the culprits to be either vandals or reckless kids.
On Wednesday, local police revealed the person responsible: a sculptor.
Turns out, the town had hired someone to restore the statue back in June. But news of the plan never reached the public, and when the restorer removed the head and brought it to his workshop to have it cleaned, residents were alarmed.
On Thursday, the town council will reclaim the statue head before deciding what to do with it next.
The world is a pretty magical place, but sometimes it just goes for the gold, as when a videographer recently captured video of a group of wild horses frolicking under a rainbow on the shore.
Like a Lisa Frank binder come to life, the scene looks like it had to have been staged or altered to create a tableau right out of a middle school daydream, but according to the uploader, everything is as it seems. The video, uploaded in mid-July by a North Carolina tourism center, shows a handful of horses on the shore of the state's Corolla Beach, intermingling, rolling around, and generally seeming to relax, right under the arch of a bright rainbow handing over the sea. Simple and perfect.
There is little context to the video, but then again, it doesn’t really need any. Sometimes a group of wild horses playing beneath a rainbow with literally unbridled glee is enough to remind you that the world can be a wondrous place.
In July of 2008, Clara Davie noticed that one of her research subjects was acting a little funny. Davie, then a Ph.D. candidate, had brought four American crows to the Binghamton Zoo in New York. She was studying how to make captive life better for the birds—all rescues, who couldn't be released into the wild for various physical and social reasons.
Among these charges was Nugget, a 15-month-old crow who couldn't fly. Over the course of a few weeks, Davie noticed that while the other crows were zipping from perch to perch, or searching for food, Nugget would go off by herself into a particular corner of the exhibit, next to a couple of low branches. There, she would flap her wings a few times and hop up and down. She performed these motions over and over, like an athlete doing reps. After about 15 minutes, she'd stop.
"It was really concerning at first," Davie says. Davie and her advisor, Anne Clark, had designed the enclosure with the crows' welfare in mind, and feared that Nugget was displaying a stereotypy: a repetitive behavior that indicates an unhappy animal, as with pacing tigers, seals swimming endless circuits, or elephants who won't stop swinging their trunks.
As they watched Nugget more closely, though, the researchers began to think something else might be going on. Eventually, Nugget began adding to her flap-and-hop routine, tacking on bouts of running, jumping from perch to perch, and even climbing the wire that made up the sides of the cage. "It progressed from this weird, disjointed behavior to this really complex pattern," says Davie. "And then all of a sudden she was flying."
Davie, now an assistant professor of biology at D'Youville College, recently published her research on Nugget in the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science. After carefully scrutinizing tapes of the crow's behavior, Davie has concluded that there's a good chance Nugget was teaching herself to fly. In the process, Davie says, she was teaching the humans who seek to help crows and other animals a lesson, too: how to design environments that don't just promote healing and well-being, but facilitate learning as well.
Many birds who require flight-related rehabilitation previously knew how to fly, and lost the ability due to injury. Baby birds who grow up in the wild learn through instinct and parental support. But Nugget, who came to the Binghamton Zoo from a rescue facility in North Carolina, has a slightly different story. The rehabbers who initially took her in think someone probably kept her as a "pet," housing her in a cupboard or a cat carrier. Being stuffed into such a small space restricted her feather growth, as well as her ability to move. "The reason she got the name Nugget was she kind of looked like a nugget," says Davie. "She had none of her primary feathers."
Even when the feathers grew back, Nugget wasn't able to take off properly—she would often try to fly, crash-land, and break her feathers again. One of the other study crows, named Dara, also had some trouble flying, while the rest of the crows were fully flighted. When Davie designed their enclosure, she did so with these varying levels of mobility in mind. "We wanted to make sure that the exhibit was long enough and tall enough to sustain prolonged flight and let the flighted birds get to high perches," she says. "Then we built ramps up to different levels in the exhibit, and branches that were designed in a sort of stepwise manner."
The idea was that Nugget could use these features like a spread-out ladder, climbing the ramps and hopping from branch to branch in order to have more perch flexibility and get off the snowy ground in the winter. Instead, they watched as she turned a corner of the enclosure into a training gym.
What began as a simple routine grew more complex as she brought in different pieces of equipment: "She first started off rapidly moving her wings up and down, and then would do a little hop," says Davie. After a few weeks of that, she added a run-and-jump, and then a hop from a high branch to a lower one and then back again. Eventually, she added a final move: she would climb up the wire mesh wall of the cage, and glide from there to the ground.
Nugget knew how to pace herself. Reviewing the hour-long tapes they made of the crows' behavior every morning, the researchers saw her repeat this workout for 15 minutes or half an hour, and then spend the rest of the time doing regular crow things: "hiding food, eating food, wandering around," and hanging out with the other birds, says Davie.
The training paid off. In early December, a couple of weeks after the researchers had spotted her climbing the cage wire—and six months after she first started performing the routine—the researchers watched, surprised, as Nugget took off from the ground and flew straight up to a high perch. "We were just like, 'Oh my god, you did it!,'" Davie recalls. "After that, we didn't see her practice behavior again."
Researchers already knew that crows are very intelligent—different species can hide food and find it again, make and use tools, and even do simple math. But watching Nugget made Davie realize the degree to which they are able to use their environments as tools, too. Although she hasn't heard of any other birds teaching themselves to fly in this particular way, she thinks Nugget's success holds lessons for all rehabbers and keepers who want to open up possibilities for their animal charges.
It's already standard practice to provide enriching activities, toys, and other environmental features for captive animals; designing an enclosure to promote learning, as Davie and Clark did accidentally, takes this one step further. "It can be really helpful to... give them the opportunity to work their way up," Davie says.
Davie also thinks that housing less able-bodied crows with more mobile ones helped inspire Nugget's efforts. When she was stuck on the ground, there was no way for her to interact with her friends on the highest perches unless they came down to her level. Indeed, although Nugget arrived at the zoo in February of 2008, she didn't start seriously practicing her routine until July, when she was moved out of a solo quarantine cage and into an enclosure with other crows. "She might have been motivated to get more social contact," Davie says. "It could be really helpful for people who are working with injured birds to house them with others with varying levels of ability."
Plus, as most humans can attest, the things you teach yourself often stick the longest. These days, when Davie visits the zoo to say hello to her former research subjects, she usually has to look up to find Nugget: "She spends a lot of time up on the high perches."
Naturecultures is a weekly column that explores the changing relationships between humanity and wilder things. Have something you want covered (or uncovered)? Send tips to cara@atlasobscura.com.
In America in the 1860s, if you had something to celebrate, you might eat a turtle. That, at least, is what Abraham Lincoln did. At his second inauguration, in 1865, the celebratory meal began with terrapin as an hors d’oeuvre, probably boiled in a stew with eggs, cream, and butter. But if you couldn’t afford to eat turtle, or were in parts of the country where the reptiles were prohibitively rare, you might eat the next best thing: mock turtle soup. That dish was served at Lincoln's first inauguration, when times were comparatively leaner. Diners would still have been happy; despite sounding like a joke at first, mock turtle soup was a comparable delicacy.
Wealthy Americans had a choice between the two—mock turtle soup for special occasions and real turtle soup for special, special occasions. The original chelonian stew had plenty of famous fans, including John Adams and George Washington. Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton were part of an elite dining group, the Hoboken Turtle Club, whose members came together to eat turtle soup with boiled eggs and brandy. William Howard Taft counted it among his favorite meals, and is said to have chosen his White House chef primarily on his ability to cook turtle. In the South, where turtles were abundant, wealthy Southerners turned out for massive parties known as "turtle frolics." Saveur describes“servants bearing three-feet-long upturned turtle shells filled with hot turtle stew."
Mock turtle soup, on the other hand, was made with a whole calf’s head, which allegedly mimicked the flavor and texture of real turtle soup. Despite being made with a comparatively inexpensive cut that might have been discarded, it was still considered high-end, and was even erroneously described on menus as being French. It was priced accordingly: On Manhattan restaurant Sullivan's 1900 menu, for instance, it is one-and-a-half times as expensive as any other soup. It was offered on upmarket tables at the Waldorf-Astoria, The Plaza, and the St. Regis, and in the pages of the White House's 1887 cookbook, flavored with a medley of sherry, cayenne pepper, lemon, sugar, salt, and mace. There, it appeared right next to the recipe for actual turtle soup.
Like a cover song that eclipses the original, over time mock turtle soup became more popular than the real stuff. Children's author Lewis Carroll played with the popularity of the dish in 1865's Alice in Wonderland, with a character called the Mock Turtle. “I don’t even know what a Mock Turtle is," Alice says. The Queen of Hearts replies: “It’s the thing Mock Turtle Soup is made from.” That thing, morose and weeping, has the shell and flippers of a turtle and the face of a lacrymal calf.
It is perhaps surprising that mock turtle soup became such a common sight on American tables, which had not been traditionally welcoming to offal. In the 1940s, when mock turtle soup was still on many top-tier menus, the American government struggled to find ways to persuade American diners to eat organs, heads, and other unidentifiable squishy bits. Chops, steaks, and other traditional cuts were being shipped overseas to feed soldiers and allies, and the American government saw hearts, kidneys, and brains as wasted sources of protein for the homefront. The challenge was how to persuade diners that they could be delicious. The Department of Defense even enlisted cultural anthropologist Margaret Mead, along with food scientists and home economists, to draw up a new marketing campaign for offal, which they called "variety meats." But by the time World War II ended, America simply went back to steaks and burgers, and continued to eschew (rather than chew) offal—except, for a while at least, for the calf's head in mock turtle soup.
Even that didn't last, though. The New York Public Library's menu dataset shows that mock turtle soup was a popular menu item from the 19th century through to the middle of the 20th. By the 1960s, however, the only places with mock turtle soup still on the menu were the luxury passenger liner SS United States and Fort Worth's Carriage House, a fancy French restaurant. Real turtle soup, on the other hand, appears on far fewer menus, but appears to have retained its cachet longer—appearing on SS Canberra's Independence Day celebration meal as late as 1973.
If mock turtle soup was more accessible than the real thing, it wasn't particularly easy to prepare at home. The process of "dressing" a calf’s head began with opening the skull and extracting the brains, "face meat," and tongue. From there, the meat needed to be boiled to tenderness before standing overnight. The introduction of a wider range of convenience foods in the 1950s—from frozen TV dinners to canned soup to dry mixes—sapped much of the energy for long days of standing over a smelly pot and even changed the American palate. "Millions of American palates adjusted to artificial flavors and then welcomed them," writes Laura Shapiro in Something From the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America. "Consumers started to let the food industry make a great many decisions on matters of taste that people in the past had always made for themselves."
Mock turtle soup did make the transition from arduous task to convenience food, but it didn't stick. Campbell's discontinued their Mock Turtle Soup—with its “tempting, distinctive taste so prized by the epicure”—before 1960. It didn't have the range of fans that true turtle soup did, but Andy Warhol was among them. “I even shop around for discontinued flavors,” he told art critic David Bourdon in 1962. “If you ever run across Mock Turtle, save it for me. It used to be my favorite, but I must have been the only one buying it, because they discontinued it.”
There is one place in the country where the love of mock turtle soup never went away—Cincinnati. This enduring popularity may come from the German immigrants who made the city home in the 19th century. According to Cheri Brinkman, author of the Cincinnati and Soup series of cookbooks, Germans appreciated the soup’s "sweet-sour" taste. “With the major slaughterhouses of the Midwest located here at the time, there were plenty of calves' heads available to make the soup,” she adds.
Today Cincinnati chefs make the dish with ground beef rather than offal, but it’s just as popular as ever. “It is still made by many local restaurants and at church festivals,” says Brinkman. Homesick Cincinnatians can even order it in cans: Local company Worthmore has been producing it commercially for over 90 years, with a recipe that includes hard-boiled eggs, lemon zest, and ketchup.
Real turtle soup is harder to get these days. Many turtles are endangered or rare and the demand for soup made from them is simply gone. Bookbinders Specialities, the canning off-shoot of famed Philadelphia seafood restaurant, no longer sells it in cans ("Snapper Soup," they called it), though a few cases linger on Amazon. Purchasers complain, however, that it doesn't taste like it used to. "The liquid in the can was a dark brown color and authentic Snapper soup has a dark brown color," writes Amazon reviewer James A. "That sadly is the only valid comparison one could make between the two.” Worthmore's mock turtle soup, on the other hand, is mor highly regarded. Reviewer Clair Dohner puts it rather directly: "Worthmore canned Mock Turtle Soup is better than Bookbinders canned Snapper Soup."
In July, two hikers in Switzerland were aiming to climb the Lagginhorn, one of the Alps’ 4,000-meter peaks, but when the weather turned sour, they decided to turn back down. That decision led them to a grisly discovery: on their way back down the mountain, they came across a hand and a pair of shoes emerging from the Hohlaub Glacier, the Associated Press reports.
The next day, after the weather had passed, local authorities were able to retrieve the body the two hikers had found. At the hospital, it was identified as the remains of a German man, who had gone missing thirty years earlier. He had been in his 40s, and was reported missing after he went hiking on August 11, 1987.
Earlier this summer, in another part of the Swiss Alps, the bodies of two locals who had been missing since 1942 were discovered near a ski lift. In both cases, melting glaciers revealed the bodies hidden there for so long.
In Switzerland, climate change has led to fewer snowy days and retreating glaciers: Glaciologists have even tried to slow the retreat of one glacier by covering it with blankets. In another part of the range, melting glaciers have made mountainsides unstable and threatened towns. As the glaciers continue to melt, what else will emerge?
“I was looking for a pin of the band The Jam,” explains the comedian Nate Fernald, author of the above tweet and writer for The Late Late Show with James Corden. “I came upon this eBay seller who had thousands and thousands of pins from the '70s and '80s, and I went down this weird rabbit hole. I bought a whole bunch of them, because they were old and weird and made me laugh."
While surfing his way through pins with slogans such as “I’m So Horny, Even the Crack of Dawn Looks Good,” and “Works Sucks, But I Need the Bucks,” Fernald says he found the strangest one of all: a pin in the likeness of a hunched brown monster with crazed green eyes, labeled simply, “Geedis.” The smiling creature had the uncanny design of some half-forgotten character from childhood, like something you could swear you remember, but can’t give any details about. It wasn’t instantly recognizable, or easy to place. It was just, Geedis.
“I didn’t really think about it at first, but then it just kept popping in my head, like, what [is] that?” says Fernald. After turning to Google for info on the character and coming up empty, he says the mystery of Geedis became even more alluring. “The more obscure the thing became the more it made me laugh, and the more I had to own it. Then I bought it and became more obsessed with it.”
After purchasing the pin, Fernald contacted the seller to see if they knew anything more about it, but they didn’t have any information about Geedis either. He eventually found three more copies of the pin, and reached out to the sellers of each one. None of them could speak to the origins of Geedis.
Fernald turned the question over to social media, with his tweet of the Geedis pin on June 21. “Most of my friends went insane trying to figure out what it was,” he says. Nothing much came of it until he sent out a second picture of his growing Geedis collection on August 1. Finally, someone on Twitter pointed him to a picture of a sheet of stickers featuring a detailed illustration of Geedis, as well as additional characters, labeled “The Land of Ta.”
The sticker sheet, which was originally posted on the Flickr page of a pop culture collector (who Fernald says also knew nothing of its backstory), features an assortment of characters. In addition to Geedis, there is Harry, a bald, red-skinned troll holding an eagle-headed snake; Tokar, a golden robot that looks like a murderous version of C-3PO, and Iggy, some sort of dopey goblin soldier… thing.
After Fernald posted the stickers to his Facebook page, a couple of other sticker sheets that appeared to be from the same series turned up. One sheet is labeled “Women of Ta,” and features variations on the well-worn fantasy theme of absurdly-busty-female-warrior-monsters. Taken all together, the designs and character names seem to hint at some lost or forgotten fantasy franchise. “In my ideal world, I would find a VHS tape of a single episode of The Land of Ta,” says Fernald.
According to the small print on the sticker sheets, The Land of Ta stickers were created in the early 1980s by the Dennison Company, which is today known as the adhesive label company Avery-Dennison. They produced a wide variety of stickers and “seals” in the early 1980s, ranging from sheets of zoo animals to holiday-themed assortments.
Other than that, Fernald has been able to discover almost nothing about Geedis or The Land of Ta. There don’t seem to be any other products out there that use the characters, or The Land of Ta. Images of the stickers are only found in sale listings or buried in the outer corners of the internet’s image databases. Fernald theorizes that maybe The Land of Ta stickers were the beginning and end of Geedis and his (its?) life. “Nerd culture is so good at archiving,” he says. “The fact that there is so little information as there is on The Land of Ta is proof that it wasn’t a comic book, or a TV show, or even a game.”
But if Geedis and The Land of Ta never existed as anything more than a brief run of weird stickers, that brings us back to original enamel pin. “Where does the pin come from? Because I can’t find any Dennison pins anywhere,” says Fernald. In the 1980s, creating a set of custom enamel pins wasn’t quite as breezy as it is today, so it seems likely they must have been mass-produced by someone, to meet some demand. So far, there doesn’t seem to be evidence of either scenario. “That’s a lot of work to make a bootleg pin of something no one wants,” says Fernald.
The search for the truth of Geedis is far from over. Avery-Dennison has not immediately responded to either Fernald's or Atlas Obscura's requests for comment, but Fernald hopes he can get their attention on Twitter, with the ultimate goal of locating the artist or artists behind the stickers. Failing that, he jokes that maybe he can just start producing bootleg Geedis merchandise until someone sues him. At least then he’d have some answers to the question that started it all. Or maybe there’s an ending that’s even more like something out of an '80s movie.
“My dream is that when all of this is said and done, this leads me to The Land of Ta.”
If you have any further information about Geedis or The Land of Ta, contact us at info@atlasobscura.com.
Thanks to the Serra da Mesa Dam in central Brazil, close to 
