American patent clerks in the 1870s could scarcely have imagined how two inventions, filed two years apart, would together change the lonely lives of frontier Americans. In 1874, there was barbed wire, and in 1876, Alexander Graham Bell’s revolutionary telephone. Together, in an amazing display of rural ingenuity, they connected isolated homesteads to their rural neighbors and the rest of the world.

Left to telephone companies and their bottom lines, farm people would not have had telecommunications at all. Building lines was expensive, and hardly worth the effort in sparsely populated areas. But, according to historian Ronald R. Kline, manufacturers underestimated the entrepreneurial, innovative spirit of these men and women. “Ranchers and farm men built many of the early systems as private lines to hook up the neighbors,” writes Kline, “often using the ubiquitous barbed-wire fences that divided much of the land west of the Mississippi.”

By the 1880s, thousands of miles of barbed wire snaked their way up and down the country. To turn the steel fence wires into telephone lines, they simply had to be connected to a telephone in a house or barn with a piece of smooth wire. The signal then passed through the smooth wire, and along the length of the barbed wire, either to a switchboard or to other houses down the line. In some cases, as many as 20 telephones were wired together—all of which would ring simultaneously with each call, regardless of who was making it and who they were trying to reach. Agreed-upon codes—three short rings for you, two long rings for me—helped people know if the call was for them.

This connectivity fundamentally changed the nature of life on the frontier. In Big Bend Country, Texas, the advantage of the network was not the way it connected farmers to the outside world, but how it linked so-called neighbors who lived miles apart. “Wherever these country telephones have been introduced, and they may appear extremely primitive, they are regarded as an indispensable convenience,” writes Richard F. Steele in An Illustrated History of the Big Bend Country. In the event of a medical emergency, a doctor could be summoned in minutes, without the agonizing wait for a messenger boy on horseback to make it into town and back again.

In Colfax, New Mexico, the barbed wire telephones provided entertainment, too, in a time when ordinary pastimes might have been limited to reading and rereading newspapers and books. “The operator got everyone to listen to the Floyd boys and others playing a banjo, or a piano or a guitar and singing. Five rings also meant that someone with a radio had the evening news on so that all the farmers could get the news and weather report.”

When, elsewhere in the state, two expensive purebred bulls were killed by new trains that ran to Arizona, the railroad company compensated local homesteaders in Hidalgo County by allowing them to use the barbed wire in the railroad right-of-way fence as a telephone line. Emma Marble, a young woman homesteading in the area in 1899, remembered how the line kept loneliness at bay and brought neighbors closer together. “The theory was that we would answer only when our own ring sounded, but whenever the bell rang, every woman on the line rushed to a receiver,” she recalled.

Homesteaders often suffered from what today might be thought of as crippling clinical depression, brought on by days, if not weeks, of solitude, isolation, and physical labor. Marble herself lived alone on a property of 160 acres. “News and gossip were common property, like the sunlight, and we never had any privacies when we went to the telephone.” This bonhomie must have seemed as warming as the sun’s rays, particularly for women, whose role as “angels of the home” often left them stuck in cabins or sod houses. That said, the number of people on the line at any given moment could be irritating. Every now and then, someone cut into a conversation, while multiple listeners reduced what any one of them would be able to hear.“Get off the line!” was a familiar refrain.

The barbed wire telephone also helped homesteaders escape the scrutiny of the government land inspector, who made frequent trips through Hidalgo to make sure homesteaders were obeying the letter of the law. “There was only one road to travel,” remembered Marble. As the inspector reached Lordsburg, friends quickly flashed the news over the barbed wire telephone to update one another on his progress as he went. “He always found the women working at some household task and all surprised as all-get-out to see him!”

The line was far from perfect, of course. Early telephone wires were shoddy, even when they used the “correct” copper wire. Barbed wire was particularly thick and heavy, and grew weightier when it rained. Even with closely spaced posts, the wire had a tendency to snap. Outside intervention, both nefarious and otherwise, was also a risk. The American Telephone Journal, in 1908, described how a prosperous farmer’s private line gave him “little to no trouble … except when mischievous boys ground the line by the aid of baling wire.” The Hidalgo County homesteaders’ line worked only in dry weather, and “hummed a great deal when the green mesquite would grow and touch the wire.”

Writing in Telephony magazine in 1886, J.L.W. Zietlow described the resulting chaos when cattle broke down the fence wire, cutting off people who had come to rely on their telephone. “It goes without saying that I have been prejudiced against fence wire telephone lines ever since,” Zietlow wrote. “I know of many bad mishaps; and in one particular case, the loss of a human life is attributed to a barbed wire telephone line failing to work.” It seems far more likely that barbed wire telephone lines saved lives, especially in cases of high-risk pregnancies or falls from horses.

Until the phone companies eventually wired the rest of rural America decades later, these inconveniences were minor—someone had to go out and ride the fence anyway—for a connection to the outside world, one that shrank the open frontier to a much, much more manageable size.

One of the most important crops in West Africa, the white Guinea yam, also happens to be rather challenging to cultivate. Despite that, 63 million tons of yams were produced worldwide in 2013, mostly in Africa. Scientists are turning their attention to the crop, hoping to improve the tuber and make it a more reliable food source in a changing world. Now they have a new tool at their disposal—the yam's genome.

Yams grown in Africa are nothing like the orange, sometimes mislabeled, sweet potatoes that grace American Thanksgiving tables. They are starchier and much larger—Guinea yams can grow to nearly five feet long. They are also much more difficult to grow. The white Guinea yam's climbing vines not only require tall supporting stakes, but are also vulnerable to pests and disease (which can claim 90 percent of a crop). New plants aren't grown from seed, but rather from small "seed yams." And male and female flowers grow on separate plants, a trait called dioecy that Guinea yams share with just five percent of flowering plants, including asparagus.

The international team of scientists behind sequencing hopes that researchers will be able to use the tuber's genetic code to unlock some mysteries, such as how the plant resists disease, or becomes one sex or the other. The result could be a hardier staple crop and increased food security for millions. Not bad for a file that takes up less than a gigabyte of hard drive space.

Caroline Ward had brought snakes back to camp with her, and the locals were not happy.

The Malagasy villagers who passed through the camp, located in Northwest Madagascar, cautioned Ward that she should kill the snakes before they killed her. (Never mind that the University of Leeds PhD student was studying the species, known locally as fandrefiala, for her conservation research.) Yet the reason for their fears wasn’t that the snakes were poisonous or aggressive—rather, it all had to do with the color of their tails. Because the fandrefiala has a tail the brick-red color of dried blood, the Malagasy believe that the snakes can transform themselves into spears, plummet out of trees and kill anything passing below them.

It was a connection that Ward’s PhD supervisor, Dr. George Holmes, had noticed in his field work all over the world: “magical” beliefs—a broad category that ranges from beliefs in mythical animals, to connections with animals’ fabled properties, to spiritualism and traditions—have an impact on the welfare of real-life animals and ecosystems.

In a paper recently published in the journal Oryx, Ward and Holmes propose that conservation biologists more closely consider beliefs in magical animals, and superstitions about animals’ magical properties, in making conservation policy.

“[Conservationists] often talk about the role of economic incentives in shaping behavior, as in, can we pay [locals] to not kill a species?” says Holmes, who has been researching interactions between conservation efforts and human society for several years. “But there are all sorts of other ways that people react to, and behave around, endangered species. This issue of people’s belief in magic is actually really important.”

In some places, magical beliefs lead to grassroots protection for particular animals; for example, in Kombolcha, Ethiopia, hyenas are believed to eat evil spirits and pass on supernatural messages through their howls—as well as keep crop-eating herbivores in check. As such, they are tolerated, even supported, by people who share their habitat.

In contrast, certain beliefs can clash with conservation efforts. Across much of Madagascar, in particular the north of the country, the appearance of an endangered aye-aye lemur is seen as a harbinger of death or sickness. Reactions to a sighting vary between groups—from specific rites to the abandonment of entire villages—but in many villages, it is believed that the only way to prevent bad luck is to kill the aye-aye and display it on a roadside pole. On some Caribbean islands, including Haiti, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic, the same treatment is given to owls, which are believed to be connected with witches.

Fitting conservation science to these beliefs can be a challenge. Another Malagasy fady, or taboo, prohibits harming the radiated tortoise, which is critically endangered. Yet this rule is only strongly held in certain villages; and even in those villages, locals do not see the rule as applying to outsiders, and therefore do not stop poachers from harming or removing them.

Beliefs can also evolve over time as people change, migrate, encounter new beliefs, or work to rejuvenate and protect old traditions.

“I think it’s somewhat frustrating, because we can’t really give one approach fix to every situation,” says Ward of the interplay between magical beliefs and conservation issues. “It’s more a matter of being more aware that these beliefs exist, and that just because they don't follow the scientific belief system doesn’t mean we can push them to one side.”

Holmes also emphasizes that utilizing magical beliefs in conservation introduces some tricky ethical questions.

“This subtle ethical issue comes with treating people’s worldviews in a very utilitarian sense,” Holmes says. “It’s saying, okay, we’re not going to treat your worldview and spirituality and culture holistically; we’re going to carve it into individual bits, and promote the ones that are good for our purposes and suppress the ones that are bad for our purposes.”

While conserving biodiversity might be an admirable goal, Holmes says, so is allowing people spiritual and religious autonomy.

Paige West, an environmental anthropologist, has seen the negative outcomes of this sort of use firsthand. The Clair Tow Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University and Barnard College in New York, West has spent decades conducting ethnographic research among the people of Papua New Guinea. In one case, after eight years of research among the Gimi people in the village of Maimafu, she concluded that a local conservation project—which attempted to protect area forests and their inhabitants by linking them to market-based enterprises, on the assumption that the Gimi people only valued local biodiversity as an economic resource—“got it wrong.”

Conservation planning failed to account for the fact that the Gimi people see everything in nature as a gift from the forest, as the physical incarnation of their ancestors. The Gimi believe that trees and animals in their forests, particularly marsupials, carry the life-force of the dead, and can be embodied by the spirit while sleeping.

“Marsupials are not simply animals to Gimi, they are the literal embodiment of ancestors; what has been translated as ‘environment’ is not simply a place filled with floral and faunal resources waiting to be used or made into commodities, it is a place of social relations between the living and the dead,” West wrote in a 2005 case study. This oversight was detrimental to the conservation project, as well as anthropologically problematic.

In West’s view, even dubbing these views “magical” can present issues.

“When people in the European intellectual tradition hear the word ‘magic,’ they immediately think of a series of beliefs that are false, or are somehow antiquated or less than rational,” she says. “To every indigenous person I’ve ever interacted with, who has a different set of ontological propositions about what animals are in the world than I do, that set of propositions is highly rational. It makes sense in the total system that is in their cultural upbringing. To use the term magical indexes those beliefs as less rational than European and western beliefs.”

Holmes and Ward also highlight that European and western people are not exempt from these beliefs themselves. Their research details animal beliefs spread throughout the world; they cite the example of the Loch Ness Monster, which brings hundreds of thousands of ecotourists to the Scottish lake, and the Icelandic respect for Huldufólk, or elves, which halted the construction of a highway through their traditional lands.

“It’s genuinely around the world,” says Holmes. “And these things matter. People's beliefs genuinely have a material impact on the wellbeing of endangered habitats, and ecosystems, and species.”

On August 1, 2012, at around 7 a.m., the members of an olive baboon troop living in central Kenya's Mpala Community Conservancy woke up, climbed down out of their sleeping trees, and started into their morning routine. For the first hour or so, they moved slowly, the adults grooming each other as the youngsters horsed around. It was early, after all.

But then, around 8:06 a.m., an adult female and her young son got hungry. They set out together into a nearby field to forage. Over the next few minutes, almost all of the other troop members stopped their grooming and playing and followed the two trailblazers. By 8:15, dozens of baboons of all ages had formed a kind of parade behind the pair, with one older male even circling back to pick up stragglers.

For the rest of the morning, the whole troop trekked through the conservancy area: snacking, hurrying through pastureland, and eventually crossing the Nanyuki River, the mother and son leading the way for the majority of the time.

For the baboons—who spend many of their morning hours searching for food—this was an ordinary start to an ordinary day. For mapmakers James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti, though, it was a kind of microcosm: a tiny moment that, if visualized properly, could unlock a number of fascinating truths about how baboons live.

Cheshire, a geographer, and Uberti, a designer, previously teamed up for London: The Information Capitol, a book of maps and infographics that lay out various hidden aspects of the city. For their new book, Where the Animals Go, they turned these talents to a new, equally rich data source: animal tracking projects, which trace individual creatures as they move through their habitats, interact with surrounding ecosystems, and even—in the case of long-migrating Antarctic albatrosses—circle entire continents.

Studies like this used to be the province of luck or high-effort gambles—coming upon pawprints in the dirt, say, or attaching a radio transmitter to a duck. Over the past few decades, though, various incarnations of GPS technology have allowed scientists to start keeping close tabs on everything from whether endangered elephants are safe, to how mountain lions bypass highways, to when ants in a colony perform their jobs, all of which Cheshire and Uberti were able to include in the book.

But the baboons presented a unique challenge. "In many cases, we're drilling down to show a specific, individual animal's movement," says Uberti. "The baboon study gave this great opportunity to show how an entire group of animals can be tracked, and how individual decisions help them move as one."

The baboon map above is based on data gathered by Margaret Crofoot, an anthropologist who studies how social systems evolve. In 2012, she and her team of researchers put tracking collars on 25 baboons living in the Mpala Conservancy. They were trying to figure out exactly how the troop—which, like all olive baboon troops, generally moves as a unit—collectively decides where to go. Were they led by alpha males and females, the high-level troop members who generally get their pick of mates and meals? Or was there something more complex going on?

Crofoot and her team tracked the baboons for four weeks, recording each of their positions once per second. They then teamed up with two other collective behavior researchers, Damien Farine and Ariana Strandburg-Peshikin, who wrote software that condensed these millions of data points into 57,000 individual "baboon decisions"—a bold change of direction, say, or a folding back into the group.

By analyzing these decisions, the researchers found that baboon troops move via a complex kind of consensus. Any single baboon that decides to go in a particular direction might "pull" a few others along, forming a group that is all going one way. Often, a couple of these cliques will form at the same time. If the resulting groups of baboons disagree about which way to go, but both want to move in the same general direction, the troop will split the difference, traveling down the middle of the proposed paths. If the difference in direction is more stark, majority rules.

In this way, individuals take turns leading the group, simply by being proactive. Despite the presence of alpha individuals in the group, this type of directional leadership didn't depend at all on dominance, sex, or age: a mom and her young son were just as likely to set the day's trajectory as anyone else. As Crofoot told Uberti and Cheshire, "all group members have a voice."

In 2015, the researchers published their findings in Science. Soon after, Uberti and Cheshire decided to include them in their book. With millions of data points to work with—what Uberti describes as "a huge hairball"—this was an entirely different challenge. "It took a lot of manual effort to go in and say, 'OK, what is the story here?'" he says. "What are the interesting movements?"

They ended up focusing on a few different days' journeys, drawn in different colors in the map above. Taken together, they give a visceral snapshot of group baboon life. Each day, the baboons explore a different swath of territory, venturing out to find food and then looping back to a stand of trees to sleep.

Meanwhile, landmarks that might help anchor humans in the landscape—say, the research center itself—are conspicuously absent, replaced by the rivers they need to cross, the dirt roads they frequently use to commute, and the sleeping trees they eventually make their way back to. "What we're interested in showing is stuff that's important to the animals, not necessarily stuff that's important to the humans," says Cheshire.

For example, on August 1—drawn in purple on the map—the whole troop crossed one of those rivers, traveled south for about a mile, and then took a slightly different path back home. And from August 21 through August 24—traced in different shades of blue and green—a leopard was hanging out near their usual home base. "They didn't come home for a few nights," Uberti says. Then on August 27—the gold loop—"they go up and take a little trip to this rancher's house." Throughout, the skinny trails of individuals join into big clumps, as the troop as a whole deals with different challenges and opportunities.

But there was still the question of showing this decision-making process in detail. With Farine's help, they found the small story from the morning of August 1, of a mother and son leading the charge. "It really exemplifies what the research has demonstrated," Cheshire says. They mapped that half hour as a kind of play-by-play, demonstrating the principles the researchers had uncovered in action. "The beauty of print is that it allows us to slow time down, and allows you to look and see how the baboons, step by step, are influencing each other," says Uberti.

In this way, a huge amount of data became both a map and an illustrative moment. "We talk about big data all the time,"says Uberti, "but sometimes it's small data that communicates the story more effectively." Small data about a small baboon and his mom.

*All map images reprinted from Where the Animals Go: Tracking Wildlife with Technology in 50 Maps and Graphics by James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti. Copyright © 2017 by James Cheshire and Oliver Uberti. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Duck-billed hadrosaur Augustynolophus morrisi—whose 66-million-year-old fossilized remains have only been found only in California—was officially declared the state's oldest representative thanks to a bill signed by Governor Jerry Brown on Saturday.

California has a state dinosaur! Meet @Augustynolophus morrisi last seen 66 million yrs ago, b4 asteroid hit Earth. https://t.co/D829rCzgtXpic.twitter.com/D4lnGDf4Y9

— 89.3 KPCC (@KPCC) September 23, 2017

The bill was put forward in April by Santa Monica Assemblymember Richard Bloom, and posits thatAugustynolophus morrisi“is essential to California’s society because it nurtures an educational opportunity for the youngest Californians to become interested in paleontology,” and science in general. The herbivorous hadrosaur joins a select club of 10 other dinosaurs that are state insignias (not to be confused with state fossils). Colorado was the first to claim one, the stegosaurus, in 1982. Texas is on its second, after changing from astrodon to sauroposeidon in 2009, and Iowa claimed the coveted tyrannosaurus in 1992. Oh, and D.C. has the capitalsaurus, known only from a single piece of bone found there during the McKinley administration.

According to Benjamin F. and Barbara S. Shearer, in their book State Names, Seals, Flags, and Symbols: A Historical Guide, state insignia started to become a thing in the 1920s and 1930s primarily as symbols of civic pride. Imagine a local garden club asking its state to recognize an official state flower. But it was really during the postwar consumer boom that they started to blossom: "Lots of states were adopting the symbols as ads for the state,” Benjamin Shearer told ABC News in 2011. That’s why tomato-growing Ohio has the tomato as its state fruit and tomato juice as its official drink, or why snowy New Hampshire made skiing its official sport.

Some connections between states and their symbols are a little less intuitive. Utah, for example, picked Jell-O as its official state snack not because the state produces the dessert, but because it ranks first in the country in per capita Jell-O consumption. "WHEREAS," the resolution declaring it so reads, "Jell-O® is representative of good family fun, which Utah is known for throughout the world." Senator Mike Lee and his staff even host weekly “Jell-O with the Senator” sit downs in Washington, D.C.

Food and civic pride both feature in New Mexico’s state question, “Red or Green?” (your choice of chile), as well as the six states with official crustaceans: Louisiana's crawfish, Maryland 's blue crab, Oregon's dungeness crab, Alabama's brown shrimp, Maine's lobster, and Texas's gulf shrimp. Speaking of animals, only three states—Texas, Virginia, and Hawaii—have official bats. North Carolina tried join the that club in 2015, but the resolution to recognize Rafinesque's big-eared bat didn't make it.

When soldiers returned from World War II in the mid-1940s, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America was ready for them. With educational programs and materials, such as the pamphlets “The Soldier Takes a Wife” and “For the Man Who Comes Back,” the organization targeted long-separated couples and men eager to spend time with real-live American women instead of paper pin-ups. Whether a wife, a sweetheart, or a dedicated correspondent, one pamphlet read, “you don’t need to be told, any one of them in the flesh is better than a million pictures on a wall.”

“Millions of our returning fighting men and servicewomen will come back with one thing uppermost in their minds,” stated another. What did these men and women want? “A home of their own and children to whom they can gave give the best chance of health and happiness.”

Although the birth control movement was started by radical feminist women who believed in liberation from childbearing, by the 1940s, the movement’s message had changed. In 1942, the Birth Control Federation of America changed its name to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and began focusing on family planning and spacing out births, rather than women’s rights.

By the end of the war, the organization had “largely abandoned the women-centered approach of the earlier birth control movement,” writes Peter Engelman, in A History of the Birth Control Movement in America. This new message “appealed more to men and the male-dominated public health departments, hospital, legislatures, and government agencies that were integral to the future success of the movement.”

The pamphlets shown here, from the collection of the New York Academy of Medicine, were willing to talk frankly about sex (“The step-up in your pulse when a nifty number looks your way isn’t love. That’s sex, mister,” one reads), but they also promoted norms rather than rebellion, sexuality within traditional marriage, and having plenty of babies—at the right time.

In the decades before World War II, the birth rate in the United States had declined steadily, but after war, the national attitude toward childbearing shifted. “Procreation was one way to express civic values,” writes historian Elaine Tyler May in Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. “Along with the baby boom came an intense and widespread endorsement of pro-natalism—the belief in the positive value of having several children.”

In its brochures, Planned Parenthood didn’t try to fight that tide. Instead, the organization focused its message on having kids at the right time, when a couple's relationship and finances were strong. The organization also encouraged couples to space out their children, and let a mother’s body rest and recover between births. “Getting married and having a family is like a military campaign. It makes forethought, preparation and a certain amount of strategy,” the pamphlet “The Soldier Takes a Wife” advised men. “By planning and preparing for the birth of each child you and your wife can do much to improve its prospects for health and happiness.”

The pamphlet included scare stories about what would happen to men who didn’t follow this advice. “Flash” Edwards’ wife dies because she had too many kids too fast, and “Steady” Steve gets himself into financial trouble by failing to plan his family carefully.

The one vestige of Planned Parenthood’s more radical past was its emphasis on female sexuality. “Frigidity and unhappiness are often the natural results of selfishness or lack of appreciation by the man of his wife’s sexual needs,” the pamphlet advised. “Love-making among civilized peoples is a delicate art which can be attained only when the physical and emotional desires of both mates are realized.”

The organization spoke directly to men about this, too. “You can learn these things by sharing your wife’s feelings instead of just thinking of your own.” (The history of feminism and women’s issues in the 1950s suggests that few men absorbed this advice.)

Even female sexuality, though, was promoted in service of a greater goal—America's bright future. “Mating may be the first objective of a marriage but two other goals—companionship and children are equally important,” Planned Parenthood advised. “Planned parenthood is important to the future of America because it seeks to help families so to develop [sic] that they may fit more happily and usefully into the life of the nation.”

Although birth control pioneers, including Margaret Sanger, who was still associated with Planned Parenthood at the time, fought the movement’s turn in this direction, this more normative message generally served birth control advocates well. “PPFA gave the birth control movement ‘a clean image,' emphasizing not women’s rights, individual freedom, or sexuality, but as Scientific American noted, 'the need of individual couples to plan their families and for the nations to plan their populations,'” writes May, the historian. “American society was certainly ready to accept birth control as a means of improving marital sex and family planning. But it was not ready to accept its potential for liberating sex outside marriage or for liberating women from childbearing to enable them to pursue careers outside the home.”

Information about and access to birth control didn’t stop the Baby Boom. The birth rate in America increased, and most couples in their 20s had multiple children. But it did, perhaps, limit its extent. Even if the postwar generation rushed to have kids all at once, those men and women did tend to stop procreating at a certain point. For these married couples, birth control didn’t keep them from having kids, or allow all women to pursue careers. But it did help couples choose the size of their families. Once they were ready to stop having kids, birth control was there to help.

Centuries ago, wolves were commonly found around Rome, Italy. They’re also part of the city’s founding myth. But over time, hunting reduced their numbers until they were living only in one area, in the mountains of central Italy. In 1971, they received protected status.

Since then, the number of wolves in Italy has grown to somewhere between 1,500 to 2,000, and in 2005 wolves were first seen around Rome. Now, for the first time in many years, wolf puppies have been born in the vicinity of city, The Telegraph reports.

The two puppies were spotted at a nature reserve not far from the city’s international airport. The area is protected by a bird conservation group, LIPU, and in 2014 the puppies’ father, Numas, was first seen in the reserve. He and his mate, Aurelia, were also seen together in 2016. Now, their offspring have been captured cavorting in the woods by hidden cameras.

Wolves are sometimes seen as a threat to livestock, which is one of the reasons they were hunted to such small numbers. But, according to the conservation group, farmers shouldn’t worry about these wolves. Based on analysis of their feces, they eat only wild boar, which no one likes anyway.

There’s a great Marvin Gaye single from 1967 called “This Love Starved Heart of Mine (It’s Killing Me).” It’s classic Motown. All energy and style and the kind of driving backbeat that made the Motown Sound so iconic. Marvin is giving it his all on this record, his voice a breaking growl, soaring over the music. It’s soul at its finest and we, the lucky listeners, just get to sit back and enjoy it. Or at least, now we do.

Unless they were top brass over at Motown HQ, soul music lovers in the U.S. at the time probably never heard this song. It went unreleased for years, and only reappeared as a bootleg in the late 1970s, with a noticeable difference: Marvin Gaye’s name was nowhere on it. When the record resurfaced years later, it was under the name J.J. Barnes, a purposeful deception by obsessive record collectors and DJs known as a "cover-up."

The practice of the cover-up most likely began in the 1950s with Jamaican DJs, who took their huge, booming sound systems, complete with generators, turntables, and speakers, to parties to play the newest releases. These events were largely grassroots, for-the-people sorts of things—street parties crowded with dancers all looking to hear the newest releases played on the loudest systems. But over time, many Jamaican DJs of this era pivoted from playing records to pressing them. Suddenly these sound systems weren’t just a party, they were a business. They charged admission, provided food and drinks, and played records straight from their own labels.

But what if a great song didn’t happen to be on your label? What if you still wanted to get people crowding into your spot, but without putting money in some other company’s pocket? Well, “DJs could keep their goodies secret by covering up,” notes Jean Oliver-Cretara, a music professor at The New School who researches Jamaican music and DJs. They could obscure the label, a trick known as white-labeling, or they could rename the album, changing the title or the artist or both to disguise it. Later, as migration brought an influx of Jamaicans to England, the practice spread among DJs, eventually finding a home in the U.K.-based underground scene known as Northern Soul.

The Northern Soul scene was all about the sound, and not just any sound. Songs had to have two key elements. First, they needed those raw-edged, dance-fueling beats that were packing dance floors an ocean away in the United States. Second, they had to be rare. Oh, you’ve got that extremely popular new Junior Walker and the All Stars single? Good for you. You can keep it. For the Northern Soul scene, obscurity was popularity, explains Abigail Gardner, a music and media professor at the University of Gloucestershire. "DJs would be chasing the most obscure records and maintaining their status as 'players,'" she says.

Northern Soul’s exacting tastes meant the hunt was always on to find the rarest of the rare. It also meant a dud in the U.S. could mean a hit in the U.K. Some tiny label churning out releases that only saw regional success meant more to Northern Soul DJs than any major Motown hit. Rob Bellars, a DJ at the famed dance club The Twisted Wheel in Manchester in the 1960s and ‘70s, used to send away for American records that hadn’t made their way overseas yet, hoping to put something unique on rotation at the Wheel. “When you wrote to a company for a record and they said it was out of stock,” Bellars explains in the book The Story of Northern Soul: A Definitive History of the Dance Scene That Refuses to Die,“you knew there were a lot of people getting in on the act.”

DJs would do whatever it took to keep their finds a secret, which often meant putting some records in a sort of witness relocation. They’d give the record a false identity by cutting off its label and replacing it with the label of an easy-to-find one. Or, they might label it as a different artist all together. “You hold things close,” as Oliver-Cretara puts it. “Those records are your cards, you don’t show that off. You have to hide your sources.”

The subterfuge served two purposes: it kept the record off of a rival DJ’s playlist, and it kept it out of the reach of bootleggers who could otherwise copy and flood the market with that used-to-be-rare 45. So your Vickie Baines record became a Christine Cooper; your Billy Watkins an H.B. Barnum; and your Marvin Gaye a J.J. Barnes.

Oliver-Cretara also notes the practice may have had roots in something much more basic than preserving secrecy: money. Record labels couldn’t always release a single exactly when or where they wanted. Maybe there was an up-and-comer whose records could be huge in England, but who wants to get their hands dirty with the ins and outs of international contracts? Just cover-up the artist, box up the records, and hello international seller. What the artist doesn’t know won’t hurt them. (At least one artist did fight back in a way, though. Oliver-Cretara tells the story of the Jamaican percussionist Bongo Herman, who upon seeing his records being played and sold under another name in the U.K., bought the entire box of cover-ups and shipped them back to his house).

It ultimately may be impossible to pin down exactly why and how Marvin Gaye’s “This Love Starved Heart of Mine” got the cover-up treatment. One thing we know for certain, though, is that this particular Marvin Gaye record went unreleased, gathering dust on the Motown shelves, for almost 30 years. “When you consider the number of phenomenal people working for us and the high level of energy, we probably passed on more hit records in a week than most labels do in a year,” as Motown founder Berry Gordy put it in the liner notes of 1994’s Love Starved Heart: Rare and Unreleased, a Marvin Gaye rarities collection that includes the label’s official release of the song. For whatever reason, this one just didn’t make the cut at the time. That’s showbiz.

The story of how the record came to make its unofficial debut in late-1970s U.K. dance halls is murkier. It could have happened when Richard Searling, a Northern Soul DJ who spun at the Wigan Casino in the 1970s and ‘80s, discovered an acetate, or test pressing, of the record in 1979. That’s the story related in Kev Roberts’ book, The Northern Soul Top 500. Alternatively, the pressing could have come from a bootleg tape. Or, as one theory goes, it wasn’t actually Searling at all who found it, but another DJ altogether.

Here’s what we do know: The copy that found its way onto English turntables in the 1970s was one that didn’t have Gaye’s name on it. Officially untitled, the record came to be known in clubs as “It’s Killing Me,” and later bootleg versions listed the artist as J.J. Barnes. There’s a bit of a joke buried in the choice of Barnes, too, since he was a singer-songwriter on the roster of Motown rival Golden World records, a label known for promoting sound-alike artists designed to compete with Motown greats. J.J. Barnes was the Pepsi to Gaye’s Coke.

For many, record collecting is a labor of love. It’s combing through dusty old stacks of forgotten songs and singers, hoping to bring them back to life for the length of a song. If you’re a part of a scene that treasures obscurity, it can also be an obsession. The spy games of the era of record cover-ups were definitely a bit of both.

Calling for a mate can be a risky business for the tiny pumpkin toadlet, a minuscule orange frog found in Brazil's Atlantic Forest. It exposes their location in the leaf litter to predators and parasites, saps their energy, and takes up important time that could be spent looking for food.

An international research team, comprising scientists from Brazil, the United Kingdom, and Denmark, have recently discovered another downside: No matter how loud they call, their frog prince or princess won't be able to hear them. The researchers have found that two species of these frogs are not able to detect the sound frequencies of their own calls. In this case, the target audience—an attractive fellow amphibian—is entirely unreachable, even while many of the creatures they'd rather not be heard by do hear their cries.

It is surprising, researchers say, that evolution hasn't stopped the frogs from calling, even while it has made them deaf to one another. More than that, it seems to be a unique scenario in the animal kingdom of a communication signal continuing to be used, even when it's, well, totally pointless.

"We have never seen this before," said Jakob Christensen-Dalsgaard, from the University of Southern Denmark, in a statement. Further anatomical studies confirmed what they had observed: that pumpkin toadlets have lost the part of the ear used for high-frequency hearing.

Since these frogs can't hear one another's amorous advances, they now have to rely on their other senses to figure out which frog to mate with. They're an almost luminous shade of orange, which may play a part in how they use visual signals to communicate with each other. When the males are calling, their throats thrum, perhaps constituting another signal. (The frogs are diurnal, and might well be able to see and interpret these signals in the daylight.) If a pulsating gullet does communicate a throaty "hello there," the accompanying call may, curiously, be a byproduct of the real mating behavior.

And even if their predators do hear them, they may be in for a nasty surprise if they decide to act on it. That dazzling DayGlo hue communicates something to them too: Pumpkin toadlets are extremely toxic. Sometimes actions really do speak louder than words.

As more and more people get their information online, there's been one definite infrastructural casualty: the newspaper box. As a 2015 Newsweek article reports, the number of boxes on street corners has declined steadily over the past decade. Earlier this month, the Village Voice, New York City's storied alt-weekly, put out its last print issue. Fans scoured the city for the red receptacles that, up until now, had housed it every week.

So residents of Chicago's Lawrence Avenue were surprised when, just a few weeks ago, a Chicago Reader newspaper box arrived on their street, next to a public garden. They were even more surprised by what it held: decidedly out-of-date copies of the Reader, including the first ever issue, which began publication in 1971.

Someone restocked the @Chicago_Reader time machine. pic.twitter.com/7rVoRtOpiX

— Mike Sula (@MikeSula) August 7, 2017

As the (online edition of) the Chicago Reader describes it, the newspaper box was collaged all over with previous issues, and filled with a supply of old papers that was repeatedly replenished as passers-by helped themselves.

Locals—who started calling the box a "time machine"—were delighted, but confused. Was this a marketing ploy? A statement about the Reader's new ownership? An attempt at putting out the recycling gone very wrong?

As Reader reporter Michael Miner eventually found out, the answer has more to do with history and nostalgia. The box was decorated, delivered, and continually topped off by a former Reader reporter, who rescued the box from a recycling yard a decade ago and the back issues from the paper's office even earlier, when they were going to be thrown out.

Dig into the mystery of the Chicago Reader Time Machine. https://t.co/sfhY7fYdnr

— Chicago Reader (@Chicago_Reader) September 26, 2017

The reporter, who is using the pseudonym "Ian Crusken," wishes remain anonymous—"the focus is not a particular employee but the many people who went into creating the culture, the paper, the content," he told Miner. He made the box, he said, because he liked the idea of "three or four hundred people in apartments reading 44 year old stories of Chicago."

He recently refilled it with his last stack of old issues, and expects them to get snapped up soon—at which point this newspaper box, too, will disappear.

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 September 1962, something fell from aloft in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, cracking the asphalt on North 8th Street in front of what’s now the Rahr-West Art Museum.

Dennis Gintner, a Manitowoc-area resident, was a pre-teen at the time. He remembers the to-do about it.

“There was a cop that came along and kicked it off the street,” he says. “Thought it came from a garbage wagon.”

But as the pieces of the mysterious hunk of metal came to light, the town of Manitowoc realized they were dealing with something that was not of this world.

Okay, well, it was only kind of from out of this world. What fell in Manitowoc all of those years ago was a piece of Sputnik IV, a Russian probe that had spent two years in orbit. The Soviets lost control of it not long after its May 1960 launch, and the craft’s low orbit meant it would eventually be dragged down to Earth.

Sputnik IV was a test run for several human spaceflight technologies, including communications relays and a life support system with a dummy inside, according to NASA. The dummy, sadly, did not survive re-entry and become a Roswell-like urban legend. The craft was initially meant to come down to Earth but, “After four days of flight, the reentry cabin was separated from its service module and retrorockets were fired, but because of an incorrect attitude the spacecraft did not reenter the atmosphere.”

“Sputnik IV was a test Vostok spacecraft, which was intended for human spaceflight from the first,” Alice Gorman, a senior lecturer at Flinders University in South Australia, says. “Hence, unlike other Sputnik satellites, it was meant to return to the surface, ideally with its precious humanoid cargo intact.

“Throughout the early Space Age, the Soviet Union excelled at these return missions. It’s one reason why there is so little USSR material surviving in orbit from this period.”

Much of the craft burnt up on the way down, but as it fragmented, some smaller pieces were able to survive the passage through the atmosphere. What returned to Earth was probably fewer than 100 lbs of material out of a total of seven tons. Some fragments likely made it into Lake Michigan. Manitowoc is the only place where a piece seemed to make actual landfall. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, says he’s never seen evidence of “anything but the Manitowoc chunk” coming from Sputnik IV.

What Gintner said about the cops and the garbage truck is what happened. Two police officers, Marvin Bauch and Ronald Rusboldt, found the object in the middle of the street and ignored it at first. When they came back later, they noticed it was too hot to touch and kicked it aside. As news reports of the craft’s re-entry came about, the police went back to the fragment. Eventually, that fragment made its way into the hands of the Smithsonian, which later returned it to the Russians (somewhat against the will of the Russians, “who called it a circus trick” according to Wisconsin Public Radio.) A replica of the fragment sits in Rahr-West today.

“A little way over and it could have gone through somebody’s roof,” Gintner said.

On the weekend of September 8 this year, the town held its annual Sputnikfest. There’s a Ms. Space Debris pageant, though the event is fairly gender neutral. There are costume contests for dogs and kids, some polka and rock bands, plenty of beer, a few authentic Star Wars costumes, and other community fair-like events.

Greg Vadney, executive director of Rahr-West, says the event isn’t necessarily heavy on the space history element. It’s actually meant to drive people to the museum.

“We are a very traditional art museum, so not a lot of people are going to walk through the door readily,” Vadney says.

So 10 years ago, they took advantage of the 1962 event to bring people toward the museum, in what he calls “an excuse to have a party.”

Vadney is not from Manitowoc, but his wife is. The general attitude Vadney has learned about people in the area toward the Sputnik incident is mild curiosity and a shrug.

“It’s equal parts a point of pride because it’s a notable event, but also something that people laugh at,” Vadney says.

Indeed, the event is marked today by a small plaque on the sidewalk, a ring in the middle of the street where the piece fell, and a historical marker. At the time, Gintner said “it was more exciting then because there was a space race going on.”

But for those who study space debris, there’s a little bit more to it.

It’s somewhat rare for space junk to make it all the way back from space to Earth relatively intact. The speed of the craft combined with the graduating thickness of our atmosphere spell doom for most—but not all—spacecraft and other objects. Usually, it’s heavier craft like Sputnik IV or fragments of rocket bodies that survive.

Gorman says there are daily re-entries, and that even the bigger satellites that re-enter are broken apart due to the flimsier materials they’re made of. The craft that survive re-entry are usually built out of heavy duty materials.

“Those that do are mostly titanium pressure spheres or stainless steel fuel tanks—both have very high melting temperatures, and they’re often encased in carbon-carbon overwrapping which is also very heat-resistant,” she says.

McDowell says that only one or two pieces actually make it to the ground (or ocean) per year. Gorman places that number at 50 to 200 pieces, though they may be of varying size. And not everything that comes back down is recovered. Intentionally deorbited satellites, brought back to Earth when they’re running out of fuel or almost defunct, are usually aimed at the ocean. “There is just so much sparsely inhabited land mass and huge areas of ocean for space junk to fall into,” Gorman says.

But there are a few outliers beyond Sputnik IV. In 1997, a piece of a rocket booster struck an Oklahoma woman in the shoulder. About one artificial object a day falls to Earth but most don’t make it to the surface, burning up in the atmosphere instead. Of all that material that makes it through that trial by fire, about 6,000 tons of fragmentary material have survived the fall to Earth since the first orbital launch in 1959.

Even Skylab, NASA’s first space station and the space debris fear of the late 1970s, ended up falling over the Australian outback, though a few small pieces scattered over homes there. In 1980, a piece of the Russian probe Cosmos 749 crashed into a golf course in Eastbourne on the southeast coast of England. (McDowell jokes that it made an “extra hole” in the greenway.) And a 1988 New Scientist feature reports a 635-pound chunk of space junk falling in the midwest in 1970, but is light on details as to what fell.

The only time there’s been a major threat from a returning space object was when Cosmos 954 re-entered over Canada in 1978. It had a radioactive core that broke apart, spreading uranium over the Yukon. Recovery efforts successfully retrieved some, but not all, of the radioactive debris.

Gorman points out that in the mid 1960s the Soviet Union had a fleet of spy satellites called Molniya that were placed in an orbit that would bring them over Russia on any close return to Earth. This ensured that anything with sensitive info wouldn’t fall, say, over Wisconsin.

“There was certainly a concern that a returned bit of space junk could reveal something about the rival space program,” Gorman says. “Soviet spy satellites often used a highly eccentric Molniya orbit, which took the satellite close over the high latitude areas of the USSR with the satellite farthest from the Earth over the US.”

So while Sputnik IV’s crash isn’t unheard of, there may not be a ton of Sputnikfests cropping up, especially considering there were only a couple of landfalls in the United States. And as Gorman says, not many of us will become the Oklahoma woman who was struck by space junk, as “The risk of being hit by falling space junk is really very low.”

As grape harvest begins, winemakers up and down the West Coast are nervous. The thick smoke smothering the region, a result of a particularly bad fire season, threatens the quality of their crops. While a subtle smokiness can be a nice flavor in a French Oak-aged Chardonnay, most wine drinkers don't want a Pinot or a Riesling that tastes like an ashtray. But that's what they could end up with, thanks to some interesting chemistry in the grapes, recently described by a team of German researchers.

Ironically, it's the grape plant's attempt to isolate the smoke molecules that allows the smoke flavor to come through in the finished wine. When grape plants absorb smoke molecules, they attach a sugar molecule to the foreign substance to render it inactive and make it more water-soluble. If you found yourself in a vineyard that had been cloaked in smoke and ate a grape straight off the vine, you wouldn't notice anything different about the berry. It isn't until the grape juice goes through fermentation, and the yeast breaks up those sugars, that the smoke molecules are released again. Just the final product contains any clue that wildfires burned near the vineyard.

Unfortunately, winemakers can't do a thing about their wine tasting like ash. But now that scientists understand exactly why the flavor occurs at all, they can start to work on a solution. The answer may be to engineer a yeast that ignores sugar attached to smoke molecules, or it may be to use grape plants that produce less of the enzyme responsible for binding the sugar and smoke. A fix is probably not coming soon, though, and certainly not soon enough for this year's vintage.

In 1878, the Austrian geologist and explorer Ferdinand von Hochstetter went prospecting in the hills above Innsbruck. He wasn’t looking for gold or minerals. Rather, he needed exhibits for a newly founded Museum of Natural History in Vienna, of which he had just been named the director. He found what he was looking for in a dusty drawer of the Renaissance-built Ambras Castle—a magnificent piece of feather work, tucked away in a case together with assorted objects from North America, China, and the Sunda Islands in Indonesia.

Although it was folded up and somewhat moth-eaten, Hochstetter quickly realized he was looking at something special: a masterpiece of Mesoamerican art, probably Aztec, possibly from the court of Moctezuma II, ninth Aztec emperor who ruled from 1502 to 1520. If so, it would be one of the few surviving relics of its kind, a rare direct link to the last indigenous ruler of the Mexica. The possibility that this object passed directly from the Emperor to the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés gave it a value beyond price. It also meant that it was destined to be a point of dispute between the governments of Austria and Mexico up to the present day.

The largest part of the object is made of nearly 500 tail plumes from the resplendent quetzal arranged in a semi-circle. These alone would have been worth a fortune to the Aztecs. Nestled inside this dazzling green arc is a mosaic made from the body feathers of the quetzal as well as ones taken from a number of other tropical birds. Four kinds of gold ornaments sewed to the feathers and arranged in rows complete the design of the outside. On the reverse side, each of the feathers is individually tied with maguey thread to a coarse-meshed fabric on a wicker frame.

Trouble was, Hochstetter didn’t know quite what this magnificent feather work was. It had been entered in the castle inventories at different times as an “Indian apron” and a “Moorish hat.” After much deliberation and study, he determined that both of these descriptions were wrong. The item, he decided, was a standard, a kind of flag that would have accompanied the emperor or his generals into battle.

Hochstetter published his findings in 1884. Other experts immediately took issue with his conclusion. It took a pioneering American anthropologist named Zelia Nuttall to point out the obvious. The feather work wasn’t a body garment or a battle standard: it was a head-dress. The old label had been right all along.

Nuttall based her arguments about the headdress on a careful examination of the object itself, conducted on location in Austria, combined with a detailed comparison to images and descriptions preserved in surviving Aztec codices. Nuttall published her work in 1887, as part of the inaugural issue of Harvard’s Peabody Museum Papers. When her writing failed to persuade her detractors, she arrived at the International Congress of Americanists in Paris the following year sporting a home-made model of the headdress on her head.

The point was made. Less certain, though, was the path the headdress took to get to the cabinet in Ambras Castle. Hochstetter and Nuttall were both convinced that it came straight from Moctezuma as part of a group of “presents” given to Cortés via intermediaries shortly after the conquistador arrived in the Central Mexican port of Veracruz. These were only the second documented group of Mexican artifacts to reach Europe. Most have gone missing since they arrived in Spain in 1519.

Experts now think that the Vienna headdress is unlikely to have come to Ambras Castle directly from Spain. It seems to have spent some time in the possession of one Count Ulrich of Montfort, an Austrian nobleman who had served as an envoy to the court in Spain in the 1560s. It probably wound up in the Innsbruck collection after he died some time in the 1590s. The headdress has remained in Austria ever since.

In recent years, there have been a number of voices calling for the headdress’ repatriation to Mexico. In 1991, the Mexican government formally asked for the headdress’ return. A study commissioned by the Austrian government claimed that a safe return would be impossible without a specially designed case to protect it from the vibrations caused by flight. According to the study, it would require a plane 984 feet long—the length of 2.7 football fields—and 164 feet high to buffer the vibrations caused by take-off and landing. Since no such plane exists the repatriation seems unlikely in the short term. In the meantime, visitors to Mexico City have to content themselves with a rather spectacular replica of the headdress in Mexico’’s National Museum of Anthropology.

When the Mexico City duplicate was commissioned in 1940, its identity as a royal “crown” seemed secure. More recently, art historians have cast doubt on the headdress’ identification with Moctezuma. Christian Feest, a former curator at the Vienna museum, has pointed out that Aztec emperors wore a gold crown known as a diadem instead of a feather headdress. Most now believe that the headdress was of a type used as an offering, worn by priests during ritual representation of gods. But it still seems likely to have been made in the royal workshops of Tenochtitlan before the arrival of the conquistadors. Certainly, the sheer extravagance of the piece suggests it was made for the head of a royal.

In the words of the Australian historian Inga Clendinnen, the Aztecs, or Mexica, “passionately prized feathers” as “projections into this dimmed world of the light, color, and exquisite delicacy of the world of the gods.” They called their most valued feathers and feather work “the Shadows of the Sacred Ones.” The royal featherworkers, the amantecas, worked in a part of the emperor’s palace called the Totocalli or House of Birds. There they made the emperor’s feather garments, shields and fans. There they also kept hundreds of birds of various kinds alive in cages. According to the conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo, 300 men were employed solely in keeping them fed and cared for.

Feathers were a much desired trade good. Conquered provinces paid tribute in feathers. Most magnificent of all was the quetzal, native to the cloud forests of Honduras and Guatemala.

To us, they might appear green, but this is insufficient. One Mexica writer described them like so: “They are green, herb-green, very green, fresh green, turquoise colored. They are like wide reeds: the ones which glisten, which bend. They become green, they become turquoise. They bend, they constantly bend; they glisten.”

The Aztecs believed that in the afterlife, warriors returned to life in the form of splendidly ornamented birds. They dwelt in a realm called the Place of the Flowering Tree. All things bright with color, whether they be sparkling gems, brightly colored flowers, or birds with iridescent plumage, issued from this higher plane of reality. Featherworks like the Vienna headdress were thus always about more than decoration or display. They were messages from another world.

In the years after the Spanish conquest, the traditions that informed the making of the Moctezuma headdress underwent a process of translation. The Place of the Flowering Tree was reinterpreted as the Christian Heaven, and the amantecas of the palace were put to work crafting feather icons for the Catholic Church. Over the centuries, the Moctezuma Headdress changed meanings and identities as well as it passed from being a royal gift to curio to exhibit in an ethnographic museum. For the time being at least, it seems that it will be frozen in this current role.

The first time Nancy Holt visited the American West, she didn’t sleep for four days. Growing up an only child in the Northeastern part of the U.S. had instilled in her a feeling of displacement, and she felt a kinship to the open desert space. Years later she likened its boundless landscape to her own internal vastness, saying, “I was experiencing it on the outside, simultaneously with my spaciousness within. I felt at one.”

Holt's artistic career would go on to revolve around the remote western landscapes to which she felt so close. She began creating outdoor installations on large scales at a time when women weren't thought to be capable of such grand pieces. Her work not only reshaped the landscape art form, it broke gender stereotypes in the process, helping pave the way for artists such as Maya Lin.

Holt was the first of the modern land artists to incorporate astronomy, the Earth’s rotation, and the elements of time and location into her sculptures. She developed pieces that engaged the viewer by framing their connection with nature. She sought to integrate her outdoor installations with the natural landscapes on which they were built, promoting environmental conservation and activism long before her peers. Land art started out in the late 1960s and early '70s as a male-dominated field, "with a few exceptions," as James Meyer put it in a 2007 interview with Holt for the book Sightlines. And it would take a while for the artistic movement to catch up to Holt's vision.

The movement's beginnings are typically pegged to late 1968, when the group exhibition Earthworksat the Dwan Gallery in New York City featured photographs of large-scale outdoor installations. (Eventually the terms "earthworks" and "land art" would come to represent different distinctions of a similar field, earthworks consisting of only natural materials while land art utilized manmade structures in or on the Earth.) The movements were a rejection of the commercialization and arbitrary hierarchies of insular art galleries. Opting to build works in natural spaces rather than for gallery walls served as a commentary on the exclusivity of the art world. Pieces displayed out in the open were foils to the esoteric paintings and sculptures that ended up hidden away by private collectors. But many of these early works lacked the kind of depth that could be found later in Holt’s sophisticated sculptures.

Holt studied biology at Tufts University, but made time to attend art lectures at MIT. Viewing abstract paintings alongside magnified images of cells helped her to perceive a strong connection between art and science. She traveled to New York City during breaks from school, and soon met Robert Smithson. They married in 1963. Over the next few years Smithson and other American artists would lay the foundations for the land art movement.

Holt's role in the movement began as a filmmaker and photographer, and she documented the processes of Smithson and others, including Richard Long and Michael Heizer, as they created early earthworks such as "A Line Made by Walking" and "Double Negative". Documentation played an integral role, as many of the works existed in out-of-the-way rural areas or were intentionally ephemeral (see Walter De Maria's "Lightning Field", or Andy Goldsworthy's natural sculptures).

There were women creating some remarkable pieces, but it was the men receiving most of the praise at the time. Decades later, the Sculpture Center celebrated women including Holt, Alice Aycock, and Agnes Denes in the 2008 exhibition Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s. It's nearly impossible today to overlook the efforts of Holt and the other women creating outdoor art in the '60s and '70s. But in those years, funding for women was neglected under the assumption that they couldn’t handle such large-scale installations or the machinery associated with creating earthworks (even though the men were hiring laborers to operate the tractors, front-end loaders, and dump trucks their pieces required).

Holt saw a missed opportunity in the land art being created. Initially, Smithson and the others were focused on building on the earth, using it like a canvas. Holt saw an opening to work with the land, devising pieces that would align the ground and sky, and frame the viewer’s experience with nature.

Her time behind the camera inspired ideas for sculptures that would work similarly to photography and film. She envisioned installations that provided a lens to frame an individual's involvement with nature, shaping a narrative from the time and place. Holt installed her first large-scale outdoor work, "Hydra’s Head," at Artpark in Lewiston, New York, in 1974. Reflecting pools dug into the earth along the Niagara river correspond to the stars that make up the head of the water snake constellation. Her minimalist style kept the physicality of the art to a minimum, opting to magnify one’s engagement with the surrounding area and universe.

Meanwhile, planning was underway for what would become Holt's most renowned work, "Sun Tunnels," completed in 1976. It's composed of 18-foot tunnels arranged in an X, and each one features drilled holes of various sizes that correspond to stars and their respective magnitudes. Every year during sunrise and sunset on the winter and summer solstices, the holes project within the cylinders the constellations that those stars make up: Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn.

To create the giant installation, Holt's team dragged four 22-ton concrete cylinders out to the middle of the Utah desert, miles from the nearest interstate. The project required a team of about 40 people, including ditch diggers, surveyors, a helicopter pilot, and an astrophysicist. Holt described the installation, which doubles as shelter from the oppressive desert sun, as “an inversion of the sky/ground relationship—bringing the sky down to the earth.”

Later works such as "Rock Rings" and "Locators" would continue the minimalist themes set by "Hydra's Head" and "Sun Tunnels," and encourage a kind of wayfinding by focusing one’s view on the cardinal and ordinal directions. Rather than looking at the works, viewers are given the chance to step into them, framing a new way of seeing their surroundings and perceiving their immediate position. It was Holt's drive to create a narrative for participation, rather than spectatorship, that pushed land art even further and influenced future works by Maya Lin and other outdoor artists.

Sadly, Smithson never got the chance to witness his partner's powerful outdoor installations or their impact on the artistic movement they helped pioneer together. He died in a plane crash in 1973, just three years after completing what is probably the field's most recognizable earthwork, "Spiral Jetty." "Hydra’s Head" was completed a year after Smithson's death, and "Sun Tunnels" two years after that.

Holt continued making art right up until her death in 2014, but she spent just as much time preserving Smithson’s legacy. She spent her final days in the hospital editing footage for her last film, The Making of Amarillo Ramp. Holt and fellow artists Richard Serra and Tony Shafrazi set aside their own works to finish Smithson's half-circle incline in the manmade Tecovas Lake, which is now dried up. "Amarillo Ramp" now sits abrading in the Texas sun. Eventually it may cease to exist, but Holt’s documentation will hold up.

Much of her own legacy, which remains relatively overlooked, covers broader ground still. Her full body of work includes poetry, drawings, and indoor installations. Holt's more well-known projects, including Virginia’s "Dark Star Park" (her most public work), are admired but viewers often overlook the artist behind them. The park is a popular place, but it truly comes alive every year on August 1, the day the land that became the neighborhood was purchased. For one minute, at 9:32 a.m., shadows from large concrete spheres meant to resemble dead stars and metal poles align with etchings in the ground. In Sightlines, Holt spoke of the process of planning the park: "I hope the precedents established here will continue in future art projects throughout the world."

Johnny Gaskell, an Australian with a love for marine biology and underwater photography, was looking on Google Maps when he spotted a surprise—a deep blue hole. Blue holes are underwater sinkholes, where the carbonate bedrock drops deeper than the surrounding sea floor. The depth of the water in these spots makes the water appear a deep, enticing blue.

Gaskell, who according to his LinkedIn page is a researcher for Sharks and Rays Australia, took a boat out to the location where the hole should be, “out further than our normal Reef trips,” he writes on Instagram.

A post shared by Marine Bio | UW Photographer (@johnny_gaskell) on Sep 23, 2017 at 11:51pm PDT

There, he and his companions found a blue hole about 50 to 65 feet deep, which was home to “huge Birdsnest Corals” and “super elongated Staghorn Corals.” These specimens, Gaskell reports, “were among the biggest and most delicate colonies I've ever seen.”

This blue hole is far from the deepest in the world (that’s the South China Sea’s Dragon Hole, which goes 987.2 feet down) or the largest (the Great Blue Hole of Belize is 984 feet across). But its location in the Great Barrier Reef, which is the largest reef in the world, makes it a special attraction.

Gaskell seems to have named this newly discovered blue hole after himself—he refers to it as “Gaskell’s blue hole”—but wants to keep the location under wraps for now. Although, presumably, if you really want to find it, you just need to spend some time on Google maps.

The Solomon Islands number almost 1,000, and were named, in 1568, by a Spanish navigator in honor of King Solomon, the biblical ruler with untold riches. Like the king, the islands were thought to possess tremendous wealth. And they do, in their way, not in gold, silver, or jewels, but in biodiversity—their coral reefs and rain forests teem with varieties of flora and fauna, many of which are unique in the world. Now a new treasure has emerged, from inside a felled tree and chronicled in the Journal of Mammalogy. It's an 18-inch rat, and it had never been successfully caught by scientists before.

Unsurprisingly, "vika" were not unknown to the residents of Vangunu Island, in the Western Province of the archipelago. They described this beast, in all its giant, coconut-cracking, tree-dwelling splendor to mammalogist Tyrone Lavery, a postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum in Chicago. He ended up making 10 separate trips to try to capture the rodent after having caught only a glimpse of one scurrying away from him on a hike in 2012. Lavery began to worry that the creature he saw had gone extinct, after his many attempts only turned up the common, introduced black rat, amusingly named Rattus rattus.

But, in late November 2015, a 30-foot tree came crashing to the ground, bringing a surprise resident with it. The rat later died from its injuries, but Lavery recognized the orange-brown fur immediately. “To finally have vika in the hand was a very special feeling,” Lavery told Nature. He wasn't able to weigh the rat, but he estimates it might have been two pounds. The Solomon Islands' rodent diversity is vast and impressive, but this is the first new rodent species discovered there in 80 years.

If he hadn't seen it himself on that fateful hike, Lavery might have assumed that the rat was the stuff of legend. There's still much to be learned—how it lives, how many are left, whether it uses those canines to tear through coconut shells, as locals attest. "These animals are important parts of culture across Solomon Islands—people have songs about them, and even children's rhymes like our 'This little piggy went to market,'" Lavery said, in a statement. It's one of a few semimythological rats and rodents from around the world, including the evil Colo Colo from Chile, who hatches from an egg laid by a snake, the Doyle-ian Giant Rat of Sumatra, and the horned squirrel Ratatoskr from Norse mythology, who ferries messages up and down the World Tree.

The vika, whose ancestors probably came to the island on a raft of vegetation, is a worthy contemporary, though Lavery says that much work must be done if this rat is not to join those others in myth. "It's getting to the stage for this rat that, if we hadn't discovered it now, it might never have gotten discovered," he said. The forests where it lives are rapidly being logged, and without conservation efforts, it may soon be gone for good.

On a summer day in 1866, Mary Edwards Walker exited a milliner’s store on Canal Street, in New York, and was promptly arrested. A report the following day stated, "The lady wore a long coat or robe and a pair of cloth pants, and the guardian of the public peace, imagining that there was something wrong about this, and that a lady ought not be allowed to dress as she pleases, undertook to arrest her."

The 19th-century dress reform movement had started 16 years earlier with the "bloomer," a billowing, tapered pant that had been adopted, briefly, by middle-class women as an alternative path to gender equality. The bloomer’s popularity was, for the most part, short-lived, largely on account of the ridicule and harassment faced by the women who wore them, but for Walker, a physician, dress reform was critical to women's emancipation.

Consider the typical outfit for women of a certain class in the late 1850s: a chemise and drawers, a tight-fitting corset, a crinoline cage underskirt, petticoats, a dress, stockings, and slippers. The long skirts dragged in the dirt, spreading disease; crinolines were flammable; corsets were constricting; and fabrics were frequently dyed with arsenic. It was a hazardous and uncomfortable time for women’s fashion, and Walker wanted to change that.

Mary Walker grew up on a farm in Oswego, New York, into a family of abolitionists who emphasized education and equality. They were anti-alcohol and anti-tobacco, and her father believed corsets were damaging to health. After working as a teacher, Walker attended medical school in Syracuse and graduated, with honors, in 1855. At her wedding in 1856, to fellow medical student Albert Miller, she wore the "reform costume"—a skirt over pants—and she did not follow the traditional vows and promise to "obey" her husband.

Walker began to lecture and contribute to the reform magazine Sibyl: A Review of the Tastes, Errors and Fashions of Society. She urged women to “go to a smith and have their dressical and dietetical chains severed so they may go forth free, sensible women.” Although an ardent support of women’s rights in general, dress reform was her priority. “The greatest sorrows from which women suffer today are … caused by their unhygienic manner of dressing. The want of the ballot is but a toy in comparison!”

Unlike other suffragists, Walker argued that women already had the right to vote, on the basis that the words "We the People" are not gender-specific. To her, there was no need to enshrine in the Constitution a right already given.

After the wedding, Walker and Miller established a private practice, but neither that nor the marriage was a success. The practice failed, reportedly, because patients did not want to see a female physician, and the marriage due to her husband’s infidelity. She left them both in 1859.

In July 1861, after spending time in Iowa (in an attempt to capitalize on the state’s more lax divorce laws), Walker moved to Washington, D.C., where she applied for a military surgeon’s contract in the Union Army. She was denied, and instead was offered a position as a nurse, which she refused. Walker continued to petition for a surgeon’s role while volunteering as a doctor. In December 1862, the New York Tribune wrote, “Dressed in male habiliments … she can amputate a limb with the skill of an old surgeon, and administer medicine equally as well. Strange to say that, although she has frequently applied for a permanent position in the medical corps, she has never been formally assigned to any particular duty.”

Eventually, in 1864, she was assigned as the acting assistant surgeon to the 53nd Ohio Volunteers, an appointment that the director of the medical staff called a “medical monstrosity." She wore an officer's uniform, with small modifications, and carried two pistols. In April 1864, she was captured behind enemy lines and kept at the Confederate prison Castle Thunder for four months, until she was released through a prisoner exchange.

Following the war, Walker continued to advocate for dress reform. She designed a "dress reform undersuit," which, she declared, was a solution “to cruel corsets, tight garters and other underpinnings.” She also claimed, dubiously, that the garment prevented seduction and rape.

She also traveled to England to state her case to crowds in London and Manchester. In London, her address began "Gentlemen and Ladies," and in the same speech, she said that "she was one of those who thought it was better and easier to live out their own individual lives, and to use the powers specially bestowed upon them, than to live according to other people's notions—to live, in fact, the lives of other persons."

Walker's speeches also drew attention to the double standards women faced. A report from Edinburgh in 1867 noted, "She also thought the press often did not do so much justice to women as they might. They often criticized women severely when they allowed men to pass, saying very little about them."

Back in the United States, the suffragists were wary of Walker, both because of her controversial attire and her perspective on the need for a constitutional amendment. For a few years, she lived with lawyer and activist Belva Lockwood. Together with five others, they tried to register to vote, and failed. By the 1870s she had adopted the attire that she would wear for the rest of her life: trousers, vest, coat, and top hat. She was harassed in the street. A woman set her dog on Walker and, on one occasion, she was pelted with eggs. To support herself, she wrote two books, and toward the end of the 19th century, agreed to appear in dime museums—popular but lowbrow attractions.

Walker radically challenged 19th-century gender norms. Of her choice of wardrobe, Walker stated, "I don’t wear men’s clothes, I wear my own clothes." She kept her maiden name, saying "a woman's name is as dear to her as a man's is to him." She argued that the pensions of wartime nurses should equal those of veterans. And, a century before the women’s liberation movement, she argued that women should be able to support themselves and receive equal pay for equal work, as well as recognition for their work in the home: "Too well do women know the great mass of men feel that if they earn the money, they have performed nine-tenths of living, and whatever a women does is only of minor consideration."

To this day, Walker remains the only women to have received the Congressional Medal of Honor, the country's highest award for wartime valor, although it did not come without controversy. In 1845, President Andrew Jackson awarded it to her along with 910 other civilians (all men) for their duty in the Civil War. But in 1917, a change to eligibility meant that any medal not earned in "actual combat" was revoked. Walker ignored the change and continued to wear the medal on her lapel until her death. Sixty years later, in 1977, President Jimmy Carter restored the award, which is today on display at the Pentagon.

Walker died the year before women obtained the right to vote. She was buried at the family plot in Oswego, in a black suit.

At the outskirts of Boise, Idaho, in a subdivision of modest homes on neat lawn rectangles, the deaf-mute artist James Castle (1899-1977) used handmade art supplies to sketch his surroundings. He lived in a bungalow with half a dozen family members, who took care of him as he diligently worked on drawings in the property’s tarpapered shed and clapboarded trailer.

To create dark pigments, he mixed stove soot with saliva. On paper scraps, he captured even the details of doorknobs, windowsills, washbasins and framed portraits of ancestors. Over the years, he tucked batches of his drawings into crannies around the house and the outbuildings.

Castle memorabilia has been surfacing from within the walls, floorboards, gardens, and lawns, as the Boise compound has undergone recent renovations. “We think we’ve found it all and then something else comes up,” says Rachel Reichert, the cultural sites manager for the Boise government’s department of arts and history. Her team is now converting the property into a city-owned cultural center called the James Castle House. It is due to open in the spring, and the public will also be welcomed at the nearby James Castle Collection and Archive, which owns thousands of his works and fosters scholarship.

Craftspeople and historians at the artist’s home are now protecting and documenting every vintage nail, excavated bottle shard and speck of wallpaper, the kinds of mundane materials that appear so often in Castle’s sketches. “I love the poetry, the interesting conversation between the buildings and the artwork,” Reichert says.

Castle grew up with almost no exposure to mainstream art. His parents worked as postmasters, farmers and storekeepers. Around age 10 he was sent to a government-run boarding school for the deaf, where he spent five years. He remained nonverbal and largely illiterate. But he “was always busy looking and busy doing,” one of his relatives reminisced in the 1990s to Jacqueline Crist, the managing partner of the Castle Collection and Archive.

Castle would typically begin his days by leafing through the newspaper—he particularly liked the comics—and then he would focus on making art. Food packaging, matchbooks, greeting cards and old homework assignments—any kind of paper that the family did not want, he would recycle. He sometimes sketched the same rooms and objects from numerous vantage points; he was apparently orienting himself, and organizing his impressions, in a soundless world.

He set up numerous mini-exhibits at home for his own enjoyment. Once he finished tacking up his drawings all around a room, he would sketch his own crowded displays on yet more sheets of scrap paper. The family sold some of his works in his lifetime, and he was persuaded to lend pieces to a handful of galleries and museums in Boise and as far away as Seattle. At the Boise house, anyone who appreciated his art would be shown more the next time they stopped by. People who were not impressed, however, would be snubbed ever afterwards.

In 1977, Castle sketched self-portraits while he was dying in a Boise hospital. He depicted himself in bed, eyes closed, and he detailed the adjacent window’s dark frame, the bunched curtains, the unwatched TV mounted on the ceiling.

The city is now adapting his family’s formerly crumbling structures into spaces for exhibitions, events and artists’ residencies. Fixtures like sinks and ceiling lights will be modeled after rustic pieces shown in his drawings, and some of the furnishings will be antiques with a patina of wear. “We want to tone down that shine of new construction,” Reichert says.

The renovation process has revealed how the Castles had thriftily redecorated and added a few rooms over the years. The family built with their own hands, without removing much that was already there. “It’s kind of a layer cake, which is great,” says Byron W. Folwell, the project architect and exhibits designer. Wallpaper fragments survive, along with some scraps of clothing were inexplicably slathered on the walls. The family’s favorite patterns in wall coverings included stripes, florals, sailboats, curlicues and clouds.

In some rooms where James Castle had tucked his artwork into crannies, mice and moisture eventually wreaked havoc. An unknown number of his drawings ended up reduced to powder over the years. So some of the very dust wadded into the buildings’ timbers is made up of ruined drawings. “Parts of Castle’s works,” Reichert says, “forever will remain encased here.”

If you're standing on the shores of Lake Geneva and spot something strange swimming through the water, it's probably not Nessie's cousin. If it's swishing back and forth and has a funny yellow antenna, it's probably Envirobot. Modeled after lamprey eels, Envirobot is a long, sensor-laden robot capable of swimming along the surface to collect samples and data for environmental scientists.

Envirobot's creators, a team of researchers from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, took advantage of advances in 3D printing to develop a robot that can collect important environmental data and deliver it to scientists in real time.

The robot was envisioned and designed to be modular, so scientists can swap out the pieces they need. "Those modules, by default, they don't have any sensors," explains Alessandro Crespi, a member of the Envirobot team. That's by design. The empty modules allow researchers and other project partners to develop their own sensors and technology to load in. During recent tests on Lake Geneva, Envirobot just took water samples, and measured the temperature and electrical conductivity of the water, but one partner is developing a pH sensor and another a biosensor that uses a tiny crustacean that is sensitive to changes in the water.

Those crustaceans belong to the genus Daphnia, and they are microscopic pollution trackers—exceptionally and indiscriminately sensitive to contaminants—used in a lot of chemical and environmental research. "This sensor based on the Daphnia is actually able to measure pollutants without knowing what it's looking for," says Crespi. That's important when scientists don't know whether a body of water is polluted." The water may look fine, but Daphnia can tell whether there's a problem. And putting tiny tanks of Daphnia on board the eel-shaped robot takes the test out of the lab and into the field. "We can actually really achieve some kind of real-time detection."

Other biosensors are in the works, including one that uses genetically engineered bacteria that will respond to specific chemicals.

While Envirobot's modular parts and capacity for novel sensors make it a useful tool for investigating pollution, there are still details that need to be worked out. Waterproofing, for example, is an ongoing challenge. "Most of the time, when we actually have some problem happening in the robot, it comes from a leakage," says Crespi. Controlling Envirobot is also difficult. Currently, technology limits just how far the robot can swim on its own before the navigation and locomotion systems lose calibration. Once Envirobot swims too far, says Crespi, "if something goes wrong, there is no way to tell it to come back."

But Crespi is optimistic these challenges can be overcome and the robot can eventually operate fully on its own. "If we want to send the robot in the middle of the lake for a mission, of course we don't want to go after it with a boat. That would eliminate all the purpose of the robot," he says. "We can definitely have autonomous navigation."

Eventually, this project's descendants will operate autonomously even underwater. "We want to be able to go under water too, not just on the surface, but this comes with a lot of other issues that we have to figure out how to deal with," says Crespi. "For example, how do we position the robot in the underwater when we have no GPS signal?"

For now, it can sense plenty on the water's surface, but that step underwater would allow scientists to construct a 3D map of pollution in a water body, something that's only possible today through lots of labor-intensive sampling. Envirobot could then take the next step, to become a kind of pollution bloodhound. "We want to have the robot to be able to actually look for a very specific pollution source by following the concentration gradient." By tracking the pollution levels, Envirobot will be able to pinpoint, say, fertilizer runoff from a farm, or illegal waste dumping by a chemical company.

This may take a while, but Envirobot's off to a promising start.