Sperm whales are the largest of the world’s toothed whales—smaller than giant, filter-feeding blue whales, but still the size of four big elephants—and they live out in the deep ocean, where they feed on squid, along with the occasional octopus, ray, or shark. In Iceland, or western Norway, or around the Azores, places where the continental shelf drops off close to the coast, these whales sometimes swim into view of human civilization. Still, they’re rarely spotted at all and almost never in the sandy, tidal North Sea, a cul-de-sac of the Atlantic Ocean between the United Kingdom and Norway.

On a January afternoon in 2016, though, Dirk-Henner Lankenau, a biologist at the University of Heidelberg, was beachcombing on the German island of Wangerooge when two dark forms appeared in the distance. When he reached the shapes, Lankenau found that they were whales, stranded overnight on the shore and already dead. Four days later, another two sperm whales were seen floating, dead, off the coast of a nearby island. That same day five more were found marooned on the Dutch island of Texel. Another two washed up soon after. The next week another dead whale showed up on a British beach, with more to follow. Within weeks, 30 sperm whales had perished on cold North Sea shores.

The whales were all males, on the younger side, and likely belonged to the same pod of bachelor sperm whales, up from southern waters to feast on squid in the Norwegian Sea. Sperm whales are normally good navigators that travel from polar to equatorial seas, but somehow this group had taken a deadly detour into the shallow, relatively squid-free North Sea.

These unfortunate whales were not the first of their kind to become trapped in the North Sea, unable to find their way back to the open ocean. For centuries now, people have documented stranded whales on these coasts. Many years are free of incidents, or see only a lone example of a lost whale. But there have also been dramatic mass beachings in 1577, 1723, 1762 (when more than two dozen dead whales were found), and 1994.

For all those centuries, the cause of these mass deaths has been a mystery. Whales that die in this way tend to be in good health, with no signs of illness or malnutrition, and their deaths have come in no clear pattern that might hint at what happened. The long history of the strandings mean that it’s hard to blame humans, exclusively at least, for causing them.

Perhaps, though, we should blame the Sun.

In a new paper, published this August in the International Journal of Astrobiology, physicist Klaus Heinrich Vanselow and his colleagues develop a theory, first advanced more than a decade ago, that whale strandings in the North Sea are caused by solar storms. Million miles away, the Sun spits out clouds of energy and particles so large they can distort Earth’s magnetic field. When they hit the planet, these magnetic fluctuations may make whales lose their way with serious, even fatal, consequences.

When an animal this large shows up dead on shore, it is an event. As far back as the 16th century, when sperm whales beached near important cities in the Netherlands, artists documented the demise with etchings and engravings. In the 18th century, one stranding was commemorated with a set of blue Delft plates. These images, often printed in pamphlets and distributed across Europe, show crowds gathered around the massive corpses but also depict the whales in fine detail. For many years, much of what Europeans knew about sperm whales was learned from these events.

The whales found stranded in the North Sea have always been males because of the differences in how male and female whales live. Sperm whales breed in equatorial oceans, and young whales remain in those waters with their mothers for at least a few years, and sometimes well into adulthood. After leaving their mothers, male whales form groups of their own, which travel far from the breeding waters. Sperm whales share our taste for squid, and the bachelor groups follow them north. The groups the bachelor whales form are not always tight-knit, but still they can lead each other into trouble.

The whales that get lost in the North Sea are on their way back south. Usually, they would skirt around Scotland and Ireland to get back to the Atlantic, but sometimes they turn south too sharply and too early—into the North Sea, which has sandbanks, estuaries, and tides more dramatic than they’re used to.

“The North Sea … is totally unsuitable for sperm whales,” wrote Chris Smeenk, of the Netherlands’ National Museum of Natural History, in a 1997 paper on the history of whale strandings. “Being animals of the deep ocean, sperm whales have no experience whatsoever in finding their way in this kind of shallow and treacherous waters.” Whales that find themselves in the North Sea have been seen to panic, thrash about, head in the exact wrong direction, and get so confused that they end up beaching even when escape is possible. Imagine a group of people who are hiking and lose their way, only to get separated, and then die alone in the wildness.

For many years scientists have been trying to figure out why these beachings happen. They have considered the role of pollution or human-generated noise, though neither explains the historical cases. One study in 2007 found a correlation between warmer periods and the frequency of North Sea strandings. There was a long gap in mass strandings between the 18th century and the 20th century, and it may be that they happen with more frequency now because the whale population is recovering from decades of intensive hunting.

An intriguing theory that has been around in some form since at least the 1980s, implicates the activity of the Sun. Whales keep their bearings through echolocation, but like many other animals that travel far and wide, they also use magnetic fields to navigate. Geomagnetic lines can act as trails of sorts, which guide animals over long distances. But those paths are not entirely reliable, since natural variation in the make-up of the Earth can cause anomalies and weak spots in the otherwise regular magnetic lines. And, on occasion, when a strong solar storm hits the planet, the magnetic field can go a little haywire.

Vanselow, of the University of Kiel, first became interested in sperm whale strandings in the late 1990s, and in his research, he came across a chart showing solar activity over the past few centuries. The curve, he noticed, looked a lot like the curve of sperm whale strandings over the same period. He started looking for connections between the phenomena, and found ... pigeons.

Pigeon racing is an old sport, but its modern incarnation took off in the 19th century. Trained homing pigeons all start from the same point and race each other home. For much of the way, they navigate by magnetic field, and in the 1970s a team of researchers showed that during solar storms, the birds were less likely to make it home and took longer to make the journey. “Pigeons for races are very expensive, so a loss of them is a bitter loss,” says Vanselow. Pigeon racers rely on forecasts of solar storms to decide whether to fly their pigeons, especially in more northern latitudes, where the effects of solar storms can be stronger.

Once he made this connection, Vanselow thought he could be on the right track. In 2005, he and a colleague published a paper that found a correlation between strandings and solar cycles. In a follow-up paper in 2009, he looked to a different measurement of solar activity, a global geomagnetic index. These papers showed that, in general, sperm whale strandings could be associated with solar cycles, though not everyone was ready to draw that connection. The authors of the 2007 paper that connected warmer temperatures and whale strandings found that solar behavior no impact on their findings.

In this new paper, however, Vanselow and his colleagues considered the cause of the strandings in January and February of 2016. They obtained data on geomagnetic conditions around the North Sea from the closest measuring station they could find, in Solund, Norway. Those readings show that, not long before January, when whales started stranding in the southern part of the North Sea, the magnetic field in its northern reaches had changed.

The North Sea is not the only place in the world where whales beach themselves, and mass stranding are more common elsewhere. In Cape Cod, where a spit of land hooks into the ocean to form a bay, where full moon tides can pull the water out a mile, there are multiple mass strandings every year. In New Zealand strandings happen with similar frequency, and single events can involve hundreds of whales. This doesn’t just happen to sperm whales, either. One of the largest known mass strandings involved 337 sei whales stuck on a beach in Chile in 2015, and last year 600 pilot whales were stranded in the shallows of New Zealand’s South Island.

The cause of these other strandings is just as mysterious as it is in the North Sea. They also have long histories, so while some recent stranding incidents have been linked to human interference, in general this is considered an natural phenomenon, unexplained.

“The ongoing question we always have is—why is this happening?” says Katie Moore, the program director for animal rescue at the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). In the two decades that she’s worked on marine mammal strandings, she’s heard anecdotal reports that stranded animals had followed prey into Cape Cod Bay, but necropsies show that these animals often have empty stomachs. She knows that, in her area, full moons mean trouble. Cape Cod resembles New Zealand in its shallow, silty waters, and some research indicates that whales may have difficulty echolocating in such waters.

But going back more than a decade now, she and her colleagues have, like Vanselow, been interested in the idea that solar storms might play a role. During a chance encounter with an old friend, Moore learned that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management had been talking to colleagues at NASA about the connection, too, and needed to a partner organization with data on whale strandings. Moore’s group, IFAW, and the government agencies have decided to bring their data sets together.

The results of that work have yet to be published, but it’s unlikely to show that solar storms are the one and only explanation for whale strandings. Antti Pulkkinen, the NASA scientist working with Moore's group, thinks that, while a solar storm could contribute to whale strandings, "we need harder evidence to prove the connection. And that is what we aim to provide."

Their research seems to be painting a complicated picture. “When we weren’t seeing what we thought we might see,” says Moore, “we started bringing in some other oceanographic experts to bring in other layers. Is it the weather? What directly or indirectly is driving the animals into shore? That’s where I think the real answers will come in, in pushing past space weather and looking at bigger picture of oceanographic change.”

If every whale stranding has multiple causes, at least in some cases solar storms may be the dominant one. Vanselow’s new work suggests that the late December magnetic disruption was large enough to disorient the whales. It is circumstantial evidence, but more convincing than a general theory. Vanselow’s work “convinces me that it is plausible in this case,” says Graham Pierce, lead author of the 2007 paper. But he adds, “If it had been generally true there should have been a stronger relationship with sunspots and strandings in the historical series."

For the whales to be led astray by the geomagnetic changes he identified, Vanselow says, they “must be at the wrong place at the wrong time”—at an oceanic crossroads, where a wrong turn can lead to death, just at the time a solar storm hits. For these unfortunate sperm whales, a gaseous burp from a flaming orb some 92 million miles away may have been enough to seal their fate.

If you've ever encountered a mouse scurrying around your house, chances are the only sound you heard out of it, if you heard anything at all, was some squeaks. But mice are actually much more musical than we humans give them credit for. It's just that we can't hear most of their vocalizations, which are ultrasonic and out of the range of human hearing.

Mice start making ultrasonic vocalizations as young pinkies to get their mother's attention, then grow up to use them in social settings. The calls span five octaves, and male vocalizations are similar to birdsong, with repeated phrases and syllables. Males appear to use their calls during courtship and mating, while females use them to determine whether their suitors are kin. But because most of these calls aren't audible to us, it's difficult for researchers to study them and their relationship to mouse behavior. Until now researchers have been forced to rely on tedious manual analysis of recordings, but a new tool, freely available to scientists, automates that analysis, so scientists can quickly identify murine syllables and songs.

Mouse songs are useful indicators for researchers who use the rodents to study human conditions such autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. They can provide useful clues about a mouse's condition without invasive tools, and about differences in behavior between wild and laboratory-raised mice. A better tool for studying one of the most common model organisms in science sounds like a very, very useful thing.

The Voynich manuscript, a 15th-century document full of undeciphered writing and a variety of cryptic illustrations, has invited its fair share of conspiracies. Named for 19th-century Polish bookseller Wilfrid Voynich, it has been suggested to be a Victorian forgery, the guide to the philosopher's stone (real or scam versions), and even the work of a lonely alien adrift on Earth.

But Nicholas Gibbs, an expert on medieval medical manuscripts, says the answer may be far more prosaic than any of that. In an article in the British Times Literary Supplement, Gibbs explains that the manuscript seems to be made up of Latin ligatures—a kind of shorthand. "Ligatures were developed as scriptorial short-cuts," he writes. "They are composed of selected letters of a word, which together represent the whole word, not unlike like a monogram."

The ampersand (&) is a common example. Its design incorporates the letters "e" and "t," which spell the Latin "et," meaning "and." Each symbol in the text represents a whole word rather than a single letter, Gibbs says. Challengingly, however, any possible index to these abbreviations is missing, making the script "resistant to interpretation," at least for now.

The Voynich manuscript appears to be some kind of medical encyclopedia, with detailed information on which herbs in what quantities can cure gynecological conditions. Its information, Gibbs writes, seems to be drawn from standard treatises of the medieval period, to form "an instruction manual for the health and well-being of the more well-to-do women in society, which was quite possibly tailored to a single individual.” So much for the conspiracy theories, which may date back to its eponymous owner, who claimed it had previously belonged to 13th-century friar and philosopher Roger Bacon. Bacon had a history of using a cipher in his work to hide it from the watchful eyes of the Church. This all led to the belief that the manuscript had deliberately been written in a secret code, and was hiding something important.

This, in turn, made it very popular with cryptographers. During World War II, prominent codebreakers spent time trying to unlock the work, but failed to find any meaning. Some people concluded that it is just "gibberish." As recently as 2013, researchers believed that it was mostly likely a hoax. "There have been numerous encrypted texts since the Middle Ages and 99.9 percent have been cracked," Klaus Schmeh, a cryptographer, told the BBC. "If you have a whole book, as here, it should be 'quite easy' as there is so much material for analysts to work with. That it has never been decrypted is a strong argument for the hoax theory."

But Gibbs told The Times of London that it is extraordinary that such an easy solution had not previously been suggested. "Human beings are not naturally complicated," he said. "They look for short cuts all over the place. If you are writing something, you don’t want to spend your time [writing the same thing repeatedly], so you have indexes. The manuscript needs an index to work.”

A massive ship that cruises the vast oceans creating intense lightning storms might sound like something out of a particularly cool Dungeons & Dragons campaign, but recent research into the effects of cargo ship exhaust on sea lightning shows that it’s not a fantastical idea at all. It is, however, particularly uncool for the environment.

According to a story in Science, a study published in Geophysical Research Letters has shown that major oceanic shipping lanes can experience twice the amount of lightning strikes compared with surrounding waters. Researchers saw the increase in 12 years of lightning data from the World Wide Lightning Location Network covering two of the world’s most trafficked shipping lanes—Sri Lanka to Sumatra and Singapore to Vietnam.

The increase in lightning storms over the lanes is, unsurprisingly, thought to be linked to the huge cargo ships that ply them. According to the study, as the ships belch out nearly unfathomable (and likely deadly) amounts of toxic emissions during their long treks, and the pollutants rise, “lead[ing] to a microphysical enhancement of convection and storm electrification in the region of the shipping lanes.” In lay terms, the exhaust leads to smaller cloud particles, which leads to more ice in the clouds, which leads to more lightning.

The environmental impact of the increased lightning density is unclear. But it is a loud and clear example of how humanity is altering weather patterns. It’s also pretty metal, but maybe we shouldn't plan to ride this lightning.

Seasoned travelers think they're on top of their hotel check-in game. Extra towels? Check. Free upgrade? No problem. Goldfish? Yes, ma'am.

A number of hotels have begun offering in-room fish-for-rent service. The latest to join the admittedly modest trend is the Van der Valk Hotel Charleroi Airport in Brussels, where a photo of one of the room companions—just €3.50 per night—recently took off on social media.

For at least a decade the Kimpton Hotel Group chain of U.S. boutique hotels has run its “Guppy Love” program, where guests, particularly those with children, can request a goldfish in their room. (Hotel staff will make sure it is cared for when guests are away—no one wants to return to a floating companion.) Happy Guest Hotel Lodge in Cheshire, England, on the other hand, offers just one fish, named "Happy," at a cost of £5 a night, but you have to prebook.

My friend is staying in a hotel in Belgium. They've offered her the option of renting a fish for the night, in case she's lonely. #noshitpic.twitter.com/DG74iRSfhY

— Michelle Cooke (@Mich_Cooke) September 2, 2017

Van der Valk Hotel manager David Dillen explained to The Telegraph that he was trying to find a way to distract guests waiting to check-in at busy times. “The queue was quite long so I decided to go out and buy some fish [as entertainment],” he said. Lonely guests liked the goldfish so much that the hotel decided to keep an entire school to brighten their spirits.

So next time you are on business trip in Brussels, make sure to ask for a fish. Not the fish. A fish.

In 1676, Sister Maria Crocifissa della Concezione had an infernal conversation with the Devil. When she came to her senses, the nun, who lived at a convent in Palma di Montechiaro in Sicily, found she had written letters in an indecipherable language. She and her sisters believed the letters were the work of Satan, who had tried to turn her away from God.

One of the letters survived, but more than three centuries later, its contents were still a mystery. But in August, the LUDUM science museum in Sicily obtained a copy of it and subjected it to a more modern analysis, using intelligence-grade code-breaking software, The Times reports.

The LUDUM group, led by Daniele Abete, had found the code-breaking software in one of the darker corners of the web, where algorithms developed by intelligence agencies have leaked to a wider audience. After priming the algorithm with ancient Greek, Arabic, and Latin, as well as the Runic alphabet, the team fed it the text of Sister Maria's “Devil’s letter.”

The strategy worked: The letter turned out to be made of a jumble of languages that, when teased apart, could be read. The nun’s writing indeed has a devilish bent to it. As The Times reports, Sister Maria wrote that the Holy Trinity were “dead weights” and that a basic principle of Catholic doctrine “works for no one.”

Abete suspects that today the nun might be diagnosed with schizophrenia or a similar condition: Perhaps she did hear a voice dictating the letter, and her linguistic skills produced this mishmash of language and heresy.

Everyone knows what ants are about. They're no-nonsense little guys. They work all summer (holidays are for the weak) to save up for winter. They sleep when they're dead. They soldier on, sometimes lifting up to 5,000 times their own weight, all for the good of the collective, out of instinct that can resemble duty and honor and obligation. They don't mess around, ants.

Except, it turns out, some do—but maybe for a good reason. In 2015, biologists at the University of Arizona observed that quite a number of so-called "worker ants" spend most of their time, well, not working. "They really just sit there," Daniel Charbonneau, a researcher at the university, said in a statement. They might chip in with chores—grooming or brood care, from time to time—but most of the time, they're studious about doing nothing. In Temnothorax rugatulus colonies in the lab, Charbonneau found around 40 percent of the six-legged subjects were industriously inactive.

Somehow, Charbonneau and two fellow researchers were able to ascertain which 20 percent of ants in the colony were the hardest-working. Then they removed them. Once the cream had been skimmed off the top, the "lazy" upped their activity level to match that of their missing comrades. "This suggests that the colony responds to the loss of highly active workers by replacing them with inactive ones," Charbonneau said, in a statement. By contrast, if the least active 20 percent get plucked out, they aren't replaced. Those lazy ants aren't really good-for-nothing—they're good-for-back-up. It's not hard to see how a single disaster could wipe out a colony's best ants, Charbonneau said. "Since they can live for up to five years or more, they have to overwinter, and being snowed in claims many workers each season."

Ant colonies may not be all that different from offices. You have your shirkers, you have the people wandering around trying to look busy. You have diligent types, "foragers," who bring in snacks and sometimes bake cookies, and nurses, who "rear the brood" or keep Advil on hand. Charbonneau observed other parallels with modern workplaces. Companies keep stockpiles in warehouses to meet demand in times of crisis. They bring in temps from external agencies when staffing is low. Computer systems are backed up by reserve processing power.

But there are also some striking differences. Lazy ants are notable for their "distended abdomens," which leads researchers to wonder whether they might also serve as "living pantries." The corporate world may be dog-eat-dog, but things don't seem to have gotten that bleak just yet.

The GOES-16 satellite has been in space for less than a year, but its Geostationary Lightning Mapper has been providing some incredible images and interesting data. Its most recent observations, however, weren't of a typical electrical storm. GOES-16 captured Hurricane Irma barreling across the Caribbean and bursting with lightning.

Hurricanes combine some of the most severe weather phenomena possible, but lightning is not typically a part of their repertoire. They lack a lot of the vertical winds that rub ice crystals and water droplets together and generate electricity that discharges as a bolt. When a hurricane does produce lightning, like Irma, it's not a good sign. Studiessuggest that when a lightning occurs in a hurricane's eyewall, the swirling winds around the calm center, the storm tends to intensify rapidly a day later.

Eyewall lightning was observed during Hurricanes Rita, Katrina, and Emily, all large, intense storms in 2005. And GOES-16 got its first view of hurricane lightning very recently, as Hurricane Harvey made landfall as a Category 4 storm. Because the Geostationary Lightning Mapper is so new, the data it collects is still considered experimental, but it's a promising tool for predicting hurricane behavior and, perhaps, saving lives.

Bill Adler moved to Tokyo from Washington, D.C., about three years ago. Over the phone, he lists a few of his new home's virtues: "Beautiful country, great food, interesting people," he says. "And cat café trains."

This past Sunday, September 10, Adler and a few dozen fellow travelers rode on one of those cat café trains. They were joined by about 30 rescue kittens, which spent the trip climbing the legs of besotted passengers, running back and forth on train benches, and napping on laps.

Adler traveled about 90 minutes outside of Tokyo to hop this train, which left from the small city of Ōgaki. He is quite familiar with cats—he has one himself—as well as with his adopted country's love for cat cafés, in which patrons drink tea and eat cookies while surrounded by felines.

But he was too curious to pass this opportunity up. "We all wondered what it was going to be like—this vision of a train and cats," he says. "How was it going to work out?"

Quite well, it turns out. Unlike the older, often lazier cats that lend stationary cat cafés a lounge-like atmosphere, the train kittens were in perpetual motion. "They were so light and little and curious about everything," says Adler. Three kittens circled one woman for nearly the entire ride, clambering all over her. Another passenger spent hours cradling a tiny black cat to his chest.

The two-and-a-half-hour trip flew by. "In Japanese, one very popular word is kawaii, which means cute," Adler says. "That word was more appropriate on this train ride than any other place I’ve ever been. It was awesomely cute. It was just wild!"

The cat train was a collaboration between a local NGO, called Kitten Cafe Sanctuary, and the train's owner, Yoro Railway Co Ltd. The NGO hoped to promote stray cat adoption, while the transportation company aimed to jumpstart tourism to Ōgaki and the destination city, Ikeno.

To this end, the ride offered other amenities—free food; views of mountains and meadows; a bathroom break halfway through.

All were ignored. "Not a single person ended up having snacks during the ride," says Adler. "Nobody got off the train [at the break]... no one bothered to look out the window, because the cats were just so cute."

The cat train was so successful, in fact, that its mission was somewhat undercut. "I don't think the cats even knew they were on a train," says Adler. "And frankly, neither did we."

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 February 1580, Francisco Gali was headed across Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. A mariner and cartographer who’d crossed the Pacific more than once, he had been living in “New Spain,” as Europeans called that part of the world, and was likely on another official mission that would take him to Asia. To sail out, first he had to make his way down the country’s Atlantic coast to manage a narrower crossing to the Pacific. On his journey, he passed through the coastal towns of the east, where the mayors had a special request of him. Make us a map, they asked.

The Spanish crown had instructed every locality in its colonial lands to send home maps of their regions. This was a new endeavor in 16th-century mapmaking: Most maps of the “New World” focused on the coastline, and these local maps were the first detailed efforts to chart the interior. The ones Gali made were some of the best—among the very few equal to “the canons of the cartography that was being done in Europe at the time,” according to the University of Seville’s Manuel Morato. His map of the town of Tlacotalpa, in particular, is “a splendid example of early coastal mapping in America,” Morato says, and, as he writes in a paper published in The Cartographic Journal, it bears a “striking resemblance” to modern maps of the same place.

The maps that the Spanish government had requested were part of a larger survey project, the Relaciones Geográficas. Towns across the colonies received a 50-question form asking for details about local place names, geography, languages, resources, plants, religions, and more. Along with the survey, local leaders were expected to send back maps.

Most places didn’t have en experienced cartographer to rely on, and many of the collected maps were made by local artists. Few encoded any real geographic data. They usually lacked proper scale, and distances were based on guesses rather than measurements. So when Gali passed through Tlacotalpa, the mayor must have seen an opportunity. Here was someone with the skills to make a proper map.

Gali himself is a little bit of a mystery man. “Francisco Gali is an enigmatic and versatile character,” says Morato. He’s most famous now for finding a route to the Philippines, but that discovery was still three years off. His past is also a little vague. “Nothing is known about his time in Seville, how he was trained as a mariner, nor, mostly importantly, how he acquired skills as a cartographer,” writes Morato in the paper. He’s the sort of shrouded historical figure who gets credit for accomplishments that may or may not be his: Some sources trace his background to a family of Sevillian master builders, or credit him with creating the layout of Tlacotapla. There’s no real evidence to back those claims, Morato writes, but Gali definitely knew how to draw a nautical map.

Gali may have had only limited time to help these coastal mayors with their Relaciones Geográficas assignment, but in Tlacotapla he traveled around, measuring altitudes, geographic coordinates for key places, and the depth of water at certain sites. In the mayor’s report back to the crown, he describes Gali as “a person who has walked and probed all heights and parts contained herein.” The map he created is about 17 inches by 12 inches, and Gali cut the top part to make it resemble a map made on animal skin.

One of the rare details that Gali included in his work is the latitudes of ten locations represented on the map. “I was curious to see if the map was drawn using those geographic coordinates and know the accuracy of that data,” says Morato. So the researcher scanned, layered, and recreated the 16th-century map with a modern mapping tool, and compared it to a current representation of the same area.

Gali’s map wasn’t perfect. His measurements were a little off, sometimes by more than a degree. That error, Morato thinks, may be attributable to a problem with his instrument. As a successful mariner, Gali should have known how to take latitudes accurately. The details on the coast are better documented than the details inland, and the distances between places are longer than they should be. But for a 16th-century map, Morato says, the accuracy here is “more than acceptable.” In some places, the coastline on the map is almost identical to the present representations of the coastline and, in many ways, “the images are practically the same.”

It’s that time of year again, when treehuggers across the United Kingdom get to vote on their nominee for Europe’s Tree of the Year. The shortlist of trees from England, Scotland, Wales, and North Ireland has been released and, unsurprisingly, there are some truly incredible arboreal specimens in the running.

Each year, the United Kingdom’s Woodland Trust conservation group gathers a list of trees that people can vote on to represent the nation in the Environmental Partnership Association’s continent-wide contest. Voters can choose among six candidates from each part of the kingdom, with enough votes earning the trees small care and repair stipends—but only one can make it through to the big league vote.

Among the incredible trees up for nomination this year are the Armada Tree in North Ireland, which is said to have grown from a seed that was left in the pocket of a drowned 16th-century sailor who was buried there; the Bleeding Yew in Pembrokeshire, a 600-year-old arbor that oozes a red-sappy substance that is either the blood of Christ or stained rainwater; Cumbria’s humble Courageous Tree, which was cracked in half by a lightning strike decades past, but survives even though it is only two inches thick in places; and the Big Tree in Orkney, which has hung on despite being held up by a metal rod and completely surrounded by a growing city.

Many of these trees are old or delicate, and securing enough votes could mean much-needed funds. If you live in the United Kingdom you can vote for your favorite until October 8. If you don’t, you can still have a look at some of Europe’s finest trees.

Does stress make you itchy? You're not alone, and you may be engaging in an elaborate conflict-prevention strategy that evolved millions of years ago.

Researchers from the University of Plymouth spent eight months in Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico, observing a group of wild rhesus macaques, Macaca mulatta, and watching for patterns—specifically in their scratching habits.

The scientists found that the macaques were scratching the most at times of heightened social stress, such as when they had to deal with a higher-ranking or unknown monkey. This echoes research conducted on human stress: We often have the same response when forced to confront our bosses or approach strangers.

It turns out there's a good reason for this—to avoid squabbles. In the study, higher-ranking monkeys were 25 percent less likely to get aggressive towards scratching monkeys compared with non-scratching ones.

According to Jamie Whitehouse, lead author of the study, this could mean that monkeys see scratching as a signal of stress—and attacking a stressed-out monkey may not be a very good idea. "As scratching can be a sign of social stress, potential attackers might be avoiding attacking obviously stressed individuals because such individuals could behave unpredictably or be weakened by their stress," Whitehouse said in a release on ScienceDaily, "meaning an attack could be either risky or unnecessary."

This is not the first time that monkeys are helping humans understand our own anxiety. A 2013 study by researchers from Manchester and Liverpool looked at the behavior of 600 Barbary macaques and found that “middle monkeys” stress out the most as they juggle aspirations to rise socially with the fear of being pushed out from the bottom of the hierarchy. That's life in the middle-class for you.

One Sunday, 18th-century Quakers living in Abington, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, were met with a strange sight outside their morning meeting. The snow lay thick on the ground and there was Benjamin Lay, a member of the congregation, wearing little clothing, with his "right leg and foot uncovered," almost knee-deep in the snow. When one Quaker after the next told him that he would get sick or that he should get inside and cover up, he turned to them. “Ah,” he said, “you pretend compassion for me, but you do not feel for the poor slaves in your fields, who go all winter half-clad.”

Lay always cut a striking figure. An 1818 article, republished in the newspaper The Friend in 1911, many years after his death, described him thus:

… only four foot seven in height; his head was large in proportion to his body, the features of his face were remarkable ... He was hunch-backed, with a projecting chest, below which his body become much contracted. His legs were so slender, as to appear almost unequal to the purpose of supporting him.

His act of protest in the snow is of the sort that might make the news today, but in the 1730s it would have been radical almost beyond understanding. This was a time, writes Marcus Rediker in his recent book The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist, when “slavery seemed to many people around the world as natural and unchangeable as the sun, the moon, and the stars in the heavens.” Lay was an abolitionist, vegetarian, pacifist, gender-conscious, anti-capitalist, environmentalist Quaker, with dwarfism and a hunchback, and he wanted to change the apparently “natural” order of things.

Despite his ultra-radical leanings, Lay has been almost entirely excised from modern history books. “The wildness of his methods of approaching antislavery is part of it,” Rediker says. “He was extremely militant and completely uncompromising.” This level of abolitionist militance was unprecedented, and only began to become common after the 1830s. Lay sits outside of the standard narrative of the movement, and his disability and lower socioeconomic status make him difficult to place in a clear historical model. “He just didn’t fit the story,” Rediker says.

The snow protest was by no means Lay’s only performed, dramatic, nonviolent act of radicalism. Quaker neighbors of his kept a young “negro girl” as a slave, and continued to justify the practice, even in the face of his exhortations on both the evil of slavery in general and the “wickedness” of separating enslaved children from their parents. When the neighbors refused to listen, Lay invited their six-year-old son into the cave where he lived and innocently entertained him throughout the day. The boy’s parents panicked. The Village Record, a local newspaper, later described how Lay “observed the father and mother running towards his dwelling; as they drew near, discovering their distress, he advanced and met them, enquiring in a feeling manner: ‘What is the matter?’” The parents, understandably terrified, explained that the boy had been missing all day. Lay is said to have paused, and said: “Your child is safe in my house, and you may now conceive of the sorrow you inflict upon the parents of the negro girl you hold in slavery, for she was torn from them by avarice.” Taking the Bible as his model, he seems to have generated living parables to show people the evil of their ways. (Another version of this story claims that the child was a three-year-old girl.)

Lay seems to have had big dreams and ideals to match. Born to a family of common Quakers in Colchester, England, he left his work as a glover at 21, eschewed his likely inheritance, and went to London in pursuit of his fortune. There he became a sailor, desperate to see the world despite the risk of injury or death. (That year, 1703, as many as 10,000 British sailors and crew members lost their lives in a major cyclone.) For more than a decade at sea, he slept in a hammock and lived among people of all ethnicities, shapes, and sizes. For the rest of his life, even after years on land, Lay thought of himself in some sense as a sailor. “At the end of his life,” writes Rediker, “he made a request that shocked his friends and acquaintances: he asked a man to ‘burn his body, and throw the ashes into the sea.’”

It was on his voyages that Lay first became aware of slavery. Fellow sailors told him horror stories about working in the African slave trade, where hundreds of thousands died in transit. Still a devout Quaker, Lay began to connect these practices to Biblical verses about racial equality—that God “hath made of one Blood all Nations of Men for to dwell on all the Face of the Earth.” He soon concluded that slave traders were murderers, and that the practice was barbarous.

In time, Lay married. Like him, his wife Sarah was a Quaker. She had similar physical conditions, and shared many of his forward-thinking beliefs. The Lays moved, in 1718, to Barbados, a place with some vestiges of a Quaker community. They were appalled to find themselves on an island built on slavery, “barbary and ill-gotten gains,” where slaves were treated worse than horses. The Lays held open meetings and offered meals to the island’s enslaved population, which drew the opprobrium of the island’s white population. Though the Lays had already made plans to leave, these “Masters and Mistresses of Slaves” called for them to be banished. In 1720, they returned to England. Lay was just getting started ruffling feathers in Quaker communities.

Twelve years later they moved to Pennsylvania, where they established themselves in the local Quaker community again. Lay was shocked to find slavery a common practice there, too, after more than a decade in England, where it was rare. At that time, around 10 percent of Pennsylvanians were enslaved, compared with around 90 percent in Barbados. In Pennsylvania, Lay performed some of his most dramatic protest stunts, including disrupting Quaker meetings with abolitionist messages. He is said to have stood up in meetings whenever a slaveholder attempted to speak, and shout: “There’s another negro-master!” Three years later, Sarah died, unexpectedly. Lay was heartbroken.

By the time he himself died, in 1759, Lay had eked out a strange and deeply principled life for himself in the Philadelphia area. He lived in a cave, made his own clothes, and walked everywhere. He had become a vegetarian and felt that animals, including horses, should not be exploited for their labor or their meat. In 1737 he published the revolutionary tract All Slaveholders That Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates, a mixture of polemic, musings, and autobiography, put together in a curiously nonlinear, almost postmodern, format. (The publisher—Benjamin Franklin, a longtime, if a little wary, friend—chose to keep his own name off the text.) Despite his requests to be cremated, which would have been tantamount to paganism, Lay was buried in an unmarked grave close to his wife’s, in the Quaker burial ground.

During his life and after his death, many people, Rediker says, thought of Lay as deranged. “[Historians] thought he was not sane, and this was a very effective way of putting him at the margins.” Ableism, too, seems to have factored in this general unwillingness to take him seriously. But some of those in the abolitionist movement did feel the need to celebrate this “Quaker comet,” as he came to be known. Benjamin Rush, one of his earliest biographers, said Lay was known to virtually everyone in Pennsylvania; his curious portrait was said to hang in many Philadelphia homes. This early abolitionist burned bright, and, despite his exclusion from many abolitionist narratives, refuses to be extinguished from history.

The streets of Japan have no shortage of interesting sights. Standing at one of Tokyo’s bustling intersections, sharp-eyed visitors might spot something unusual about the traffic signals hanging above, which feature green lights with a noticeably blue tinge—so much so that illustrated Japanese road safety guides use distinctively blue “green” lights. This is no illusion. Blue and green—a combination known alternatively as “grue” or "bleen”—traffic signals in Japan are the result of a mix of linguistics, international law and a dash of passive-aggressive policy by the Japanese government.

It is a near universal constant when driving: red means stop, and green means go. So fundamental is this dynamic that it is codified in international law under the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals, which has been ratified by 74 countries. Why, then, does Japan—not a signatory to the Convention—seem to buck the trend with its blue/green traffic signals?

Historically, there has been significant overlap in the Japanese language as it pertains to green (midori) and blue (ao). In that regard, blue—one of the four traditional colors originally established in the Japanese language along with red, black and white—historically encompassed items that other cultures would describe as green—creating the concept of “grue,” the portmanteau of blue and green first coined by philosopher Nelson Goodman in 1955. Indeed, a distinct word for green is a relatively recent development in Japanese, only coming into existence in the late Heian Period (794-1185). This continues to manifest itself in several ways in Japanese.

As in many languages, green in Japanese can be used in reference to something new or inexperienced. Whereas in English a rookie employee might be referred to as being “green,” in Japanese they are aonisai, meaning a “blue two-year old.” Elsewhere, a visitor to Japan might be tempted to try the exotic sounding ao-ringo—“blue apple,” only to perhaps be disappointed at finding out it refers to a regular green Granny Smith apple. Dozens of other examples exist in relation to nature, food and animals.

Traffic lights are treated similarly. In official literature and conversation, the “green” traffic light is referenced as ao, rather than midori. Even dating back to when traffic lights were first introduced in Japan in the 1930s—a time when traffic signals employed a distinctly green light—common practice was to make reference to “blue” lights. In modern times, Japanese traffic law requires those seeking a driver’s license to pass an eye exam specifying, among other things, the ability to distinguish between red, yellow and blue.

In the intervening years, this system of officially referring to green lights as blue put the Japanese government in a difficult position. Linguists took issue with the continued use of ao for what was a distinctly green color, and the country faced pressure to comply with international traffic customs regarding traffic lights.

Ultimately, a novel solution was employed. In 1973, the government mandated through a cabinet order that traffic lights use the bluest shade of green possible—still technically green, but noticeably blue enough to justifiably continue using the ao nomenclature. While modern Japanese allows for a clear delineation between blue and green, the concept of blue still encompassing shades of green still remains firmly rooted in Japanese culture and language.

“Grue” traffic lights remain a common sight in cities across Japan. While some newer traffic signals come equipped with bright green LEDs—still referred to as blue—the familiar blue-green lights can still be found without much effort—representing a nod to the evolution of the Japanese language.

Here’s a wonderful word to add to your vocabulary: Micrometeorites.

Micrometeorites are teeny particles, less than a millimeter in size, that made it through Earth’s atmosphere from space. They are extraterrestrial, cosmic dust, star stuff—or, more precisely, asteroid stuff. As they speed through the atmosphere, micrometeorites melt to form spherical drops, and when they land on Earth, they cool and form dendritic crystals that branch from their surface like trees. In their pristine form, they’re quite beautiful.

But it’s rare for scientists to find unaltered micrometeorites. Long years on Earth change and corrode those original spheres into unrecognizable shapes. In a new study, though, published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, researchers from the Imperial College of London report that they have developed a technique for recognizing fossil cosmic dust, even when it’s less than perfect.

Lead author Martin Suttle and his colleagues identified micrometeorites in the White Cliffs of Dover, the dramatic English coastline made of Late Cretaceous chalk. The scientists sourced chalk blocks from a “7 meter tall escarpment along Hogden Lane,” they report, and recovered the space dust particles both through chemical dissolution and by grinding down the samples.

Some of the tiny spheres they found could be identified as ancient micrometeorites relatively easily based on their features. Others were identified by their unique geochemical characteristics.

Before this analysis, no one knew that the famous White Cliffs contain space dust, which is rarely discovered on Earth. What this means, though, is that micrometeorites may be much more common on this planet than anyone knew. Now that scientists have a better idea of what the particles look like, they can look for more of these tiny clues to the past of our planet and the vast unexplored reaches of space.

The Western City Gate in Belgrade, Serbia, is a structure that demands attention. Consisting of two high-rises linked by a two-story walkway, it reaches 377 feet into the air and is topped by a small round tower. Enclosed concrete stairwells barrel up the sides like massive exhaust pipes. Also known as the Genex Tower, it was designed by Mihajlo Mitrović in 1977 and is currently the second-tallest building in the city. Unsurprisingly, it's also on a new map that plots Belgrade’s Modernist architectural marvels.

Modernist Belgrade, part of Blue Crow Media's map series, highlights the city’s architectural heritage. After World War II, and after Yugoslavia split with the Soviet Union in 1948, a new part of the city, Novi Beograd ("New Belgrade") was designated for development. "The postwar period went from industrialization to urbanization and modernization—a large number of schools, hospitals, public edifices, administrative buildings, all the way to roads, whole settlements, urban areas, and, finally, a huge amount of (proper and healthy) housing, was built in Yugoslavia, in the period of Modernism," says architect Ljubica Slavković, who also edited the map.

The buildings featured include the “Toblerone” apartment block, a concrete tower with sharply triangular features, the bulbous glass form of the Museum of Aviation, and the geometric Pionir Sports Hall. “By the 1960s with stability and progress, a new generation of Yugoslav architects emerged, who began to express individual creativity and to explore new borders of expression,” says Slavković. “Many young architects built their careers on opportunities and projects architects today can only dream of.”

As a style of architecture, Modernism is notoriously polarizing. “Of course, as it is always the case with something new, this architecture was also raising a lot of questions and disapproval by the public,” says Slavković. “However, many of the best buildings of Belgrade today were built in that period, and I believe that was visible from the start.”

The bilingual map, in English and Serbian, invites readers to recognize the significance of these buildings, even as many have been neglected. “As in the rest of the world, they are viewed both as masterpieces and as disasters, depending on who is looking at them” says Slavković. Yet, she says, “there is a lot more that can be done, since we have already witnessed some of them disappearing.”

Atlas Obscura has a selection of images featured on the map.

To see these buildings in their true concrete glory, check out Atlas Obscura's Past Future Monuments of the Balkans, a 12-day tour of Modernist memorials in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Greece has a lot of ancient temples. Greece also has a lot of earthquakes. And sometimes they happen in the same places. On one hand, this shouldn't be surprising. Greece and its neighboring islands are contained in a "box" of seismic fault lines that run in all different directions. The region also has millennia of history and is bursting with ancient ruins. But new research from the University of Plymouth suggests the overlap of earthquakes and temples may be no accident. A study published in the Proceedings of the Geologists' Association suggests that the ancient Greeks deliberately built their sacred or treasured sites on land that had previously been shaken by a quake.

Delphi, the famous ancient sanctuary and temple complex, was once thought of as the navel of the world. It was partially destroyed by an earthquake in 373 B.C., and then rebuilt in precisely the same place, atop a fault line, which gave rise to the intoxicating gases and sacred spring there. Scientists have previously connected these geothermal features with the site's spiritual importance, but Ian Stewart, director of the university's Sustainable Earth Institute, believes the site is emblematic of a larger trend. Other examples of sacred sites intentionally built on fault lines, he suggests, may include Mycenae, Ephesus, Cnidus, and Hierapolis.

"I have always thought it more than a coincidence that many important sites are located directly on top of fault lines created by seismic activity," Stewart said in a statement released by the University. "The Ancient Greeks placed great value on hot springs unlocked by earthquakes, but perhaps the building of temples and cities close to these sites was more systematic than has previously been thought." That said, there are many ancient sacred sites on stabler ground, and many faults that don't host temples.

Stewart believes that the ancient Greeks saw earthquakes as a mixed blessing. "[They] were incredibly intelligent people," he said. "I believe they would have recognized the significance [of these fault lines] and wanted their citizens to benefit from the properties they created." Modern Greece is a little more wary of the properties created by seismic activity—every new home or building is built with stringent anti-earthquake measures.

It is not especially valuable by the standards of old baseball cards (the T206 Honus Wagner has long set that standard), but a vintage “pasteboard” depicting an mustachioed, light-hitting infielder sharing a moment with an adorable puppy named Midget is up for auction. It’s being hailed as the most popular baseball card of all time.

As Forbes is reporting, the Mile High Card Company is auctioning an Art Whitney baseball card from 1887 that is famous not because of the player—who was unremarkable, known mostly for changing teams as if they were socks—but because of the whimsical picture. Because Whitney switched teams so often, the image was meant as a jokey juxtaposition of him and a loyal animal. No Hall of Famer, Whitney is an unlikely candidate to produce a card worth more than the paper it’s printed on, but thanks to the funny picture and people's love of dogs, it’s become quite popular.

The card, which would originally have been found in packs of Old Judge cigarettes, has been named as a favorite by baseball card experts and even celebrity collectors such as sports and news commentator Keith Olbermann. It’s easily one of the most popular cards of the Old Judge releases, and increasingly a target for the discerning enthusiast.

At press time the price of the card sits at $200 in the online auction, but is expected to rise, perhaps to around $500–1,000, as examples have in the past. Not bad for a average player and a dog.

Thousands of years before air conditioners were invented, architects in hot climates were well-versed in making the most of natural materials and weather patterns to keep buildings and their occupants cool.

Builders in India during the time of the Mughal Empire, which ruled much of the subcontinent between the 16th and 18th centuries, relied on a few tricks to ward off the hot climate that dominates two-thirds of the year. For example, they installed adjustable bamboo screens, which could be lowered depending on the position of the sun, or built vaulted roofs to deflect the full force of the sun during the hottest part of the day. They also employed evaporative cooling, or using water to take the edge off a hot breeze. The emperor's throne room in Dehli’s Red Fort, for instance, was surrounded by four open gates that were sprinkled with water, according to a 2013 article from Aligarh Muslim University.

The Mughals got the trick from Persia, but fundamentals of evaporative cooling go back to ancient Egypt at least. Now a team of Dehli-based architects, Ant-Studio, has turned to this common-sense technique to cool down emissions from an electronics factory in the capital—with little cost, energy use, or environmental impact.

Monish Siripurapu and colleagues stacked dozens of conical terracotta tubes, and rigged a system to send a flow of water over them. Hot air from the factory’s generators get directed through the tubes. Their first attempt dropped the temperature of the surrounding area from 107 to 96 degrees Fahrenheit.

Long time ago, human use some teasels in the windway, soaked them and made cooler. Ever after, they find so many different ways to become the weather less warm; such as funnels, windwards and... Ant studio, has made the special traditional cooling by clay on june 2017. They used traditional evaporative cooling techniques that converts hot air to cool air. Because it doesnt need any technologic energy, its a fully ecological way for cooling, specially on xerothemic weather. @studio.ant قديما، كه كولر و سيستم تهويه اي وجود نداشت، مردم در مسیر بادی که از پنجره می گذشت یک بوته خار می گذاشتند و اون رو مرطوب می کردند واز هوای خنکش استفاده مي كردند. بعد ها، روش هاي مختلف ديگه اي رو مثل بادگير و تونل ها براي خنك كردن اتاق هاشون پيدا كردند. انت استوديو، يك كولر خاص با روش قديمي رو در ژوئن امسال (٢٠١٧) درست كرد كه با استفاده از همون تكنيك قديمي، اما به وسيله ي سفال، هواي گرم رو به هواي خنك تبديل مي كنه. بخاطر اينكه توي اين روش هيچ احتياجي به تكنولوژي و انرژي نداريم، اين كولر، يك كار كاملا اكولوژيك محسوب ميشه، و خب خيلي به درد مناطق گرم و خشك مي خوره. #beehive#antstudio #traditional #ecology #evaporative #clay #modern #cooling #aircondition #warm #xerothermic #design #boomsoostudio #noida #india

A post shared by Boomsoo (@boomsoostudio) on Sep 11, 2017 at 11:04am PDT

“I believe this experiment worked quite well functionally," Siripurapu told architecture magazine ArchDaily. He also sees beauty in the cellular tube structure, and the potential for a new art and craft form that could engage local artisans. "There are many factories throughout the country that face a similar issue," he said, "and this is a solution that can be easily adopted and a widespread multiplication of this concept may even assist the local potters."

For nearly as long as modern humans have been around, we've been really into fire. Today, it's the subject of entire fields of scientific study. Scientists are still trying to figure out exactly how flames work, and new discoveries could lead to innovations that might make extinguishing flames easier, or render combustion in industrial settings more efficient. In order to do any of that, fire scientists need to be able to see exactly what's happening in a flame.

A research team from Saudi Arabia has developed a new method for generating 3D images of flames when they're exposed to electrical fields. When electrodes are placed on each side of a flame, an "ionic wind" is created—charged particles in the flame move toward the electrodes, and the behavior of a flame can change based on the voltage and current applied to the electrodes. To track the ionic wind, the researchers trained a special argon laser on a flame, added reflective particles to the fire, and then tracked the light that bounced back.

“We used a smoke generator [to add particles to the flame], but we had to control the timing of the smoke generation very carefully so that we didn’t disturb the main flow. It was a time-consuming step requiring a lot of patience,” study coauthor Min Suk Cha said in a press release. But the care paid off and produced images that are not only useful for understanding how fire behaves, but also mesmerizing for the rest of us.