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The Secret Blue Ice Cloud in Every Champagne Bottle

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Like ice cream and revenge, champagne is best served cold, ideally between 42.8 and 53.6 degrees Fahrenheit. But if you're forced to drink it at 68 degrees Fahrenheit, just below room temperature, something fleeting but amazing will happen. Scientists at the University of Reims, in France's Champagne region, used a super-high-speed camera to observe a short-lived, blue "mini-cloud" escaping the tepid bottle—a cloud that hangs around for just two to three thousandths of a second. That plume of cyan gas is colder than ice, and blue as the circumstances (lukewarm champagne). Researchers published their work in the journal Scientific Reports earlier this week.

This cloud was "totally unexpected," coauthor Gerard Liger-Belair, an expert in bubbles and foam (!), told AFP. Most people who have popped a bottle of cold champagne will be familiar with the wisps of white fog that cascade from the bottleneck. Before it's been opened, champagne is under high pressure, hence the cage on the cork. But when it's open and the pressure adjusts, carbon dioxide pours forth. At 68 degrees Fahrenheit, however, that white mist is very briefly replaced with blue.

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If the color of the blue reminds you of the sky, there's a reason for that. The sky gets its shade from molecules scattering blue light from the sun. "The bluish cloud forms when the CO2 transforms into miniature particles of dry ice which reflect the ambient light," Liger-Belair said. "This blue cloud has the same physical origin as the blue color of the sky. Is that not extraordinary?"

It is indeed extraordinary, but perhaps not wondrous enough to justify drinking your champagne at 68 degrees Fahrenheit—especially since you're not going to see magic blue cloud without high-speed imaging.


19th-Century 'Lover's Eye' Jewelry Was the Perfect Accessory for Secret Affairs

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What would have been sexier for early 19th-century British nobles than having a passionate affair? Flirting with their lover right in front of everyone. How? By wearing one of the most intimate parts of their beloved—the eyes—all over their body.

Eye miniatures, also known as lover’s eyes, were a subgenre of jewelry that became the height of fashion in the Georgian era. For centuries, tiny personal portraits of one’s beloved had been common adornments, but depictions of that person’s eyes alone were something pretty new. Although eye miniatures were first spotted around the time of the French Revolution, they became very popular across the Channel around the same time, due to one particular royal trendsetter.

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That fashion-forward fellow was the Prince of Wales, the future George IV and eldest son of King George III of American Revolution fame. In contrast to the moral rectitude of his famously faithful father, George Jr. collected true loves like other men did horses. His most infamous affair started in the early 1780s, when the prince fell head-over-heels for married Catholic Maria Fitzherbert.

The 1701 Act of Settlement forbade British royals, especially the future head of the Church of England, from wedding Catholics. Despite her eminent unsuitability, George wooed Maria with endless affection, a faked suicide attempt, and quite a few gifts. He also commissioned British miniaturist Richard Cosway to paint a portrait of his eye, which the prince mailed to her, along with a marriage proposal.

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Maria eventually made her lover a portrait of her own eyes. The two were wed soon after, which was illegal; George III eventually forced them apart and made his son marry a German princess. Although the match with Maria was ill-fated, the Prince of Wales started an imitable fashion for eye miniatures, also known as “lover’s eyes.” Only about a thousand of these exist today. All were produced between the 1780s and 1830s, in America, Western Europe, and Russia.

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Affluent individuals would wear these trinkets on every appendage, from finger rings to brooches and pendants. These lovers’ gifts, often set on plaques of ivory, were discreet. Presumably, only the wearer and the portrait subject would know the identity of the beloved being depicted, keeping the experience intimate. And the places people would wear them—on the wrist, near the heart—created a “tactile connection between the owner’s body that mirrored the emotional closeness between subject and wearer,” as art historian Jennifer Horn noted in The Power of Objects in Eighteenth-Century British America.

It can be difficult for modern art historians to identify the subject of small portraits. After all, you can only see eyes, eyebrows, and maybe a bit of hair.

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If you were particularly close to a relative, you might even get a lover’s eye made of a beloved family member. One 18th-century example featured a brown eye beneath some clouds; the gaze in question belonged to Margaret Wardlaw, who died at the age of nine.

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Other pieces were surrounded by pearls, symbols of tears and indicating that the subject passed away. One such example appears in the collection of Dr. David Skier and his wife, Nan. In 2012, they loaned their collection of lover’s eyes—numbering over 100, among the largest worldwide—to the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama. Although this exhibit has since closed, you can still get your fill of lover’s eyes around the northeast United States, at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

In Search of Cemeteries Alive With Beauty, Art, and History

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Despite its irreverent title, the new book 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die is quite specific about appropriate behavior in graveyards. “Rule number one is be respectful,” Loren Rhoads writes. "Even cemeteries that are closed to new burials deserve to be treated like something precious and irreplaceable, because they are."

Cemeteries are, by their nature, full of stories, which is what Rhoads wanted to tap into when creating the book. "Our relationships with the places we visit can be deepened and enriched by learning the stories of those who came—and stayed—before us," she writes.

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The book spans burial sites across the globe and through the ages. In the remote Scottish Hebrides, at Reilig Odhrán on the Isle of Iona, ancient, worn gravestones mark the resting places of Irish, Scottish, and Norwegian kings. Argentinian First Lady Eva Perón is buried in La Recoleta, a cemetery in Buenos Aires. In Iran, the grave of 12th-century mathematician and writer Omar Khayyám is marked with a towering, geometric 20th-century monument.

The book doesn't just focus on the resting places of famous figures. Some are there for beauty alone. Barcelona’s Poblenau Cemetery contains a sculpture of young man, collapsed to his knees, in the tender embrace of a winged skeleton. Known as The Kiss of Death, it is both beautiful and unsettling—both work of art and memorial. Sydney’s Waverley Cemetery sprawls across 40 acres of oceanfront land, where headstones and monuments tumble towards the water. And in Romania's Merry Cemetery, bright blue grave markers hold paintings of the deceased. These markers both create an atmosphere and hold important symbols.

Cemeteries are monuments to death, but also sites of contemplation and appreciation of life. "There's nothing like visiting a cemetery to give you a little perspective," writes Rhoads. Atlas Obscura has a selection of images from the book, which will be released on October 3.

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The Changing Nature of Lubunca, Turkey's LGBTQ Slang

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A young man wearing huge mirrored sunglasses and a fur coat looks into the camera confidently, while, behind him, a gaggle of fans giggles nervously. He blows a kiss at the camera. “Ablan star bebeğim,” he says to applause.

The phrase means “Your sister is a star baby” and it is in Lubunca, a secret Turkish queer slang that has been used by the LGBTQ community in Turkey since the late Ottoman era. Until recently only a tiny subset of Turkish society even knew what Lubunca was, let alone how to speak it. Now Lubunca is going viral.

The young man in the video is a famous queer DJ named Kerimcan Durmaz who has over two million followers on Instagram. He is part of a wave of young, queer social media stars who are bringing Lubunca out of the back alleys where it was born and into the limelight. “Thousands of people are watching their Instagram stories, Snapchat videos and hear those words,” says Kunz, an anonymous queer blogger who only goes by his pseudonym.

Kunz says that because of Durmaz everyone was saying “Ablan star bebeğim” in the summer of 2016. “Even people on TV shows were using this saying,” says Kunz. He explains that in Lubunca, Abla directly translates as “a feminine old gay person” although it’s closer to “sister” in English. In Turkey, where 78 percent of the population say they reject homosexuality, according to 2013 Pew study, people on TV saying “abla” casually is a big change.

Before the advent of Twitter and Instagram, Lubunca was primarily used among LGBTQ sex workers, particularly transgender women. “Lubunca was born to urgent need,” explains Gizem Derin, a transgender man and activist. “It was created by transgender women. When they were walking in the streets they needed to protect themselves from abusive crimes and police.”

To this day transgender sex workers are the most at risk. Prevailing attitudes against queer people in Turkey mean that when crimes are committed against transgender sex workers they are rarely reported and even more rarely prosecuted.

No one is quite certain of when Lubunca began. The first recorded instances of it were in the 1980s, but linguistic clues suggest that it was in use by the end of the Ottoman period in the early 1900s.

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Many of the words in Lubunca have their roots in Roma—the language spoken by Romani people. “Lubni”, the root of Lubunca, comes from the Romani word for “prostitute.” In the late Ottoman era, says Nicholas Kontovas, a socio-historical linguist who has studied Lubunca extensively, Roma people lived on the outskirts of Ottoman society. It was also around this time that many of the traditional Turkish bathhouses—previously centers for sex work among the middle and upper classes—stopped being centers for male and trans sex workers.

“Lubunca and the social context that it came from arise from changing Ottoman attitudes towards male-male sexuality,” says Kontovas.

He explains that it’s easy to find multiple references to young male sex workers in literature from the classic Ottoman period. They are referred to as “boys” even though many of them were as old as 25. At least among the upper classes there seemed to be no stigma about a man sleeping with other men as long as it did not interfere with his duties to his wife.

But as the Ottoman empire went into decline, these values slowly started shifting, and by the early 1900s men having sex with men was morally taboo. Kontovas believes this may have been the root of Lubunca. Bathhouses were no longer safe private spaces for sex workers and so queer sex worker communities sprang up in neighborhoods that were shared by Roma people.

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Another clue that Lubunca was used in the Ottoman period is the nature of its puns. Before 1925 the Turkish alphabet was based off of Arabic script. “The Turkish word for five means bottom because Arabic numeral five looks like a round thing,” says Kontovas, laughing. This means that Lubunca was used at a time when people were familiar with the Ottoman alphabet— as far back as the late Ottoman period in the 1920s.

Linguists and sociologists first started recording Lubunca in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but Kontovas thinks that this is because attitudes around discussing sex had started to open up at that time—not because Lubunca was growing.

Since then Lubunca has been recorded in academic circles but it is only with the advent of social media that it truly started to go mainstream. Stars like Durmaz are making Lubunca cool and profitable. In the summer of 2016 Durmaz made “Ablan star bebeğim” into the hook for a club tune. In the music video Durmaz strides across a roof, purse first, with doubled sunglasses on. It’s camp, it’s fabulous and without social media there is no way it would exist in Turkey.

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But the growth of Lubunca is not without its problems. Kontovas compares the current moment in Turkey to Britain in the 1960s, when homosexuality was still illegal and queer people used the secret language Polari to communicate. In the 1960s Polari started to become more mainstream through a massively popular BBC radio show called Round the Horne. But the language’s very popularity defeated its purpose, says Kontovas.

“People didn’t use Polari when it became popularized by Round the Horne. The popularity signals greater openness for discussion of sexuality in the society. But it’s a Pyrrhic victory. People who might still need it for secrecy, trans sex workers, people who are not funny and can’t integrate, can no longer practically use it for secrecy,” he says.

In Britain’s case the popularity of Polari came around the same as the LGBTQ civil rights movement. Polari mostly died as a language after it became popular. But that was also because it was no longer as needed.

However, greater public awareness of Lubunca is not coming at the same time as increasing LGBTQ rights in Turkey. In fact, it’s just the opposite. The government in Turkey is deeply conservative. In 2010, former family minister Aliye Kavaf described homosexuality as a “disease.” This year, for the third year in a row, Turkish authorities canceled Pride in Istanbul citing security threats from far-right groups. The decision was criticized by Pride organizers, who stated, “Security cannot be provided by imprisoning us behind walls, asking us to hide, preventing us from organizing and being visible, and encouraging the ones who are threatening us.”

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In this environment the people who continue to be most at risk are transgender women. Many transgender women are unable to find work because of discrimination and turn to sex work out of economic necessity. They are working illegally with great risk of violence or arrest. It is the reason that they still need Lubunca and why, despite the language’s popularity online, the majority of people who speak it fluently are transgender women.

“A lot of trans sex workers are still victimized by the police,” says Kontovas. “Gay men use it less fluently than trans women. Because it is still needed for trans women.”

But people like Kunz don’t believe that Lubunca should be secret. Rather, they point to the importance of visibility. “If you talk Lubunca in the society, people could understand your identity or understand that ‘you’re different.’ So, if the aim is to hide our identities and to create safe spaces, Lubunca is not something very beneficial here,” says Kunz. “In my opinion, people use Lubunca mainly for fun today and it makes a good contribution to LGBTQ visibility in the society.”

Still, just because Lubunca is becoming more widespread does not mean that it will inevitably start to die out—not as long as it’s useful.

Kontovas points out that language always changes and shifts with the times. Lubunca may diverge, he says. On the one hand there may be the mainstream Lubunca used in bits and pieces by the broader public. On the other hand there may be the secret Lubunca that will continue to grow and change as long as it’s needed.

Perhaps You’d Like to Purchase Art Sculpted by a Cow

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Back in 2007, Whit Deschner was hanging out with a friend in his hometown of Baker City, Oregon, kicking back and looking at the scenery. There was his friend's cabin. There were the grass, the clouds, the trees. And there was one of the town's ubiquitous salt blocks—lunchpail-sized cubes of salt and minerals, set out regularly for local deer and livestock.

As always, animals had licked this formerly boring salt block into a much stranger shape, carving out whorls, curves, and concavities. "We'd had a couple of beers," Deschner remembers. "I kept looking at [the salt block]. I thought, 'You'd give an artist $100,000 for one of them if they blew it up.'"

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Eleven years later, Deschner's dream has nearly come true. On Saturday, September 16, Baker City will host the 11th annual Great Salt Lick Contest, in which ungulate-tongued salt blocks are displayed, judged, and auctioned to benefit Parkinson's research. Over the past 10 years, Deschner and other volunteers have raised $92,000 for Oregon Health & Science University by auctioning the accidental artworks. If all goes according to pattern, Deschner expects to send the total over $100,000 this year, he says.

The artists' process remains simple. Human patrons provide participating animals with 50-pound blocks of salt, which can be found at feed stores for about $6.50. The blocks are left outside, and the artists go to town, licking them for hours and producing intriguing scoops, divots and swirls.

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Then, it's contest time. The best works receive cash prizes, which range from $50 to $150. They do even better at auction: one year, the grand prize winner fetched $1800, the current record. Related categories—such as "Best Forgery," which once saw a sugar cube called "Sweet Deception" sell for $270, and "Michael J. Fox Lookalike Block," which asks human sculptors to do their best to honor another spokesman for Parkinson's—are also lucrative. "The community really gets into it," Deschner says.

Deschner himself owns a bunch of the works, some of which he has even had cast in bronze in order to better preserve them. Over the years, he's noticed that different species fall into different schools: "Goats and deer are more realist," he says. "Cows are more impressionist. The horses aren't artistic at all."

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He leaves the actual judging to a panel, which generally hews to a particular theme. This year's judges are all brewers, vintners, and distillers. In past years, Deschner has successfully recruited local clergy, as well as city council members. "They couldn't agree on anything," he says. "So I had them do the salt lick judging, and they finally agreed."

The contest has proven so successful that last year, the other half of Deschner's original vision came true: a four-foot-tall, solid bronze replica of a salt lick sculpture was installed in Baker City's downtown.

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If you'd like to score a high-saline artwork for your home, keep an eye on the Great Salt Lick's Facebook page, where Deschner says they may set up a system for online bids.

But if your favorite goes too fast, or sells too high, never fear: it's a flexible medium, and you may get another chance. "Some people just throw ‘em back out," Deschner says. "And if they’re there next year, they bring 'em back in and sell 'em again."

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.

Parrotfish Have Been Caught 'Farming' Coral Reefs

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Octopus gardens get all the attention from songwriters, but maybe it's time someone wrote a ditty about parrotfish algae farms. According to new research, the fascinating fish—also responsible for pooping out Hawaii’s white-sand beaches—actually “farms” its food in coral reefs.

A pair of research papers have stated that some species of parrotfish, colorful creatures with fused teeth that form a bird-like beak, revisit the same feeding spots at regular intervals, according to a story on Futurity. Like farmers on land, they seem to spread out their feedings in such a way that new crops of algae can grow in their favored spots, and even go so far as to defend the spots from other sea creatures that might try to steal a crop before its harvest time.

The studies also took note of the movement and concentration of the fish around the Palmyra Atoll, some 1,000 miles from Hawaii, and noticed that while the fish tend to range pretty widely, they return to their feeding spots in deliberate patterns, which supports the idea that their behavior resembles farming.

As an added benefit for the reef, in addition to keeping it clean of algae, the parrotfish also create little divots with their beaks that allow for young corals to sprout. In their way, they are also tending to the coral reef as a whole.

Between their vivid colors, strange tooth-beaks, sand-poop, and now an undersea green thumb, parrotfish are turning out to be one of the most incredible stars of the reef realm.

Smoke From American Wildfires Made It All the Way to France

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If it seems like the entire Western United States is on fire right now, that's because, well, it kind of is. Despite a rainy winter and spring, this fire season is one of the worst in recent memory, with 126 fires burning more than two million acres in the country at the time of publication. The Chetco Bar fire in Southwestern Oregon is currently the largest among them, and has consumed more than 188,000 acres since mid-July. Farther north, British Columbia alone has 153 active fires. And where there's fire, there's smoke.

So much smoke, in fact, that some has drifted clear across the continent and an ocean.

One of NASA's satellites tracked a cloud of smoke making its way—over just four days in early September—from the American West to France. Not all of the smoke produced by American fires is being blown clear across the world (much to the relief of Parisians), but some makes it up to higher altitudes, where it is picked up by prevailing winds and carried to the east. According to NASA atmospheric scientist Colin Seftor, "It’s not that uncommon for smoke from fires in North America to reach Europe." But, he noted on NASA's Earth Observatory, this year's smoke is particularly thick and persistent. Smoke from mid-August fires in the United States lingered over Europe for days. "It’s going to take a while for everything to dissipate," he added.

The Most Inspiring Hot Air Balloon Ride Ever

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You probably know the names of the first people to fly an airplane, and the first person to set foot on the moon. You may know who won the race to fly solo around the globe, and who first outsped the speed of sound. But do you know the story of Vincenzo Lunardi, the first man to fly over England in a hot air balloon with a dog, a cat, and two pigeons? If you don't, right now—exactly 233 years after this particular feat—is a great time to learn.

In his own estimation, Vincenzo Lunardi was made to fly balloons. Born in Italy in 1759, he'd started his career as a diplomat, acting as a secretary to the Neapolitan Assembly in England. While he was there, though, he became obsessed with accounts, mostly from France, of a new invention: the hot air balloon, a massive sackcloth filled with hydrogen that could float up into the sky, and take a human with it.

There was just one problem: the Londoners didn't think he could do it. In fact, they didn't think anyone could do it. While France had seen its fair share of ballooning success, whenever aspiring aeronauts had demonstrated in Britain, they had failed spectacularly, either damaging their balloons irreparably during takeoff, or failing to leave the ground at all. If they were successful—as in the case of James Tytler of Scotland, who managed to get aloft in August of 1974—they flew for so little time that spectators nearly rioted.

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So when Lunardi came to London, he started by talking the talk. He drummed up enthusiasm for his endeavor by putting his balloon on public display, and distributing pamphlets that promised a "Grand Atmospherical Excursion!" Then on September 15, 1784, having built up a suitable amount of excitement, he walked the walk: he and his crew brought the balloon to London's Artillery Grounds, pumped it full of gas, and took off.

Maybe it was the accumulated effects of high altitude—or maybe it was just his natural showmanship coming out—but the most breathless account of the flight comes from Lunardi himself. In a 16-page pamphlet called "Lunardi's Grand Aerostatic Voyage," the self-described "enterprising Foreigner" spelled out his adventure minute-by-minute.

First, off there was the crowd: "A hundred and fifty thousand Spectators, on a moderate calculation, composed of all ranks and descriptions of people" stood awaiting his launch at the Artillery Grounds, he wrote. In Lunardi's description, doubters and believers mingled together, and the fields and surrounding buildings filled up with spectators of all ages, classes, and nationalities, jockeying for views.

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Despite his celebration of the crowd's diversity, Lunardi dedicated the entire pamphlet to the spectator of most import: George Augustus Frederick, then the Prince of Wales, who was 14 years old at the time. (He also put in a special shoutout to his favorite demographic: the gaggle, he wrote, featured "as great a display of female beauties as ever.")

The crowd had made a good choice. In Lunardi's telling, the drama started before the balloon even left the ground. While the crew was checking the envelope, one of the upright supports fell, knocking a high-up crew member off balance. Thankfully for Lunardi, he responded like a stuntman: "With great dexterity, he seized on a rope, and slid with coolness and unconcern to the ground," Lunardi wrote.

There was even interpersonal drama. Around 1 p.m., Lunardi and his assistant, George Biggins, climbed into the basket but the load proved too heavy, and a disappointed Biggins was forced to climb back out again. "[Nothing] could be more visible than the regret which they felt on separating," Lunardi wrote. (His aforementioned other basketmates—two pigeons, a cat, and a "favorite lap dog"—were allowed to stay.) After takeoff, there was another slapstick moment, as the balloon dipped dangerously close to nearby houses.

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Lunardi threw out a bunch of sandbags, and one of his steering oars, and the balloon menagerie continued on its way. "The loudest acclamations rent the skies," Lunardi wrote. "Some cried through excess of joy, some wept for his safety… the Prince of Wales drank to him, in a glass of wine." From above, the ever-cool Lunardi "calmly waved his flag."

After that, he was on his own. The rest of the journey was a mix of sprawling vistas, scientific experiments, and moments of peril. Although Lunardi steered as best he could with his remaining oar, air currents buffeted him to and fro, at one point blowing the balloon high up in the atmosphere, where the passengers were subjected to extreme cold. Icicles formed on his clothes, and "the cat was so benumbed as to be rendered motionless." He himself almost fell asleep, and decided to drink several glasses of wine in quick succession for warmth, and to vigorously snuggle the dog, who, he thought, might not otherwise make it.

Looking over the basket was also dicey. Although he grew to enjoy the view—especially the clouds—at first it was so overwhelming that he was seized by "a sudden giddiness," and had to step back. Later, though, he grew confident enough to lean over the basket's edge, and to shout out at the public through his speaking trumpet. When he saw an acquaintance on the ground, he lowered the balloon enough to toss the traumatized cat overboard to him.

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All told, Lunardi stayed aloft for a little over three hours. In that time, he traveled about 80 miles total, back and forth over a 26-mile stretch of land. He landed around 5 p.m., in a small village called Colliers-end, where a local farm girl helped him keep the balloon's envelope from dragging on the ground. At this point, he was very cold, he wrote, and "the dog was very wet."

Lunardi would go on to enjoy a long, storied career as an aeronaut, full of literal and figurative ups (he eventually earned the nickname the "Daredevil Aeronaut") and downs (after a young boy died while crewing for him, he was forced to flee England for the United States). But this first ride over London set the tone, not just for his career, but for balloon travel in general. The balloon was placed back on display, and Lunardi himself became something of a sex symbol, a daring man who had ventured alone to parts unknown. His exploits even started a fashion craze: women began wearing "Lunardi skirts," decorated with little balloons, and "Lunardi bonnets," two feet high and designed to look inflated.

In the decades to come, balloonists would cross the English channel, head up to the stratosphere, and help to introduce audiences to the panorama, a brand new way of seeing the world. With his ride—and in his own words—Lunardi had successfully inaugurated, in one country's imagination, "a truly wonderful and magnificent Machine."


A New U.K. Banknote Is Designed to Be Friendly to the Blind

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Sorting out one’s finances is important. But American currency doesn't particularly lend itself to any kind of sorting, especially for the visually impaired, since all the banknotes are the same size, shape, and feel. That single in your pocket could very well be a fin, sawbuck, Jackson, or C-note.

Blind people don't have the same problem everywhere, though. The Bank of England's new £10 note, for example, is designed to be easily recognizable by touch. The new note, which features Jane Austen (the only non-Queen female on British money these days), features a series of raised dots in its upper-left corner and fine raised lines on its sides. These features, coupled with a new material—smooth, durable plastic polymer—should make it easily identifiable.

“The difference is night and day between the old paper notes and the new plastic ones. From a blind person perspective, you couldn’t really tell the difference between an old £10 and a £20,” Ian Morris, a blind supply chain manager, told The Independent. “It’s a fantastic invention; absolutely superb.”

The United Kingdom also has notes, like Australia's, that are a different sizes based on their values. Canadian dollars are all the same size, but they have Braille dots that make them legible to the fingers. Euros, Japanese yen, Hong Kong dollars, and more combine both approaches. High value euros are even a little thicker than other bills.

The United States remains a laggard in blind-friendly money. A lawsuit filed in 2002 by the American Council of the Blind forced the Treasury's hand, but tactile bills—hey, what’s the rush—won't happen before 2020 at the earliest. In the meantime, resourceful blind Americans often employ a folding system—ones are left unfolded, fives are folded in half, tens folded lengthwise, 20s get both folds.

The federal government has also supplied electronic scanners, which read out the value of a bill, to the blind or visually impaired at no cost since 2015, but visitors to the country are on their own. “Euros aren’t too bad but when we find ourselves in the U.S.," Morris told Huffington Post U.K., "that is an absolute nightmare."

Necropants and Other Tales of 17th-Century Icelandic Sorcery

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Iceland in the 17th century wasn't the greatest time or place to be alive. Faced with natural disasters, constant coastal pirate raids, and a crushing class system that left all but the richest citizens living in stone huts, the Icelandic peasants of the time led a hard life. As is often the case in such situations where hope was scarce and education even more so, many of the people turned to witchcraft as a last resort to improve their wretched lives.

Of course, the practice was no more accepted in 17th-century Iceland than it was in colonial Salem, Massachusetts, and a number of accused parties were burnt at the stake. Interestingly the majority of the victims of the Icelandic witch hunt were male, as opposed to the overwhelmingly female victims in other parts of the world. The naturalistic magics of the time generally promised pragmatic outcomes—such as controlling unruly weather—although others had more esoteric, though still useful, effects—such as invisibility.

However, the defining characteristic of much of Icelandic sorcery is the oddly specific and elaborate rituals themselves, which often call for some bodily tithe or gruesome sacrifice. For instance, summoning a vengeful zombie required lots of spit and snot-licking. While many of the more insane workings were likely no more than folklore even in their day, and never actually attempted, they still make for some fascinatingly grim windows into the culture of the era. One of the crazier examples is the spell for summoning a creature called a "tilberi," a two-headed snake-thing that would help people steal goat milk.

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The tilberi was said to be summoned by first stealing a rib from a corpse only recently interred, then wrapping the bone with gray wool (also stolen, preferably from the sheep of a widow). This macabre totem was then to be kept between a woman's breasts, during which time she must spit out her communion bread or wafer for three Sundays, and feed it to the fetish, which would slowly grow and become alive, until it was suckling the inside of her thigh, where it left a mark like a wart.

Once this gross creature reached maturity it would slink off to a neighbor's land and suckle their goats' milk until it was so full, it would roll back to its creator's home to expel it's stolen milk.

Ugh.

But possibly even more stomach-churning than the tilberi is the legend of the "nábrók," or "necropants." These vile leggings were the main component in a ritual that was said to bring the caster unlimited wealth, although the requirements of the spell were so outlandish that simple back-breaking labor seems like a more attractive alternative.

According to the ritual, to create a pair of necropants, the sorcerer must first make a pact with a friend, stating that once the friend has died of natural causes, the sorcerer has permission to skin them from the waist down. Once the friend is dead, the greedy magician must then wait until the friend has been buried, dig up the body, and then skin the lower half of the corpse without creating any holes or tears, thus creating a pair of gruesome skin pants.

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Once the "necropants" have been created, the caster must don the purloined pantaloons against his bare skin. Now the ritual requires that the sorcerer steal a coin from a destitute widow, and place it in the empty scrotum of the pants along with the magical Icelandic stave (symbol), Nábrókarstafur, written on a scrap of parchment. And that's it!

The pants soon become indistinguishable from the wearer's body, and so long as the original coin was not removed, the scrotum should continue to miraculously fill with coins for the rest of time.

The only known pair of necropants in the world (in actuality, a frighteningly realistic reproduction, hair and all), are now located in the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft in Hólmavík, Iceland, alongside models of the tilberi life cycle. The sickly translucent pair of empty legs is standing on a bed of dull coins, which assumedly sprang forth from the desiccated scrotum hanging above.

Harry Potter eat your heart out (unless that is a component of some horrible Icelandic spell).

This article was first published on October 13, 2013, and has been updated and expanded.

For Centuries, People Celebrated a Little Boy’s First Pair of Trousers

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John Neal, an 18th-century resident of post–Revolutionary War America, remembered the day that he and his twin sister were torn asunder. “They put me into jacket and trousers,” he wrote in 1795. He gathered up his collection of petticoats and flung them over to his sister. “‘Sis may have these.’ Being twins, we had always been alike, till then; but from that time forward, I was the man-child and she—poor thing! only ‘Sissy,’ and forced to wear petticoats.” Today, almost all Western children start wearing pants of some sort at an early age, but for centuries a little boy’s first donning of trousers was momentous, worthy of celebration.

This meant a “breeching” ceremony or party. The tradition seems to have started in the United Kingdom sometime in the middle of the 16th century, and then made its way across the Atlantic with early European migrants. It apparently petered out in the early 20th century, perhaps in part because changes in laundry technology made washing soiled pants—after inevitable childhood accidents—a bit easier.

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For hundreds of years, pants were thought to have transformative qualities. They turned a little boy from a genderless child, stymied from tree-climbing or other rambunctious activities by long skirts, into a boy ready to enter the rugged world of men. Before that, all small children wore long dresses that extended beyond their feet, like modern Christening robes, before graduating to shorter dresses. Among poorer children, these were totally androgynous garments that could be passed from one sibling to the next. Richer families, though, could afford to differentiate between male and female garments through color or trimmings.

But breeches were a ticket to the wider world, writes Anne S. Lombard in Making Manhood: Growing Up Male in Colonial New England. “Breeches allowed a boy to travel: to run, to climb onto wagons and over fences, and to ride horses. His sisters remained confined in dresses, which inhibited their movements and kept them closer to the house.” In Laurence Sterne’s rambling opus The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Tristram’s breeching opens a new chapter in his education: “‘Tis high time,” his father says, “to take this young creature out of these women’s hands, and put him into those of a private governor.” This begins with his breeching.

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With the power of pants came an understanding of manly responsibility, writes Jennifer Jordan in an essay on 17th-century masculinity. “The breeching ceremony stands out as one of the most significant milestones in a boy’s journey to acquiring manhood.” This seems to have been understood by even very little boys. Samuel Coleridge, the English poet and philosopher, described his five-year-old son Hartley being breeched in an 1801 letter. “He did not roll and tumble over and over in his old joyous way,” he wrote.“No! It was an eager & solemn gladness, as if he felt it to be an awful area in his Life.” These parties were usually held over a weekend at home, with relatives invited to stay. The pockets of Hartley’s breeches jingled with “a load of money,” Coleridge wrote, likely gifted to this fledgling man by visiting family members.

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Depending on their individual or family circumstances, breeching boys may have been anywhere between four and eight. An 1899 poem by Etta G. Salsbury (taken from the rather slushy collection Our Little Tot’s First Speaker) tells the story of four-year-old Willie, so grown-up and boisterous that his mother brought forward his breeching:

You may be sure that I was glad;
I marched right up and kissed her,
Then gave my bibs and petticoats,
And all, to baby sister.

...

I never whine, now I’m so fine,
And don’t get into messes;
For mamma says, if I am bad,
She’ll put me back in dresses!

Often, the decision was a parental compromise. While fathers might have looked forward to playing more active roles in their sons’ lives, mothers sometimes dreaded the loss of their small boys. “Some mothers might try to delay the event, especially if there were no other infants or toddlers in the nursery,” writes historian Kathryn K. Kane on Regency Redingote, a blog about English history. Smaller, sicklier boys might also have their breeching postponed. As soon as they were breeched, their mothers began to spend less time with them. “[Their fathers] might teach them to ride, to hunt, or other gentlemanly sports and activities,” she writes. “Though he did not leave home straight away, a boy who had been breeched had effectively left the domestic sphere of women.”

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Class, too, had a part to play in when, and how, a boy was breeched. Poorer families were unlikely to commission a new suit from a tailor, and instead might give a child his older brother’s or cousin’s hand-me-downs. A party, if it happened at all, would be much more limited in scope. Often, a breeching at the age of around seven could be an introduction to a life of manual labor.

By contrast, wealthier families’ breeching parties might be lavish affairs, in which the child might even be given a small toy sword. Kane describes how a small boy would change into his new suit and accessories, sometimes helped into them by the tailor or the boy’s father’s valet. “When all was in readiness, family and friends would gather in the room, along with the little boy, in his gown and petticoats. By the Regency, another guest would be present, the local barber,” Kane writes. A little boy would receive his first haircut and emerge a freshly minted young gentlemen, before doing the rounds of the room and receiving a small amount of money from each guest. “There are no records which tell us what happened to this money, though it seems unlikely that such young boys were allowed to keep it.”

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But not everyone saw breeching as a positive step. In the 1797 book On Clothing, author and printer George Nicholson worried that pants made urination a needlessly unpleasant experience, and encouraged masturbation through overfamiliarity with one’s genitals. “During the first and second year, the boy can neither button nor unbutton his breeches, and he is continually in a sad condition,” he wrote. More than that, he felt that the restriction on their crotches might similarly bind their nascent brains. “In his breeches, [a boy is] pent up and shackled, and by way of compensation, his mind is stuffed with opinion and folly,” he wrote.

There’s no evidence that a healthy breeze around one’s privates stimulates the intellect, but one of Nicholson’s other concerns, that breeches might have an impact on the future fertility of these young men, may not have been so far off the mark. Recent scientific studies have suggested that tight pants can damage sperm more than smoking or alcohol. Perhaps today’s advances in elastic, zippers, and parachute pants would have eased his mind.

Scientists Once Dressed Frogs in Tiny Pants to Study Reproduction

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You might value pants for their leg-sheathing, buttock-concealing and pocket-generating powers—but they can also serve as frog genital shackles, and they played a crucial role in 18th-century fertility research.

Reproduction wasn’t always a settled science. Prior to cell theory and the invention of the microscope, inquisitive minds engaged in quite a bit of guesswork over where babies come from. As early as 350 B.C., Aristotle proposed a theory of epigenesis—which was essentially correct. But not everyone cared for the idea of a sperm-and-egg collaboration.

So-called preformationists believed organisms developed from miniature versions of themselves. For instance, in the 17th and 18th centuries, Dutch physicist Nicolaas Hartsoeker took a hardline “spermist” approach, postulating that each sperm contained a complete preformed humanoid, or homunculus. Ovists, on the other hand, believed the egg contained all that was needed and merely required male seed as a chemical trigger. Still others pointed to maggots or fermentation as proof of spontaneous generation, at least in simpler organisms.

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To reach our current understanding of reproduction, these fanciful theories would need to fall by science’s sword—and fall they did. Physician Francesco Redi’s classic 1668 experiment, in which he separated meat from swarming flies with gauze, struck a crucial blow to spontaneous generation. The ovists and the spermists would prove more difficult to defeat, which brings us to Italian physiologist and priest Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729-1799)—and his tiny frog pants.

Spallanzani was a devoted ovist. As evolutionary geneticist Kenneth Weiss points out in his 2004 paper The Frog in Taffeta Pants, Spallanzani and other microscope-users of the day knew semen contained “wormified beings in a thicker component, and a thinner liquid.” Based on popular theories concerning inheritable intestinal worms, Spallanzani thought the sperm might be mere parasites and that the seminal fluid alone served as a chemical trigger for the all-encompassing egg.

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In the 1760s, to better understand the process, Spallanzani repeated a 1736 experiment by French scientist René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur. In the original experiment, Réaumur enshrouded the posteriors of male frogs in pants made from pig's bladder and taffeta. He aimed to prevent the dousing of frog eggs and examine any male frog secretions caught in the pants to gain a better understanding of how fertilization works. The frogs' tendency to wriggle out of the pants made these experiments challenging.

In his follow-up experiment decades later, Spallanzani described the prophylactic garment as “pants,” but without illustration or artifact, we’re left to imagine the most ridiculous possibilities. (Tiny lederhosen, perhaps?). Spallanzani’s pants prevented the thicker portion of the semen from reaching the egg, though he was still loathe to credit its wormlike contents with fertilization.

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According to Ernesto Capanna’s Lazzaro Spallanzani: At the Roots of Modern Biology, Spallanzani went on to throw pants on various amphibian species. In each case, he collected semen from the taffeta pants and successfully carried out artificial insemination on a female of the same species. In time, he even upgraded to dogs, but didn’t need special pants for canine semen collection.

Spallanzani remained an ovist his entire life, always finding a way to credit the egg alone as the human “tadpole.” He died of bladder cancer in 1799 and the bladder itself remains preserved in Pavia, Italy.

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The scientific understanding of reproduction has changed a great deal over the last two centuries, but animal breeding programs continue. The methods of semen collection remain, if we’re being honest, a bit awkward. Plus, every now and then, a well-meaning scientist busts out a pair of experimental pants. In 1993, Egyptian sexologist Dr. Ahmed Shafik dressed rats in polyester pants to study the fabric’s effects on sexual activity.

Never doubt the research potential of tiny trousers.

The Impending Disappearance of Great Britain's Oldest Snow Patch

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By day, Iain Cameron is a health and safety manager for an aerospace company in Edinburgh, Scotland. But by night—or, at least, on weekends and holidays—he is one of Great Britain's most tenacious "snow patchers," people who seek and document the island's patches of snow, the ones that manage to hold on through the warmer months, through quirks of topography, shadow, and microclimate. These are the closest Britain comes to having its very own glaciers. Some patches are fleeting and variable, while others can last the whole summer. Of these, the Sphinx, in Garbh Choire Mor on Braeriach in the Cairngorms, is one of the oldest and heartiest.

But this year is different. Crucially, the winter of 2016 was warm and dry, with little snow, and the following spring similarly mild. In an ordinary year, there might be as many as 100 patches left by September. In 2016 there were 82; in 2015, a staggering 678. This year, there are two. For the first time in 11 years, Ben Nevis, Scotland's highest mountain, is snowless. The Sphinx has hung on, for now, but its days are numbered.

Cameron has been watching the Sphinx closely, and determined that it will melt and sublimate entirely by September 20. This, according to the Financial Times, will be likely the first time in more than ten years, and likely the sixth time in three centuries, that all of Great Britain will be without snow. When the Sphinx does go, however, Cameron hopes to be there, with his tent and his cell phone. "It may go at 3 am on a wet Wednesday night but this has never been chronicled before," he told the newspaper. "So to be there would be amazing."

Cameron has been fascinated with summertime snow since childhood, he told The Guardian. He climbs not for peaks, but for the patches, which "tend to sit in the little gullies and corries below the peaks. I go straight to the snow." From these expeditions, he writes an annual report on snow and its patches for the Met Office, the United Kingdom's weather agency, and maintains a social media presence on Facebook and Twitter. Snow fans are waiting with bated breath for his updates on the Sphinx. Paul Sutherland, a fan, summed it up in a comment: "The whole country is watching ..."

When Your Brand-New Bridge Is a Meter Too Short

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We've all returned products that didn't work for us—pants that were too short, candles that smelled weird, chargers with the wrong doohickey at the end.

The residents of Esbjerg, Denmark, are currently experiencing this type of hassle on a larger scale. Earlier this year, officials ordered a footbridge meant to cross the nearby Kongeåen canal. But as the Local reports, it's now sitting by the side of the canal instead, because the last piece was a meter too short to actually stretch over the water.

"We ordered a bridge to go from one side to the other. It doesn't do that," Hans Kjær, the municipality's Director for Technology and the Environment, told news outlet Jydske Vestkysten. "Someone in the system must be red-faced," he added.

The municipality is currently seeking solutions, and Kjær says the bridge will be passable for the opening celebration, which happens this coming Friday, September 22. It's unclear whether this will entail a permanent fix or a (literal) stopgap.

Jydske Vestkysten's Facebook commenters had some good advice: "They have to find a place where it fits, the creek is probably narrower somewhere," one wrote.

Another suggested a specific type of retail therapy: "Maybe they should consider a new tape measure."

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.

There Are Definitely at Least 14,003 Plant Species in the Amazon Rain Forest

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How many different types of plants are in the Amazon rain forest? This is an astonishingly hard question to answer. The number is clearly in the range of “really quite a lot,” but scientists have long debated what “a lot” really means. Estimates derived from different types of models range from the tens of thousands to the hundreds of thousands.

In a new report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists from institutions around the world have come up with a number that represents all plant species that are definitely known to exist in the Amazon rain forest. In total, they report, humans have identified 14,003 species of plants. Most of those plants—52 percent—are shrubs, small trees, lianas, vines, and herbs. The list also includes 6,727 tree species.

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To come up with these numbers, the authors of the paper combined research from the entire Amazon basin. They started with checklists from the databases of herbaria and other collections across the world, then verified the plants on the lists, eliminated errors, and updated the identification of species to the current state of knowledge. Creating the list required the work of hundreds of specialists but resulted in a comprehensive accounting of “all currently known seed plant species found in the lowland rain forest biome,” according to the paper.

The researchers took a more restrictive definition of the Amazon rain forest than some estimates of the species diversity there have used. They identified the Amazon as the “lowland rain forest biome” beneath 1,000 meters of elevation, as opposed to the entire Amazon basin, which includes other biomes.

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This number—14,003 species of plants—supports the lower end of estimates of Amazonian plant diversity. Even though we certainly don’t know about all the plant species in this part of the world, the number we know of indicates the total is in the tens of thousands.

But there are still plenty of strange and wonderful plants that haven’t been documented yet. As the researchers write in their paper, the report “highlights the need for further exploration of the vast expanses of these still poorly collected forests. Much of the Amazonian flora remains undiscovered.”


We're Not the Only Primate With Unsustainable Eating Habits

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Driving other species to extinction might be something of a primate proclivity. A new study suggests that monkeys in Thailand are using tools—just like us—to overfish some tasty shellfish. Long-tailed macaques in a national park in Thailand have figured out how to use rocks to crack open snails and oysters. And they have been busy.

An international team of researchers studied two groups of the macaques on islands in Khao Sam Roi Yot National Park. On one of the islands, NomSao, there is a small population of monkeys that use large rocks to break open big shellfish along the shore. On the other island, Koram, a denser population of monkeys uses smaller stones on smaller shellfish. The researchers suspect that the size difference in prey and rocks used is a result of monkeys on Koram eating all the largest individuals. Their smaller tools match the size of their smaller dinners.

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The monkeys on NomSao ate about one-tenth of the island's periwinkle (a type of snail) population in a year. On Koram, the monkeys eat even more, and periwinkles only survive there for the moment because their larvae drift in from other places. It may not be long before some of the shellfish species go extinct on one or both islands, in which case the monkeys might lose more than an easy food source. "Over-harvesting could ultimately lead to the loss of technological knowledge in these macaques," write the study authors. If the oysters and periwinkles disappear, the macaques will have no reason to keep using tools and passing the knowledge of them on to their offspring. The technology could be reinvented later, said study coauthor Lydia Luncz, of University of Oxford, in a press release. "This has interesting parallels to the evolution of human stone use, where stone technology might also have been lost and reinvented throughout history."

This Squid Egg Mass Looks Like a Massive Jelly Tube

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As if squid aren’t fascinating and frightening enough on their own, some species lay eggs that are fascinating and a little frightening themselves. One lucky undersea photographer was recently able to snap some shots of the bizarre, rarely seen egg tube of the diamond squid, and it is something to behold.

As Live Science is reporting, Jay Wink, owner of Abc Scuba Diving Port Douglas in Queensland, Australia, caught these images of a translucent, pink, worm-like mass that looks like it is about to engulf the diver floating nearby. After Wink posted his photos to the internet, many speculated that it was some kind of pyrosome, a colonial animal also called a "sea pickle."

The eggs are thought to come from a diamond squid, a species that is fished in Japanese waters, but is also found in other tropical and subtropical waters. The species lays its tiny eggs in long strings of pink beads that wrap around a gelatinous core like a slinky, and float on the currents, probably unattended by the parents. The mass could contain between 20,000 and 40,000 tiny squid. Any that make it to adulthood could grow to up to three feet long.

The Massive Trans-Siberian Railway May Get Even Longer

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The Trans-Siberian Railway, the longest railway line in the world, built between 1891 and 1916 by order of Russian tsar Alexander III, covers around 6,000 miles, from Moscow to Vladivostok (with service to Pyongyang), in nearly eight short days. If a plan recently put forward by a group of Japanese investors goes forward, it may get even larger—all the way to Tokyo. Given the fact that Japan is more than 500 miles from the mainland, this would require at least two colossal bridges over the ocean, one connecting coastal Russia to its eastern-most island, Sakhalin, and another from Sakhalin to the Japanese island of Hokkaido.

This would not be the first time that the epic railway—which runs through 87 cities and across 16 rivers, such as the Volga, Ova, Ural, Oka, and Amur—needed to find a brute force solution to a natural obstacle. In the late 1890s, Russian engineers had to purchase a special icebreaker from England to temporarily connect the two sides of Lake Baikal while the railway was completed on the south shore of the lake. Sections of the ship were transported to Lake Baikal by cargo ship and horse, and then reassembled on-site between 1898 and 1899. The icebreaker transported entire train carriages from one side of the other, like a sort of “swimming bridge.”

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The challenges to this plan may be even more daunting, leading Russian President Vladimir Putin to declare the project to be, rather literally, of “planetary scale." If completed, the Trans-Siberian railway would span 8,400 miles, and make it possible to go from London to Tokyo by a series of trains—a trip that would take roughly 15 long, scenic days.

All the Lies About the Origins of 'Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire'

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When's the last time you told a shameless fib? Did you get caught? Do you know why? Maybe you couldn't stop your eyes from darting around, or your hands from fidgeting. Maybe your nose started growing rapidly, like Pinocchio's. Or did your would-be targets point out a smoky smell, coming from the seat of your jeans? It's an association as strong as a steel rivet: from schoolyard taunts to political cartoons to fact-checking websites, a true liar's pants are always on fire.

As popular as the saying has become, though—and as satisfying as it is to chant or say—"liar, liar, pants on fire!" is not the most intuitive of phrases. Although people's pants do sometimes catch on fire, this correlates more with carrying around accidentally explosivematerials than it does with truthfulness. Meanwhile, the vast majority of liars make it through life unscathed by this particular fashion catastrophe. The mystery of the phrase's origins is compounded by the fact that several of its more popularly reported etymologies are, in fact, lies.

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"'Liar, liar'—without the 'pants on fire'—has been around a long time," says Barry Popik, a linguist who specializes in slang and proverbs. As early as the 1400s, people would call each other out using the phrase "liar, liar, lick-dish!," the idea being—according to one proverb dictionary—that the accused will "lie as fast as a dog will lick a dish." Popik dug into the complete phrase in June of 2010 for his etymology blog, The Big Apple, and found a collection of English naval ballads from 1840, featuring a short poem that seems to come from this lineage, and that links two of the phrase's main aspects, lying and fire: "Liar, liar, lick spit / turn about the candlestick," it reads. "What's good for liar? Brimstone and fire."

All of these, though, are missing that crucial pants element. The earliest full example Popik found was from the 1930s—specifically, the August 13, 1933, issue of the Sunday World-Herald. In an article titled "Fat Pat to Rassle Savage Because the Public Wants It," a reporter wrote that fans had been clamoring to see "Fat" Pat McGill rassle Steve Savage, to the extent that the local wrestling promoter has been "deluged by letters, swamped by phone calls, and buried under an avalanche of telegrams." This news is followed by a cheekily defensive parenthetical: "It is so, you liar, liar, pants on fire; there were several people who called up."

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The phrase is deployed casually, which suggests that it may already have been fairly well-known at that point. Popik also found a number of uses from the late 1930s and 1940s, most of them embedded in the classic playground poem, which also brings in some Pinocchio imagery: "Liar, liar / pants on fire / nose as long as a telephone wire!" But whatever genius child first came up with this taunt has been lost to the annals of time. "Unfortunately, we didn't have Twitter back then," Popik says. "If we had Twitter, I'd be able to pin this down to the exact day and exact hour."

Amateur etymologists and pranksters have stepped in to fill the gap. A commenter on one popular etymology blog cited a story he read in a history book, about an 18th-century British merchant who was famously mendacious, and who once lit his pants on fire while loading his gun and smoking a cigar at the same time. ("It's highly unlikely the saying is from the 1700s," says Popik, who had never heard this story.) One Yahoo Answers member, known simply as Bryce, cited a Biblical verse featuring the line "'Thy trousers, they burn with a fire as though from Heaven." (This is, of course, not a real Biblical verse—Bryce made it up.)

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And then there is the poem "The Liar," commonly attributed to William Blake, which begins in a familiar way:

"Deceiver, dissembler
Your trousers are alight
From what pole or gallows
Shall they dangle in the night?"

Further verses, which are worth reading, bring in an ill-fated horse, a "red devil of mendacity" who "grips your soul with such tenacity," and another instant-classic couplet: "from what pit of foul deceit / are all these whoppers sprung?" Anyone who has read Blake's best-known poem, "The Tyger," will recognize the poem's meter, rhyme scheme, and question-based structure.

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But the poem itself is an imposter: it was written not by Blake in 1810, but by a gifted parodist sometime around 2010. It comes courtesy of the Uncyclopedia, a now-defunct website that billed itself as a "content-free encyclopedia," and it has fooled a lot of people seeking high-minded ways to talk about lying, from investment bankers to ministers to social scientists. They've fallen for a classic trap: "Famous people—such as Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Winston Churchill—get famous quotes attributed to them," Popik says. "Unfortunately, the bogus quotes are still around in the internet age... people are too lazy to search for a few seconds."

Despite its lack of fascinating backstory or literary pedigree, though, "Liar, liar, pants on fire" has spent decades doing just fine on its own. "It's a nice rhyme," says Popik, when asked about its longevity. Plus, he adds, it's perpetually relevant: "There are a lot of liars." Make sure you're not one of them: before you spread a linguistic origin story, take a second to do a little research. Otherwise, your own trousers might end up aflame.

A Machine That Made Stockings Helped Kick Off the Industrial Revolution

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In early 1590s, Lord Hunsdon, a chamberlain of Queen Elizabeth I, brought her an object to consider, one that he considered a marvelous invention. It was a stocking, somewhat coarsely woven. The queen was known for her fondness for these undergarments; she had first received a pair at Christmas in 1561, from her silk woman, one Mrs. Montague. In the 16th century, both women and men covered their legs with hosiery, knit by hand and stitched together in the form of a person’s leg. But these stockings were different. They were not hand-knit. They had been made by machine.

Queen Elizabeth had some sense of what mechanically produced stockings might mean, and she wanted none of it. "I have too much love for my poor people who obtain their bread by the employment of knitting to give my money to forward an invention that will tend to their ruin by depriving them of employment and thus making them beggars,” she pronounced.

Today, stockings are hardly the object of controversy. But from then to the early 19th century, machine-made stockings were at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution. European royals subsidized their manufacture, industrial spies went after the technology to make them, and political dissidents smashed the frames on which they were made. These delicate undergarments heralded the economic transformation that would change the world.

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Most men in the late 1500s would not have bothered themselves with the making of hosiery, and William Lee’s inspiration for creating a stocking-knitting machine has been lost to history. Lee was a curate in Calverton, England, an area known for its wool. One apocryphal story holds that he invented a stocking-knitting machine so that the object of his affections wouldn’t be able to ignore him by knitting. A counter-narrative has it that he created the machine to spare his wife the toil of hand-knitting stockings for money. For whatever reason, by 1589 he had created a machine that could imitate the handiwork of knitters.

His design was simple. An early version had just 12 needles stuck into small blocks of wood. When the machine worked, those needles darted forward, grabbed a thread, and pulled it back through the previous line of loops. Over time he improved the design so that it included more needles and a greater density of needles per inch of fabric, which improved the quality of the resulting textile. After successfully setting up shop with the machine in Calverton, he and his brother decided to move their business to London, where they attracted the attention of Hunsdon, the royal chamberlain.

His handiwork having been rejected by Elizabeth and later her successor, James I, in 1605, Lee took his invention to France, where King Henry IV embraced his ingenuity. By then, Lee had created nine machines, and he started to manufacture stockings for the French elite. For about five years, Lee’s vision of quickly producing stockings was fulfilled, but in 1610, after the king was assassinated, his new life fell apart. He was never able to find his footing again in France, and after his death in 1614, his brother and their workers took the machines back to England and began rebuilding the industry in the area around Nottingham.

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In the decades that followed, Lee’s apprentices continued to refine his machine to speed production and improve quality. By the 1650s, the government of England (headed by Oliver Cromwell) was more eager to embrace this technology, and in 1657 Cromwell incorporated the Worshipful Company of Framework Knitters (still around today) to oversee the production of stockings by machine. The technology the British knitters were using had become so desirable that an industrial spy, Jean Hindret, came to England to learn about the machines. After he brought that knowledge back to France, Louis XIV, the Sun King, had him set up shop in Paris’s Bois de Boulonge, and then heavily subsidized the stocking industry over the next decade.

By the early 1800s, machine-knitted stockings were widely accepted and had become a well-established industry. The frames had become more complicated and more expensive, and wealthy men started investing in them and hiring workers to run them. In 1811, when a long war with France contracted the British economy, Nottingham textile workers protesting their wages and changes in the industry changed their opinion of the machines and smashed them to bits. These protests continued for months, and the political protestors who led them became known as Luddites (after the fictional apprentice Ned Ludd, who was supposed to have been smashing stocking frames as far back as 1779). The movement was considered dangerous enough that in February 1812, Parliament passed an act on the Destruction of Stocking Frames, which made destroying a stocking-machine a capital crime. Dozens of Luddites were hanged for their acts of protest.

These revolting workers did not want to return to the days of hand-knitting stockings, a long and tedious process, but they were being buffeted by a new economic order that Lee's "stocking frame" machine had wrought. Perhaps Queen Elizabeth was right to be skeptical of Lee's invention. Even if she couldn't stop it, she sensed that this innovation in leg-coverings promised a new way of working that would change what was possible for workers and consumers—for better and for worse.

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