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Ancient Romans Were Using Lead Pipes Earlier Than We Thought

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The Ancient Romans are known for their vast empire, their politics, and for their impressive public works projects. Parts of their aqueduct, sewer, and pipe system that carried water to residents, and waste away, can still be found. The pipes have long been a source of controversy—it's been suggested the lead from pipes caused widespread lead poisoning that led to the downfall of the Roman Empire. New research still doesn't answer that question, but it does tell us the Romans started using lead pipes earlier than previously believed.

Today, the site of Ancient Rome's harbor city Ostia lies about two miles from the shore, thanks to centuries of silt deposits from the Tiber River. A team of British and French researchers took 177 core samples from the area, then used carbon dating to determine the age of each layer. The layers of soil provide a record of flooding on the Tiber and the buildup of silt, but they also provide a thorough record of the use of lead pipes. The researchers were able to measure the levels of lead in the layers, and found that Romans started using lead pipes around 200 BC, and stopped around 250 AD.

Lead pipes found in Rome by archaeologists so far have date stamps that only go back to 11 BC, but the new timeline for lead pipe use makes sense—large aqueducts were built around 140 and 125 BC and they would have needed an extensive pipe system to deliver all that water to residents. The lead levels dropped during a civil war in the first century BC, and again after 250 AD, when they stopped maintaining their pipe system as their economy declined.


A Handmade 118-Foot Rope Bridge, Rewoven Every Year

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Although the Inca Empire has long since vanished, Peru's Cusco Region is saturated with archaeological and historical sites that offer a glimpse into Pre-Colombian civilizations. In one particular remote mountain village, Inca tradition is alive at a three-day event that has been performed annually for 600 years: the rope-braiding festival of the Q’eswachaka, the last handwoven Incan rope bridge. 


During the festival, members of four local Quechua communities contribute strands of rope woven from grass. These strands are then woven together to create a 118-foot bridge that is slung across the Apurimac River. It replaces the bridge woven the previous year, which sags more and more over its 12-month reign.

The 2017 festivities took place in June beside the river, nearly a four-hour drive south of the city of Cusco. The trip is over rough and mountainous terrain and past cookie-cutter villages influenced by early Spanish conquest.

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Approaching the bridge, there are a few thatched roof homes along the road. Older men and women sit on the ground in their yards, braiding together bundles of tall grass. The grass used for rope production is called ichu. The Quechua people collect ichu and bend it to make it more pliable. They then hammer the grass with a stone while occasionally pouring water over it. This method creates a flexible product that can be easily braided into a sturdy rope. 


The area of the Q’eswachaka was very quiet on the first day of the festival. There were only a handful of local villagers relaxing by the bridge. However, around noon, hundreds of villagers descended from their mountain homes carrying large bundles of prepared rope. All the men were dressed in white jackets and pants with white hats. The women were all dressed in a traditional, vibrantly colored melkkhay skirt. Many of the women carried their babies in a backpack-style blanket carrier called an awayu.

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Within the first few hours, farm trucks drove down to the bridge with many large red garbage pails filled with homemade corn beer called Cheecha. The villagers also brought a large oven to bake cuy for the participants of the festival (cuy being the Quechua name for roasted guinea pig). This is a traditional meal of Peru which predates the Inca. Cuy is prepared for this festival in abundance using a local herb for seasoning called huacatay. Huacatay (Tagetes minuta) is a marigold that grows wild around the bridge and has a pungent lime smell. 


Soon the roads around the bridge were densely crowded with hundreds of villagers laughing and huddled in groups around the area while preparing more braided rope. A section of the road had been cleared and some men had laid out long strands of rope. They had taken positions along the length of the rope and began braiding together the many strands of prepared rope to make a thicker product. This process continued throughout the first day and yielded enough rope to reconstruct the bridge. 


The following days included, carrying the rope across the old bridge, tying the new product securely to the anchor points, and, finally, cutting down the old bridge.

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Life in Kyrgyzstan, 26 Years After the Collapse of the Soviet Union

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French photographer Elliott Verdier knew very little about Kyrgyzstan when he arrived in Bishkek, the capital, in June 2016. As the sun rose over the city, he observed for the first time the pink morning light and the distant mountains. By the following February, he had traveled the country and photographed its people and places to create his photo series A Shaded Path.

Kyrgyzstan’s ancient landscape was once part of the Silk Road, and for the majority of the 20th century, it was part of the USSR's sprawling Central Asian empire. It shares borders with other former Soviet states—Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Taijikistan—as well as China. On August 31, 1991, as the Soviet Union collapsed, Kyrgyzstan declared its independence.

"The fall of the USSR redistributed the cards of economics, politics, and ethnic issues over Central Asia," says Verdier, in an email interview. "The Kyrgyz Republic unites under one constitution many minorities and struggles to form a proper national identity." In 2010, violence broke out between the Kyrgyz people and the minority Uzbek population, and there are ongoing concerns about the country's record on human rights. Politically, says Verdier, Kyrgyzstan is "still unstable and lives under the shadow of corruption and dictatorship. If I remember, they had more than 20 prime ministers in 25 years and two revolutions." There have been 19, excluding Acting Prime Ministers, of whom there have been nine more. The most recent Prime Minister, 40-year-old Sapar Isakov, was appointed on August 26, 2017. At press time, his Wikipedia entry is just two lines long.

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The economic fallout of independence was significant. “The economy collapsed with USSR, as almost all of its exports were for the Soviet Union, and many industrial cities, such as Balykchy, fell into disuse.” Verdier recounted meeting an admiral who had worked in freight transport on Issyk-Kul Lake. He showed Verdier the abandoned port in Balykchy. “He looked so passionate about it, still living in it past glory," remembers the photographer. "After a few vodka shots, Ukrainian songs, and thankful speeches, we finally did the portrait."

One of the things Verdier noticed among the older residents is nostalgia for what the country was. “The USSR was powerful and Kyrgyzstan was part of this power,” he says. But he also noticed something else: “The generational disparities between those nostalgic for an abolished USSR order, and modern, Westernized youths born after the fall.” The young people he met were motivated, ambitious, dynamic. "I feel like they’re dragging this older generation that is hard to move from old habits, and this is why transition is so slow."

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Verdier met fashion design students, hunters, fishermen. At Min Kush, in the center of the country, he photographed a coal miner. They walked together across a freezing landscape to reach the mine, where the shooting conditions continued to be a challenge. "It took time," recalls Verdier, but he "never moved or lost patience, he was truly glad and thankful he could testify of his way of living."

"Photography undoubtedly connects people, so when they accepted … they were naturally sharing their story." He also found that his large-format camera created a different mood. "They naturally pose for posterity."

Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from Verdier's project.

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The Search for the World’s Most Enchanting Greenhouses

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Magnus Edmondson and India Hobson’s greenhouse quest began in Oxford, England, at the Botanic Garden, on a Sunday morning. “We were the only people there, and it was so incredibly quiet,” they write. The only sounds were “gasps of wonderment” and the “occasional sigh.” From there, Edmondson and Hobson, photographers based in Sheffield, were hooked. They began what they call “a self-initiated Greenhouse Tour of the World”—they find, explore, and photograph greenhouses, potting sheds, polytunnels, conservatories, and other indoor spaces made by humans, for plants.

For their photography company, Haarkon, Edmondson and Hobson were already traveling far and wide. Now they make it a point to seek out greenhouses on their travels and in their spare time. They might be found at the private greenhouse of an orchid grower or Belgium’s Botanic Garden Meise. Most recently they have been exploring California conservatories, the New York Botanical Garden, and the Gardens by the Bay in Singapore. They told Atlas Obscura what drives them to seek out these green spaces, where the world we usually think of as "outside" is contained within clear walls.

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What are the most surprising, hidden, or out-of-the-way greenhouses you've visited?

The hidden ones which are the most memorable usually belong to a private owner who has a passion for growing a particular plant. Their love for what they are doing just shines through, and it's reflected in the care and attention they give to their plants and the buildings they're housed in.

One that always sticks out for us is a guy in North Yorkshire with a small sign outside his long drive with the words "Cacti For Sale" written on it. We pulled down his drive on a wet winter morning and checked out his impressive cactus collection.

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Which have been the most flat-out wonderful—the ones you keep telling people about? What made them so amazing?

Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is always a place which we mention whenever anybody asks us about a good glasshouse to visit; there is so much variety in the houses they have, which have been added to and adapted over the decades. It also helps that Edinburgh is one of our favorite cities in the United Kingdom to visit.

If you're up for traveling somewhere a little more exotic, we recently visited the Cloud Forest at Gardens by the Bay in Singapore, it's one of the best things we've experienced on our whole tour. The scale of the environment they have created and the journey you make through the conservatory is brilliant and well thought-out. It's also a great escape from the heat of the city.

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How do you find and choose the greenhouses you visit? Has your strategy changed as you've visited more of them?

We have the internet to thank for most of the places we find and visit. It involves lots of searching through Google and Instagram to get a glimpse of greenhouses hiding all over the world. We have learned that it's worth making the journey on a hunch that there may be a great greenhouse to be discovered. We've been disappointed a few times after a long journey, but the gems we've found by just going for it far outweigh any less-than-successful trips.

How did you start this love affair with plants? What attracts you to them?

We started with just a couple in our house, we didn't have a garden and so wanted to have something green indoors. Over the years our collection has built up as we found out what types of plants like to live with us and our lifestyle.

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Are there particular challenges or joys in creating these photos that differ from your other work?

Essentially the website and Instagram is our version of a photo album or scrapbook—it's where we keep all of our holiday photos and all of the things that we've seen and liked so that we can refer to it in the future. We're lucky because we've been given opportunities to travel to places we might not have thought of, and we find ourselves experiencing new things all the time. Documenting it is just part of the fun. A huge part of the enjoyment of what we do is that we get to do it all together and share it, so it becomes less work and more just a very fluid, odd, but interesting lifestyle!

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How far out of your way are you willing to go for a good greenhouse?

We have just arrived back from a week-long trip to Australia, searching out green places in the cities in the southeast of the country, so I guess we'd pretty much go anywhere. We have a long way to go before we start running out of places to visit.

For €50, You Can Buy a Share in This French Castle

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When you think of a castle, you likely picture a king lording over it, directing operations and fitting the building to his every whim.

In Dordogne, France, though, fans of one castle are trying to change that conception, the Local reports. As part of a crowdfunding campaign, they're selling fifty-Euro shares in the castle of Saint-Vincent-le-Paluel, a 15th-century chateau now famous for being torched by the Nazis during World War II, and for one memorable film appearance, in the 1968 comedy Le Tatoué.

The campaign was started by "Adopte un Château," a group dedicated to restoring the 30,000 abandoned and damaged castles in France. Although they've helped castles through crowdfunding before, if this plan goes through, it will be the first time donors receive a share in the building, and help to dictate is future.

It isn't a sure thing: the castle is going up for auction on September 21st. By that point, the fundraisers will have to have drummed up enough money to outbid any other potential buyers. According to the Local, 400 people have bought into the scheme so far, raising around €30,000. The starting bid is €250,000, so they have a bit of a ways to go.

But just picture it: a castle with hundreds of tiny thrones, instead of one big one. That's more fun to imagine, right?

Every day, we track down a fleeting wonder—something amazing that’s only happening right now. Have a tip for us? Tell us about it! Send your temporary miracles to cara@atlasobscura.com.

The Holy Grail of Video Game History Is Probably an Office Memo

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Seeking the holy grail of video game history might bring to mind the internet-shattering discovery of some long-lost NES classic. But for the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF), a young organization working to collect and preserve the disappearing ephemera of gaming history, the grail is probably something closer to some scribbled notes or old meeting minutes.

The VGHF, a registered nonprofit, was founded in February 2017 by video game archivist and historian Frank Cifaldi. “As an individual, I’ve been preserving video game history since 1998,” says Cifaldi. “Going back to the days when I was dumping NES cartridge ROMs on the internet.” (That is, he was pulling the game code off the cartridges, so they could be played using computer-based emulators.) Cifaldi started the Foundation as a way to locate and preserve the ever-fading historical legacy of a multi-billion-dollar industry, and to encourage more in-depth and probing discussion on the subject.

Today, the art involved in video game development is more evident than ever, but as many have noted, this was not always the case. “For most of video game history, there was no point in holding on to that source code, because you’re never going to port it or anything to another console. You did the game, it’s out, and you move on to the next one,” says Cifaldi. In addition to the source code for the games themselves, the behind-the-scenes materials that tell the story of a given game’s creation and release are even harder to come by. While there is some incentive and means for fans and others to copy and pass on a game itself (namely fun, via the aforementioned ROMs), those more ephemeral materials are usually only ever found in the possession of people who worked on the original games. For whatever reason, they rarely bothered to hold onto items from production—or the companies that made them went out of business or were acquired by other companies. As Cifaldi points out, time is running out for such discoveries. “We’re hitting the point where this industry is old enough that people are starting to pass. It’s time to take this stuff seriously.”

VGHF does its fair share of preserving code and the technology for playing games—the primary source materials of video game life. “In general, the holy grail of video game preservation is source code," Cifaldi says. "That’s what actually builds games.” But there are many people who do this, and do a good job of it, from independent ROM collectors to the handful of museums across the country that collect video games or the thousands of titles available on the Internet Archive. But unlike these other preservation efforts, VGHF is seeking the materials and information surrounding the games—Cifaldi wants to preserve context, to better understand games as historical artifacts. “You can play Super Mario Bros. and enjoy it for what it is, but if you understand the time and place, and how it was actually kind of new that there was a blue sky, and that the screen scrolled, you understand why it was so impactful, and you can appreciate it in a different way,” says Cifaldi.

Cifaldi often compares the struggles of video game scholars to those of film scholars. “Film scholars have access to studio correspondence between the director and the production company, they have things like shooting scripts for the movie, etc.,” he says. The video game industry just hasn’t preserved similar materials. These seemingly mundane assets could help fill in the surprisingly large gaps in gaming's historical record—simple things such as the release dates of games, which weren’t really publicly announced until the 1990s, with a few exceptions. “Sonic 2 had a whole marketing campaign around ‘Sonic Tuesday.’ I’ll never forget it. November 24th, 1992,” says Cifaldi. Most simply appeared in stores, sold or didn't sell, and were forgotten.

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The items the foundation is searching for could range from old advertisements and game reviews to scribbled development notes and internal memos, and even just old pictures of people working on games. “We don’t know what game studios looked like inside for the most part, or what the development environment would have looked like,” says Cifaldi.

One example of a game that the foundation was able to save from the memory hole of history was the odd Carmen Sandiego franchise extension, Where in North Dakota Is Carmen Sandiego? Like a TV pilot that never went to series, the game was developed in 1989 by Broderbund Software and a group of North Dakota teachers in an attempt to create a region-specific version of the popular Carmen Sandiego educational games. Unsurprisingly to everyone outside of North Dakota, it never took off. “The game was maybe sold at retail? But we have no record of that happening,” says Cifaldi. “All we have is a complementary copy that was sent to the teachers.”

But the game was completed, and members of the VGHF actually travelled to North Dakota to collect everything they could about it from teachers who still had related materials. They found handwritten notes from the teachers, correspondence between them and Broderbund, worksheets that would have been given to students playing the game, and early and finished builds of the game and its manuals. All of this was insight into its development and evolution. They even found photos of the teachers working on the game.

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VGHF presented a playable version of Where in North Dakota Is Carmen Sandiego?, along with a clue guide, at the 2017 Game Developer’s Conference. No one who tried it was able to catch any of the game’s crooks. Still, a game that was little more than a barely remembered oddity now has a story of its own.

Not yet through its first year, VGHF is working on digitizing its growing collection and expanding its influence. Cifaldi and his colleagues recently launched a writing fund to encourage scholars to create thought-provoking writing on the history of gaming. As it evolves, Cifaldi would like to see it continue to do the work that foundations do—raising money to support projects that align with its mission.

In the meantime, Cifaldi will keep preserving gaming’s fading history the old fashioned way: “A lot of it is just tracking down and talking to people who were in the industry and encouraging them to understand that their contributions were important, or that some of the material they have is important.”

Found: Amazingly Well Preserved Bones of Giant Flying Reptiles

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Imagine a pterosaur flying through the sky. How big is it? Whatever you’re thinking of, it’s probably too small. Pterosaurs, which lived 228 to 66 million years ago, could be as large as modern-day airplanes.

For many years paleontologists thought that, despite the pterosaurs’ wings, the ancient reptiles couldn’t actually fly. (Glide, maybe, but that doesn't really count.) But as they learned more about pterosaur anatomy—that these ancient reptiles had wings more like a bat than a bird, special air sacs, and thin-walled, hollow bones—scientists came to believe that pterosaurs could fly after all. Those hollow bones, though, are usually crushed by the time they’re discovered by modern science, limiting the information available about these creatures.

Now, new research, described this month at the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, could reveal more about key qualities that made it possible for pterosaurs to fly, reports LiveScience. Scientists at University of Michigan and the Natural Resources Authority in Jordan have been studying two pterosaur fossils found with their bones intact.

One of the fossils is a new species of pterosaur, which, with a wingspan of 16 feet, is relatively small. The other is closer in size to Quetzalcoatlus northropi, the largest of the pterosaurs, which can have a 40-foot wingspan. These well-preserved bones should be able to reveal more about how big pterosaurs were, the air sacs that helped power their flight, and their capability of lifting off the ground and into the air.

Thieves Infiltrated the Paris Catacombs to Steal $300,000 of Wine

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Under the streets of Paris, 150 miles of secret tunnels snake around the city: the ancient Mines of Paris network. Tourists can visit one piece of one portion of it—Les Catacombes de Paris, ossuaries that hold the broken up remains of some two million people. Some time in the early hours of Tuesday, August 29, this underground boneyard became a crime scene—for the theft of more than 300 bottles of vintage wine, The Guardian reports.

The thieves stole the wine from the cellar of a high-end apartment building close to the leafy Jardin du Luxembourg. Detectives believe they drilled in through the limestone wall of the catacombs and pilfered around $300,000 worth of valuable grand cru bottles. In a statement to French media, a police spokesperson said that they believe the unknown thieves had visited the cellar before. "The suspects didn't drill that particular wall by accident," they reported.

The Mines are vast, and closed at night, and even during the day, only around a mile of the network is accessible to the public, and then only with a guide. Queues for this ghoulish attraction snake around the block, but for the savvy there are other ways in. Secret entrances, mostly former sewer openings, can be found throughout the city. (Sometimes they lead to underground parties and concerts, of dubious legality.)

Recent years have seen other daring oenological crimes. On Christmas Day, 2014, thieves made off with more than 100 bottles, totaling $500,000, from Thomas Keller's Napa Valley restaurant French Laundry, and hit two other high-end cellars. "They know what wine they want," John Rittmaster, co-owner of Prima, one of the other restaurants hit in the spree, told Bloomberg. "This is wine stolen to order." The suspects in that case were caught when they tried to fence some of their loot in North Carolina.


Squirrels Are Unintentionally Luring Bears to Railroad Tracks

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Bears and people food just don't mix. When the large omnivores associate humans with quick, easy access to food, they hang around towns and camps, and sometimes even attack. In national parks such as Yellowstone and Yosemite, these bears either have to be relocated or euthanized. But it's not just careless campers or unsecured garbage cans that get bears into trouble. In Canada's Yolo and Banff National Parks, bears are spending more time around the railroad tracks that wind through the parks—and 17 grizzly bears have been killed by trains in Banff National Park since 2000. The source of people food there is hopper train cars full of agricultural seeds, such as wheat and canola, that leak a little as they pass through. But bears aren't scratching around for trails of seeds. It is seed caches, made by some small, red rodents, that are putting the bears in harm's way.

Red squirrels collect the leaked seeds in mounds called middens, and some bears have learned that middens make easy meals. A team of researchers from the University of Alberta surveyed middens in Banff and Yolo. They found that squirrel populations are more dense along the tracks, and their middens contain train cargo: canola and wheat seeds, as well as sprouted wheat, soybeans, and even the sulfur pellets used to adjust soil pH. The scientists also found that bears definitely associate these middens with the tasty seeds. In some cases, the bears dug up several feet to search for middens, and scat shows they have indeed been eating the seeds and sulfur pellets. Bears are known to raid squirrel middens in search of wild seeds, such as whitebark pine seeds, but only at high elevations, far above where the train tracks run.

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The researchers also noted that the parks' usual crop of Canada buffaloberry, a large part of the bears' diet, was "particularly poor" during the year of the surveys, so bears may have been raiding middens more often than usual. Buffaloberry growth can vary dramatically from year to year, so in some years, there may be even more bears lingering around railways. Stopping those seed leaks, say the researchers, is the only way to keep them safe.

The Most Interesting Bugs in the World

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It's been at least three whole minutes since I asked for a few of his favorites, and Robert Bixler is still naming bugs. There's the clearwing moth, which imitates bumblebees in both dress and behavior, and eschews normal moth protocol to fly during the day. There's the Halloween pennant dragonfly, which is bright orange with brown-splotched wings. There's the cherry millipede, which, when disturbed, smells like someone cracked open a jar of maraschino cherries.

And there's the larval antlion, a big-jawed blob that lives in sandy soil. When it's hungry, it digs a pit trap, and then lies at the bottom of it waiting for ants to troop by and fall in. This last type has a very particular fanbase: "They're the delight of every nine and 10-year-old boy who knows about them," says Bixler, a professor at Clemson University's College of Behavioral, Social and Health Sciences. "They'll sit sticking pine needles into the funnel, and trying to get the antlion to grab at them."

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Did you click on that dragonfly link? Would you like to lift-and-sniff a cherry millipede? Next time you're somewhere with sandy soil, might you find yourself casting about for the nearest pine needle? If so, you may have fallen into Bixler's own friendly trap. A specialist in what he calls "environmental socialization," he is always looking for new ways to get people to go outside and engage with the wild world around them. Little-known bugs, he thinks, might make pretty good bait.

Bixler started stockpiling bug stats a few years ago, after he became frustrated by what he saw as a tendency—both in his field and in the world at large—to overlook nearby possibilities in favor of more glamorous species and locales. "Nobody wants to study human behavior in a local park," he says. "Everybody wants to study stuff at Yellowstone National Park."

While looking for a close-to-home problem to delve into, "I realized I hear people say all the time, 'I hate bugs! Bugs are awful!'" he says. "It just occurred to me that, if we could figure out ways to get more people knowledgeable and interested in insects, people would be more comfortable outdoors."

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Like most rebranding efforts, this one started with focus groups. Last year, Bixler and one of his graduate students, Nate Shipley, gathered groups of college students and gave them a series of bug-related surveys and quizzes. "First, we just wanted to know, what do people know about bugs?" says Shipley, now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. "And they don't know a whole lot."

On average, the students surveyed were able to list just 12 different insects in one survey's free response portion. (Many also included non-insect creepy-crawlies such as spiders, millipedes, and, in a couple of instances, snakes.) What's more, the best-known critters generally fell into two categories: "beautiful bugs," like butterflies, ladybugs, and fireflies, and "bothersome bugs," like mosquitos and wasps.

For a taxonomic group that boasts over 900,000 known species, these recognition numbers aren't so great. "We started to think about how to promote insect literacy," says Bixler. For the next few surveys, which made up his Master's thesis, Shipley asked questions meant to gauge not just how well people knew certain bugs, but the degree to which they would like to know them.

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He had participants rate how interesting they found various bugs, and what exactly intrigued them (e.g. "fuzzy body," "horns look dangerous," "shape looks cool."). He even tracked their eye movements as they looked at different bugs side by side. (If people liked a bug, he wrote, they tended to focus on its head.)

The winners make up a category that Bixler and Shipley now call "Fascinating and UNfamiliar," or "FUN" bugs. These tended to display certain traits: "Color, shape, unusual morphological structures," says Shipley. The survey champion, the bagworm caterpillar, "doesn't have a defined shape," says Shipley. "People are curious—what is that? They also think it's kind of cute."

Shipley and Bixler hope their findings will help various stakeholders "use the novelty of bugs to their advantage," says Shipley. "When you're putting together a brochure, a sign, or an online article—how do you catch someone's attention?" They're also putting together a set of 75 FUN bugs that are common enough that they can be found in much of the United States, and fascinating enough that people might want to look: carrion beetles, jumping spiders, mud daubers, plus all the ones this article has already mentioned.

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"It's in the spirit of Pokemon GO, or just a scavenger hunt," says Bixler, who plans to give the list to nature centers, botanical gardens, and schools. They're calling it the BUG-ket list: "Seventy-five bugs to see before you die!" says Bixler.

Bixler still thinks middle childhood—the average antlion-lover's age—is the ideal time to get into bugs. "I would love it if every 10-year-old who had a baseball bat in their bedroom had an insect net sitting next to it," he says. But one of the great things about bugwatching is you can start anytime and anywhere. "There are lions and rhinoceroses in Africa, but we have ant lions and rhinoceros beetles right here [in the United States]," says Bixler. "Anyone can afford to go on a bug safari."

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Last but not least, Bixler says, bugwatching "provides simple pleasures." He brings up his own favorite bug category: a group of insects and spiders known as "bird-dropping" bugs, which camouflage themselves as lumps of avian poop. "There's dozens and dozens of [types]," he says, with clear glee. Since learning about them, he continues, "I smile every time I see a bird dropping." How much more FUN can you get?

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.

The 19th-Century Freakout Over Steam-Powered Buses

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In the 1830s, the transportation industry of the United Kingdom took a dramatic turn. Large, clunking, hissing steam-engined vehicles—which looked like a cross between a carriage and a trolley car—began to rumble along the roads. Alarmed by their appearance, some people threw rocks at them. Others wrote furious letters to the local government. Still others used stones to block the paths of traveling steam buses.

These salvos were part of a battle between old-fashioned horses and high-tech steam: horse-drawn omnibuses, from which we get our modern word “bus,” had been the public transportation standard, but now the steam-powered bus threatened to take their place. And that would not do. Horse-bus drivers and their supporters opposed the steam-powered bus technology so much that in the mid 1800s that they resorted to both legal and physical sabotage.

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According to M.G. Lay in Ways of the World: A History of the World's Roads and of the Vehicles that Used Them, while thousands of people in the U.K. welcomed and used the buses, which could hold over a dozen passengers at once, the enemies of the steam bus were fierce. Horse-bus drivers saw the new technology as a threat to their livelihood. Despite evidence to the contrary, many turnpike trusts, which managed roads between towns in the U.K., believed that steam buses caused more damage to the roads than horse’s hooves. The public nursed growing fears of the technology's possible dangers: the machines were faster than any land vehicle before them, but steam power was seen as unreliable and a progenitor of explosions and accidents.

Various horse-drawn public transportation vehicles had existed in the U.K. since the 17th century, and while they were occasionally involved in accidents, they were a familiar technology. In the 19th century, with the invention of steam-powered engines, steam and horse-drawn buses were suddenly in direct competition for customers and the road. That competition got ugly relatively fast. Frederick Talbot wrote in his 1921 book on inventions that in one accident in Aldgate, England in the mid 1800s, a horse-drawn carriage and a steam bus resorted to a game of chicken when they “essayed to dispute the right-of-way,” causing an accident “with dire results.”

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Omnibuses, which, like today’s buses, gathered travelers along predetermined routes, had previously competed with and triumphed over smaller horse-drawn stagecoaches, which required booking ahead. Now that horseless carriages were advertised to cause less damage to the roads, carry more people, and give a smoother ride than their horse-drawn counterparts, horse-drawn carriage companies had to double down their efforts to own the transport game.

The steam bus, a brand-new technology, encountered trouble on even slightly rough terrain. The steering was rough, and on early models drivers needed to stop and haul water from a nearby pond or stashed water source every six or seven miles to keep the steam going.

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Accidents and mishaps added to a general public anxiety of the machines. Sir Goldsworth Gurney developed one form of steam-powered bus (often called “steam omnibuses”) which almost ran into a Bristol Mailcoach, causing Gurney to “force his vehicle into a pile of bricks” in front of a crowd, according to Dale Porter in The Life and Times of Goldsworthy Gurney. Gurney tested his vehicles until he thought they were safe, but steam power’s reputation began to fall into ruin almost from the start, as seen in poet Thomas Hood’s take on the new tech:

“Instead of journeys people now go up on a Gurney
with steam to do the work by power of attorney
but with a load it makes blowed and you all may be undone
and find you're going up to heaven instead of up to London”

Evidence of the steam-bus’s dangers mounted as the technology was refined. In 1833, a vehicle owned by bus company entrepreneur Walter Hancock appeared in headlines after its engine exploded during an en-route repair performed by the bus driver, which ended in the driver’s death.

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Advances continued despite public fears, and bus lines began to grow in London by the mid-1800s. One of Hancock’s steam buses, the Automaton, could carry an unprecedented 22 people; vehicles of his brought travelers around London and into other towns, and sported names like Autopsy, Infant, Enterprise and German Drag. In the book Birth of the British Motor Car, T. R. Nicholson writes that the steam bus was heralded by the press at times, with one source insisting that “scientific and practical men of all ranks” understood steam-powered buses needed to replace horses as a more efficient transportation of the future.

Horse-drawn companies became especially wary of Gurney’s threat to their livelihoods, according to the Local Transport History Society in the U.K. Starting June 23, 1831, stagecoach drivers decided to sabotage his vehicle. The saboteurs laid deep piles of stones onto the roads in front of one of his steam carriages three days in a row, damaging the machine and causing it to topple over.

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The scale tipped further out of the steam bus’ favor with laws supported by Parliament’s House of Lords, who may have been influenced by angry horse-carriage investors and citizens. New Turnpike Acts instated harsh tolls on steam-powered or motorized buses, and England’s Locomotive Act of 1861 (known also as the Red Flag Act) required self-propelled vehicles to be led by a man who carried a red flag, to make sure the speed was limited to walking pace. At one hearing, Gurney said "wherever we attempted to run, or contracts were made, we were met by an act of Parliament.”

Steam powered buses did try to compete into the late 1800s and early 1900s, until gas-powered cars closed in on the industry in the 1920s. In the end, motorized buses won, and no one baulks at the idea of a heavy, metal contraption zooming travelers about town.

Of course, new forms of transportation may still be regarded with suspicion—the advent of self-driving cars has drawn similar fears to those of the steam-bus era. Maybe we’re bound to relive another round of condemnation, but this time, at least, let’s hope saboteurs stay out of it.

Author Terry Pratchett's Unfinished Works Have Been Crushed With a Steamroller

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Prolific author and satirist Terry Pratchett, creator of the classic Discworld fantasy-comedy universe, died in 2015 after a heart-wrenching battle with Alzheimer’s disease. But one small saving grace of his slow decline was that he was able to communicate his wishes for what would become of his work after he was gone. Specifically, he wanted his unfinished work be taken into the street and crushed by a steamroller.

Pratchett’s request was recently carried out during the Great Dorset Steam Fair in Tarrant Hinton, England, a celebration of steam-powered vehicles. According to The Guardian, the hard drive containing his unfinished works was rolled over by a vintage steamroller named Lord Jericho. Fellow author and close friend Neil Gaiman (they cowrote the popular 1990 novel Good Omens together) first shared Pratchett’s wishes in a 2015 interview with The Times, and the destruction was carried out by Rob Wilkins, who manages Pratchett’s estate. In a tweet containing a picture of Pratchett’s crushed hard drive, Wilkins showed that he had fulfilled his obligation to the author.

From Kurt Cobain’s journals to Douglas Adams’s half-finished The Salmon of Doubt, posthumous publishing, often without the consent of the author, is a common practice that Pratchett seemingly wanted to avoid. And he’s not the only only author who wished that his unfinished work be erased from history. Franz Kafka left a number of writings and unfinished works in the hands of a friend who was to burn them all after his death. Kafka didn’t get his wish. Same for Vladimir Nabokov's final, unfinished novel, The Original of Laura, which was published by his son Dmitri in 2009—to scathing reviews. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? playwright Edward Albee, who died in 2016, also requested that his unfinished work be destroyed, although it is unclear just yet if he will get his wish.

In many of these cases, executors and others are faced with the question of whether preserving such writings (or, in some cases, profiting from them) is of more importance than the author's wishes. But Pratchett, who in addition to writing the character of Death into many of his Discworld novels, was a vocal advocate for the right to die, hopefully would have been happy to see his request carried out so faithfully.

The smashed up bits of Pratchett’s hard drive will go on display as part of an upcoming exhibition of his work at the Salisbury Museum.

Found: 381 New Amazon Species

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About a week ago, late in August, the government of Brazil announced that it would open 17,800 square miles of the Amazon, an area known as the National Reserve of Copper and Associates, or Renca, to commercial mining. The reserve is known to be a rich resource of gold and other valuable minerals, but it’s also rich in other natural resources—rare birds, plants, insects, frogs, fish, and other creatures.

As if to underscore the point, the Mamirauá Institute for Sustainable Development and the World Wildlife Fund released a new report this week detailing the discovery by science of hundreds of incredible Amazon species, reports The Independent. According to the report, in 2014 and 2015, scientists identified 381 previously undescribed species, putting the rate of discovery at one new species every two days.

The report includes 216 plants, 93 fish, 32 amphibians, and smaller numbers of mammals, reptiles, and birds. The most striking species include a pink river dolphin, with a population of just 1,000, a titi monkey with a bright orange tail, and a stingray whose surface looks like a honeycomb. These animals are all at risk from human activities, particularly farming and logging, as the BBC reports.

The incredible extent of biodiversity in the Amazon is still being uncovered; we don’t even know what we’ll be missing as we diminish these forests. There are people who recognize this danger and are ready to fight for the Amazon. A Brazilian judge has already suspended the government decree that would have allow mining in the Renca reserve.

This Man Had Bees on His Face for Longer Than Anyone Else on Record

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Can you think of something you did yesterday that lasted about an hour? Maybe it was a meeting, or a workout, or your lunch break. Maybe you had a long conversation with a friend, or took a solid chunk of time to finish a good book.

Okay, ready to feel jealous? Yesterday—August 30th, 2017—Juan Carlos Noguez Ortiz of Toronto, Canada sat in a plastic bubble on a public street and let 100,000 bees crawl all over his face for exactly 61 minutes, setting a world record in the process.

"I wanted to show people that they don't have to be scared of the bees," Ortiz, who works at Dickey Bee Honey Farm in nearby Cookstown, told CBC News.

In the outlet's video of the stunt (which you can see here), Ortiz sits very still as bees are poured over his head, forming a wriggling wig and sideburns and eventually covering his entire face. "Hey Juan, you good?" someone shouted at one point, prompting Ortiz to give a slow double thumbs-up. A countdown clock ran beside him, letting a growing crowd know as he inched towards the existing record—53 and a half minutes—and then sprinted past it.

"Bee-bearding," as this practice is called, works like this: first, you put a colony's queen in a small cage. Then, you hang the cage from your chin and release the rest of the colony. The worker bees will smell their queen and huddle around her, forming a full, luscious insect beard.

Bee-bearding dates back to 1830, when an innovative Ukranian apiarist named Petro Prokopovych began encouraging his charges to settle on his chin in order to market his beekeeping products.

This particular bee beard was also a promotional stunt: it was staged to market the film Blood Honey, a psychological thriller about a woman who becomes "stuck in a life threatening nightmare" after returning to her childhood home. As the Toronto Star reports, at some point during the film, the main character, Jenibel, is apparently similarly covered in bees.

And now that you know the secret, you can, too! Hey, it beats (most) meetings.

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.

Solving the Mysterious Disappearance of Two 18th-Century French Frigates

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On March 10, 1788, two majestic French frigates, L'Astrolabe and La Boussole, set sail from Botany Bay, Australia, into the great blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean. Precisely what happened next, however, is a mystery—the ships were never seen again. Two months after leaving Botany Bay, the vessels, captained by explorer Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de La Pérouse, are thought to have wrecked on Vanikoro, an island a little smaller than Cleveland, out between Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands. Some men survived, according to local oral history, and spent the next six months building a two-masted boat. They're thought to have sailed away, but their fate is unknown.

Researchers at Australian National University (ANU) say that the recent rediscovery of an 1818 Indian newspaper article—about a castaway who spent four years marooned on a different island, hundreds of miles away and decades later—may be the key to understanding what became of the ships' crews, totaling more than 100 people.

Many books and articles about La Pérouse have asked the same questions, writes ANU researcher Garrick Hitchcock in an article on The Conversation. "Did the vessel even make it out of the Vanikoro lagoon, or was it attacked by locals in canoes? If it did get away, did it founder and sink beneath the waves? Or did the survivors die of thirst or starvation at sea? Or did they again suffer shipwreck elsewhere in the Pacific?"

The 1818 article, originally published in The Madras Courier on December 29, tells the story of the rescue of a shipwrecked Indian sailor named Shaik Jumaul. Jamaul had been on the crew of Morning Star, which wrecked in Torres Strait and left him marooned on tiny Murray Island, some 1,500 miles west of Vanikoro. In his time on the island, the article explains, he fully adopted the local way of life—so much so that the indigenous people who had sheltered him were allegedly devastated to see him go.

He told his rescuers about European artifacts he had seen on the surrounding islands: several muskets, a compass, two cutlasses, and a gold watch. Jumaul asked the islanders how they'd procured these objects and was told that, about 30 years earlier, a large ship had wrecked near the island. "A great number of white men came in their boats from her and fought them," he said. "Several escaped to the other islands, where they were killed; but a young boy’s life was saved, who lived amongst them a very long time." These men, it seems, may have been the surviving crew members of L'Astrolabe and La Boussole who sailed away from Vanikoro.

"The chronology fits nicely, for it was 30 years earlier, in late 1788 or early 1789, that the La Pérouse survivors departed Vanikoro in their small vessel," writes Hitchcock. "Furthermore, historians are not aware of any other European ship in the region at that time."

But one last mystery does remain, and seems unlikely to ever be solved. The Courier describes the islanders' sadness when the young man—perhaps the last survivor of La Pérouse's expedition—disappeared overnight, in a canoe, with two young women. They, also, were never seen again.


These Bats Don't Let Scorpion Stings Get in the Way of a Tasty Meal

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The Arizona bark scorpion may be just a few inches long, but it is the most venomous scorpion species in North America. Despite the bark scorpion's potent sting (it isn't fatal to most humans but causes intense pain), it's still a snack for some birds, snakes, and grasshopper mice. Grasshopper mice, for example, are immune to the venom, and scientists have suspected the pallid bat, another scorpion predator, either has similar immunity, or is just really good at dodging the scorpion's stinger. A new study shows they're not nimble—ground-hunting bats rarely are—but is instead unfazed by the venom. The underlying molecular mechanism could help medical researchers develop new medications for pain management.

A team of researchers from the University of California, Riverside, first watched high-speed footage of pallid bats feeding on bark scorpions to see if they were being stung at all. Every bat they observed was stung, but this didn't seem to interrupt their dining. The researchers then injected the bats with doses of the venom. The highest dose they gave is nearly seven times the dose that kills 50 percent of mice, which is a common measure of venom potency. While some of the bats had mild reactions, all were just fine after 10 minutes.

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The next step was to sequence the genes behind the bat's pain receptors. The grasshopper mouse, for example, has receptors trick the venom into binding with a specific spot that actually blocks pain. The pallid bat genes use a different mechanism, however, and the researchers aren't quite sure yet how it works. They do know that the genes are similar to sequences found in a species of opossum, Tasmanian devils, and platypuses (who are venomous themselves). Researchers hope to unravel the pallid bat pain mystery soon.

The Transcendental Ritual of Mongolian Camel Coaxing May Soon Be Lost Forever

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Springtime in the Gobi is as life-giving as it is treacherous. As the -45-degree lows of winter yield to 100-degree summertime highs, the traditional livestock of the area’s Mongolian herders start to give birth. Risks are many. Shaggy Bactrian camels (two humps!) are pregnant for 13 months, and usually give birth to a calf every second year. But the harsh, dusty climate is unforgiving, and it is not uncommon for mother or baby to perish during or after delivery. The result is often orphaned babies and grieving mothers who need one another—but don’t have any filial bonds.

After centuries in the desert, the nomadic herders have developed a unique musical ritual to help form these bonds, or reestablish one when a camel mother has rejected her own offspring. In the half-light of dusk or dawn, a musician wields his instrument, usually a horsehead fiddle, known as a morin khuur, or a Mongolian flute. Everyone present wears their best clothes, out of respect for the rite. The mother and calf are tied together, and, on the orange dunes, another musician begins to chant: “khuus, khuus, khuus.”

At first, observers say, the mother either ignores the calf altogether or lashes out by biting or spitting at it. The “coaxer,” at this point, adjusts the melody based on the behavior. The singer begins to weave elements of poetry or song into the tune, to mimic the sound of the camel’s walking, running, and bellowing. After many hours of this, it is said, the mother and calf begin to weep. The spell is cast, and the animals are joined for life.

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This is the basic outline of the ceremony, according to information submitted to UNESCO in an attempt to recognize and safeguard the unique practice. Other aspects may be added or omitted, depending on how hostile the mother camel and calf are. Sometimes, herdsmen cover the orphan calf with the pelt of the mother’s dead offspring, or tie the two together overnight far from the rest of the camp. Camels can’t fit inside the Mongolian gers, also known as yurts, that herders live in, but as part of the ritual the animals are sometimes brought to the entrance and shown the fire inside. Previously, the anklebones of wild sheep were tied around the camels’ necks, based on the myth that these ewes never reject their babies. These wild sheep are now endangered, and their anklebones surpassingly rare.

There is a mystical element to this ritual, explains Galiimaa Nyamaa, a professor at the Mongolian University of Science and Technology in Ulaanbaatar. “It asks the gods of animals and humans and spirits of nature to help people,” she says. “The coaxer and owner of camel ask the gods for a blessing and protection from natural disasters and other deities.” Elders believe that the ritual has an allegorical significance as well, relating to the importance of patience and acceptance in any relationship.

This ritual doesn’t just save the baby’s life, but also ensures the herders a steady stream of camel milk, for as long as the mother is nursing. “The camel milk is not only the source of food and drinks in the severe Gobi conditions,” says Nyamaa. “It is also the basic means of preventing illness or for healing diseases.” (Curiously, some American consumers have recently begun turning to this creamy elixir for relief from autism, head colds, and diabetes.)

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The Gobi stretches over an area about twice the size of France, spanning much of the Chinese provinces of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, and the southern band of Outer Mongolia, where this ritual takes place. Almost nothing grows on this spectacular expanse of sand, mountains, and arid plains, stripped of rainfall from the Indian Ocean by the Tibetan Plateau. Its tiny population has therefore rejected agriculture for the demanding life of nomadic herding. Each family has its own caravan of a few hundred camels.

Each year there are fewer and fewer young herders willing to learn and pass on this tradition. Summer droughts between 1995 and 2005 chased a series of cataclysmic winter blizzards, which wiped out much of the livestock. After the 1990 revolution and the peaceful resignation of the then-authoritarian government, Mongolia has begun to prosper—but miners earn far more than herdsmen, and the country’s flourishing urban centers are a seductive alternative to a nomadic life. Between 2003 and 2013, for instance, the number of herding households in Mandal-Ovoo province decreased by 37.5 percent, from 488 families to just 305.

There is also a growing trend among Mongolian families of sending daughters away to study and live in cities, and those who leave almost never return. The young men who remain in the desert plains struggle then to find wives and raise families that can help with the livestock and maintain the traditions. On top of that, many have discovered that motorbikes are cheaper and less tempestuous beasts of burden than camels. All of this, coupled with climate change, are eroding the traditional way of life and the landscape itself.

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Particular aspects of the ritual are passing from use as well. Traditional Mongolian instruments are falling from favor. The vargan, a plucked “jaw harp,” hasn’t been used for camel coaxing in 20 years, and certain kinds of flute are relegated only to theater and performance, rather than an intricate dance with livestock. The practice has been documented by filmmakers, including in the 2003 German-Mongolian docudrama The Story of the Weeping Camel. But it’s very possible that these films may soon be little more than memorials to an extinguished art.

A few dedicated Mongolians, including Nyamaa, have petitioned the United Nations to safeguard this practice. In 2015, they added it to their "List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding," but it’s hard to know what impact this can have beyond recognizing the existence of the practical yet transcendental ritual. In a video statement to the United Nations, one aging coaxer, Ch. Perlee, tried to explain the beauty of “the gentle sound of ‘khuus’” coupled with the melody: “Even people who are looking at the ritual start to cry.”

Behold the World Record for Most People Dressed Like Scientists

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Ever on the cutting-edge of strange new records that no one had ever thought to create, much less break, the Guinness World Record organization has awarded yet another bizarre honor, this time to a group that put together “largest gathering of people dressed as scientists.” It had very little to do with science, but it may have been one of the most scientific-lookingevents in recent history.

As stated in a press release, 893 people dressed as scientists gathered in Salt Lake City, Utah, to break the record. The event was put together by USANA, a nutritional supplement marketing scheme, to honor its 25th anniversary. In order for attendees to count towards the record, they had to be wearing a white lab coat and safety goggles, and be holding a test tube or beaker—pretty much be a scientist in a cartoon.

For over a century, the white lab coat has been the widely recognized uniform that screams “scientist.” Once, they were much more strictly utilitarian garments that would make any potentially caustic spills instantly identifiable, but the coat has since spread out to a number of other industries, including engineering and medicine. Physicians adopted the white lab coat back in the 19th century to bring a measure of perceived seriousness and professionalism to the field, which historically had been rife with quackery. The pristine white coat signaled cleanliness and scientific rigor.

Ironically, those same white coats are now thought by some to be potentially harmful because they can stress people out, and cause what's called “white coat hypertension.” But as a cartoonish shorthand, the white lab coat still can’t be beat. However, the same cannot be said for this world record, which, sitting at under 1,000, is just begging to be overtaken. In fact, it wouldn't be all that hard to top with actual scientists.

The Women Who Rode Miles on Horseback to Deliver Library Books

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They were known as the "book women." They would saddle up, usually at dawn, to pick their way along snowy hillsides and through muddy creeks with a simple goal: to deliver reading material to Kentucky’s isolated mountain communities.

The Pack Horse Library initiative was part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), created to help lift America out of the Great Depression, during which, by 1933, unemployment had risen to 40 percent in Appalachia. Roving horseback libraries weren't entirely new to Kentucky, but this initiative was an opportunity to boost both employment and literacy at the same time.

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The WPA paid the salaries of the book carriers—almost all the employees were women, making the initiative unusual among WPA programs—but very little else. Counties had to have their own base libraries from which the mounted librarians would travel. Local schools helped cover those costs, and the reading materials—books, magazines, and newspapers—were all donated. In December 1940, a notice in the Mountain Eagle newspaper noted that the Letcher County library "needs donations of books and magazines regardless of how old or worn they may be."

Old magazines and newspapers were cut and pasted into scrapbooks with particular themes—recipes, for example, or crafts. One such scrapbook, which still is held today at the FDR Presidential Library & Museum in Hyde Park, New York, contains recipes pasted into a notebook with the following introduction: “Cook books are popular. Anything to do with canning or preserving is welcomed.” Books were repaired in the libraries and, as historian Donald C. Boyd notes, old Christmas cards were circulated to use as bookmarks and prevent damage from dog-eared pages.

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The book women rode 100 to 120 miles a week along designated routes, regardless of the weather. If the destination was too remote even for horses, they dismounted and went on foot. In most cases, they were recruited locally—according to Boyd, "a familiar face to otherwise distrustful mountain folk."

By the end of 1938, there were 274 librarians riding out across 29 counties. In total, the program employed nearly 1,000 riding librarians. Funding ended in 1943, the same year the WPA was dissolved as unemployment plummeted during wartime. It wasn’t until the following decade that mobile book services in the area resumed, in the form of the bookmobile, which had been steadily increasing in popularity across the country.

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In addition to providing reading materials, the book women served as touchstones for these communities. They tried to fill book requests, sometimes stopped to read to those who couldn’t, and helped nurture local pride. As one recipient said, "Them books you brought us has saved our lives." In the same year as the call for books, the Mountain Eagleexalted the Letcher County library: "The library belong to our community and to our county, and is here to serve us ... It is our duty to visit the library and to help in every way that we can, that we may keep it as an active factor in our community."

Atlas Obscura has a selection of images of the Kentucky pack horse librarians.

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Why Some Plants Have Huge Leaves and Others Have Tiny Ones

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Plants have a delicate balance to strike when it comes to their leaves. They need to be large enough to absorb lots of sunlight for photosynthesis, but not so big they use up a lot of water to cool those leaves through evaporation. But a new study suggests things are a bit more nuanced than that. After analyzing data from 7,670 kinds of plants around the world, researchers determined that the main driver of leaf size for plants in most places is actually the difference between the temperature of the leaf itself and the air around it—and how that changes between hot days and frosty nights.

Back in the 1800s, plant geographers noticed a pattern: Plants closer to the equator had larger leaves, and as you move toward the poles (and into deserts), the leaves on plants get progressively smaller. Tropical rain forests were full of large, lush leaves, while in arid places and way up north bushes and shrubs get by with tiny foliage. Scientists long thought that the risk of overheating and drying out was the determining factor in this, but it turns out not to be the only one. "What we've been able to show," coauthor Ian Wright told the BBC, "is over perhaps as much as half the world the overall limits to leaf size are much more set by the risk of freezing at night than the risk of overheating during the day."

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Water also plays an important role, Wright said, because "if there's enough water in the soil then there's almost no limit to how large leaves can be." As climate change affects both temperature and water availability, understanding how plants will respond to such changes—and why—will be critical. The researchers' model can help predict which plants, thanks to leaf size, will thrive in the new world we've made for them.

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